Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

Die Publikation stellt Fragmente jüdischer Kultur in den Handschriften und Altbeständen der Wissenschaftlichen Stadtbibliothek Mainz vor. Ihre Identifikation, Übersetzung und Interpretation leistet Andreas Lehnardt. Die Einordnung in den Kontext der Trägerbände und ihrer Provenienzen übernimmt Annelen Ottermann.

For use by the Author only | © 2022 Koninklijke Brill NV xii sigla and abbreviations vl I.A. Vullers, Lexicon Persico-Latinum Etymologicum, 2 vols. (Repr., Graz 1962). wkas Wörterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache, ed. by Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (Wiesbaden 1957-).

Anlässlich der 700 Jahre jüdischer Präsenz im historischen Tirol vereint der hier vorliegende Band neue literarische und historisch-archäologische Erkenntnisse. Die Forschungsergebnisse ergänzen die Geschichte im eigentlichen Sinn und die Geschichte der jüdischen Buchkultur vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit. Wertvolle jüdische Textfragmente aus Tiroler Bibliotheken und Archiven zeugen vom judaistisch-philologischen Reichtum der Funde. Zusätzlich werden Einblicke präsentiert in die fragmentierte Geschichte des Judentums in Tirol von Juden als Randgruppe und Minderheit, in jüdisch-christliche Konversionen, den Judenschutz, sowie in die Architekturgeschichte und jüdische Friedhöfe.

On Hemorrhoids was written for a young man of noble family who was seeking a regimen to deal with this problem. While it is not the first monograph on the subject. Maimonides’ work bears his personal stamp with its emphasis on dietetics, which plays a primary role in so many of his works. He treats the diease of hemorrhoids cautiously, reluctant to resort to more drastic measures such as bleeding and surgery; warns against surgery if the underlying causes of the disease have not been treated; and insists on his personal attendance if the more drastic treatments become necessary. His monograph was very popular during the Middle Ages,  copied in Judeo-Arabic as well as translated into Hebrew and Latin. Giovanni da Capua’s Latin translation was an important source for the discussion of hemorrhoids in Guy de Chauliac’s Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna

for some literature items about the collection. There is a catalogue by I.I. Gintsburg, Каталог Еврейских Рукописей СПбФ ив ран. Catalog of Jewish Manuscripts in the Institute of Oriental Studies. Memorial Edition, in Russian (New York: Norman Ross Publishing, 2003) and an overview of the cataloguing history by E.O. Shukhman, "История описания еврейских рукописей из коллекции Института восточных рукописей ран," in Источниковедение культурных традиций Востока. Гебраистика-эллинистика-сирология-славистка [Studies in the Cultural Traditions of the East. Hebrew-Greek-Syriac-Slavonic], ed. C. v. Büttner and N. Smelova, Труды по иудаике. Филология и культурология 3 (St. Petersburg: Institute of Jewish Studies, 2016), 70-93. Shukhman (pp. 81-90) also published the until then unpublished foreword by K.B. Starkova's to the original version of the catalogue by Gintsburg (mentioned in K.B. Starkova, "Рукописи коллекции Фирковича Государственной Публичной Библиотеки им. М. Е. Салтыкова-Щедрина," in Письменные памятники Востока (Москва: Наука, 1974), 183n6, translated as K.B. Starkova, "Les manuscrits de la collection Firkovič conservés à la Bibliothèque publique d' État Saltykov-Ščedrin,"Revue des Études Juives 134, no. 3-4 (1975): 102n6). The Targum manuscripts from the collection of the institute are described in Michael L. Klein, "Targumic Manuscripts in Leningrad," Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 17 (1989): 2-4. For the D 226 manuscript with the Arabic Bible translation cf. golinets 2. sfc: Katsh, "Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic mss in the Collections of the ussr," 424-427; Harviainen, "The Cairo Genizot";8 Iakerson, Abraham Firkovich de Karaïet, 24-27; Vasilyeva, "Documents in the Firkovich Collection," 208; 3. ac: Katsh, "Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic mss in the Collections of the ussr," 427-430.9 The biblical manuscripts of both Firkovich Collections are highly valued on account of their number, geographic provenance, and date. They embody the oldest layers of the Tiberian Masoretic tradition. The ffc biblical manuscripts are assigned to the divisions "Евр. i Библ.," "Евр. i А," and "Евр. i B." The latter two comprise the so-called "First Odessa Collection" that originally belonged to the Odessa Society of History and Antiquities.10 The designations Евр. i А and Евр. i B. originate from the catalogue by E.M. Pinner written while the collection was still in Odessa.11 The sfc biblical manuscripts are assigned to three sections: scrolls on leather and parchment (Евр. ii); books in codex form on parchment (Евр. ii В); books in codex form on paper (Евр. ii С). While some of the manuscripts from these collections are well known to the scholars of Hebrew, Biblical, Targumic, and Jewish Studies, the lack of upto-date published catalogues of the nlr collections hinders manuscript study. The only modern catalogues are partial internal library descriptions of the collections in Russian. The only published catalogues are one by A. Harkavy and H.L. Strack which covers only a part of the ffc12 and another by Harkavy alone for the two Samaritan divisions of the sfc.13 The former also describes 8 Tapani Harviainen, "The Cairo Genizot and Other Sources of the Second Firkovich Collection in St. Petersburg," in

A study of the characteristics of colophon in Hebrew manuscripts.

Published in "Colofoni armeni a confronto. Le sottoscrizioni dei manoscritti in ambito armeno e nelle altre tradizioni scrittorie del mondo mediterraneo. Atti del colloquio internazionale Bologna, 12-13 ottobre 2012", a cura di Anna Sirinian, Paola Buzi, Gaga Shurgaia, Pontificio Istituto Orientale, Roma 2016, pp. 347-382.

In this study the author shows how Italy has been the major source of Hebrew Manuscripts and printed Books for the most important collections all over the world. In the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, due to the expulsion of Jews from the France-Ashkenazic area in the late 13th and 14th centuries, and at the end of 15th century from Spain and Portugal, many Jewish people immigrated into Italy and brought a huge quantity of manuscripts in the Italian Peninsula. Many Medieval Hebrew manuscripts  copied by Sephardi and Ashkenazic scribes in the previous centuries came to enrich those written in Italy by the Italian copyists.  Italy, where also the land in which printing of books was born. In the following centuries Italy, lost the flag of the greatest center and lighthouse of Jewish studies. As a consequence from the 19th century the treasures held in the Italian Jewish communities, was sold and acquired by the major Libraries of  Europe, of the United States and, later in the 20th century, of the State of Israel. This diaspora of Italian Hebrew manuscripts strongly enriched every important Judaica Collection all over the world.

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In questo studio l'autore mostra come l'Italia sia stata la maggiore fonte che ha alimentato di libri ebraici, manoscritti e a stampa, le collezioni di tutto il mondo. Nel Quattro e Cinquecento, per una serie di congiunture storiche, fra cui l'espulsione degli ebrei dall'area ashkenazita alla fine del Duecento e del Trecento, e alla fine del Quattrocento degli ebrei dalla Spagna e dal Portogallo, che spinsero in Italia molta popolazione ebraica di quelle regioni, nel nostro paese si accumulò una enorme quan-tità di manoscritti, sia prodotti dagli ebrei italiani, sia portati dai sefarditi e dagli ashkenaziti. L'Italia, in cui era nata la stampa dei libri, nei secoli successivi perse la bandiera di massimo centro e faro degli studi ebraici e dall'Ottocento il tesoro librario delle comunità italiane cominciò a subire una diaspora verso altri paesi europei e gli Stati Uniti e, in seguito nel Novecento, verso lo Stato d'Israele.

This article presents the edition and study of a new list of words that occur twice with two meanings discovered at the end of the Leningrad Codex B19a. The list is written in a figurative shape and forms one of the designs on the first carpet pages in the manuscript (f. 473v).

Ja hem comentat en l'apartat de la introducció les dificultats que s'esdevenen de representar els sons catalans amb l'alfabet hebreu. 972 A més de la no correspondència fonètica i gràfica entre una i una altra llengua hi hem d'afegir els problemes d'interpretació dels mots aljamiats, especialment per la manca de vocals i per les diverses possibilitats de lectura d'alguns dels termes catalans transcrits en caràcters hebreus.

Las bibliotecas españolas contienen diversas colecciones de manuscritos hebreos de excelente calidad y muy variados temas, habiendo sido algunos de ellos utilizados para ediciones de las más importantes Biblias Políglotas, como la de Amberes o la Complutense. Se ofrece aquí una visión de conjunto de los manuscritos bíblicos o relacionados con la Biblia en las principales colecciones, haciendo un análisis de los principales manuscritos que las componen y de su estado de catalogación. Para su mejor identificación, se han agrupado en varios apartados, atendiendo principalmente a su contenido.

Abstract: A great number of valuables Biblical Hebrew manuscripts are conserved in Spanish libraries. They are of various content and some of them are specially significant for many reasons, one of them having been used in the editing of such important Polyglote Bibles like the Complutensian or the Antwerp Bible. An overview of the main libraries collections of manuscripts is given, analyzing its catalogs and the most significant manuscripts. In order to identify better the single copies, they appear distributed in groups, depending on its content.

The Masoretic notes that appear alongside the biblical text written in geometric or figured shapes are little studied to date. The few existing studies usually focus on the form without paying attention to the content. The biblical Hebrew manuscript BH Mss1 (M1) has a huge number of Masoretic notes in figured patterns and while the existence of
figured Masorah has been addressed, their designs have not been described and studied in relation to their content. This paper focuses on the figured Masorah notes, their location, shape and content. From a joint analysis of the form and content it is possible to conclude that the main purpose behind writing the Masorah in figured patterns in M1 is a practical one: to record all the information in the available space.

Preface

I am happy to offer to the reader this edition of the Hebrew translation of Maimonides’ Medical Aphorisms by Zeraḥyah ben Isaac ben Sheʾaltiel Ḥen, also known as Zeraḥyah Gracian. Born in Barcelona, he emigrated at a later date to Italy where he was active in Rome between the years 1277–91 as a teacher of philosophy, commentator of the Bible, and translator. In this capacity, he translated major works in the field of medieval philosophy, such as Aristotle’s De anima, the commentaries of Averroes on Aristotle’s Physica and Metaphysica, and Themistius’ Paraphrase of Aristotle’s De caelo. These translations might have been intended as a sort of Hebrew adaptation of the contents of the Latin Corpus Aristotelicum diffused in Europe from 1250 onwards. As to medical compositions, he translated works by Galen, Ibn Sīnā’s K. al-Qānūn fi al-ṭibb, bks. 1–2, and several works from the hand of Maimonides. These works include: On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs; On Coitus; Commentary on Hippocrates’ Aphorisms; On Hemorrhoids; On the Regimen of Health; and his Medical Aphorisms. His intention with these translations may have been to provide Italian Jewish physicians with a corpus of medical works in Hebrew parallel to the Latin translations of Greek and Arabic medical works. This intention is also clear from the insertion of many loanwords in Latin and/or Italian as they feature in his translation of the Medical Aphorisms that was copied in sixteen manuscripts, most of them in Italian script. Zeraḥyah’s translation has not been edited so far, with the exception of aphorisms 25.59–68, which were edited by Moritz Steinschneider on the basis of MSS Berlin, Preußische Staatsbibliothek, Or. Qu. 512, and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, hebr. 111, and of the entire treatise 25, which was edited by Suessman Muntner on the basis of the latter manuscript.
This edition is part of a project to critically edit Maimonides’ medical works that have not been edited at all or have been edited in unreliable editions. The project started in 1995 at the University College London with the support of the Wellcome Trust and was continued at the University of Cologne with the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. It resulted in the publication of critical editions of Maimonides’ On Asthma (2 vols.); Medical Aphorisms (5 vols.); On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs; On Hemorrhoids; On Rules Regarding the Practical Part of the Medical Art; On Coitus; On the Regimen of Health; On the Elucidation of Some Symptoms and the Response to Them; and Commentary on Hippocratesʼ Aphorisms. The first ten volumes in the series were published by the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative at Brigham Young’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. From On Coitus on, the publication is continued by E.J. Brill, Leiden.

The Creation era, widespread among the Jews already in the Middle Ages, is usually considered clear and reliable. However in certain manuscripts the year from the Creation of the World can be ambiguous, either because of a vagueness of its number indicated in the colophon, or because of an unusual variation in the year reckoning itself. This paper demonstrates and analyzes such examples, providing attempts for clarifying the precise date. The main results relate to the millennia indication in the chronograms, which sometimes should be dated five years earlier than was usually supposed, and the reckoning based on Adam epoch in the region of Greater Iran, where colophons reveal the use of the Creation era differed in one year from the generally known system.

The paper traces the uses of different types of parentheses in the history of Hebrew scribal culture and printing – in punctuation as well as in textual criticism, references, glosses, etc.
As a pair of signs, parentheses have some antecedents in ancient Hebrew scribal practices (Dead Sea Scrolls). In some ways the "inverted nuns" in the Hebrew Bible (esp. Num. 10, 35-36) also belong to the prehistory of the parentheses in Hebrew writing. In medieval Hebrew manuscripts we find only functional equivalents of the parentheses insofar as they mark a textual unit at its beginning and its end, as a sign of omission or addition, or in order to offer a textual variant for it. Yet the story of this sign really begins only in the age of printing and under the impact of general printing. The paper presents 16th-17th century sources on the different forms and uses of the parentheses in Hebrew printing.
(Round) parentheses to indicate deletions or erroneous readings, and [square] brackets to indicate additions, emendations or alternative readings, were and still are widely used in Hebrew books since the 18th century. (The earliest example of a similar editorial practice that we know of is the Sulzbach-edition of the Zohar in 1686.) This usage illustrates a characteristic difference between Hebrew and general printing of "canonical" literatures. Classical and general philology tended to separate all "footnote" material, including variant readings, from the main text and to print them on the margins or elsewhere in the book. Hebrew printers and editors, however, often preferred to place textual emendations and variant readings in the text itself in its proper place in a linear way – as was done often already in ancient cuneiform texts and Greek papyri, as well as in Aramaic translations of the Bible and in early medieval Christian manuscripts. This ancient scribal custom was preserved through the ages in Jewish textual culture and is widespread even today – due probably to the fact that significant parts of the classical Jewish literary corpus still have an "oral" character and are "read" or "recited" aloud. Variant textual readings frequently have a performative significance and should be kept within close proximity of the words that they "correct" or refer to – not unlike instructions on sheet music or stage directions.

Codicum hebraicorum fragmenta. Nuovi frammenti di manoscritti ebraici medievali provenienti da legature nella Biblioteca del Seminario Vescovile di Asti, in «La Bibliofilia. Rivista di storia del libro e di bibliografia» 2021/1 (CXXIII) • «“Affioramenti”: novità e scoperte per il libro italiano del Quattro e Cinquecento. Prima parte», pp. 179-187

Although Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was not a book collector, at his death his library of more than 1200 manuscripts and incunabula was one of the largest private collections of the late fifteenth century. Unfortunately, despite the extraordinary importance, sometimes even unique character, of many of Pico’s manuscrips, this library is still underexplored. In this paper will be presented the first results on the arabic-hebrew section of more of 150 manuscripts and incunabula. Thanks to the ex libris, the notes on the contents and other elements, part of the collection can be still identified.

How can it be possible that sheets dismembered from the same manuscript are now found in two distant libraries, namely as Bologna and Leipzig University Libraries?
In fact, several Juridical Books Bound in 16th-Century Bologna were reused to bind with Folios from a 12th-Century Manuscript of Halakhot Gedolot, that are held in Bologna and in Leipzig. After years of research I am convinced that the dispersion of manuscript fragments, formerly used as book-binding and reappearing today in libraries across Europe and continents, originates in the purchasing of antique books for private collections and libraries, most of which, eventually, ended as donations at University or National Libraries. At the National Library of Israel, for example, sheets and fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts, used as bookbinding, reappeared among contents of book donations. Two individual folios, discovered in Bologna and containing part of the Halakhot Gedolot, had parental links with 15 fragments, discovered and preserved in Leipzig, actually belonging – as it appears – to the same manuscript, copied by the same scribe. They were reused in Bologna as ligatures of code belonged to Ulisse Aldrovandi  collection, at the University Library of Bologna. Information kindly provided by Dr. Martin Eifler, librarian at the Leipzig University Library, was of fundamental importance, allowing us to retrace the fascinating history of these folios, reused to bind legal books, and the chain of events, proofing the connection between the Leipzig and Bologna fragments. The Halakhot Gedolot fragments had been reused as bindings of five volumes of Latin juridical works belonged to Odofredus de Dinariis, Lecturae in Digestum Novum, printed in Lyon, in 1552. The Odofredus de Dinariis printed Latin work had  been in the possession of the Leipzig jurist, Professor Gustav Friedrich Hänel,19 whose library, consisting in a large number of manuscripts and prints reached the University Library of Leipzig after his death in 1878. The five volumes, now in Leipzig, were printed in Lyon in 1532 and sent to the Bologna purchasers who had them bound by reusing folios of the same codex of the Halakhot Gedolot. In the 19th century, the bibliophile Professor Gustav Friedrich Hänel, on a journey to Bologna, in search of old books of law, acquired the five legal volumes. When he died in 1878, the five tomes came to the Leipzig Library. The printed volumes, damaged by water, underwent restoration around the year 2000. During the restoration work, the fragments of the Hebrew manuscript were detached and the five volumes refitted with new bindings.

This study describes the fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts, reused as bookbinding and recently discovered by the author at the State Archives of Camerino, in the central-southern Marche Province of Macerata. The study (of the fragments) reveals that the various reused sheets contain several pages of Rashi’s commentaries on treatises from the Talmud and the Bible, part of the Talmudic compendium Sefer ha-Halakhot by Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi ha-Cohen (1013-1103) Baba Mexi‘a, and part of Šimšon ben Xadoq’s work Tašbex. Among the most important documents are 13 fragments of three different early Bibles, dating to the end of the 11th century. All fragments of the three Hebrew Bibles are devoid of Massorah while uniformly representing the extended Tiberian punctuation system. The Hebrew scripts show ancient characteristics, typical of the intermediate phase between the first manuscripts copied in the 11th century in the Apulian Jewish Academies, in particular the Otranto School and the development the Italian handwriting will undergo in the 12th and 13th centuries, in central Italy. The size of the sheets, almost square, with the height differing by only 2 centimetres from the width, further attests to the antiquity of the three Bibles.

Texts with mystical contents are very rare among the Hebrew binding fragments discovered in German libraries and archives. One newly discovered fragment in the Gotha Research Library contains part of an unknown mystical composition. The text consists of mystical speculations about the Hebrew alphabet and allusions to the Book of Creation (Sefer Yeṣira) and its mystical interpretation of letters. The anonymous author also depicts the role of the angels en passant, especially the function of Metatron. This unknown text may have been written by the followers of the German Pietists (Ḥaside Ashkenaz) at the end of the 14 th century.

The survival of Maimonides’s personal copy of Commentary on the Mishnah, an early work that the author revised throughout his life, provides an unparalleled window into the ways that Maimonides (1138–1204) continually reconsidered legal and conceptual questions. This manuscript covers five of the six orders of the Mishnah and contains countless corrections and emendations, the vast majority in the author’s own hand. This article argues that Maimonides’s intense interest in solving problems related to the enumeration of the commandments, which he addresses at length in Book of the Commandments and, to a lesser extent, Mishneh Torah, led him to make a number of emendations to his Commentary and to rethink other aspects of this work. That is, when writing Book of the Commandments and Mishneh Torah in the decade after completing his Commentary, Maimonides tackled, and sometimes even concocted, questions that he had no reason to consider in the latter work. This study traces two ways that Maimonides’s later works diverges from his earlier in the meaning of Hebrew and Arabic technical terms and in increased attention to scripture in determing Jewish law, revealing a great medieval mind “in perpetual motion.”

In an Ashkenazi Bible manuscript from 1299 (MS Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. hebr. 16), the masora magna was added to the Bible text in micrographic script. The text of the masora forms letters, which in turn form words and this design was applied to all the titles of the individual biblical books. In the same way, with the help of the micro graphic masora magna, the Masorete Aberzush added a memorial inscription to the Book of Psalms in commemoration of his murdered family members. The inscription extends across the bottom of 42 pages of the codex. There is a content related inter dependence between the sections of the inscription and the psalms on each respective page. This indicates that the place and form of the commemoration of the dead are therefore consciously chosen and executed by the Masorete when creating the masora. The relationship of the text of the psalms to Aberzush’s inscription is bidirectional. The potential reader of the manuscript should be involved with the Masorete as an active participant in the commemoration of the dead. This form of commemoration, therefore, transforms what began as a private manuscript into a “public space” in which future generations of readers will carry on the now public remembrance of the dead. The phenomena described are also observable in a 16th - century manuscript (MS Munich, BStB, Cod. hebr. 393). Known by the title “Megilat Ta‘anit Batra”, this fasting calendar was handed down in an extended version that includes addi tional fasting days. The extra days were added by an unknown author from the 14th century and represent his personal commemoration of his departed teacher and daughter. The author's intention to turn a private commemoration into a public affair through later readership became a reality through the copying of the text into a later manuscript. The new transmission context represents a transformation from a private to a public memorial. In both cases, these codices became public spaces of commemoration.

The author reviews the 37 years of research on fragments of medieval Hebrew parchment manuscripts that were reused as bookbinding from the mid-16th century. The phenomenon does not concern only the Hebrew codes, but also those of the Christian world and other cultures, and was caused  by the spread of the printed book, which at mid 16th century caused the manuscript to collapse in the book market. The project that took off in Italy in 1981 thanks to an intuition of the late Prof. Giuseppe Baruch Sermoneta zal, was the first in Europe to carry out a systematic research in the archives and libraries of Italy. Today it is estimated to have recorded about 16,000 fragments in the Italian peninsula, mostly bifolios and folios in addition to smaller fragments, but certainly many more are still to be found. Almost ten years ago, the Books within Books project has taken off in Europe, which has extended this research in Europe and also in the United States and Israel, and has created a site where all the fragments, illustrated by a photograph , are listed and cataloged.

שתי הערות על קטעים הקשורים בפירוש רב האיי גאון לברכות - אחד נדפס על שמו ואינו לו, וחברו נדפס על שם רבנו חננאל אך הוא לרב האיי.
מתוך כך מתברר שהקטע שנדפס בשגגה על שם רב האיי, וקטעים נוספים, הינם שרידים מהחיבור שהיה נחשב אבוד לחלוטין - פירוש ר' אברהם בן הרמב"ם לתלמוד. זיהויים הוביל לזיהוי דפים חדשים מספר "המספיק לעובדי ה'", בכתב ידו של ר' אברהם

This article examines occurrences of Mishnaic Hebrew in textual witnesses of Rashi's commentary on the Pentateuch. The commentary contains many quotes from, and paraphrases of, talmudic literature, and Rashi's own writing, too, is profoundly influenced by Mishnaic Hebrew. From this perspective his commentary does not differ from other indirect witnesses, whose importance for an understanding of Mishnaic Hebrew is undisputed. Any scholar who takes the trouble to examine reliable witnesses of the commentary will encounter many forms that confirm, or shed light on, the findings of modern scholarship on Mishnaic Hebrew. These forms are also instructive as to their time and place: they reflect the Ashkenazic tradition that characterized the Jewish literature of eleventh-century France. Four words are discussed: עגומת (Deut 20:5), זקפים (Deut 20:9), כגלייה (Gen 16:4), and ניפולת (Lev 26:26). One important conclusion is that the same deliberate and unwitting changes that over the generations blurred the original form of Mishnaic Hebrew in its direct witnesses also corrupted the language of Rashi's commentary. This phenomenon may be exploited for the purpose of rating textual witnesses of Rashi's commentary in line with the extent to which they preserve the original Mishnaic Hebrew forms.

Toolkit for Genizah Scholars: A Practical Guide for Neophytes
prepared for the participants of the EAJS SUMMER LABORATORY FOR YOUNG GENIZAH RESEARCHERS, Institut für den Nahen und Mittleren Osten, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, 6–7 September 2017.

Corrections and additions are most welcome (g.schwarb[at]gmail.com).

The present article studies a fascinating manuscript, a unicum, housed in the British Library, Heb MS Add 27559. This manuscript of works by Ṭodros Ṭodrosi of Arles features a lengthy Hebrew anthology of logical and scientific texts, written by Greek and Arabic philosophers, some of which were translated by him into Hebrew for the first time. In a previous study that appeared in 2021, we examined the section from the book on natural science of this anthology that Ṭodros devoted to the study and explanation of Aristotle’s Physics and which he completed in Trinquetaille in 1333 at the age of twenty. In that paper, we uncovered Ṭodros’s aims and his own unique methodology in this section and sketched a picture of
the ways in which Ṭodros intended to assist his contemporary readers in the study of natural science. In the present paper, we shed new light on this manuscript through an examination of the book on logic that Ṭodros dedicated to the study and explanation of Aristotle’s Organon. We describe Ṭodros’s modus operandi and examine the nature of his discussions in each of the sections of his book on logic, with special attention to the section on the Posterior Analytics, and we show to what extent they correspond to what we uncovered in his treatment of the Physics. The paper analyzes Ṭodros’s use of Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Posterior Analytics in order to explain Averroes’ Middle Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, and it illustrates Ṭodros’s use of al-Fārābī’s Long Commentary on the Topics in order to explain Averroes’ Middle Commentary on that book. The paper, just as our 2021 study that it complements, contributes to our knowledge of the fundamental status of Averroes’ middle commentaries on the Corpus Aristotelicum among medieval Jewish scholars, as well as to our growing awareness and appreciation of the achievements of this fourteenth-century Provençal Jewish scholar, Ṭodros Ṭodrosi.

This treatise was composed at an unknown date at the request of al-Malik al-Afḍal Nūr al-Dīn Alī, Saladin’s eldest son who complained of constipation, indigestion, and depression. The treatise enjoyed great popularity in Jewish circles, as it was translated three times into Hebrew as far as we know now, namely by Moses ben Samuel ibn Tibbon (active between 1240-1283) in the year 1244, by an anonymous translator, and by Zeraḥyah ben Isaac ben She’altiel Ḥen who was active as a translator in Rome between 1277 and 1291. Of the translation by Moses Ibn Tibbon we have three anonymous independent adaptations of the original text dating from the fourteenth until the sixteenth century. Especially in Italian Jewish circles in the fourteenth and fifteenth century his translation seems to have been in demand, as six manuscripts were copied in Italy, four in Italian script and two more in a different script in that very same period.
Maimonides’ On the Regimen of Health is frequently quoted in Hebrew literature. Judah ben Samuel ibn Abbas, the author of a moral work called Ya’ir Nativ, also known as Shevet Yehudah which he composed in 1250, recommends in chapter 15 on the curriculum of students, first to study Bible and Talmud, then to proceed to the study of ethics and the sciences—medicine, astronomy, logic, and physics—and finally the study of metaphysics. The first medical treatises one should study are  those that deal with the preservation of one’s health (שמירת הבריאות), foremost amongst them Maimonides’ On the Preservation of Health (הנהגת הבריאות). R. Shem Tob ibn Falaquera (c. 1225-1295) composed a medical poem in Hebrew entitled Batei Hanhagat ha-Guf ha-Bari (Stanzas on the Regimen of a Healthy Body) for which he drew part of his inspiration from Maimonides’ On the Regimen of Health, apparently in the original Arabic. The very introductory words by Falaquera namely that the limbs are the “the instruments of the soul” (kelei ha-nefesh) which enable the soul to actualize its potentialities are strongly reminiscent of Maimonides’ discussion in On the Regimen of Health 3.10. And in his Sefer ha-Mevakkesh (Book of the Seeker) which he composed in 1263 Shem Tov remarks that Maimonides composed medical books and that all his statements [in the field of medicine] are true and clear (וכל אמרותיו אמרות טהורות ודברים ברורים). And in the same book he quotes Maimonides’ statement from On the Regimen of Health 2.2 and 2.3 in a Hebrew translation from his own hand on the healing power of nature and the role of the physician to assist nature. The translator Israel ben Joseph Caslari  gives in the introduction of his Hebrew translation of Arnau de Vilanova’s Regimen sanitatis ad regem aragonum which he translated in the year 1327 in Avignon the following interesting account of the necessity of the composition of Regimina in general and and then refers to Maimonides’ health guide as well:

With this we mean to say that, with respect to remedies, it is not necessary to write as many treatises as we must do with nutritive substances and foods in relation to the conservation of health. It could almost be said that every man needs a text written for himself; for this reason kings and magnates are accustomed to ask their doctors to write a text for them with the diet they should follow. So I myself, the translator of this book, ask forgiveness for having meddled in an art which is not mine, translating this book, which is the first that has been written to date—although I know well that Rabbi Moses [Maimonides], of blessed memory, wrote a treatise on the theme.

The philosopher, biblical commentator and grammarian Joseph ben Abba Mari ibn Kaspi (1279-1340) comments on the verse Proverbs 12:10: יודע צדיק נפש בהמתו (A righteous man knows the needs of his beast): כמאמר החכם מי שינהג עצמו כמו שינהג בהמתו לא יחלה לעולם (This is as the statement by the scholar: “If someone manages his animal in the same way as he manages himself, he will never fall ill”, which is a quotation from On the Regimen of Health 1.5 in a Hebrew translation by himself. R. Menahem ben Aaron ibn Zeraḥ (c. 1310-1385) draws freely upon Maimonides’ On the Regimen of Health and On Asthma for his discussion of the regimen of health in the treatise Ẓeidah la-Derekh which is basically a code of laws concerning the daily way of life. Menahem does not bring literal quotations but adapts the Maimonidean text as he sees fit, as in the following examples:



Maimonides, Regimen (Ibn Tibbon) 1.22 Menahem, p. 24
ולגליאנוס מאמר אמרו על צד המוסר לאדם ונשבע אמנם גדול הרופאים והמפורסם כתב
באלהים שהוא בתכלית האמת יזהיר האנשים בו
שלא יאכלו הפירות ואמר כי מנהגו שתהיה לו קדחת כי היה לו קדחת
בכל שנה ואביו צוה לו שלא יאכל פירות כלל וניצל בכל שנה וצוה לו אביו שלא יאכל מהם כלל
מן הקדחת בשנה ההיא ואחרי כן הנהיג כל ימיו וכן עשה
שלא יאכל פירות ונשבע שלא היה לו קדחת מאז ומן היום ההוא והלאה לא היה לו קדחת
עד היום שעשה המאמר ההוא אלא קדחת יום וחי כמאה שנה

Galen has a saying in which he tells people Indeed, the greatest and most
in the form of an advice and swears by God famous physician wrote
that it is the ultimate in advice in which he
forbids people to eat fruit. He said that he that he
used to suffer from fever every year, and suffered from fever every year
that [when] his father told him not to eat and that his father told him not to
any fruit at all, he was saved from the .eat from them at all
fever during that year. He continued not to ,And thus he did
eat fruit during the whole of his life, and
he swore that he did not suffer from fever
from then on until the time that he wrote and from that year onwards
down that statement, except for an he did not suffer from fever
.ephemeral fever .but lived for 120 years

R. Meir Aldabi (c. 1310-1360) consulted Maimonides’ Regimen and/or On Asthma for his discussion of the regimen of health in his compilation entitled Shevilei Emunah (Paths of Faith). An example is the following statement from the section on bathing:

Galen has written: There is nothing more fitting to dissolve the bad parts [in the body] as sleep immediately after bathing, once some of the [bodily] heat resulting from the bath has cooled off. Maimonides, of blessed memory, has written that since he came to know about this, he did not bathe except at the time of sunset, so that after leaving the bath he would go to sleep for the night, which is the natural sleep. But sleep in the bathhouse is very bad. One should be careful not to drink cold water after leaving the bath...

The physician Tobias ben Moses Cohn (1652-1729) quotes from Maimonides’ On the Regimen of Health in his Ma‘aseh Tuviyyah which was to use David Ruderman’s words “the most influential Hebrew textbook of the sciences, especially medicine.” Thus, he introduces its medical part by stating in the name of the greatest physician that “the medical art is common and easy for the fools, but how difficult it is for a true physician.” This statement is an adaptation of Maimonides’ Regimen 4.9: “But, for those who are ignorant of the basic principles of this art and for those who are reckless with this art, nothing [seems] difficult, and they do not see that there are diseases which require consideration.” And then he continues:

And thus wrote Maimonides, of blessed memory, in his On the Regimen of Health: Someone who gives himself over in the hands of a physician who does not know analogical reasoning is like a sailor who gives himself over to the blowing of the wind, for winds do not blow according to analogical reasoning. Sometimes the activity and blowing of the wind makes the sailor arrive at his destination safely, but at other times it is the cause of his drowning and of the loss of the ship. People err in this as they think that the best doctor is the experienced one, although he does not reason according to analogy and has not seen the light of the Torah and wisdom. And this is untrue. Did not Hippocrates, the head of the physicians, say in the beginning of his Aphorisms: “Experiment is dangerous”.

Actually the quotation does not hail from his Regimen but from his On Asthma 11.3,4.
The Arabic text of Maimonides’ On the Regimen of Health has been edited and translated in the past by the German physician Hermann Kroner on the basis of MS Bodleian Uri 555 in accordance with Moses’ ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation as extant in MSS Munich 111, Munich 289, and Berlin Or. qu. 836. However, his edition suffers from mistakes and incorrect readings, which can be partly explained from the defective state of the manuscript. The Hebrew translation by Moses ibn Tibbon was edited by Süssmann Muntner with extensive introduction, notes and explanations. But, unfortunately Muntner’s edition is uncritical, eclectic and contains several mistakes. This edition became the basis for modern translations into English, German, Italian, and Spanish which are flawed because of the corrupt source they consulted. Bar-Sela, Hoff and Faris provided a new English translation on the basis of the Arabic text under consultation of the Hebrew and Latin translation. As this translation is in general accurate and only suffers from occasional mistakes, I have consulted it extensively for my own translation, for which opportunity I am very grateful.

This PowerPoint want to talk about the vicissitudes of medieval Hebrew manuscripts, especially in Europe, searching what they reveal about the stories of Hebrew fragments, their wandering from land to land and their final destine to be reused as bindings. I would like to show how not only the manuscripts which come to us entire, but also the fragments re-used for secondary purposes, can give us valuable information on the ways and paths that the Hebrew manuscripts were followed in the Western world.

PowerPoint Presentation at the National Library of Israel.

in: Metatexte. Erzählungen von schrifttragenden Artefakten in der alttestamentlichen und mittelalterlichen Literatur (hg. v. Friedrich-Emanuel Focken und Michael Ott,  Materiale Textkulturen 15), Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016, 299–334 (Open access: http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/455285).

To date, research has related to the unique Jewish art of Micrography in scant overview articles. These focus on the array of motifs or the connection between the decoration and the main text it decorates. The content of the decoration’s forming text and the possible ties between it and the decoration it formed was rarely related to and thus micrography decorations were not read in their entirety in any given manuscript. More recent studies suggest otherwise demonstrating the importance of reading all the penned text.