Fragment of the Month: July 2018

Reunited At Last: T-S K10.4 and Bodl. MS. Heb. c. 13/25

Noam Sienna

Working with the Genizah is sometimes compared to putting together a puzzle with half a million pieces… But it might more accurately be described as putting together half a million different puzzles that have been all jumbled together, and with half the pieces missing. In her award-winning work on the Genizah, Marina Rustow has described the process of finding “joins,” i.e. matches between fragments, as requiring the combination of intuition, training, vision, technology, persistence, and sheer luck.[1]

Through this combination of qualities, mostly the last, I recently came across a join between two well-known fragments which until now have been only studied separately: the fragments T-S K10.4 (in Cambridge) and Bodl. MS. Heb. c. 13/25-28 (in Oxford). The Oxford manuscript has long been recognized by art historians as one of the earliest examples of an illuminated ketubbah.[2] Its arches, formed by interlocking circles of micrography, and its decorations in gold, red, and blue demonstrate a clear artistic relationship between the development of the illuminated ketubbah and the illuminated carpet page of the Masoretic codex, as well as the development of the micrographic tradition itself. Thus, this important fragment was already discussed in early scholarship on the history of the decorated ketubbah, including by Moses Gaster (1923), Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein (1932), and Franz Landsberger (1955).[3] Its companion piece in Cambridge, however, languished on the shelf, and at first it was not even catalogued as a ketubbah at all; the handwritten label on its folder in Cambridge still erroneously identifies it as: “Illuminated Fragment — Masoretic Adnotations of an illuminated Bible.”[4]

Cambridge University Library T-S K10.4 (left) joined up with Bodl. MS. Heb. c. 13/25 (right; reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford). Digital image prepared by Aaron Hodge Silver.

By the 1970s, both fragments had been correctly identified as being pieces of an illuminated ketubbah, but separately. In Leila Avrin’s work (both her 1974 dissertation on the Cairo Codex and her 1981 article on Hebrew micrography), she described the Oxford fragment as from a tenth-century ketubbah, and the Cambridge fragment as from a twelfth-century ketubbah.[5] In 1979, Alexander Scheiber argued that the Oxford fragment was in fact also from the twelfth century; he transcribed the large blessing on it, and added that there was another parchment ketubbah fragment “in the same hand” which had not been dealt with, namely the Cambridge fragment, which he went on to describe.[6] He even reproduced plates of both fragments, facing each other! But he apparently did not recognize them as fragments of the same manuscript. Correctly identified, the Cambridge ketubbah fragment has been described in a number of contemporary works on micrography and the history of the ketubbah, such as by Dalia-Ruth Halperin (2008 and 2013), and Shalom Sabar (2000 and 2013), who writes that it is “similar” to the ketubbah fragment in the Bodleian but that its preservation is too poor to be certain, adding in a footnote that “it is possible, however, that this fragment is a Bible page and not a ketubbah.”[7]

However, it can now be shown that not only is this fragment definitively a ketubbah, it is in fact the left side of the ketubbah preserved in Oxford. While preparing a lecture on Hebrew micrography, I looked for an image of a Geniza ketubbah with micrography, and found pictures of both the Oxford and Cambridge ketubbot… Arranging them on the slide, it occurred to me that they were quite similar. In fact, I thought, the designs almost matched up. I inched them closer and closer to each other… Not almost — they did match up perfectly. This was suggested by the join of the large illuminated word tov, and then confirmed on closer inspection thanks to the micrographic decoration (identified by Shulamit Elizur and Sara Cohen as the piyyut Yefefiyya veḥamuda by the eleventh-century poet Yinnon bar Ṣemaḥ), which is continuous from one fragment to the other.

Joining the Cambridge and Oxford fragments, including the pieces that comprise the poetic preamble and text of this ketubbah (Bodl. MS Heb. c. 13/26-28), we can now reconstruct one of the largest illuminated medieval ketubbot from the Genizah. Some portions of other decorated and illuminated ketubbot from this period have been preserved, but because of their fragmentary state they have not yet received extensive scholarly attention.[8] Visualizing the full decorative program of this ketubbah, it must have been incredible: six layers of calligraphic borders of varying widths, including piyyutim in micrography; one thin border of gold outlined in blue; one wide border of gold calligraphy on a blue background; two arches of intersecting circles of micrography interspersed with red, blue, and gold shapes, and the monumental calligraphy of the poetic superscription in gold and blue. As a whole, this ketubbah appears to have been executed to the highest standards of medieval Levantine Jewish book art.

Close up of Cambridge University Library T-S K10.4 (left) joined up with Bodl. MS. Heb. c. 13/25 (right; reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford). 

This newly-joined ketubbah is an important example of illumination in the Genizah society, and it demonstrates a clear relationship between the decoration of ketubbot and the carpet pages of Masoretic Bibles. The similarities in the deployment of color and gold, geometric micrography, and architectural layout may in fact suggest that the same artists and illuminators who adorned luxury Bibles like the Leningrad Codex and Cairo Codex were also commissioned for other artistic projects, including ketubbot. The extensive use of liturgical poetry and epithalamia in the micrography, rather than the masoretic commentary used in Bibles, is particularly interesting, both for the textual record of these piyyutim, and for the artistic implications of the development of micrography. In A Mediterranean Society, Goitein observed: “Students of medieval ornamental art have paid little attention to the illuminations of Geniza marriage contracts… Because of the large size of the documents concerned and their fragmentary state any relevant publications will encounter difficulties. But I believe it is an attractive topic.”[9] The reunification of these fragments, and the reconstruction of this magnificent ketubbah, can only render this topic even more attractive for further research.

Footnotes