This article examines certain texts heretofore known as ‘minor tractates’ that prescribe regulations for producing Torah scrolls. The rabbinic writers responsible for these scribal tractates (as I call them) were fixated on the proper production of Torah scrolls. I argue that the scribal tractates are motivated by a desire to distinguish the Torah scroll from the codex , which became a popular technology of writing for Jews in the early Islamic period. With the rise of the Jewish codex in the early Islamic period, certain rabbinic Jews used the literary vehicle of Mishnah-imitation to represent the Torah scroll not only as a sacred artefact – an object with special ritualized status – but as an instrument of reading that had to be defined in opposition to the codex.

This article delves into the reception of Haim Naḥman Bialik and his work across Jewish communities in North Africa during the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike studies to date, I do not dwell on any single author or piece; rather, I offer a panoramic perspective, with figures, texts and events. I suggest that the volume of dialogues and historic events revealed in the article, as well as their multiple aspects, speak to North African Jewry’s deep familiarity with Bialik and his work, shedding light on his status as a national bard in the region. Highlighting his status as a cultural icon, the article explores four key aspects: Bialik references in the Jewish North African press during his lifetime and after his death; Bialik’s impact on North African Zionist activists; studies and translations of Bialik’s poetry, as well as North African poetry inspired by his works; familiarity with, and demand for, Bialik’s books.

The Erfurt manuscript of the Tosefta contains 15 places where the scribe marked one of two possible versions of the text with a double colon. While scholars have commented on individual instances of the double colon, there is no scholarly consensus as to its form and purpose. In this article I provide a comprehensive analysis of all instances of this scribal phenomenon; in each case I demonstrate the philological import of the notation, and the backdrop to the proposed alternate text. Furthermore, an analysis of these instances as a whole reveals a complex system of internal notations whereby the scribe uses a combination of colons and selective vocalization to record his emendation practices while copying the manuscript. My analysis also relates to the long-debated question of whether the scribe had access to an additional witness of the Tosefta and lends support to the claim that he did.

The tax collected by the Jewish Patriarch in late antiquity has no name in Jewish sources, but in one instance Roman law calls it by the same name as a particular Roman tax. Building on the work of Clifford Ando, this note discusses what the two taxes had in common, and proposes that the Jewish tax played an important role in bringing about the idea of a single Jewish people rather than various groups of people of Jewish ancestry living in various communities.