Micrography in Hebrew Manuscripts

The BL has just put up a new website for their digitized Hebrew manuscripts (mentioned here). You can now filter by Hebrew Bible manuscripts. There are 13 in all, seven of which are scrolls. There are some short articles on the new site as well that are worth reading. The most interesting one is on the subject of micrography. The description for the Sana’a Pentateuch (A.D. 1469) describes it this way:

Micrography is an original and charming expression of Jewish art dating back to the early Middle Ages still practised today. It entails using minute Hebrew script to create geometric patterns and animate forms. Micrographic decoration can already be found in some of the Hebrew Bibles produced in the Near East in the 9th and 10th century CE. With time, this unique form of Jewish art gradually spread beyond the boundaries of the Near East, to Europe and Yemen reaching its pinnacle between the 13th and 15th centuries CE.

Initially, the scribes used the Masorah (body of rules on the reading, spelling and intonation of the scriptural text) to shape the micrographic outlines in Hebrew Bibles, but over time they looked for other sources, a particular favourite being the Book of Psalms.

As with Jewish manuscript illumination itself, micrographic designs tended to follow the trends in the host environment at a particular time. Thus, in Islamic lands and Spain the patterns and shapes delineated in Hebrew minuscule lettering were mainly architectural, geometric and vegetal, whereas in European countries such as France and Germany they were symbolic and figurative. Micrographic grotesques and fabulous creatures became quite popular in hand-copied books produced in Ashkenaz (Franco-German areas) in the medieval period. From the 17th century CE onwards micrography was mainly used to decorate marriage contracts, amulets, Esther scrolls and other types of Hebrew texts written by hand.

There are some incredible designs in this micrography. Here is Psalm 119 in the Sana’a Pentateuch.

BL Or 2348, f. 39r and 38v

 And here is Jonah praying from the fish beside the text of Jonah 2 in the “Jonah Pentateuch.”

BL Add MS 21160, f. 292r

For more on micrography, see Illuminating in Micrography by Dalia-Ruth Halperin (Brill, 2013).

Hundreds More Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts from the British Library

Add. MS 9401 f. 3r. Genesis. Dated 1588.

Yesterday the British Library announced that more Hebrew manuscripts have now been digitized.

Our followers and readers will be delighted to learn that over 760 Hebrew manuscripts have now been uploaded to the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts. Generously funded by The Polonsky Foundation, the Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project aims at digitising and providing free on-line access to well over 1250 Hebrew handwritten books from the Library’s collection. The project, which began in 2013 is due for completion in June 2016, when the full complement of manuscripts will be available to a global audience.

I haven’t found a reliable way to filter for Old Testament manuscripts yet. If someone knows, let me know in the comments. A keyword search for “Hebrew Bible” returned 818 results but plenty of these were false hits. Just poking around though there are some beautiful Hebrew Bible manuscripts in this collection.

Add MS 11657 f. 171v. Isaiah. Dated 1300-1399.

Add MS 15282 f. 75v. Exodus. Dated 1300-1324

Add MS 9402, f. 101r. Daniel. Dated  1588.

New Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts of Corpus Christi College, Oxford

An email from the librarian at Corpus Christi, Oxford informs me of a new catalogue which includes seven Biblical Hebrew manuscripts:

Corpus Library and Archives are delighted to announce the publication of A descriptive catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Edited by Peter E. Pormann (CCC 1994), the catalogue complements recently published volumes on the College’s Western and Greek manuscripts.

The editor, Profesor Peter Pormann (Manchester University) will be giving a David Patterson Lecture at 7.15 pm on Monday 7 March, in the Corpus auditorium: The Study of Hebrew in Medieval and Renaissance England: the Corpus connection

Here is a brief summary of the collection:

Although few in number, the College’s Hebrew manuscripts are outstanding in rarity and value. At the core of the collection are the seven Biblical manuscripts given to Corpus by John Claymond, each of which features an interlinear translation. Jewish and Christian scribes produced such texts in a collaborative effort during the mid-thirteenth century to provide tools for non-Jews to learn Hebrew. In addition the collection contains a near complete copy of Rashi’s biblical commentaries, and an Ashkenazi prayer book. In the latter, the owner, a Jew from Spain living in England, recorded different debts owed to him by a variety of Christian dignitaries around the year 1200. He did this in Judaeo-Arabic (i.e. Arabic written in Hebrew letters), and this document is the only one of its kind; no other texts are known to have been written in this language during the entire Middle Ages in the British Isles. Taken together, the Corpus collection forms one of the most important collections of Anglo-Jewish manuscripts in the world.

According to the VMR, Corpus Christi has only one Greek New Testament manuscript (l 2436).

A Contract to copy Scripture from AD 1021

Without doubt, one of the most important manuscripts for our modern editions of the Hebrew Scriptures is the Leningrad Codex B19a, and many institutions own the facsimile edition. [Interesting that people stick with the name ‘Leningrad Codex’ and that the name has not gone the way of the Rhodes statues.] This manuscripts is dated, and to my surprise I learned that from some years later we have a contract with the scribe of the Leningrad Codex, Samuel ben Jacob, to copy ‘Eight Prophets and the Writings’ for the respectable sum of 25 dinars.

Read the full story here in the fragment of the month of the Taylor-Schechter Research Unit of the Cambridge University Library.