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Mosseri

By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Rebecca Jefferson on Wed 22 Dec 2021

Rebecca, you have a new book coming out in February 2022. What’s it about, and how did you come to be interested in it?

The book, The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt: the History and Provenance of a Jewish Archive (I. B. Tauris, 2022), solely focuses on what we now call the ‘discovery of the Cairo Genizah’. It attempts to tell the provenance stories of the many other Genizah collections around the world whose stories have not been told as fully as that of Cambridge’s Taylor-Schechter collection. My interest in it began when I started working... Read More

Has tags: Adolf Neubauer, Bodleian, Count d'Hulst, David Kaufmann, Elkan Nathan Adler, Genizah Fragments, Greville Chester, Mordechai Adelmann, Moses Shapira, Mosseri, Q&A, Rabbi Ben-Shim'on, Samuel Raffalovich, Solomon Schechter, Solomon Wertheimer, Yemen

 

By Melonie Schmierer-Lee on Thu 9 Dec 2021

Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 63 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in April 2012, by Oded Zinger:

One of the pleasures of Genizah research in Cambridge is the way one stumbles across fascinating human stories while leafing through the Collection. Though my dissertation research revolves around marital disputes in the Genizah, when examining some of the documentary... Read More

Has tags: Abraham Maimonides, agunah, Genizah Fragments, Mosseri, petition, widow

 

By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Ben Outhwaite on Wed 13 Oct 2021

Ben, what have you been up to?

The most exciting recent thing is that we have now returned to the office, after more than 18 months of mostly working at home. Things aren’t quite back to normal – we still wear masks in public areas, the UL is much quieter than it usually is, and they’ve closed the tearoom!!! – but we’re getting there.

Yes, the UL isn’t the same without a place to sip mediocre coffee and discuss medieval manuscripts, is it? Speaking of manuscripts, what are you working on at the moment?

We’ve just come to the end of a... Read More

Has tags: Abraham Maimonides, Genizah Fragments, mastara, Mosseri, Q&A, responsa

 

By Melonie Schmierer-Lee and Oded Zinger on Wed 14 Jul 2021

Oded, what are you working on at the moment?

I’m currently working on several court notes (for example Mosseri VII.207.1 and Mosseri VII.189.2). Mosseri VII.207.1 is a small note written by the court clerk (probably Hillel b. Eli or Halfon b. Manasseh in his early years) to the judge. A woman presented a bill of divorce which appeared suspicious. It was dated according to the calendar of deeds (shetarot) though the writer claims that it was not the custom of the judge to use this type of dating, and the bill of divorce also lacked the legal formula on its verso that... Read More

Has tags: agunah, divorce, dowry, Firkovich, Genizah Fragments, legal, Mosseri, petition, Q&A

 

By Melonie Schmierer-Lee on Thu 27 May 2021

Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 63 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in April 2012, by the conservator Lucy Cheng:

Mosseri IXa.1.28 is a paper fragment, which was crumpled and exposed to dust due to less than ideal storage in the past. After testing the stability of the inks, the fragment was cleaned by gentle brushing, and encrustation of dirt or dust was broken down with pressure from a small spatula and the debris brushed away. To... Read More

Has tags: conservation, Genizah Fragments, Mosseri

 

By Ben Outhwaite on Fri 7 May 2021

The Jacques (or Jack) Mosseri Collection arrived in Cambridge in 2006. After Schechter brought his famed hoard to Cambridge, Mosseri, a prominent member of Egypt’s Jewish community with a keen interest in its history, and knowing that other manuscripts had been buried, set about retrieving these from various places. Following his death, and with his family leaving Egypt, scholars lost track of the collection, but it re-emerged in the... Read More

Has tags: bulla, Dunash b. Labrat, Genizah Fragments, Gershom, Isaac Luria, Moses Maimonides, Mosseri, podcast, Stefan Reif

 

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