Genizah Fragment Research Articles

Efraim Lev and Zohar Amar, Practical materia medica of the medieval eastern Mediterranean according to the Cairo Genizah, Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series, vol. 7, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2008, pp. x, 619, €169.00, $237.00 (hardback 978-90-04-16120-7).

Efraim Lev and Zohar Amar, Practical materia medica of the medieval eastern Mediterranean according to the Cairo Genizah, Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series, vol. 7, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2008, pp. x, 619, €169.00, $237.00 (hardback 978-90-04-16120-7).

The Hebrew Manuscript Collection of Cambridge University Library

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.

The Penn/Cambridge Genizah Fragment Project: Issues in Description, Access, and Reunification

ABSTRACT The University of Pennsylvania Library and the Tay-lor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library in England have embarked on a project to digitize their joint holdings of manuscript fragments from the Cairo Genizah. One goal of this collaboration is to develop and implement an online catalog and image database for the University of Pennsylvania's collection of Genizah fragments, which will provide the foundation for a global electronic repository and catalog of the entire Cairo Genizah. The project staffs have developed preliminary guidelines for standardized descriptive metadata. The authors discuss the issues and difficulties specific to cataloging these fragments, how an online catalog can facilitate this ambitious task, and why MARC tagging was adopted for this purpose.

Syrups from the Apothecary's Shop: a Genizah Fragment Containing one of the Earliest Manuscripts of Minhaj Al-Dukkan

Minhāj al-dukkān wa-dustūr al-a'yān fī a'māl wa-tarākīb al-adwiya al-nāfi'a lil-insān (‘The management of the [pharmacist's] shop and the rule for the notables on the preparation and composition of medicines beneficial to Man’) is a manual for pharmacists composed in the year 658/1260 in Cairo by the otherwise unknown Abū 'l-Munā Dāwūd b. Abī Naṣr al-Kūhīn al-'Aṭṭār al-Hārūnī al-Isrā'īlī, from his name a Jewish druggist. Minhāj al-dukkān was composed in the period covered by the Genizah, but hitherto no such manuscript has been identified. We were able to identify T-S Ar. 40.91 as a fragment of chapter two of Minhāj al-dukkān. In this article we will present a transcription and translation of T-S Ar. 40.91, followed by a description of the sources and materia medica referred to. Finally, we will show that this fragment is a remnant of one of the earliest manuscripts of Minhāj al-dukkān found so far.

A New Version of the Ereṣ Israel Haggadah Liturgy and the Evolution of the Ereṣ Israel Miqraʾ Bikkurim Midrash

Nicholas de Lange published four fragmentary Haggadah manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah containing Greek rubrics and Babylonian-style blessing formulas, two of which share further intriguing features. First, those Babylonian blessings have been grafted onto a Haggadah text that resembles the Ereṣ-Israel Seder liturgy in both contents and formulation. Secondly, the midrash on Deut 26:5-8 is slightly more elaborated in those fragments than in the more widely known EI versions. A Babylonized EI form is known from another Genizah fragment, in which, inter alia , the original EI blessing formulas were also eclipsed by Babylonian texts. Moreover, the elaborated midrash may also be found in a distinctively EI Haggadah, MS JTS ENA 2856.2-4 + ENA 3222:2. This Haggadah is undoubtedly the form of exemplar that was subsequently Babylonized and ultimately appeared with Greek rubrics in de Lange's fragments. The EI text is of unusual interest because it documents the progressive elaboration of the midrash to Deut 26:5-8. The nature and evolution of the passage are explored in this paper and in an appendix.

Studies in Hebrew and Jewish Languages Presented to Shelomo Morag (review)

REVIEWS STUDIES IN HEBREW AND JEWISH LANGUAGES PRE· SENTED TO SHELOMO MORAG. Moshe Bar-Asher, ed. Pp. 552 (Hebrew) + *189 (English). Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Bialik Institute, 1996. Cloth. Professor Shelomo Morag has dominated Hebrew language studies for the last few decades. He has made valuable contributions in the research of many aspects of Hebrew and also of other Semitic languages, especially Jewish Aramaic. The main focus of his work has been on the transmission of language in the various Jewish reading traditions. This volume brings together forty-one articles (thirty-one in Hebrew and ten in English) by leading scholars in the many fields of Professor Morag's research. In the depth and breadth of their scholarship, they are a fitting tribute to the work and inspiration of the honorand. The Hebrew section opens with an appreciation of the work of Professor Morag by Moshe Bar-Asher. The scholarly publications reflect only a part of his activities. He wrote numerous articles for the Israeli press, mainly on subjects of his scholarly expertise. The development of modem Hebrew owes much to him, on account of his many contributions to the work of the Hebrew Language Academy. His language traditions project, the aim of which has been to record living oral traditions of Jewish languages , will be an important source for research for generations of future scholars. This is followed by reminiscences by Professor Morag himself concerning his life and work. Of particular interest is his description of the early days of the Hebrew University, when he was a young student. The introductory section closes with a bibliography of the writings of Professor Morag compiled by Anat Tsairi. The Hebrew articles are divided into a section on "Hebrew and Aramaic studies" and one on "Language traditions and modem Jewish languages." The first section opens with an examination by Dan Eldar of the polemical debates on Hebrew grammar between the medieval Spanish grammarian Ibn Janatt and his contemporary Samuel ha-Nagid. He discusses in a characteristically thorough fashion a newly discovered Genizah fragment of one of the polemical grammatical treatises of Ibn Janatt, Kiliib alTashwir ("The book of putting to shame"), which casts new light on these debates, especially through its description of the grammatical ideas of Samuel ha-Nagid, the details of which were not known previously. Yoel Elitzur offers new evidence from topographical names of the phonetic shift of 6 and e in Canaanite languages in the biblical period. Scholars have recognized evidence of this shift in various toponyms and personal names Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 260 Reviews (e.g., Yehoshua ' > Yeshua '). The new evidence includes the toponyms Haifa, 'Akko, Dibon and So'ar, the last two of which are in Moab. The interchange can be traced back as far as the second millennium B.C.E. Joshua BIau studies the background of a number of words in Rabbinical Hebrew with Aramaic morphological patterns. He focuses on the verbal form 'ittaph'al and the nominalpa'lan. He argues convincingly that these arose as a result of the transfer of the abstract Aramaic patterns into Hebrew and not by the loan of Aramaic lexical items. This has important implications for the general debate concerning the contact between the two languages. Avi Hurvitz presents a useful overview of recent scholarly opinions concerning the presence of 'Aramaisms' in the Hebrew Bible. The opinion that all Aramaisms reflect a late linguistic layer of biblical Hebrew is no longer tenable. A number of Aramaisms are found in the early parts of the Bible, where they should be interpreted as features of the Northern dialect of Hebrew or an attempt to give a foreign feel to a narrative concerning Aramaeans. Abraham Tal studies in detail the rabbinic and medieval interpretations of the term for a bodily defect meroal) 'a'Sekh (Lev 21 :20). He skillfully untangles the multiplicity of intermeshing traditions and explains their background. Israel Yeivin examines the Hebrew of early liturgical poetry (piyyutim), with special attention to its morphology, on the basis of early manuscripts, mainly from the Genizah. He argues that the language of this type of literature is more than an artificial pastiche of elements borrowed from earlier...

A Genizah Fragment of Talmud Yerushalmi in the Antonin Collection of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad

A Genizah Fragment of Talmud Yerushalmi in the Antonin Collection of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad

A Genizah Fragment of a Treatise on the Sciences in General

A Genizah Fragment of a Treatise on the Sciences in General