The oldest Hebrew manuscript dated by its colophon: a leaf of a Mishna manuscript with Babylonian vocalization in Toronto*
Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, EPHE, PSL / Oxford University
I thank the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library of the University of Toronto, and especially the Judaica Librarian, Nadav Sharon, for their welcome to the Library, their assistance with my research, and their permission to publish the images of the fragment. My gratitude goes to Dr Albert Dov Friedberg, who kindly shared with me his knowledge and documentation on the fragments, to Professor Sacha Stern who kindly checked my date calculations, and to Dr Yitz Landes for our discussions of the fragments. Last but not least, I thank Dr Ben Outhwaite for sending me images of the Cambridge fragments of the manuscript and for accepting the publication of this paper as a FOTM.
The discovery of the ‘Egyptian fragments’ in the 19th century revealed to Western scholarship an array of manuscripts vocalized with the supralinear graphic system which originated in Iraq and Iran. Various Cairo Genizah collections contain dozens of fragments of Biblical texts, poetry and legal compendia with vowels and sometimes with cantillation signs (te‘amim) set out according to the Babylonian tradition – and not the more prevalent Tiberian tradition. Among them, there are fragments of the Mishna with Babylonian vowels. They have attracted considerable scholarly attention from early on. Pioneers such as Paul Kahle considered that these exemplars originated from the yeshivot of Iraq, and Israel Yeivin used them to reconstruct the different traditions of Hebrew pronunciation among Babylonian Jewish communities. Yeivin defined the manuscript’s pronunciation tradition as a ‘Middle Babylonian’ type.1 The scholars of the Mishna text pointed to the homogeneity of the manuscript’s textual version with the text type attested in later Italian manuscripts and defined it as ‘Palestinian’.2 The study of the materiality of these books partly reconstructed from the scattered fragments is still a desideratum, as is a systematic study of their palaeographical features.
It is generally agreed that most of the fragments with Babylonian vocalization belong to the earliest ‘strata’ of the Cairo Genizah, and of the medieval Hebrew manuscript tradition as a whole. However, the lack of explicitly dated manuscripts has made the precise dating of these fragments difficult, and has hindered palaeographical comparisons. The earliest explicitly dated Hebrew manuscript hitherto known to us was a parchment codex of Hagiographa, incidentally also with Babylonian vocalization, copied in Gunbad-i-Mallgàn (Do Gonbadān in Iran) in 903/4 CE. In this article, I discuss a partly dated Genizah fragment – again with Babylonian vocalization – and argue that in all probability it is older than the Gunbad-i-Mallgàn biblical manuscript by some sixty years. Such an early dating provides a new palaeographical milestone for comparative analysis of other manuscripts and sheds new light on the chronology of the early fragments from the Cairo Genizah.
In his 1935 Introduction to The Mishna Text in Babylonia, the aforementioned Paul Kahle, listed and described the Genizah fragments of this foundational legal code, which were vocalised with Babylonian supralinear vowels.3 Prior to that, Kahle’s pupil Ch. B. Friedmann, in his 1927 dissertation, sorted the fragments known to him into three distinct codices.4 Kahle identified further fragments and attributed them to five distinct original codices (A to E).5 Written by different scribes, these fragments belong to the same palaeographical sub-type of the Oriental square script. More recent research, chiefly by Israel Yeivin, identified further fragments of Babylonian Mishna manuscripts in the Genizah, and used them to reconstruct a specific tradition of Hebrew as pronounced and written by the Jews in Iraq.6
Paul Kahle undertook to compare his Babylonian vocalised fragments with the two complete early Mishnah manuscripts in existence, both of Italian origin, the “Codex Kaufmann” (Budapest, Hungarian Academy of Science, MS A 50) datable to the 12th century, and the “Mishna Parma” (Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS Parm. 3173 (De Rossi n° 138)), probably written as early as the last quarter of the 11th century.7 The researcher's conclusion was that the Geniza fragments under study
are at least four or five hundred years older than the above-mentioned Mishna MSS. Unfortunately there is no piece of these Fragments dated. The last part of the MS A is preserved in Oxford. There is missing, however, just the last leaf, upon which there could possibly have been a date. Yet there is scarcely a doubt that we have here before us texts which must have been written down at the latest in the ninth century. The Babylonian vocalisation shows undoubtedly that they come from Babylonia. We therefore have texts from the time of the Babylonian Gaons, from a time when the Babylonian Academies were in a prosperous condition—texts which a Saadja may have had before him as MSS of a hundred years old.8
This erudite Genizah scholar, pioneer in the study of the Hebrew vocalization traditions, was somewhat off the mark when he described the fragments as “four to five hundred years older” than the two Italian Mishna codices, as his estimate would put these fragments in the 7th–8th centuries. He was however right to consider these Geniza fragments as exceptionally ancient, going back to the heydays of the Gaonic yeshivot in Iraq. Aware of the imprecision of his dating, Kahle specifically deplored the absence of the very last leaf of Manuscript A (henceforth ‘MS A’), surmising that this lost leaf could have contained the final colophon of the scribe, which would have provided scholars with a more accurate date.
Kahle’s inkling proved to be right. Unknown to him, the last missing leaf of ‘MS A’ has in fact survived the vagaries of time. It has been acquired by the scholar and philanthropist Albert Dov Friedberg and his wife Nancy Friedberg, who donated it to the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library of the University of Toronto, Ontario, in 1995 or 1996, together with their more extensive collection of Genizah fragments and Hebrew manuscripts.9 The fragment in question, today MSS Friedberg 9-001 c. 1 and another folio of the same manuscript, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c. 2, have been promptly identified as joins with the other fragments belonging to Friedmann’s and Kahle’s ‘MS A’ by the team of the Friedberg Geniza Project.10 The list of the fragments of ‘MS A’ in the order of the Mishna text was compiled by Israel Yeivin in his 1985 study of the Babylonian vocalization tradition11 and in the order of the collections by Yaacov Sussmann in his Thesaurus of Talmudic Manuscripts published in 2012, where a full bibliography of the individual fragments is also provided.12
‘MS A’ is the best-preserved early exemplar of the Mishna without Talmud or commentaries known to us.13 No less than thirty-six folios, spanning over thirty-one shelfmarks, have been discovered in the Geniza collections, today in Cambridge, Oxford, St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, New York and Toronto. These fragments stem from various tractates belonging to the orders Nashim, Neziqin, Qodashim and Toharot:
– Order Nashim: Jerusalem, NLI 577.4.15 (Ketubbot 5,6–7,6) (Sussmann, n° 7662); Cambridge, T-S E1.81 (Ketubbot 8,1, v. 8,7–8) (Sussmann, n° 1703); New York, JTS ENA 3655.7 (Ketubbot 11,1–3 v. 12,3–4) (Sussmann n° 6751); Cambridge, T-S E1.89 (Ketubbot 13, 7 – Nedarim 2, 4) (Sussmann n° 1708); Cambridge, T-S F6.4 (Nedarim 3,1–8; v. 3,11–4,3) (Sussmann n° 2492); Cambridge, CUL Or 1080.1.36 (Nedarim 4,4–5,1 v. 5,4–6,3) (Sussmann, n° 565); Cambridge, CUL Or 1080.1.38 (Nedarim 6,6–7,2, v. 7,5–8,9) (Sussmann, n° 1567 and n° 157714 ); Oxford, Bodl. MS Heb d 63.10 (Nedarim 8,5–9,1) (Sussmann, n° 885); Cambridge, T-S E1.90 (Nedarim 9,9–11,10) (Sussmann, n° 1708); Philadelphia, Katz Center for Judaic Studies, Halper 76 (Nedarim 11,10 – Nazir 3,2) (Sussmann, n° 6996); Cambridge, T-S E1.92 + T-S AS 62.409 (Nazir 3,4–4,4; 4,5–5,5) (Sussmann, n° 1710); Cambridge, T-S E1.93 (Nazir 5,5–6, v. 6,7–7,1) (Sussmann, n° 1710); Cambridge, T-S E1.94 (Nazir 7,1–8, v. 8,4–9,5) (Sussmann, n° 1710); Cambridge, T-S E1.83 (Gittin 1–3,3) (Sussmann, n° 1705); Cambridge, T-S E1.84 (Gittin 3,4–5,6) (Sussmann, n° 1705); Cambridge, T-S E1.85 (Gittin 5,9–7,6) (Sussmann, n° 1705); Oxford, Bodl. MS Heb d 64.88 (Gittin 7,7–9,4) (Sussmann, n° 882); Cambridge, T-S F6.16 (Gittin 9,4 – Sotah 1, 9) (Sussmann, n° 2500); New York, JTS, ENA 3593.5 + T-S AS 62.351 + T-S E1.154 (P1) (Sotah 4,1–7,3);
– Neziqin: St. Petersburg, RNL, EVR III B 483a, fol. 1 (‘Eduyot 5,9–8,2) (Sussmann, n° 8677)
– Qodashim: St. Petersburg, RNL, EVR III B 483a (Antonin) 483a, fol. 2 (Zevahim 1,1–3,6) (Sussmann, n° 8677);
– Toharot: Cambridge, T-S E1.154 (P3) + T-S AS 62.489 (Nega‘aim 3,8–5,2); T-S E1.154 (P2) + T-S AS 62.532 + T-S AS 62.272 (Parah 2,5–4,3) (Sussmann n° 1763); Cambridge, T-S E1.138 + T-S E1.140 (Parah 8,9–9,1 (138r); 9,3–10,1 (140r); 10,1–10,7 (138v); 11,1–6 (140v) (Sussmann, n° 1749 and n° 1751); Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c. 2 (Niddah 6,1 (end)–9,5 (beginning) (n° Sussmann, n° 8458); Oxford, Bodl. MS Heb c. 17.35–43 (fol. 35r-v: Niddah 9,5 – ‘Oqṣin 3,3) (Sussmann, n° 759); Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c. 1 (‘Oqṣin 3,4–3,12) (Sussmann, n° 8458).
– Lastly, a small fragment, T-S AS 62.352, is written by the same scribe. The upper corner of a page, this fragment, unfortunately, contains only בן א[...] in line one and אמ[ר] in line two, making the identification of the text very difficult.
It is quite conceivable, though difficult to ascertain, that these fragments all belonged to a single volume containing all six orders of the Mishna. The tractates within one Mishna order followed each other in the same volume. In addition, some fragments display the end of one tractate and the beginning of the next on the same page, separated by a small blank space in the line, the explicit formula of the previous tractate, and the title of the next.
Fig. 1 T-S E1.89 (see here for this item on CUDL)
This continuity is attested in the following fragments: Cambridge, T-S E1.89: Ketubbot is followed by Nedarim (Fig. 1), Philadelphia, KCAJS, Halper 76 Nedarim is followed by Nazir, Cambridge, T-S F6.16 Gittin is followed by Sotah. The well-preserved Oxford, Bodl. MS Heb c. 17.35–43 contains on its nine consecutive folios six tractates of the order Toharot (out of twelve), completed by the perfectly matching Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1 and c2. Toronto MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1r ends with a ‘table of contents’, a list of all the twelve tractates of the order (sidra) Toharot written below the text, with the number of the chapters in each tractate (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2 Toronto, The Fisher Rare Books Library, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1 r
We can infer that this codex ‘MS A’ included at least the complete order Toharot. The verso of the Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1 is blank: it was the outer closing page of the book – no text was written after the end of Toharot. As we shall see, for almost a half of the order Toharot the scribe of this densely written manuscript needed only about two quires of five bifolios (ten folios) each. At this rate, the entire Mishna would occupy a perfectly manageable medium size volume. Unfortunately, none of the fragments contain the juncture between different orders of the Mishna on the same folio. The fragment RNL EVR III B 483a, fol. 2r opens with the beginning of a new order, Qodashim, introduced by the title: סדרא דחמשא קדשים, “Order Five: Qodashim”, but this is a disjoint folio, and it is impossible to assess its place in the book. Whether ‘MS A’ was one volume or a set of fascicles, the material and palaeographical features of its extant folios are similar. They are all written on the same quality of parchment, darker on the hair side with visible traces of grain, in one densely written block of text. However, the number of lines per page vary: there are only 30 lines per page in the St. Petersburg fragments and 36 in the Oxford and Toronto fragments. All the fragments were copied by the same scribe, in a square medium-size script (the average letter he measures c. 3,5–4 x 3,5–4 mm).
The full codicological reconstruction of this codex ‘MS A’ is still to be completed, but relevant information can be gathered from the one complete quire, composed of Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1 and MSS Friedberg 9-001 c2 and Oxford, Bodl. MS Heb. c. 17.35–43. Now disjoint, the two Toronto fragments are in fact two parts of the same bifolio, which was the outer bifolio of the last quire of the book. Oxford, Bodl. MS Heb. c. 17.35–43 constitutes the other part of the same quire, which is complete. The order of the text is: Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c. 2r–v: Niddah 6,1 (end) – 9,5 (beginning); Oxford, Bodl. MS Heb c. 17.35–43: fol. 35r–v: Niddah 9,5–10,8 (end); Mashqin (the title given in this manuscript to the tractate usually known as Makhshirin) (fol. 35v 1,1–1,4 (beginning); fol. 36r–v 1,4–4,1 (beginning); fol. 37r–v 4,1–6,6 (beginning); fol. 38r 6,6–6,8 (in the manuscript, 6,9) (end); Zavim (fol. 38r–v 1,1–3,2 (beginning); fol.39r–v 3,2–5,9 (beginning); fol. 40r 5,9–12 (end)); Tevul Yom (fol. 40r–v 1,1–3,4 (beginning); fol. 41r 3,4–4,7 (end)); Yadaim (fol. 41r–v 1,1–3,1 (beginning); fol. 42r–v 3,1–4,15; fol. 43r 4,16 (end)) ‘Oqṣin (fol. 43r, 1,1–3,3); Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c. 1: ‘Oqṣin (3,4–3,12). The quire is originally a quinion to which one more leaf was added, so that the quire contains eleven leaves, twenty-two pages in total (Fig. 3). Too much text was left for the initially planned five bifolios and too little to need a complete bifolio. As it is the last quire of the book, the scribe must have realised that he did not have sufficient space. The inserted leaf is now fol. 42. To enable the stitching of this leaf to the quire, the sheet was broader and folded to create a stub, visible between fol. 35 and 36 of the Oxford part.
Fig. 3 The complete last quire of Toharot of ‘MS A’, Toronto, The Fisher Rare Books Library, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1 r and Oxford, Bodl. MS Heb c 17.35–43
Once reconstructed, the quire reveals that it began by the hair side and followed the so-called Gregory’s rule:15 on the openings, the hair side of the parchment faces the hair side and flesh faces flesh. Gregory’s rule is broken only by the additional, inserted folio 42. The parchment was scored with a hard point. The lines joined perforations in the outer margins of the open bifolio – the holes made with an awl appear in the outer margins, including on the stub.
As for the colophon, Paul Kahle was right to emphasize its importance. Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1 completes the Bodleian fragment and contains a concluding scribal colophon, written in a mixture of Hebrew and Babylonian Aramaic. The date is only partly preserved, but it can be reconstructed with high degree of accuracy.
Fig. 4 Toronto, The Fisher Rare Books Library, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1 r: the colophon
The preserved lines of the colophon read:
[..מ.] ברוך שהחיינו וקיימנו והגיענו ל[זמ]ן הזה ברוך שעזרני
[...] נעתק הדפתר הזה יום ששי בשבת [...בע]שרים ותשעה [ימים] בחדש
[...מ]אה וחמשין ותרתין שנין לשטרי לחיי [...] לעלם [...]
“[...] Blessed be the One who has given us life, sustained us and brought us to this time.16 Blessed be the one who has helped me. / This codex (daftar) was completed on Friday […] on the twenty-ninth of the month / […] one hundred fifty-two of the era of the documents for the life […] and for eternity.”
The parchment is unfortunately damaged and the date is only partly preserved. As it stands, the text mentions the day of the week, the day of the month, the decades and units of the year as well as the dating era: לשטרי, “the era of the documents”, the Talmudic name for the Seleucid computation. The part of the dating concerning the year is expressed in Babylonian Aramaic. As line two of the colophon ends with the word חדש, “month”, we expect that the name of the month was written at the beginning of line three. The lacuna in the parchment allows space for the name of the month as well as for the introduction of the year. In the usual dating formula, the year would be introduced by שנת, “year of”, or בשנת, “in the year of”. This must have been followed by the word אלפא, “one thousand”. The next word, the hundreds, is partly legible. Its last letter is clear: it is a he. The penultimate letter could be read with the help of the ultraviolet lamp and the digital portable microscope Dinolyte: it is an aleph. This word (being a number) can only be reconstructed as מאה, “one hundred”. Thus, the manuscript was written in the year 1152 of the Seleucid era. It is true, from a grammatical point of view, that another numeral could have been written before מאה, “one hundred”, giving for example three hundred, four hundred, etc. However, the size of the illegible space in the manuscript does not allow for another word in the dating clause. The year 1152 of the Seleucid era corresponds to AM 4600 or 4601 depending on the specific comput and depending on the month.17 It corresponds to 840 or 841 of the Julian calendar.18 The reconstruction of the month is problematic, as it is unclear what precise type of Seleucid reckoning was used, but according to the calculation currently used for Seleucid era, in 841 CE, the 29th fell on a Friday in the month of Tammuz.
This date of 840–841 CE not only makes of ‘MS A’ the earliest dated manuscript of the Mishna,19 but also the very earliest medieval Hebrew book explicitly dated by scribal colophon.20 As we saw, this dating is nearly sixty years earlier than the most ancient dated manuscript hitherto known, dated to 903/4 CE (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-NS-00246-00026-00002/1).21 The date of Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c1 and of ‘MS A’ as a whole constitutes an important evidence of book making practices, most probably in Babylonia, before the middle of the 9th century. Pending a detailed palaeographical analysis of the script of ‘MS A’, its preliminary examination shows affinities with the other Babylonian manuscripts, including the Gunbat-i-Mallgàn Bible of 903/4.22 While ‘MS A’ is unique in the explicit date it contains, it forms in fact part of a large corpus of Babylonian manuscripts. To this corpus belong dozens of fragments discovered in the Cairo Genizah as well as a few more complete manuscripts, chief among them the famous midrash Sifra nowadays in the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. ebr. 66). The precise dating of Toronto, MSS Friedberg 9-001 c. 1 as proposed in this paper thus provides us with a firmer basis for undertaking the palaeographical and historical study of this entire Babylonian corpus.
Footnotes
1 I. Yeivin, The Hebrew Language Tradition as Reflected in the Babylonian Vocalization (in Hebrew), 2 vols, The Academy of the Hebrew Language, Jerusalem, 1985.
2 See especially Yaacov Sussmann, “Manuscripts and text traditions of the Mishna” (in Hebrew), in Y. Sussmann (with Yoav Rosenthal and Aharon Shweka), Thesaurus of Talmudic Manuscripts (in Hebrew), 3 vols, the Friedberg Genizah Project and Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, 2012, vol. 3, p. 39, note 86; Simcha Emanuel, Hidden Treasures from Europe (in Hebrew), 2 vols, Mekize Nirdamim, Jerusalem, 2015 – 2019, II, p. 33, note 59, and the bibliography there. See also Yitz Landes, The Transmission of the Mishnah and the Spread of Rabbinic Judaism, 200 CE–1200 CE (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2023), 179–180, footnote 97.
3 P. Kahle, J. Weinberg and T. Weinberg, “The Mishna Text in Babylonia: I. Introduction and edition of the texts”, Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935), pp. 185–222.
4 For the initial attribution of the fragments to three distinct codices (A, B and C), see Ch. B. Friedmann, “Zur Geschichte der ältesten Mischna-Überlieferung. Babylonische Mischna-Fragmente aus der Alt-Kairoer Geniza, veröffentlicht und kritisch untersucht, 1927”, in Jahrbuch XVIII der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft zu Frankfurt a.M., 1927.
5 Kahle, Weinberg and Weinberg, “The Mishna Text in Babylonia I”, p. 187.
6 Yeivin, The Hebrew Language Tradition.
7 One of its scribes also copied MS Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. ebr. 31 explicitly dated to 1073.
8 Kahle, Weinberg and Weinberg, “The Mishna Text in Babylonia: I”, p. 187.
9 B. D. Walfish, “The Friedberg Collection of Rare Hebraica at the University of Toronto”, The Halcyon: The Newsletter of the Friends of the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library 18 (November 1996); Idem, “As it is Written”: Judaic Treasures from Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (Exhibition Catalogue), Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, University of Toronto, Toronto, 2015, p. 5.
10 https://fgp.genizah.org/FgpFrames.aspx?mainSiteType=false&lang=eng&UIT=7...
11 Yeivin, The Hebrew Language Tradition, I, p. 194.
12 Sussmann, Thesaurus.
13 Sussmann, “Manuscripts and text traditions of the Mishna”, p. 39, note 86.
14 Sussmann, Thesaurus, n° 1577 corresponds to a small fragment listed as CUL Or 1080.2.60 (fol. 2). It was captured in the microfilm (see image here), but it is no longer to be found under this classmark.
15 Called after a German-American theologian and student of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, Caspar René Gregory who was the first to notice the regularity of the arrangements of the hair and flesh sides of the parchment in a quire, see C.R. Gregory, “Les cahiers des manuscrits grecs”, Comptes-rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. 29, ser. 3 (1885), pp. 264–265. It is worth mentioning that some early Babylonian Hebrew manuscripts do not follow this rule, see M. Glatzer, “Early Babylonian manuscripts”, Gazette du Livre Médiéval 27 (1995).
16 This blessing is found in BT Berakhot 54a; Pesahim 7b; Sukkah 46a. In Berakhot it refers to the construction of a new house or a new acquisition while in Pesahim and Sukkah, the recitation of this blessing is advised upon the creation of a lulav for oneself. The use of this blessing in our manuscript may indicate that the scribe wrote it for his personal use, by analogy of producing a lulav for oneself.
17 AM is reckoned from Tishri to Elul, while the calculation of the era of the documents in Iraq would start in the month of Nisan.
18 Calculated with the help of the Calendar Converter for Near East Historians (https://www.muqawwim.com/). The online catalogue of the Toronto Hebrew collections contains a mention that the manuscript was dated by C14 to the early 11th century. However, neither the University of Toronto Rare Books Library nor the previous owner, Dr Albert Dov Friedberg have carried out a C14 analysis. Short palaeographical reports commissioned by Dr Friedberg, authored by Ada Yardeni and Edna Engel, confirm an early date for these fragments.
19 Until now, the earliest such dated manuscripts were T-S E3.75 containing the tractate Avot, copied in 1066, see Sussmann, “Manuscripts and text traditions of the Mishna”, in Thesaurus, vol. 3, p. 39, note 84, and T-S NS 329.341 + T-S AS 78.90 a fragment of Bikkurim of 1064; see Thesaurus, I.358, no. 3558; II.442 no. 4545.
20 For the overview of the early writing of documentary nature and their problematic dating, see esp. S. Hopkins, “The oldest dated document in the Geniza?”, in S. Morag, I. Ben-Ami and N.A. Stillman (eds), Studies in Judaism and Islam presented to Shlomo Dov Goitein on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, Magness Press, Jerusalem, 1981, pp. 83–93; J. Olszowy-Schlanger, “Les plus anciens documents dates de la Guenizah du Caire: lecture et relectures”, Annuaire de l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sciences historiques et philologiques 20 (2004–2005), pp. 47–50; E. Krakovski and S. Stern, “The ‘oldest dated document of the Cairo Genizah’ (Halper 331): The Seleucid era and sectarian Jewish calendars”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 31/3 (2021), pp. 617–634.
21 This Biblical manuscript from Iran, vocalised, with supralinear Babylonian vowels, is preserved in nine Genizah fragments: T-S AS 62.402, T-S AS 62.461, T-S AS 62.492-493, T-S AS 62.533, T-S AS 62.644, T-S NS 246.26.2, T-S NS 246.26.18(a); T-S NS 283.10, see esp. Malachi Beit-Arié, Colette Sirat, Mordechai Glatzer, Codices hebraicis litteris exarati quo tempore scripti fuerint exhibentes, Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi, Brepols, Turnhout, 1997, I, n° 2, pp. 40–41.
22 See HebrewPal website: www.hebrewpalaeography.com.
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