Clearing the Backlog at Lunel

Claim (verbatim)

Translation markets clear backlogs the way dams break: nothing, then everything old at once, then a thin fast stream of the new. When Almohad persecution pushed Andalusi Jewish scholarship into Provence after 1148, Lunel and its Ibn Tibbon dynasty created sudden demand for Hebrew versions of the Judeo-Arabic classics: works composed long before - Saadia's Emunot ve-Deot (933), Bahya's Duties of the Heart (c. 1080), Ibn Gabirol's ethical treatise (c. 1045) - were translated in a single generation, 1161-1186, with lags of 80 to 250 years, while works composed after the corridor opened (Maimonides' Guide, c. 1191, in Hebrew by 1204) crossed in under twenty. Composition date plotted against translation lag will therefore show a cliff at the corridor's opening: the signature of a demand shock, not of diffusion.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among at least eight Judeo-Arabic prose works with translator-dated Hebrew renderings made 1160-1215, every work composed before 1100 shows a composition-to-translation lag above 75 years and every work composed after 1150 a lag below 40 years, with zero exceptions, and the median lag falls by at least 5x across the 1100 composition boundary; coverage guard: at least eight works with dated translator prefaces or colophon dates, else inconclusive.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Sefaria - the hosted texts and translator prefaces of Emunot ve-Deot, Chovot HaLevavot, the Kuzari, Tikkun Middot HaNefesh, and Moreh Nevukhim, among others - extract composition and translation dates from the dated prefaces and compute the lag table.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The Provencal translation cliff is one of the most-told episodes in Jewish intellectual history: the dated translator prefaces (Chovot ha-Levavot 1161, Kuzari 1167, Emunot ve-Deot 1186, the Guide by 1204) have been in print since the nineteenth century and catalogued since Steinschneider, and the demand-shock explanation — Almohad refugees creating a Hebrew-reading market in Provence for the Judeo-Arabic classics — is the standard account of why the translation movement began exactly then. The claim's dates all check out; no factual errors. The prediction is arithmetic on these published dates, and the five-fold median-lag drop is guaranteed by the canonical cases themselves (Saadia 933 to 1186 against the Guide c. 1191 to 1204). Leaked: both the mechanism and the numbers are already in located print, and the pin adds thresholds to a lag table scholarship has effectively published.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.