Jewish Manuscripts Research Articles

Hebrew Manuscripts as a Source of Knowledge

Abstract The Hebrew Manuscripts Catalogue of the National Library of Israel holds a wealth of information about Jewish history, literature, and culture. However, its complex structure and limited accessibility have resulted in underutilized data. This study aims to harness new digital approaches to unlock the potential of this valuable resource. Specifically, we focus on 275 Yemenite Jewish manuscripts related to ‘sciences’ to explore complex relationships within the data. We began by consolidating metadata from the Hebrew Manuscripts Catalogue, often found scattered within the ‘notes’ field of the records. We supplemented this data with information from linked open data (LOD) entities as well as previous research. This comprehensive approach reveals details about copyists, authors, and owners, even identifying lesser-known figures. Our methodology involved using Nodegoat for data management and visualization. This platform allowed us to create a comprehensive data model for manuscript provenance and explore relationships between objects, transactions, persons, and organizations, along with geographical data.

The Intentional Alteration of Jewish Manuscripts and the Houston Mahzor

Abstract Books are living forms that must be understood not simply as they were at the moment and place of their creation, but also as they changed through time and space. This article focuses on a little-known medieval mahzor from the Rhineland, currently in Houston, which has been published in only three catalogue entries. It begins by introducing the manuscript and then goes on to focus on what is perhaps its most remarkable aspect: its extensive mutilation. After examining how and why other medieval Jewish manuscripts were intentionally altered, this essay explores the various campaigns that modified the Houston Mahzor and what can be known about the manuscript’s missing texts and images. Reimagining the Mahzor as it once was reveals a richly illuminated manuscript with strikingly unusual images. Studying how it was intentionally altered over time uncovers a range of reactions from its varied audience, Jewish and Christian, German and Italian, medieval and modern.

Book Review: <em>Derviš M. Korkut: A Biography—Rescuer of the Sarajevo Haggadah</em>

At the beginning of 2020, the Sarajevo-based publishing house El-Kalem, released a biography of Derviš M. Korkut, a Bosniak hero, to whom Yad Vashem posthumously awarded Righteous among the Nations on December 14, 1994. Winston Churchill's words, with which the author begins the biography—that the Balkans produce more history than they can handle—best describe the difficult times in which Korkut lived. For Korkut and his fellow Bosnians, these difficult times lasted from the beginning of the 20th century to its very end. The book is based on exhaustive archival research and reconstructs Korkut’s life very precisely, while the concise overview of the historical circumstances of the 20th century in the Balkans, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, allows a better understanding of his actions. His defense of his Jewish neighbors began early when the Minister of Interior of the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Milorad Drašković, initiated a procedure for the disenfranchisement of Yugoslav Jews. Korkut took part in the campaign against Drašković’s policies, publicly condemned such a policy, and gave a speech in the town of Derventa, in favor of the Jews When, at the beginning of 1942, Nazi General Johann Hans Fortner came to the National Museum, demanding the handover of the Haggadah—a 15th-century Jewish manuscript brought to Bosnia and Herzegovina by Sephardic Jews who settled in Sarajevo, then part of the Ottoman Empire—Korkut managed to save the Haggadah, risking his own life in doing so (p. 40). Shortly after rescuing the Haggadah, a friend asked Korkut to help a Jewish girl, Donkica Papo (later Mira Baković), whose parents had already been sent to an Ustasha camp. After spending several months hiding in Korkut’s house, he managed to obtain forged documents for her and save her. In 1994, while Bosnia and Herzegovina was ravaged once again by the war, Mira Baković wrote to Yad Vashem, explaining how Derviš and his wife Servet Korkut had saved both her life and the Haggadah. Yad Vashem posthumously awarded him “Righteous Among the Nations” on December 14, 1994 at the Israeli Embassy in Paris (p. 63). This poignant, well-written biography shows not only a life of a truly remarkable man, but also how difficult times throughout the 20th century, reflected on the people in Bosnia and Herzegovina and how they tried to respond to them by preserving the unique Bosnian multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, and multicultural community. The story of Derviš M.Korkut’s life, marked by courage, perseverance, and resistance needs to be given the place in collective memory that it deserves, a task this book achieves. Written in English and thus available to a wider readership, it not only pays tribute to Derviš M. Korkut, but also sheds light on the Sarajevo he sought to preserve at the risk of his life.

Еврейские общины средневекового Солхата по археологическим и рукописным источникам: историко-культурные аспекты

Research Objectives: A reconstruction of the history and cultural life of the Jewish communities in Medieval Solkhat in the context of the urban life of the multicultural and multiconfessional city of the Golden Horde. Research Materials: The article is based on the results of historical research from the 19th to the 21st centuries, as well as new archaeological excavations in Stary Krym conducted by M.G. Kramarovsky. Medieval Jewish manuscripts from Crimea are also an important source, shedding light on the history of the Jewish (Karaite and Rabbinic) communities of Solkhat. Results and Novelty of the Research: The history of the Crimean Jewish communities, especially in Medieval Solkhat, is a field that has not been thoroughly researched. Therefore, events such as the discovery by M.G. Kramarovsky of the ruins of the 13th-century synagogue, along with associated artefacts related to these communities, are important milestones in the research of the Jewish past of Solkhat and the history of the Golden Horde. The combination and juxtaposition of the new archaeological material with the existing Jewish manuscripts from Crimea, which until recently had not been systematically researched, shed light on a little-known aspect of that historical period. Such a combination of sources provided the authors with an opportunity to carry out a partial reconstruction of the cultural and social life of the Jewish communities of Solkhat and an assessment of their place in the context of the medieval urban life of this multicultural and multireligious centre of the Golden Horde.

Vladimir Ivanov’s “Jewish Manuscripts”. Part 1. The Collection And The Archive

The “Bukharian Collection” of Vladimir A. Ivanov included dozens of Jewish manuscripts. They came to the Asian Museum in St. Petersburg in 1915, and Alexander A. Freiman systematized some of them – in Judeo-Persian only – by 1918. Over the past century, there have been several (re-)inventories, so nowadays one cannot rely on those obsolete publications, working with these monuments. Part of the provenance has been lost. Basing on Ivanov’s archive and the inventory books of different years, this article is an attempt to update the information on all Jewish manuscripts acquired in Bukhara. The Aramaic and Hebrew manuscripts are new to the scientific circulation, the provenance of the Judeo-Persian manuscripts is clarified. Ivanov’s personal notes for each manuscript are scarce. Nevertheless, they are the primary source about the manuscripts, and today his “notebook” on the “Collection” is kept in the Archive of Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Studies RAS. Using Ivanov’s list of manuscripts and their description by Freiman, as well as the current inventory, I managed to restore the provenance of almost all monuments. Some last Hebrew manuscripts in this list are particularly difficult to identify, while other monuments within the Jewish fund have been erroneously attributed to the “Collection” for a long time. Only one manuscript from Bukhara has remained unidentified. Checking the rest of the manuscripts for Ivanov’s notes at the margins in his “notebook” helped to match and connect the archival data with the source data of the manuscripts.

Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe by Ephraim Kanarfogel

Reviewed by: Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe by Ephraim Kanarfogel Ahuva Liberles Ephraim Kanarfogel. Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 260 pp. In his exciting new book, Brothers from Afar, Ephraim Kanarfogel tackles one of the greatest challenges for the religious leaders of the Jewish minority in Christian Europe—the mild but constant seepage of Jews into the arms of the Christian religion, by choice or under threats and coercion. Focusing on medieval northern Europe, this book presents the diverse rabbinic approaches to apostasy and shows how these approaches were translated into rabbinic decisions. Kanarfogel also identifies the complexity of rabbinic attitudes toward individuals who sought to rejoin the Jewish community after their conversion, and how these judgments were challenged and changed over the course of the Middle Ages and in different geographic areas. This book is the conclusive outcome of the author's many years of extensive research on this subject. As the author clarifies in his introduction, this is a book about the history of Halakhah as it relates to apostasy and reversion, rather than a book about medieval converts or conversion per se. At the same time, it reveals much about actual acts of conversion and medieval converts. Drawing on an extremely impressive corpus of medieval Jewish manuscripts, many of which were previously unknown or had never been addressed, Brothers [End Page 164] from Afar examines the sources against the backdrop of the linguistic and legal context in which they were created. Throughout the monograph, the reader will find profound rabbinic discussions illuminating several aspects of the intricate religious identity of apostates. How was an apostate supposed to comprehend his or her religious affiliation according to Jewish law? Did he or she relinquish Judaism by undergoing baptism? It is important to distinguish between the social and economic distance that the Jewish community, according to its rabbinic leaders, was expected to maintain from apostates, and rabbinic expectations from the converts to continue to fulfill their obligations to their Jewish family regardless of their baptism and new religious affiliation. In this context, the act of religious immersion upon the return of a convert to the fold is justified as a communal necessity, to publicly demonstrate the return to the Jewish community, rather than as a religious requirement to overturn one's conversion. In the first chapter, "Assessing the Ashkenazi Context," Kanarfogel challenges the generally accepted thesis suggested by Jacob Katz in his work, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (1961), that Rashi was the first to understand the talmudic principle that "A Jew remains a Jew even if he has sinned grievously" (ʾaf ʿal pi she-ḥataʾ Yisraʾel hu) as holding halakhic significance for the individual Jew who converted to Christianity, rather than merely as a general attitude. Until now, it has been widely accepted that Rashi's perception of apostates as still belonging, in most respects, to the Jewish people, was an approach embraced by most rabbinic adjudicators in medieval Ashkenaz. Even though earlier scholars acknowledged that some rabbinic authorities suggested apostates should undergo ritual immersion upon their return, this position was deemed to result from a desire on the part of lay Jews to gauge the sincerity of the apostate. It was also seen as an expectation that stemmed from popular culture and served to undo the convert's previous baptism (6–8). One of the goals of Brothers from Afar is to demonstrate that some rabbinic approaches were much closer to this view than was previously thought and that ritual immersion was indeed demanded by some rabbinic authorities. Kanarfogel asserts that mid-thirteenth-century northern French Tosafists prescribed immersion for apostates returning to Judaism, in contrast to earlier scholarly claims that apostates were encouraged to return to the Jewish community without being required to undergo any special ceremony or act. In chapter 2, "Establishing Boundaries: Immersion, Repentance, and Verification," Kanarfogel paints a rich picture of medieval rabbinic scholarship by examining dozens of medieval Hebrew manuscripts dealing with halakhic questions concerning converts and conversion, closely noting and revealing variations in the choice of words and shifts in the order...

Notes for a Biography: A Portrait of Isaiah Sonne (1887–1960)

Abstract Isaiah Sonne (1887–1960) was a distinguished scholar, paleographer, bibliographer, librarian, book dealer, and collector whose activities spanned Habsburg Galicia, Fascist Italy, Mandatory Palestine, and the United States during the first six decades of the 20th century. Although he was a prolific author and appreciated by many individuals especially because of his paleographic skills and profound knowledge of Jewish manuscripts and early printed books, his life and scholarship have only received modest attention since his death. The portrait offered in this brief article represents the first fruits of a book project that aims to produce the very first cultural biography of this scholar.

Medieval or Early Pre-Modern? Dating Several Fragments from a Judeo-Persian Manuscript (C40 Hebrew, the IOM RAS)

The article examines some paleographic and codicological aspects of several fragments of the undated manuscript C40 from the Hebrew Collection in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOM RAS). This is a codex of Shahin's Musa-name, formed from some different, scattered fragments. Apparently, three large fragments of this manuscript are taken from medieval codices, which were gathered by one person (the so-called “restorer”) in the 19th century. Judging from the results of their comparative and historical analysis, one can suggest some possibilities for dating of each fragment. The author dates these fragments back to the late 15th early 16th centuries C.E. According to her, they were transcribed in the region where the cities of Qum and Kashan are located (the current provinces of Qum and Isfahan in Iran). Unfortunately, it is hardly possible to provide a more accurate localization. However, several dated and previously studied Jewish manuscripts from this period and this area have nearly the same attributes, quality, or characteristics of the writing material and the type of writing, as well as some textual pattern.

The Cairo Genizah Fragment of the Visions of Levi from the University of Manchester Library

Abstract Although the Visions of Levi (so-called Aramaic Levi Document) is a Jewish priestly composition written in the second or third century BCE, the largest part of its text comes from the trove of Jewish medieval manuscripts found in the Genizah of the Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. Among the Genizah scrolls housed at the University of Manchester Library, Gideon Bohak found a new fragment (P 1185) of the pseudepigraphic document dedicated to Levi and his life. The present study contains a new edition of P 1185, including its paleographic description, notes on the readings, comments and photographs of the manuscript.

Genizah Fragment’s Version of the Amoraic Statements in Bavli Eruvin 103a

The Genizah fragment Cambridge U-L T-S F2 (2) 23, numbered C98948 in the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society, includes among other things the amoraic controversy between R. Eleazar and R. Jose son of R. Hanina, as well as the give and take between R. Safra and Abaye in Tractate Eruvin 103a. Some of the researchers are divided concerning the initial formation of the sugya. The controversy between R. Eleazar and R. Jose son of R. Hanina as presented in the fragment’s version poses difficulties and interferes with the ordered understanding of the methods utilized by these amoraim to solve the contradiction between the Mishna in Eruvin and the Mishna in Pesaḥim. The purpose of the article is to present the difficulties in the fragment’s version with regard to the abovementioned amoraic controversy and reach conclusions regarding the precise original version of the fragment. Thus too in the matter of the fragment’s version of the give and take between R. Safra and Abaye, which differs from other versions. The purpose of the article is to examine the fragment’s version of this give and take in comparison to other versions and reach conclusions regarding the clearest and most precise version compared to the other versions.

Leviathan: The Metamorphosis of a Medieval Image

Abstract The image of Leviathan held a special fascination for artists who decorated wooden synagogues and illustrated manuscripts from the eighteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe. They usually depicted this biblical and Talmudic creature as a giant fish coiled round in a circle. A leviathan of the same shape appears at first in Jewish manuscripts produced in Germany and regions under the cultural influence of German Jews in the thirteenth century. The appearance of this image was inspired, probably, by piyutim (liturgical songs) written in this time in the same region. The Jewish commentary tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrates a renewed surge of interest in this particular creature. It can be assumed that the special interest in Leviathan, both in the verbal and in the visual tradition, was correlated with the expectation of messianic times. The Leviathan represents the only image in the vault paintings of wooden synagogues that possesses a direct connection to traditional texts and manifests continuity with the Middle Ages visual traditions. In light of this, investigation into the Leviathan image in synagogue paintings is of special significance. The use of this image by Jewish artists may also shed indirect light on the meaning of other depictions that are compositionally related, and thus furnish a partial answer to the intriguing questions of the character and significance of those paintings. The present article is devoted to precisely these aspects of the Leviathan image; i.e., the genesis of its form and its semantics in synagogue paintings.

Tale of a plaster – Different versions of a story and possible meaning of the phrase Lo shmiʿa li (Bavli Eruvin 102b)

This article deals with different versions of a story in Tractate Eruvin of the Babylonian Talmud (102b). This story has different versions in various sources, including in one page from the Genizah fragment Cambridge U-L T-S F2 (2) 23, numbered C98948 in the Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society. Each version changes our understanding of the story’s content, and in this article we will display these variations and examine the feasibility that they reflect about the original version. The story ends with the phrase Lo shamiʿa li, for which we shall offer a new alternative meaning. Contribution: The main contribution of this article is in revealing the importance of comparing the different versions to the same story which implies a change in the content of the story. This has future implications when considering a story that has different versions. In addition, exploring and examining a particular phrase can offer a different interpretation or meaning than it was commonly thought. These insights are based on story and phrase found in the theological text, so that the article fits to the focus and scope of this journal.

About Origin of Some Jewish Manuscripts (Fond 182 of the RNL Manuscript Department)

In the Soviet time, libraries only preserved the names of private and, occasionally, institutional collections. Standalone manuscripts or small sets of manuscripts would become part of the collections in national languages. The information concerning the origins of new arrivals was not considered valuable enough to keep record of. Such was the case of Fond 182 of the Manuscript Department of the Russian National Library, commonly referred to as the Schneerson Library. Close examination of the content, handwriting, binding, stickers and owners’ inscription may allow us to identify some of the manuscript’s former owners. Thus, the collection contains not only the manuscripts of the Schneerson family proper, but also those belonging to Zelig Persits, Yaakov Maze, Benyamin Epstein, Bentsion Ettlinger, and the Karaite national library “Karay Bitikligi”, as well as the materials – mostly fragments – that should have been ascribed to the Günzburg Collection and some “trophy” manuscripts that were brought over to the USSR after the WWII and due to the lack of qualified scholars, wound up in Fond 182.

Zwoje znad Morza Martwego

Manuscripts from Qumran (The Dead Sea Scrolls) are a unique collection of Jewish manuscripts written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek nearly 2,000 years ago. Their discovery is associated with extraordinary events and coincidences. In twelve grottos located in the region of Qumran, on the north-west coast of the Dead Sea, in the years 1947-1956 and 2017 around 900 manuscripts were found. To protect and present one of the world's oldest and richest collections of biblical texts, the Shrine of the Book was built as part of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Freedom and Slavery in the Sarajevo Haggadah

The Sarajevo Haggadah has long been known to scholars as one of the earliest medieval Jewish manuscripts and to the wider public as a symbol of tolerance and hope. Despite its fame, however, one of...

Milvia Bollati, Flora Cassen, and Marc Michael Epstein, The Lombard Haggadah. Introduction by Christopher de Hamel. Ed. Sandra Hindman. Les Eluminures. New York: Paul Holberton, 2019, 239 pp., colored ill.

Those of us who work with medieval illustrated manuscripts are often guilty of ignoring the major contributions by medieval Jewish scribes and illuminators or the manuscripts produced for Jewish consumers. To remedy this situation, Milivia Bollati, Flora Cassen, and Marc Michael Epstein here present the most impressive Lombard Haggadah, both by examining its background, purpose, design, and by providing a complete facsimile of the manuscript. Famous Christopher de Hamel (Cambridge) adds a pleasant introduction in which he emphasizes the considerable degree of overlap of Christian and Jewish manuscript production. The Lombard Haggadah is the earliest stand-alone Haggadah and is one of only three illustrated medieval Haggadot still privately owned (Sandra Hindman, 8). This manuscript was on public display in New York in April 2019, and was for sale. <?page nr="510"?>It is not clear to me whether any buyer acquired it.

Allegory and Religious Pluralism: Biblical Interpretation in the Eighteenth Century

AbstractThe Christian discourse of the literal and spiritual senses in the Bible was, in the long eighteenth century, no less tied to perceptions of Jewish interpretive abilities than it had been previously. However, rather than linking Jews with literalism, in many cases the early modern version of this discourse associated Jews with allegory. By touching upon three moments in the reception history of the Bible in the eighteenth century, this article exhibits the entanglement of religious identity and biblical allegory characteristic of this context. The English Newtonian, William Whiston, fervently resisted allegorical interpretations of the Bible in favor of scientific and literal explanations, and blamed Jewish manuscript corruption for any confusion of meaning. Johan Kemper was a convert whose recruitment to Uppsala University reveals an appetite on the part of university and governmental authorities for rabbinic and kabbalistic interpretive methods and their application to Christian texts. Finally, the German Jewish intellectual Moses Mendelssohn responded to challenges facing the Jewish community by combining traditional rabbinic approaches and early modern philosophy in defense of a multivocal reading of biblical texts. Furthermore, Mendelssohn’s insistence on the particularity of biblical symbols, that they are not universally accessible, informed his vision for religious pluralism. Each of these figures illuminates not only the thorny plight of biblical allegory in modernity, but also the ever-present barriers and passageways between Judaism and Christianity as they manifested during the European Enlightenment.

Queerly Sectarian: Jewish Difference, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Marital Disciplines

Queerly Sectarian:Jewish Difference, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Marital Disciplines Maxine Grossman (bio) In her essay, "Queer and Now," Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explores the potential for queer theory to identify and deconstruct uninterrogated categories of cultural power. Modern heterosexuality, she explains, gains social authority in large measure from its apparent naturalness.1 "If we are receptive to Foucault's understanding of modern sexuality as the most intensive site of the demand for, and detection or discursive production of, the Truth of individual identity," she writes: … it seems as though this silent, normative, uninterrogated "regular" heterosexuality may not function as a sexuality at all. Think of how a culturally central concept like public/private is organized so as to preserve for heterosexuality the unproblematicalness, the apparent naturalness, of its discretionary choice between display and concealment. …2 The category of heterosexuality, from this perspective, so defines the norm that it eclipses the constructions and power dynamics that underpin it, while ensuring its own status as "natural" and "unproblematic." Uninterrogated categories have discursive power within academic disciplines as much as they do in larger social contexts. Scholarly treatments of the Dead Sea Scrolls—a collection of Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period—provide evidence for such layerings of academic assumption. Attitudes toward marriage and sexuality in the scrolls appear to fall "between" Judaism and Christianity (the former often understood as sex-positive and the latter as a site for ascetic or sex-negative attitudes), in ways that have led scholars to understand the scrolls as evidence for a sectarian Judaism, at most a marginal cul-de-sac in the narrative of Jewish history. Queer treatments of these categories, however, provide an opportunity to read the scrolls back into the narrative of Jewish history while calling into question the binary foundations that underpin certain aspects of that narrative. This essay begins with a brief introduction to the scrolls and an interrogation of the term "sectarian" as used in reference to them. Tensions around "normative" and sectarian Judaism will then be explored, particularly in light [End Page 87] of treatments of marriage and sexuality within the rule texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In lieu of a framework that distinguishes between (Jewish) marriage and (Christian) celibacy, this treatment will highlight the complexity of attitudes toward sexuality in the Judaism of the Second Temple period. A queer approach to these social norms, in turn, will provide for a reconsideration of the larger cultural framings of religion, sect, and Jewishness in scholarly discourse around the scrolls and their contributions to Jewish history. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Some Opening Observations The term "Dead Sea Scrolls" refers to the more than 900 manuscripts, many highly fragmentary, that were discovered in the mid-twentieth century in eleven caves in the Judean Desert, not far from the northern tip of the Dead Sea.3 The caves are all within walking distance of the ancient ruin of Khirbet Qumran, which many scholars understand as a habitation site, and from which arises the designation "Qumran Scrolls." The scrolls and the site of Qumran both date from the first centuries BCE and CE, and the scrolls themselves reflect an interesting range of Second Temple period Jewish literature, including close to three dozen manuscripts of the book of Deuteronomy, roughly twenty each of Genesis and Isaiah, and more than a dozen each of Exodus, Leviticus, and the books of Enoch and Jubilees (which are elsewhere preserved among the Pseudepigrapha but are not included in the canon of the Hebrew Bible). In all, the scrolls include some 200 copies of biblical manuscripts, reflecting an uneven representation of all the books of the modern Jewish Bible, with the notable exception of the Book of Esther.4 Another large proportion of manuscripts reflects previously unknown texts that expand on biblical themes, including dozens of legal texts (especially the Temple Scroll); narratives and so-called Testaments of biblical figures (the Genesis Apocryphon, the Testament of Kohath); hymns; and prayers. Calendars, horoscopes, and cryptic texts are also found among the scrolls. The texts are almost exclusively written in Hebrew and Aramaic (with a small number in Greek), and they are diverse but not comprehensive in their representation of...

Каталоги та списки єврейських рукописів у фондах Національної бібліотеки України ім. В. І. Вернадського

Каталоги та списки єврейських рукописів у фондах Національної бібліотеки України ім. В. І. Вернадського

Legends about Legends: Abraham Eleazar's Adaptation of Nicolas Flamel

This paper explores the relationship between three illustrated alchemical treatises, all of which are associated with Jewish adepts: the famous Le Livre des figures hieroglyphiques attributed to Nicolas Flamel, and two treatises published in 1735 in Erfurt—the Uraltes Chymisches Werckh and the Donum Dei. The Werckh is supposedly written by Rabbi Abraham Eleazar, while the Donum Dei is attributed to an ancient alchemist–cabalist, Rabbi Samuel Baruch. I argue that these authors are fictitious, and that both works were in fact written in the early eighteenth century by their supposed editor, the probably pseudonymous Julius Gervasius. Gervasius connects the Werckh with the legend of Nicolas Flamel by suggesting that it is based on the original, Jewish manuscript which helped Flamel to find the Stone of the Sages. Gervasius used various strategies to confer a sense of Jewish “authenticity” on these works, borrowing from contemporary (non-Jewish) perceptions of Jewish ritual, Hebrew language, and Christian Cabala. The Werckh also borrows and adapts a sequence of allegorical illustrations from those in pseudo-Flamel's Livre, and I compare the two sets of figures and, where possible, interpret them. I conclude that the later works in fact teach us far more about the state of alchemy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than they do about either medieval alchemy or Judaism.