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A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts 1
II
The examination of the contents of the Genizah is
not yet concluded. "The day is short and the work
is great," and the workman, if not actually "lazy,"
as the Fathers of the Synagogue put it, is subject to
all sorts of diversions and advocations, such as lectur-
ing, manuscript-copying, proof-correcting, and ---- novel
reading. The numberless volumes of "fresh divinity"
which an indefatigable press throws on the market
daily take up also a good deal of one's time, if one
would be "up to date," though many of them, I am
sorry to say, prove, at best, very bad novels.
As stated in the previous article 2 on the same sub-
ject, there is not a single department of Jewish lit-
erature ---- Bible, Liturgy, Talmud, Midrashim, Philoso-
phy, Apologetics, or History ---- which is not illustrated
by the Genizah discoveries. Naturally, not all the
discoveries are of equal importance, but there are very
few that will not yield essential contributions to the
department to which they belong. How a Weiss or
a Friedmann would rejoice in his heart at the sight of
these Talmudical fragments! And what raptures of
delight are there in store for the student when sifting
and reducing to order the historical documents which
the Genizah has furnished in abundance, including even
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the remains of the sacred writings of strange Jewish
sects that have long since vanished. Considerations
of space, however, forbid me to enter into detailed de-
scriptions; these would require a whole series of
essays. I shall confine myself in this place to general
remarks upon the fragments in their various branches,
the trials and surprises awating one in the course
of their examination, and some of the results they
have yielded up to the present.
The process of examining such a collection is
necessarily a very slow one. In the ordinary course
of cataloguing manuscripts, you have to deal with
entire volumes, where the study of a single leaf tells
you at once the tale of hundreds and hundreds of its
neighbours and kindred. The collections from the
Genizah, however, consist, not of volumes, but of
separate loose sheets, each of them with a history of
its own, which you can learn only by subjecting it to
examination by itself. The identification of Biblical
fragments gives the least trouble, as they are mostly
written in large, square characters, whilst their matter
is so familiar that you can take in their contents at a
glance. Still, a glance will not always suffice, for
these fragments are not only written in different
hands, testifying to various palæographic ages, but
many of them are also provided with Massoretic
notes, or with an unfamiliar system of punctuation.
Others are interspersed with portions of the Chaldaic
or Arabic versions. They all have to be arranged
"after their kind," whilst as specimens of writing they
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have to be sorted into some kind of chronological
order. To judge by the writing ---- which is, I admit,
not a very trustworthy test ---- the Genizah furnishes us
with the oldest known manuscripts of any pary of
the Bible, older even than the Pentateuch manuscript of
the British Museum (Oriental 4445), described as
dating "probably" from the ninth century. On one
Biblical fragment I found some gilt letters. Gold ink
was well known to the Jews of antiquity. Some
scholars even claim it as an invention of the People
of the Book. But its use in the writing of the Scrip-
tures was early forbidden by the Rabbis. The pro-
hibition was meant to apply only to copies intended
for public reading in the synagogue. But, as a fact,
all manuscripts of the Bible are singularly free from
an age when simplicity and uniformity in the materials
used for writing the Bible had not yet become the
rule.
Of great rarity, again, are the fragments in which
all of the words (except those at the beginning of the
verses) are represented by a peculiar system of
initials only, as, for instance, "In the beginning
G. c. the h. a. the e." (Gen. I:I). That such ab-
breviations should be employed even in copies of
Holy Writ was only natural in an age when the
chisel and the pen were the only means of making
thought visible. On the strength of the few ab-
breviations they met with in Bible manuscripts, Ken-
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nicott and other scholars tried to account for cer-
tain misreadings of the Septuagint. Take your Web-
ster's Dictionary, and look up how many hundreds of
words begin, for instance, with the letter B, and think,
on the other hand, that in the sentence before you
there was room for one B-headed word only, and you
will form some idea what a dangerous pitfall lay in
every initial for the Greek translator, or even for the
Jewish scribe. The Genizah has for the first time
supplied us with samples providing that the abbrevia-
tion system was not limited to certain isolated words,
but extended to the whole contents of the Bible.
The particular system represented in the Genizah
seems to have been known to the old Rabbis under
the name of Trellis-writing. Dr. Felix Perles, from
his acquaintance with the few specimens acquired by
the Bodleian Library, at once recognized their signi-
ficance for the verbal criticism of the Bible, and made
them the subject of some apt remarks in a recent essay
(Analecten zur Textkritik, etc., Munich, 1895). The
Cambridge collections include such examples in far
greater number, and many more may still be found.
They will probably be edited in a volume by them-
selves, and will, I have no doubt, after careful study
throw fresh light on many an obscure passage in the
different versions.
While the Trellis-written Bible was undoubtedly
intended for the use of the grown-up scholar, in
whose case a fair acquaintance with the sacred volume
could be assumed, we have another species of Bibli-
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cal fragments, representing the "Reader without
Tears" of the Old World. They are written in large,
distinct letters, and contain, as a rule, the first verses
of the Book of Leviticus, accompanied or preceded
by various combinations of the letters of the alphabet,
which the child had to practise upon. The modern
educationalist, with his low notions of the "priestly
legislation," ---- harsh, unsympathetic words, indeed ----
would probably regard this part of the Scriptures as
the last thing in the world fit to be put into the hands
of children. We must not forget, however, that the
Jew of ancient times was not given to analysis. Seiz-
ing upon its bold features, he saw in the Book of
Leviticus only the good message of God's reconcilia-
tion with man, by means of sacrifice and of purity in
soul and body. Perceiving, on the other hand, in
every babe the budding minister "without taint of sin
and falsehood," the Rabbi could certainly render no
higher homage to chilhood than when he said, "Let
the pure come and busy themselves with purity."
Every school thus assumed in his eyes the aspect of
a holy temple, in which the child by his reading per-
formed the service of an officiating priest.
Sometimes it is the fragments forming the conclu-
sions of books, or, more correctly, of whole groups
of books, such as the end of the Pentateuch, the end
of the Prophets, and the end of the Hagiographa,
that yield us important information; for in some cases
they possess appendixes or colophons that give the
date of the manuscript, as well as the name of the
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owner and of the scribe. Occasionally we come upon
a good scolding, as when the colophon runs: "This
Pentateuch [or Psalter] was dedicated by N. N., in
the year ----, to the synagagogue -----. It shall not
be sold, it shall not be removed, it shall not be
pawned; cursed be he who selles it, cursed be he who
removes it," etc. So far "the pious founder." It is
rather disconcerting to read these curses when you
happen to know something about the person who
removed the manuscript, but you have to make the
best of such kind wishes if you want to get at its
history. Perhaps my researches may, after all, prove
helpful to the feeble efforts made by the pious donor
to achieve immortality, inasmuch as his name will
again be given to the world in the catalogue which
will one day be prepared. His chances in the dust-
heap of the Genizah were certainly much poorer.
The foregoing remarks will suffice to show that
even the Biblical fragments, though naturally adding
to our knowledge little that is fresh in matter, are not
without their points of interest, and must by no means
be lightly esteemed. But this is not all. Ancient
manuscripts are not to be judged by mere outword
appearances; they have depths and under-currents of
their own. And, after you have taken in the text,
marginal notes, versions, curses, and all, there flashes
upon you, from between the lines or the words, a
faint yellow mark differently shaped from those in the
rest of the fragment, and you discover that it is a
palimpsest you have in hand. Your purely Hebrew
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studies are then at an end, and you find yourself drift-
ing suddenly into Greek, Palestinian Syriac, Coptic,
or Georgian, as the case may be. Only in two cases
have the palimpsests turned out to be Hebrew upon
Hebrew. A new examination then begins, and to
this you have to apply yourself the most strenuously
as the under writing is usually of more importance
than the later surface writing.
This has proved to be especially the case with the
liturgical fragments, among which the earliest, and
perhaps the most important, palimpsests have been
found. Personally, I am quite satisfied with their
appearance. If they restore to us the older forms of
the "original prayers," as some of them indeed do,
they need, of course, no further raison d'être for the
Jewish student, this being the only means of supply-
ing us with that history of our ancient liturgy which
is still a desideratum. But even if they represent only
some hymn of the later Psalmists of the synagogue
(Paitanim), I am not, on closer acquaintance, particu-
larly anxious to see them improved upon. One likes
to think of the old days when devotion was not yet
procurable ready-made from hymn-books run by theo-
logical syndicates; and many a fragment in the Genizah
headed "In thy name, Merciful One," and followed
by some artless religious lyric or simple prayer, is full
of suggestion regarding by-gone times. You can see
by their abruptness and their unfinished state that
they were not the product of elaborate literary art,
but were penned down in the excitement of the
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moment, in a "fit of love," so to speak, to express the
religious aspirations of the writer. Their metre may
be faulty, their diction crude, and their grammar ques-
tionable, but love letters are not, as a rule, distinguished
by perfection of style. They are sublime stammering at
best, though they are intelligible enough to two souls
absorbed in each other. I am particularly fond of
looking at the remnants of a Piyutim collection, writ-
ten on papyrus leaves, with their rough edges and very
ancient writing. In turning those leaves, with which
time has dealt so harshly, one almost imagines one
sees again the "gods ascending out of the earth,"
transporting us, as they do, to the Kaliric period, and
perhaps even earlier, when synagogues were set on
fire by the angels who came to listen to the service of
the holy singers, and mortals stormed Heaven with
their prayers. How one would like to catch a glimpse
of that early hymnologist to whom we owe the well-
known Piyut, ... , which, in its iconoclastic victory
of monotheism over all kinds of idolatries, ancient
as well as modern, might be best described as the
Marseillaise of the people of the Lord of the Hosts-
a Marseillaise which is not followed by a Reign of
Terror, but by the Kingdom of God on earth, when
the upright shall exult, and the saints trium-
phantly rejoice.
These are, however, merely my personal senti-
ments. The majority of students would look rather
askance upon the contents of the Sabbatical hymn
under which the remains of Aquila were buried for
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nearly nine centuries. The story of Aquila, or
Akylas, the name under which he passes in Rabbinic
literature, is not a very familiar one to the public, and it
offers so many points of interest that it is worth dwelling
upon for a while. He flourished in the first decades of
the second century of the Christian Era, was a Græco-
Roman by birth, and was brought up in the pagan
religion of his native place, Sinope, a town in the
Pontos, in Asia Minor, which acquired fresh fame as
the opening scene of the Crimean War. Both Jewish
and Christian legends report him to have been a kins-
man of the Emperor Hadrian, but there is no histori-
cal evidence for it. It is, however, not unlikely that
he had some relation with the court, as we know that
Hadrian entrusted him with the restoration of Jeru-
salem, which he was planning at that time. Of his
father we know only that he was well-off and a good
orthodox heathen; for it is recorded that Aquila, who
was already professing Judaism when his father died,
had great difficulties with his share in the inheritance,
which included idols. In accordance with his inter-
pretation of the Jewish law (Deut. 13:17), he refused
to derive any profit from them, even indirectly, and
threw their equivalent in money into the Dead Sea.
His early training must have been that of the regular
Greek gentleman, sufficiently known from Plutarch's
Lives. According to one report he began life as
priest in the pagan temple of his native place, in which,
considering his high connexions, he probably held
some rich benefice.
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