Paleographic and Halachic Aspects of the Erfurt Torah Scrolls

Paleographical Analysis of Torah Scroll DB.JS.14.001, 2019

This was the first collaborative project of the MIKRA Research Laboratory's international paleography team of R. Brian Rickett, Mark Jerushalmi, and Avraham Deutsch

Henoch Journnal, 2021

This study focuses on the palaeographical analysis of an almost unknown Torah scroll, Berlin, private collection, MS Rhineland 1217, written in Ashkenaz, around the beginning of the 13th century. This scroll is unique because it was written according to pre-Maimonidean halakhic strictures. The palaeographical features of this scroll are comparatively analysed here with a selection of biblical manuscripts and Torah scrolls, also produced in Ashkenaz and dated to between the late 12th and 14th centuries.

Academia Letters, 2021

The present report represents a commissioned paleographical analysis (short paper) performed by the MIKRA Research Laboratory paleography team on a Torah scroll labeled NTS.25.15. The scroll's dimensions are provided as well as its paleography specific features and discussion of their significance. It concludes with a projected date and place of origin.

The dating of the Jewish medieval liturgical scrolls is a notoriously difficult task. These exceptional books, whose sacralised nature requires an array of norms of production, conservation, disposal and ritualistic reading, usually do not bear colophons and inscriptions indicating their time and place of copy or their scribe's identity. The techniques of production of the scrolls only partly overlap with the techniques used to produce codices, so that the achievements of Hebrew codicology to establish a typology of the medieval Hebrew book are not always applicable to scrolls. It is also generally assumed that the monumental calligraphic script used for liturgical scrolls is highly normative, carefully copied by scribes, and less prone to rapid developments through time and space than the script of books written in less controlled kinds of script, making a palaeographical identification even more difficult than in the case of undated codices. In recent years, however, the palaeography of medieval Hebrew scrolls has met with a renewed interest. This includes the scroll fragments discovered in the framework of the international project "Books within Books: Hebrew Fragments in European Libraries" (henceforth BwB). Together with that, the advances in Hebrew palaeography, and especially recent studies dedicated to various "micro-groups" of manuscripts, which can be located in a specific region with some degree of precision, promise to be helpful also for the study of the liturgical scrolls. In this paper, I will present some preliminary observations on the script of fragments of seven Torah scrolls, which were produced, with high degree of probability, in 13th-to 15th-century Poland. This small corpus contains scrolls, which were reused in the book bindings manufactured in Cracow in the 15th century. After a brief overview of the extant Hebrew books from medieval Poland, the paper will briefly describe the pertinent features of the script of the scrolls and propose their tentative palaeographic dating. The Jewish presence in the lands of today's Poland is attested since the 11th century, although itinerant Jewish merchants must have passed through these

HENOCH, 43/1 (2021) New Series 2005, 2021

This article aims to provide a full codicological and paleographical overview, as well as the contents of the Sefer Torah held in the University Library of Bologna (BUB, scroll 2). This scroll, which is the oldest complete extant Sefer Torah, has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention after its very early radiocarbon dating to the 12th-13th century was established, and its typological differences confirmed by the comparison with later Torah scrolls. In addition, this exemplar is a highly significant witness of a unique scribal tradition, otherwise known only through fragmentary evidence. The analysis of BUB Sefer Torah’s inner and outer features, compared with the scribal devices related to the copying of Torah scrolls in the Middle Ages, unveils a new approach to crucial questions on scribal traditions in the Jewish Middle Ages.

The discovery in the Cairo Geniza of more than fifty fragments of horizontal scrolls containing texts that differ from liturgical biblical readings shows that a scroll format was used for non-biblical books long after the Jewish adoption of the codex format. This paper looks at the physical and palaeographical aspects of scrolls containing Talmud, Midrash, Targum and liturgical texts produced between the 9 th and 11 th century.