Today we are announcing a new piece of Genizah research and a new book in the field of book history from our friends over at Gorgias Press. This book, titled Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time, is a collection of essays examining the widespread phenomenon of ‘colophons’ in manuscript culture. From Gorgias Press:
The colophon, the ultimate or “crowing touch” paragraphs of a manuscript or a book, provides readers with a the historical context in which the scribe produced the manuscript (or the publisher, a book). At its most fundamental level, the... Read Morearticle
Nick Posegay
on Fri 27 May 2022
The Cairo Genizah is famous as a source for the study of medieval Jewish history, and that is mainly what we focus on in our work at the Genizah Research Unit. However, Egyptian Jews continued to produce and consume textual media all the way up to the Genizah’s “discovery” in 1896 (and beyond). As a result, Genizah collections also contain hundreds of manuscripts produced during the 19th century, written even as Oxbridge scholars sought to move them from Egypt to England. Among these are Arabic textbooks, Ladino novels, French wedding invitations, Yiddish newspapers, and Viennese Bibles.... Read More
Has tags: article, Genizah Fragments, Ottoman, printed
Ben Outhwaite
on Wed 2 Mar 2022
The newly published article in the Journal of Semitic Studies by Dr Kim Phillips, ‘T-S A43.1+ and the Imitation of the Tiberian Reading Tradition’, is a significant piece of research whose title belies its potentially far-reaching repercussions for our understanding of the relationship between the Tiberian and the Palestinian (‘Eretz-Yisraeli’) reading traditions and their systems of vocalisation.
Kim’s article is just one of several that have been or soon will be published from his four-year Rothschild Foundation for Higher Education-funded... Read More
Has tags: article, Genizah Fragments, serugin, vocalisation
Nick Posegay
on Thu 8 Jul 2021
GRU researcher Dr. Magdalen Connolly and I have just published an article about Genizah Qurʾan fragments in the Journal of Qurʾanic Studies, titled “A Survey of Personal-Use Qurʾan Manuscripts Based on Fragments from the Cairo Genizah.” In it, we identify 25 separate manuscripts of the Qurʾan – the holy book of Islam – in Cairo Genizah collections, including many in Cambridge. These manuscripts span the entire Genizah period and raise questions about medieval and pre-modern Jewish peoples’ engagement with... Read More
Has tags: article, Genizah Fragments, Qurʾan
Melonie Schmierer-Lee
on Thu 10 Jun 2021
Nick Posegay's article 'Sticking to the Script: How an incredible journey of Hebrew letters helps us recall the Arabic language' has just appeared in The Scholar, an annual magazine for Gates Cambridge scholars and alumni. Nick's article tells the Genizah story to a general audience through the lens of T-S Ar.5.58, a leaf from a Bible glossary with the vocabulary for a portion of 1 Samuel:
"The scribe’s booklet was... Read More
Has tags: article, Bible, Genizah Fragments, glossary