The early developments of hebrew scripts in north-western Europe

Abstract

The ‘Twelfth Century Renaissance’ and its palaeographical transformations had some impact on Jewish culture in North-Western Europe in general and on the Hebrew script in particular. Very few Hebrew books from this period have been preserved, but they testify nonetheless to an intense literary creativity and book production as well as to the profound changes in the Hebrew script. At some point in the twelfth century, the Hebrew script used in Northern France, England and the Holy Roman Empire (lands often referred to by a general term Ashkenaz, ’’Germany”) had acquired pronounced Gothic features. This paper briefly presents the available corpus of the earliest dated Ashkenazi manuscripts still in existence, and analyses the pertinent palaeographical features of their different sub-types.