Publisher Description

Comprehensive catalogue of Hebrew Bible fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Additional Series, describing 14,679 items.

The Taylor-Schechter New Series contains over 40,000 manuscript fragments that originated in the world famous Cairo Genizah. These fragments are extremely important for research, but students are hampered by the difficulties involved in identifying and gathering the fragments pertaining to particular works or genres. This volume represents an important step toward classifying the contents of the collection and increasing its accessibility, especially with regard to those fragments that belong to the various genres of rabbinic literature.

Comprehensive catalogue of Hebrew Bible fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Additional Series, describing 14,679 items.

Forms the first part of a project to classify and describe the Arabic portion of the Genizah Collection.

A collection of essays by international experts summarizing recent developments in Genizah research.

Professor Morag presents the results of a painstaking investigation of significant linguistic and textual aspects of 165 medieval manuscripts in the 'Old Series' of the famous Taylor-Schechter Collection. The vocalisation found in these manuscripts exhibits signs and forms characteristic of the Tiberian, Babylonian ('simple' as well as 'complex') and Palestino-Tiberian systems and sheds important light on the grammatical structure and meaning of the words in which it occurs. This pioneering study includes detailed descriptions of the manuscripts containing the vocalisation and eleven plates that illustrate the author's classification of the material.

In the Semitic languages the vowels are not part of the alphabet and each Semitic language has its special method of marking its particular vowel values. In the Hebrew of Late Antiquity, a supralinear method of doing this was first introduced after the Arabic conquest of Palestine in the seventh century. It was used mainly for liturgical purposes in complicated poetic texts, and it was soon displaced by the classical Tiberian system. The oldest existing specimens of this supralinear method are on vellum manuscripts from Cairo where the remaining fragments were deposited by Jewish refugees from Crusader Palestine at the end of the eleventh century. The fragments from the Cairo depository, known as the Cairo Genizah, are best represented in the Genizah Collections at Cambridge University Library. This volume gives for the first time a full description of the scattered and torn fragments, as well as of their notational value.

This catalogue will serve as an essential research tool for scholars studying early manuscriptal evidence of targumic literature. It provides a descriptive entry for every targum fragment in the Cambridge Genizah Collections. 1600 fragments - spanning a period of almost a thousand years - have been identified among the 140,000 items in Cambridge. The freshly identified manuscripts will provide the basis for topical research in the fields of Semitic languages, targumic studies, and the history of rabbinic Bible translation.