Cambridge University Library
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from our Fragment of the Month in September 2007, by our late colleague Friedrich Niessen and Gideon Bohak:
‘Take a plate of lead and write on it in the first hour of the day; bury it in a new grave which is three days old’. Thus starts a Judaeo-Arabic instruction preserved in the Additional Series (... Read More
Has tags: curse, Genizah Fragments, magic
Hi Mohamed, which manuscript are you working on today?
I’m working on T-S Ar.42.8. It’s a fragment in Arabic script by an unidentified author and scribe.
Can you tell me about it?
It’s a fragment of a work on poetics, covering the subject of prosody in Classical Arabic poetry and mentioning famous Arabic poetic scholars, such as al-Ḵalīl and al-Aḵṭal. The recto... Read More
Has tags: Arabic, Genizah Fragments, literature, poetry, Q&A
A new article in the Guardian (‘Unchain your wife’: the Orthodox women shining a light on ‘get’ refusal) raises the issue of Jewish women who are chained – that is, unable to get remarried although they have been left by their husbands. According to Jewish law, a divorce is not complete until the husband, willingly, gives his wife a get – a formal bill of divorce – written in accordance with very strict rules. A slight error, even in one word or letter, can make... Read More
Has tags: agunah, divorce, Genizah Fragments, get, get refusal, marriage
On this National Cheese Day, I thought I would take a look at what traces of cheese we can find among the documents in Cambridge Digital Library. Cheese is mentioned frequently in the Genizah world, as it was a mainstay of the medieval diet: milk could not be preserved, and so most dairy was consumed in the form of various kinds of cheese, hard and soft, salted, brined or fresh. It was popular throughout the Genizah world and in Egypt it was a favourite food of both the poorest and the richest sections of society. The Baḥrī Mamlūk sultan an-Naṣīr Muḥammad (d. 1341 CE), for instance, was... Read More
Has tags: cheese, dairy, Genizah Fragments, kashrut, kosher
Our Throwback Thursday this week is taken from issue 49 of the printed edition of Genizah Fragments, published in April 2005, by Avi Shivtiel:
A number of talmudic sages seem to have favoured the learning of languages, since the Talmud records several statements to the effect that this was a skill to be encouraged among scholars.
An early and important midrash claims that God gave the Torah to Israel in four languages - Hebrew, Latin, Arabic and Aramaic (Sifrey, Ve-Zot Ha-... Read More
Has tags: Armenian, Avi Shivtiel, Genizah Fragments, glossary, language, list, Romance, vocabulary
So, Mel, tell me what are you working on today?
I’m writing a catalogue entry for T-S NS J378. It’s an easy one to do, because — helpfully — several other people have already translated it: Goitein, Gershon Weiss, and Amir Ashur. We still need a catalogue entry for it, though, for Cambridge Digital Library, so I’m writing that. It’s a betrothal agreement, written by our favourite court scribe, Halfon ben Manasseh. The date isn’t preserved, but because we know Halfon’s handwriting, we... Read More
Has tags: betrothal, Genizah Fragments, Goitein, legal, marriage, Q&A
It has long been customary in both Genizah studies and Arabic codicology to describe the numerals frequently found in documentary texts as ‘Coptic’.[1] Recent work has shown that these curvilinear numerals may better be termed ḥurūf al-zimām (‘the letters of accounts/registers’) or ‘zimām numerals’ (Chrisomalis, 2010). In what follows, I will give a (very) brief overview of the Coptic alphabetic numerical system, ḥurūf al-zimām, and the related Mozarabic/Toledan and Rūmī/Fāsī numerals to explain why the Genizah Research Unit will be adopting this more accurate terminology in future... Read More
Has tags: accounts, Coptic, Genizah Fragments, numerals
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
Amir, which manuscripts are you working on today?
I'm actually working on dozens of manuscripts relating to Abraham Maimuni, as part of a project led by Mordechai Akiva Friedman. Right now, I’m looking at T-S 10K8.9, T-S 12.205, T-S 13J9.11, T-S 13J26.21 verso, T-S NS 100.74, T-S Ar.18(2).73, T-S AS... Read More
Has tags: Abraham Maimonides, debt, Genizah Fragments, legal, Mordechai Akiva Friedman, Q&A, responsa
Scattered through the many Genizah manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah are doodles and page decorations, drawings and designs. When studying and cataloguing thousands of pages of text you will only come across these pictures on occasion, and often, if you are busy deciphering the handwriting and identifying the author, the pictures can be an interesting sideline, a bit of light-hearted amusement or only given a brief glance.
Now, however, Pinar Zararsiz, during her internship (2019-2020) at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, has gathered together many, and a wide variety of, examples... Read More
Has tags: drawing, exhibition, Genizah Fragments
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