The Hebrew Manuscript Collection of Cambridge University Library

Abstract

In the event of a fire or some other catastrophe in the library, which items from your collection would you save? With flames racing around you or the flood waters rising, the correct answer would probably be ' whatever 's closest', but as part of a coldly-considered risk assessment exercise, I am sure it is a question that has been pondered by all librarians with collection responsibilities at one time or another. Manuscripts represent the thorniest challenge to such disaster planning, since by definition each and every one is unique. Electing to clutch one to your chest as you flee the approaching conflagration is a weighty decision, to which there may well be no right answer. Save an autograph letter of recommendation by Maimonides, and you have saved one of the most iconic treasures of the Cairo Genizah.1 Yet this letter has been pored over, transcribed, translated, and photographed more than perhaps any other Genizah fragment; several generations of scholars have wrung it dry. To lose it would be a great sentimental loss, but not disastrous. If you thereby leave behind Mosseri IXa.2.61, a scrappy fragment of a letter in Arabic script, which has never been catalogued, transcribed, translated, photographed or even microfilmed and, in fact, is still unconsented then we shall never know just what an individual named Ahmad al-Najjar Abbas took the trouble to write, sometime in the Middle Ages.2 With 193,000 Taylor-Schechter manuscripts, reunited now with 7,000 from the Jacques Mosseri Collection, there are just too many Genizah items for this kind of exercise: rescue Ben Sira in Hebrew? The Aramaic Levi Document? The Damascus Document (manuscripts A and B)? Autographs by Hai ben Sherira, Judah ha-Levi, or Joseph Karo?3 With such a plethora of treasures, it can be forgotten that Cambridge University Library has been amassing Hebrew manuscripts for five hundred years,4 long before the days of Taylor and Schechter.