“Their Battlefield is Eight upon Eight”: A Newly-Discovered Hebrew Poem on Chess (T-S Misc. 17.60)
The Cairo Genizah is most well-known for the extraordinary riches of its manuscript material, even though much of what was deposited there in the post-medieval period was printed books. Indeed, Schechter himself wrote in 1897 that printed material constituted “nearly all the contributions to the Genizah of the last four hundred years,” and that the majority of his time in Cairo was spent “getting rid of these parvenus” while saving “every piece of paper or parchment that had any claim to respectable age” (Schechter 1908, 7). Luckily for researchers of early modern printing, Schechter did not get rid of all of the printed material – Nick Posegay has estimated that there are “currently around 11,000 printed classmarks in the Cambridge University Library” Genizah collections (Posegay 2023, 82) – and this material, largely uncatalogued, represents an unparalleled window into the world of printed Jewish books in the early modern eastern Mediterranean.
My current research project focuses on the Ibn Nahmias press, a printing house run by Iberian exiles in Constantinople (Istanbul), from 1493 to 1530. This press represents not only the intellectual products of the first generation of Sephardi Jews after the Expulsion from Spain, but it was also the first establishment of any kind to print with moveable type outside of Christian Europe. I came to Cambridge with the hopes of finding material from the Ibn Nahmias press in the printed collections, both from their known editions as well as from books not yet documented bibliographically. Recent scholarship on printed Genizah material has already uncovered four previously-unknown editions attributed to the Ibn Nahmias press (Cohen 2020 and Kogman-Appel 2023), and my research at Cambridge University Library in search of Ibn Nahmias imprints likewise turned up over two hundred printed fragments from sixteenth-century Constantinople, most of which could be identified with documented editions but some of which do appear to represent new bibliographic entries.
Unfortunately, none of these unknown “parvenus,” as Schechter would have it, came with a colophon confirming their date or place of production, but I feel confident in assigning them to sixteenth-century Constantinople on the basis of their paper, typography, and content. The fragments of documented editions show that more than half of all known pre-1530 Constantinople books made it to Cairo at some point in at least one copy; this supports the hypothesis that fragments of unknown books may also have come from Constantinople. Furthermore, my own success rate at spotting a pre-1530 Constantinople edition from an unlabelled fragment with no other identifying information was around 3 out of every 4, and 90% of my “false positives” were either from sixteenth-century Constantinople after 1530, or from sixteenth-century Salonica (Thessaloniki). Thus it is fair to suggest that fragments of unknown editions that look to me like sixteenth-century Ottoman imprints are very likely to be so. Most of these unknown editions are halakhic and liturgical works, but one of them contains a fascinating piece of literary production: a rhymed Hebrew poem on the game of chess!
T-S Misc.17.60, front
This poem comes at the end of a rhymed work summarising the laws of ritual slaughter [shehita] as codified by Maimonides in the Mishneh torah, Hilkhot shehita Chapters 1–4. This genre is not uncommon, and was already established in the Middle Ages; other early modern examples include a lengthy summary of the laws of ritual slaughter in rhyme published in a miscellany along with a similar poem on calendrical calculations (She’erit yosef, Salonica, 1521); a short poem on “the laws of checking the lungs” of a slaughtered animal, according to the custom of Salonica, by Meir ben Ya‘aqov Me’iri (published at the end of his Ya’ir nativ: hilkhot shehita, Ferrara, 1552); and an entire book by the Moroccan rabbi Yitshaq Arobas (Zivhe tsedeq, Venice, 1662), explaining Maimonides’ laws of slaughter with commentary in eight chapters which are not only in rhymed verse but also alphabetical!
So far, however, the author of our composition is unknown, as is its date and place, but I would tentatively assign its printing to Constantinople, ca. 1510-1515; it uses identical fonts and page layout to other works of the Ibn Nahmias press of that time. I have found two consecutive bifolia (T-S Misc 17.60 and T-S AS 190.393), which are numbered as leaves 8 and 9, comprising eight pages in total; the preserved text begins at the end of Chapter One and runs continuously to the end of Chapter Four (apparently mislabelled as a second Chapter Three). At the end of the final chapter (the concluding line: ופה שלמו לך הלכות שחיטות / לרב משה בנו מימון פשוטות, “and here ends for you the laws of slaughter / of Rabbi Moshe, son of Maymun, [which have been here] made plain”), after a short and uninformative colophon (“done and completed, praise to the Creator of the World”), the author or editor has added the beginning of another text: “A Poem on the War of Chess / Refined Sevenfold.”
A Poem on the War of Chess /
Refined Sevenfold
I shall instruct you in a battle attested /
which will be fought with strategy and wisdom.
In it, kings stand arrayed in all their might /
Ready to fight, with all their princes alongside them:
Two horses [sus], two elephants [pil], and rooks [ruq] /
Two, with eight pawns [metsiq],
And the king sets his place among them /
With his people and his advisors settled around him,
And he arranges the queen at his side /
And then he is prepared to fight his enemies.
Here they are in their battalions and forces /
And their enemies face them in the same number;
They can be identified by the recorded signs /
Of their bodies, made from wood or bone.
Their battlefield [biq‘a] is eight upon eight /
And their fight begins without sword or shield:
The runners [ragliyim] — they who are the pawns — /
Are the first ones to enter the straits;
They run to be first among all others /
And with them, every action will be prepared and completed.
Their path in the battle is a straight one /
But in truth it is a very brief one;
For their station is only one square [tur] /
And they may not turn or veer in their path.
They may only turn to strike their neighbours /
But they may go only forwards, not backwards.
If the time comes that they reach the eighth [row] /
A great accomplishment for the player’s hand,
Then they will return diagonally as a queen /
And she will be greatly desired by the king.
The path of the rook is both straight and lengthy /
And he will strike down anyone in his path;
He can cross the whole board in a single [turn] /
And go where he wishes with ease…
Why this poem appears here is unclear. It is possible that this was simply to use up the blank space of the final folios, or perhaps this was part of a poetic miscellany (as in the similar anthology of She’erit yosef mentioned above). Judging from the page numbering, I believe that these two leaves are the middle two leaves of a three-bifolia quire (the outer bifolium, number 7, would have had an introduction and the beginning of Chapter One, as well as the rest of the chess poem); this would have been the third quire of the book (the first two quires would have had the signatures 1-2-3 and 4-5-6). Thus, both of these compositions must have been preceded by at least one other work of some kind. Three-bifolia quires with this exact style of page signature are present in several other works of the Ibn Nahmias press, including Midrash tilim (1512, #20 in Ya‘ari 1967) and Sefer ha-shorashim (1513, #21 in Ya‘ari 1967), which suggests that this work comes from around that same time.
In any case, the chess poem (of which 17 lines are preserved, comprising perhaps half of the original text) is a fascinating addition to a small corpus of Hebrew poetry describing the game of chess. Perhaps the most famous example is a twelfth-century poem attributed to the renowned Andalusi grammarian and exegete Avraham ibn ‘Ezra. This poem (beginning “אשורר שיר במלחמה ערוכה”) not only circulated in manuscript, but inspired several copies and imitations in later centuries (Keats 1993). The bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider, in his 1873 essay Schach bei den Juden, published three additional sixteenth-century poetic compositions on chess, clearly modeled after Ibn Ezra’s poem. Two of these poems are anonymous, but one (which begins “שמעוני מתי שכל ואישים / בני מדע וכל חכמי חרשים”) was authored by none other than Shlomo b. Mazaltov (ca. 1480–1550), a Romaniote scholar, poet, and musician, who worked as an editor for the Ibn Nahmias press from 1513 until 1523, including on the 1513 printing of Sefer ha-shorashim (Beeri 1994, Tohar 2024).
In fact, Shlomo b. Mazaltov also published an anthology of medieval and early modern Hebrew poetry in 1545 (creatively titled Shirim u-zemirot ve-tishbahot, “Poems and Songs and Odes”), including sixty of his own compositions (the chess poem republished by Steinschneider among them). Furthermore, from that book we learn that Shlomo b. Mazaltov was also the author of at least three additional books which have not otherwise survived (and it is unknown whether they were in manuscript or print): commentaries on the positive and negative commandments, titled Revid zahav and Torei zahav; and a volume of poetry entitled Yeri‘ot shelomo, which apparently included a variety of secular and liturgical compositions.
Could our chess poem be a second work on the same topic by Shlomo b. Mazaltov? In fact, could both of the compositions attested in this fragment be his? He seems a likely suspect: he was involved in the Constantinople press at the exact time we suspect this work to have been printed; he was both a poet and scholar, writing verse on a variety of secular and religious topics; we know that at least three of his books, including a gathering of his own poems, have been otherwise lost; and he specifically authored at least one poem on chess on the model of Ibn Ezra! I therefore suggest that the works present in these two leaves can be attributed to Shlomo b. Mazaltov; perhaps they may even be fragments of a printed edition of his collection Yeri‘ot shelomo, which would then be another addition to the catalogue of Ibn Nahmias books.
In any case, we can definitely say that this poem is a hitherto-unknown late medieval Hebrew composition describing the game of chess. Our poem, Shlomo b. Mazaltov’s other poem, and Ibn Ezra’s original poem all use essentially the same vocabulary for the pieces (including ragli for pawn; ruq for rook; and pil, literally ‘elephant,’ for the piece known in modern times as the bishop). For the game itself, Ibn Ezra uses the word שחמט, “shahmat,” a loanword from the Persian. The word used for chess in this fragment, like in the other known sixteenth-century poems, is השקק or שקק (perhaps to be vocalized hisqaq, shiqaq, or sqaq): this is a well-attested word for chess in late medieval Hebrew, part of a large family of terms derived from the Old French eschec (probably also ultimately from the Persian shah), including the Italian scacco and Greek skaki, and even the English word ‘chess’ itself. This poem testifies to the continued popularity of medieval Sephardi poetic forms in 16th-century Ottoman Jewish society, and probably to the continued popularity of the chess game as well. We can only hope that the rest of its lines, and its other companions, still lie buried in the riches of the Genizah collection.
T-S Misc 17.60
Transcription and translation by Noam Sienna, 2025
שיר על מלחמת השקק / שבעתים מזוקק
אלמד ידך לקרב רשומה / אשר תלחם בתחבולות וחכמה
אשר עמדו במו חילם מלכים / להלחם ועמם כל נסיכים
שני סוסים שני פילים ורוקים / שנים עם שמנה המציקים
והמלך בתוכם שת מקומו / סביביו ישכנו שריו ועמו
והמלכה בצדו הוא מכונה / ואת אויביו להלחם נכונה
ואלה הם גדודיהם וחילם / ואויביהם כמספרם למולם
ונכרים בסימנים רשומים / בגופיהם בעצים או עצמים
ובקעתם שמנה על שמנה / ומלחמתם בלי חרב וצנה
והרגליים והמה המציקים / אשר המה למצור גם מצוקים
ירוצון לעלות על כל תחלה / ובם תכין ותשלם כל פעלה
ודרכם בקרב דרך ישרה / אבל היא באמת במאד קצרה
בטור אחד לבדו תחנותם / ולא יפנו ויסבו בלכתם
אבל יטו להכות השכנים / ולא ילכו לאחור אך לפנים
ועת כי יפלה עד השמיני / אשר תגבר מאד יד איש ימיני
אזי יחזור באלכסון כמלכה / ולמלך מאד תהיה חשוקה
ודרך רוק ישרה וארוכה / וכל עומד למולו הוא ידוכה
והבקעה ידלג הוא באחת / וכן ילך כחפצו גם בנחת
Bibliography
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Posegay, Nick. “Hebrew Printing and Printers’ Colophons in the Cairo Genizah: Networking Book Trade in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.” In Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time (eds. G Kiraz and S Schmidtke), Georgias Press, 2023, 79-105.
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Schechter, Solomon. Studies in Judaism: Second Series. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1908.
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Tohar, Vered. “Shlomo ben mazal tov veha-polifonya shel ha-siah ba-sefer ha-‘ivri: bein ha-magiah le-vein ha-meshorer.” In Avnei derekh ba-toldot ha-sefer ha-‘ivri (eds. D Schwartz and G Prebor), Bar Ilan University Press, 2024, 129-146.
Ya‘ari, Avraham. Hebrew Printing at Constantinople. Magnes Press, 1967 (Hebrew).
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The manuscripts in this article are part of the Cairo Genizah Collection in Cambridge University Library. To see more items from this collection visit: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah/1