Elijah ha-Naqdan and the Nakdanim of Medieval Europe

Somewhere in northern France, in the summer of 1239, a scribe named Elijah came to the last pages of Deuteronomy in a book he had been making for a patron called Rabbi Asher. For eight leaves, from folio 234 to folio 241, he turned the Masorah into a second inscription: large Hebrew letters built out of minute script, each letter a cage of Masoretic notes, and the letters together spelling his name, his father’s praise and a blessing on the man who had paid for the book.¹ Inside one of those letters, on folio 239, the notes ran out. Elijah filled the gap with a confession and a boast. He had found no Masorah to put there, he wrote, so he would write about himself instead: the scribe, the nakdan, the masran, son of the great Berechiah.²

The book is now Vat. ebr. 14 in the Vatican Library, a Pentateuch with the Aramaic Targum, the Five Scrolls and the Haftarot, copied, corrected, vocalised and furnished with Masorah by Elijah ben Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Naqdan.³ Its maker is one of the few medieval pointers of the Bible whose voice can still be heard, and his father is one of the most surprising figures of Anglo-Norman Jewry, a punctuator of Hebrew books who also turned Aesop’s fables into Hebrew rhymed prose.⁴ Between them they show what a nakdan was, what he did to a page, and why later scholars came to doubt that he understood his own work.⁵

Writer, Pointer, Masorete

Elijah’s titles describe three different jobs. The sofer, the scribe, wrote the consonants. The nakdan, the pointer, added the vowel signs and the accents. The masran wrote the Masorah, the small notes in the margins that count rare forms and guard the spelling of the text.⁶ In a phrase that recurs in colophons from Fustat to Normandy, a craftsman who did all three said that he had written, pointed and “masoreticised” the book.⁷ Elijah used the same three verbs in the colophon of his other surviving Bible: “I have written, vocalized and added the Masorah in this book.”⁸

The word nakdan comes from the Hebrew for a point or dot. The Jewish Encyclopedia, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, defined the naḳdanim as punctuators or Masoretic annotators, the successors of the Masoretes proper, whose activity “consisted in collecting and conserving Masoretic material, revising the consonantal text produced by professional scribes, and furnishing them with vowel-signs and accents as well as with Masoretic glosses.”⁹ In a narrower sense, it added, the name belongs to those who flourished from the twelfth century to the invention of printing.¹⁰ Its article on the Masorah gave the same craftsmen a physical signature: the nakdanim of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries revised the work of the copyists and added the vowels and accents, “generally in fainter ink and with a finer pen,” and frequently the Masorah as well.¹¹

The encyclopaedia’s list of nakdanim whose names survive runs to forty-five entries.¹² It is a roll call of northern Europe. There is Ḥayyim ben Isaac, at work in La Rochelle in 1215–16; Judah ben Isaac, called Sir Leon, of Paris, around 1200; Joseph Ḥazzan of Troyes, author of a grammatical work; Joseph of Xanten, son of Kalonymus of Neuss, in 1294; Moses ben Yom-Ṭob ha-Naḳdan; Jekuthiel ben Judah ha-Kohen, author of the ʿEn ha-Ḳore; and, at number nine, “Elijah Naḳdan, son or grandson” of Berechiah ben Natronai Krespia ha-Naḳdan.¹³ Even the great Tosafist Rabbenu Tam appears on the list.¹⁴ The pointing of the Bible, in this world, was not a mechanical trade but a branch of learning, and the encyclopaedia also named Tosafists from Rabbenu Gershom to Meir of Rothenburg as compilers of Masoretic material that turned up in the margins of codices.¹⁵

One Man in Fustat

The craft had begun in the East, and its classic witness shows that the three jobs could live in one pair of hands. In the early eleventh century, in Fustat, the scribe Samuel ben Jacob wrote the codex now called the Leningrad Codex for a client named Mevorakh ben Joseph.¹⁶ His long ownership colophon opens by stating that “this codex of the complete Bible was written, furnished with vocalisation and masora, and carefully checked in Fusṭāṭ.”¹⁷ On one of the carpet pages, folio 474, Samuel wrote that he had “written, vocalised and provided the masora of this codex.”¹⁸

Benjamin Outhwaite, who has followed Samuel through the fragments of the Cairo Genizah, draws out what that means. Samuel copied the text and also added the vocalisation and the Masorah, “performing alone a task often carried out by a scribe (sofer) and a punctuator (naqdan) working together.”¹⁹ He seems also to have produced the micrography of the carpet pages and perhaps their gold, “a remarkable piece of solo entrepreneurship, producing single-handedly a luxury edition of the Hebrew Bible.”²⁰ Outhwaite notes other eastern codices with the same pattern: one written, vocalised and provided with Masorah by Joseph ben Jacob the Maghribi, another written and vocalised by Moses ben Hillel.²¹ The journal’s profile of Samuel ben Jacob follows his career further.

The word Samuel used for “checked,” mugah, matters for everything that follows. Outhwaite explains it as the term for authoritative Bibles copied or corrected against a particular textual tradition, and quotes Israel Yeivin’s definition, “any sort of carefully corrected text.”²² A nakdan was, among other things, a corrector. Two centuries later, in northern France, Elijah would use the same word for the old book against which he checked his own work.²³

A Bible in Another Hand

In Europe the jobs were often divided, and the division can be seen on the page. The only Hebrew book written in England that can be dated before the expulsion of 1290, now in the care of the Museum of the Bible in Washington and long known as Codex Valmadonna I, was finished in Tammuz 4949, in the summer of 1189.²⁴ Its original scribe recorded on the final page that he had finished the Hebrew Ḥumash, the Targum, the Haftarot, the Five Scrolls and Job.²⁵ Sotheby’s description of the codex records that its square Ashkenazic script carries vocalisation, cantillation marks and Masorah Magna and Parva “in another hand.”²⁶

The scribe and the pointer did not even necessarily work from the same model. Élodie Attia, the scholar who has studied Elijah’s Bibles most closely, observes that a medieval biblical manuscript was “the result of a complex process involving sources and different people.” The sofer was responsible for the consonants and may have used a different exemplar from the one used by the naqdan or the masran. In the Valmadonna codex, she notes, many Masoretic annotations contradict the consonantal text beside them.²⁷

England’s Jews knew what such a book was worth. A Hebrew deed of 1271 from Lincolnshire, now among the muniments of Westminster Abbey, records a Bible handed over in anticipation of the marriage of Judith, daughter of Madame Bellaset, to Aaron son of Benjamin. It was “written on parchment, in three columns on each page, with nikud and Masorah, Targum and Haftarot, bound in a single volume.”²⁸ The pointing and the Masorah were named in the contract alongside the parchment, as part of what made the book valuable. The 1189 codex itself survived the riots that followed the coronation of Richard I, perhaps because, as Ephraim of Bonn reported of the books looted at York in 1190, the plunder was carried to Cologne and sold back to Jews.²⁹

The Fox-Fable Father

Elijah’s father wrote the book for which the family is best remembered. Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes him, was a fabulist, translator, thinker, copyist and grammarian of the end of the twelfth and the thirteenth century, who lived in Normandy and for a time in England. “His title ha-Nakdan testifies to the fact that he punctuated Hebrew books.”³⁰ Some have identified him with Benedictus le Puncteur of Oxford, who contributed to a gift for Richard I in 1194, though many deny the identification.³¹

His best-known work is the Mishle Shuʿalim, the Fox Fables, a collection of 107 fables in the common count, or 113 in a fuller version.³² The Posen Library notes that most of the stories come from Marie de France’s French Ysopet and from medieval Latin versions of Aesop, with others from Indian and Islamic sources that circulated in northern Europe, and that at the end of each one Berechiah offers the lessons to be gleaned from it.³³ In the translation by Moses Hadas, one fable tells of a lion sleeping in the shade of a rock and a toad that bites him on the forehead; the moral is that “a giant is sometimes strangled by a fly.”³⁴ In his preface Berechiah wrote that the fables were known to all mankind and found in the books of all languages, “but my faith differs from theirs.”³⁵ The same preface laments the moral state of English Jewry and concludes, “I would prefer toil and a dry crust to sharing my lot with them.”³⁶

The fables were only part of his work. Berechiah translated Adelard of Bath’s Quaestiones Naturales, the popular twelfth-century book of natural science, under the title Dodi ve-Nekhdi; he wrote ethical treatises drawing on Saadia Gaon; and he composed a lapidary of sixty-three kinds of stones and a commentary on Job.³⁷ The Jewish Encyclopedia thought it significant that in the fables’ preface he refers to the turning of fate “to the island of the sea,” which Adolf Neubauer read as an allusion to the English massacres of 1190.³⁸

Elijah himself has a part in the history of his father’s reputation. An older view placed Berechiah in Provence around 1260. The Jewish Encyclopedia explains that this rested on a misreading of a colophon written by his son, which Joseph Jacobs showed in 1890 to belong to 1233.³⁹ A pointer’s colophon, read correctly, moved a fabulist from thirteenth-century Provence to twelfth-century England.

Two Books Signed by the Son

Only two manuscripts by Elijah survive, and each carries his name in more than one place.⁴⁰ The smaller is Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Or. Quart. 9: a Pentateuch, Five Scrolls, Job and Haftarot of 198 leaves, about 134 by 115 millimetres, copied, corrected, vocalised and furnished with Masorah by Elijah, and finished on Wednesday 26 October 1233.⁴¹ The letters of its text are about two millimetres high.⁴² Its colophon names the place where it was finished as RDWM. Scholars have read the name as Rouen, while Gérard Nahon proposed Dormans in the Marne; Attia records both views.⁴³

In that colophon Elijah calls himself “the scribe Elijah ben ha[?] Berakhiah ha-Naqdan,” praises his father as reader, Mishnah scholar, expert grammarian and sage, and adds: “I am son of his old age. I have written, vocalized and added the Masorah in this book.”⁴⁴ A word in the opening was later erased, leaving a gap in the middle of his father’s name.⁴⁵

The larger book, Vat. ebr. 14, measures about 300 by 240 millimetres.⁴⁶ Its first three leaves were lost and replaced in the fifteenth century by an Italo-Ashkenazic hand; from folio 4 to the end, the only scribe, corrector, punctuator and Masorete is Elijah.⁴⁷ He marked his name inside the Masora Magna with dots, picked out its letters with dots and floral patterns, and marked it again at the head and inside a column of the Haftarot.⁴⁸ On folio 242 he added a scribal blessing for himself: “Be strong and stronger the scribe and punctuator.”⁴⁹ The long micrographic colophon at the end of Deuteronomy praises Berechiah as one who “gave heed, sought out, set in order many proverbs,” words borrowed from Ecclesiastes, and blesses Rabbi Asher “who dedicated his heart to make this beautiful book.”⁵⁰

I did not find any corresponding masoretic notes here. I am writing, I, the scribe, the Naqdan and the masran, son of the man of lots of works, the Rav Berakhiah ha-Naqdan.

Elijah ha-Naqdan, Vat. ebr. 14, f. 239r, trans. Élodie Attia⁵¹

The date of the larger book has its own small history. Elijah wrote in his final colophon, on a damaged last leaf, that he finished the book on the third day of the week, the 21st of Av, in the year 99 of the fifth millennium by the short count.⁵² Read as 4999, that gives the summer of 1239, which suits his script and his father’s dates, and Norman Golb and Benjamin Richler accepted it. But the 21st of Av 4999 fell on a Sunday, not a Tuesday, and Neubauer had suggested 1219 instead.⁵³ In 2022 Bettina Burghardt, writing in the working papers of the Heidelberg Corpus Masoreticum project, went through every plausible reading of the colophon and found an internally consistent date, Tuesday 16 Av 4999, 19 July 1239. Her conclusion was that “the assumption that the scribe made an error is unwarranted.”⁵⁴ The title of her paper, Taking the Scribe Seriously, could serve for the whole modern study of the nakdanim.

Elijah’s notes show him at work. On two leaves he wrote in the lower margin, “Here, I did not find anymore notes,” evidence that he was searching for Masoretic material to copy. In the Haftarot he noted where the reading “in France” begins.⁵⁵ Later hands added comments quoting Abraham ibn Ezra and glosses in Old French written in Hebrew letters.⁵⁶ The book was used, read and annotated in the society that produced it.

Pictures Made of Notes

What makes Vat. ebr. 14 famous is the shape of its Masorah. In many of its lower margins the notes do not run in lines but form pictures. Attia counted sixty-four figurative micrographic designs and eleven simple drawings: twenty-one in Genesis, twelve in Exodus, four in Leviticus, eight in Numbers and nineteen in Deuteronomy.⁵⁷ The series opens with Noah’s ark on folio 7 and Noah offering a sacrifice on folio 9, and some of the drawings may have been inspired by Latin manuscripts from Rouen.⁵⁸ It is, she notes, the oldest Ashkenazic manuscript to present such an extensive series of figurative Masorah, including human figures.⁵⁹

Such art had enemies. Attia records that the practice was widespread enough in the lifetime of Judah he-Ḥasid (1150–1217) to draw his condemnation.⁶⁰ It also shaped the reputation of Ashkenazi Bibles for centuries. Jacob ben Ḥayyim, introducing the second rabbinic Bible printed in Venice in 1524–25, complained that most Masoretic notes were written in a contracted form and with ornaments, “so much so that they cannot at all be deciphered, as the desire of the writer was only to embellish his writing and not to examine or to understand the sense.”⁶¹ Elias Levita, in 1538, swore that he had travelled a day or two to see a reliable index of the Masorah, trusted Spanish codices most, and dismissed the marginal glosses of other books: “the scribes have perverted them, as they did not care for the Masorah, but only thought to ornament their writing, and to make even lines.”⁶² The journal’s essays on Elias Levita and on biblical micrography trace both sides of that story.

Modern scholars largely repeated the charge. Attia quotes a description of micrographic Masorah as having taken on “an aesthetic function rather than that of an aid to the study of the biblical text,” its tiny characters and loose alignment showing that the Masorah “was scarcely even understood,” and notes Colette Sirat’s view that micrographic Masorah was never meant to be read.⁶³ Ashkenazi communities were commonly said to have been unfamiliar with the Masorah, and the pictures themselves were offered as proof.⁶⁴

Did the Pointer Understand His Masorah?

Attia’s edition was designed to test that claim. Working at Heidelberg between 2011 and 2014, she took the thirteen folios of Exodus in Vat. ebr. 14 that contain figurative Masorah and edited every note on them, regular and pictorial, lemma by lemma.⁶⁵ She chose Exodus because there she could compare Elijah’s notes with three of the great eastern codices: the Leningrad Codex, the Damascus Pentateuch and British Library Or. 4445. She also compared them with a Spanish Bible and with three early Ashkenazi books, including the Valmadonna codex, the La Rochelle Bible and Elijah’s own Berlin manuscript, checking the thirteen folios against ninety-one others.⁶⁶

The result reversed the old verdict. In most cases the notes could be identified, were comprehensive, and showed strong parallels with those of the oldest eastern Tiberian codices.⁶⁷ Only two of the roughly 160 lemmas she edited carried figurative notes that could not be read, and every other uncertainty in the edition had nothing to do with the pictures.⁶⁸ One note in the edition matched a list known from the Masoretic compendium Okhlah ve-Okhlah, which suggested that Elijah had access to manuscripts containing ancient material.⁶⁹ “The presence of figurative elements in the Masorah represents neither a loss nor a distortion of Masoretic knowledge,” she concluded, “but instead illustrates a development in the transmission of the Masorah.”⁷⁰

One marginal note shows the nakdan comparing sources. On folio 256, reviewing a passage, Elijah recorded a reading found “in an old masoret, old corrected exemplar,” a yashan noshan mugah.⁷¹ Attia notes that it is not clear whether he meant a Masoretic note from an old manuscript or the biblical text in one, and whether the old book was an earlier Ashkenazi copy or a model codex of the Ben Asher tradition. Either way, it seems probable that Elijah knew Tiberian sources.⁷² The word mugah is the same one Samuel ben Jacob had used in Fustat.⁷³

An Anglo-Norman Accent

Agreement with the eastern codices was not total, and the differences turned out to have a pattern of their own. In the thirteen folios of Exodus, Attia found 162 lemmas with Masoretic notes, carrying seventy variants against the comparison manuscripts.⁷⁴ Some of the same variants recur in Vat. ebr. 14, the Valmadonna codex and the Berlin manuscript, and she grouped them as “Anglo-Norman” features, perhaps the trace of a regional scribal tradition in England and northern France.⁷⁵

The La Rochelle Bible, copied in the Atlantic port around 1216, stood apart. It showed almost none of the Anglo-Norman features and stayed closer to the eastern codices.⁷⁶ Attia suggests that it may have been copied from a Spanish exemplar, and that a busy harbour would have put many manuscripts into circulation along with other goods.⁷⁷

Elijah’s own two books also differ. The Berlin manuscript looks like a miniature of the Vatican one, but it follows different rules of vocalisation, interchanging qameṣ and pataḥ, and shureq and qibbuṣ, and omitting dagesh. Attia suggests that local pronunciation may have influenced it, that it may have been copied from a different exemplar, and that its tiny format may mean it was meant for use as a prayer book.⁷⁸ The same man, pointing two copies of much the same books six years apart, could follow two models.

These findings sit uneasily with a judgement made in 1977 by Federico Pérez Castro, who compared Toledo, Ashkenazi and eastern Bibles and concluded that the Ashkenazi manuscripts were “far removed” from the Ben Asher model.⁷⁹ Attia points out that the eastern codices already differed among themselves, so that the Cairo Codex of the Prophets varied from the Leningrad Codex almost as much as one of Pérez Castro’s Ashkenazi samples did.⁸⁰ Her conclusion is that the Ashkenazi Bibles “remain fundamentally Tiberian and should be considered a medieval development of that tradition,” and that the idea of a single standard Tiberian text set against a non-standard one has to be abandoned.⁸¹ The pointing of Elijah’s books is neither the vowel system of Codex Reuchlinianus nor a degraded copy of Aleppo. It is the Tiberian tradition as it was practised in thirteenth-century Normandy and England.⁸²

Grammarians of the Points

The nakdanim did not only point books. Some of them wrote the rules. Moses ben Yom-Ṭob of London, known as Moses ha-Naḳdan, wrote the Darke ha-Niḳḳud weha-Neginot, on the rules of vowels and accents. Jacob ben Ḥayyim printed it in the Bomberg rabbinic Bible, and it was repeated in all later rabbinic Bibles; the Jewish Encyclopedia called it “practically the standard work on Hebrew punctuation in the Middle Ages.” In it Moses quotes Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra and Solomon Parḥon.⁸³ Every reader of the rabbinic Bible, including the readers of the new Miqraot Gedolot HaKeter, stands at the end of a line that runs back through Venice to a nakdan of medieval London.

Moses ben Yom-Ṭob had pupils. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger describes the London circle in which Moses ben Isaac ben ha-Nesiah compiled his dictionary of biblical Hebrew, the Sefer ha-Shoham, around 1260. He was a disciple of “the famous grammarian and Masorete” Moses ben Yom Tov, and a fellow student of his son Elijah Menahem, a rich merchant, pawnbroker, physician and eminent rabbi.⁸⁴ The Sefer ha-Shoham, she writes, is the most important work of Hebrew linguistics composed in the Ashkenazi world. Among the authorities it cites are Moses ben Yom Tov and Berechiah ha-Nakdan.⁸⁵ Its author, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, took his book’s title from the onyx stone because shoham is an anagram of his own name, Moshe.⁸⁶

Further east, in Prague in the second half of the thirteenth century, Jekuthiel ben Judah ha-Kohen, called ha-Naḳdan, occupied himself chiefly with the Masorah and its pointing. With the help of six ancient Spanish manuscripts he prepared a correctly vocalised and accented text of the Pentateuch and the Book of Esther, and explained his rules in the ʿEn ha-Ḳore, quoting Ben Naphtali, Ben Asher, Ibn Janaḥ, Ibn Ezra and Rabbenu Tam. Elias Levita and later grammarians quoted him in turn.⁸⁷ It was Jekuthiel, Attia notes, who already in the thirteenth century claimed that Spanish books stood closest to the Ben Asher tradition. Yet some of the grammatical explanations in his ʿEn ha-Ḳore correspond to the very variants she found in the Anglo-Norman Bibles.⁸⁸ Even a critic of the local practice described it from inside.

What the Nakdan Left

The nakdanim are easy to overlook because their work is everywhere. Every pointed Hebrew Bible, from the codices of Fustat to the printed rabbinic Bibles of Venice and the digital texts of today, carries the signs that such craftsmen added to the consonants and checked against older books. The hub page on the nakdanim surveys the vowel systems they used and the treatises that described them, among them the Hidāyat al-Qāriʾ and the margins of the Masorah parva and magna they filled.

What the European pointers left in addition was a record of themselves. Samuel ben Jacob put his name into the carpet pages of a Bible in Fustat.⁸⁹ An unnamed pointer added the vowels, accents and Masorah to an English Pentateuch in 1189, in a hand different from the scribe’s.⁹⁰ Elijah ben Berechiah wrote his father’s praise in letters made of Masoretic notes and told the reader, inside one of those letters, that he had looked for notes and found none.⁹¹ The Erfurt Bibles and the books copied by women scribes carry the same kind of trace.

For four centuries, from Jacob ben Ḥayyim to the catalogues of the twentieth century, the pictures in such books were taken as proof that their makers did not understand the Masorah.⁹² Attia’s reading of thirteen leaves of Exodus showed the opposite: the son of the fox-fable writer knew his Masorah, compared it with old corrected books, and turned it into art without losing its content.⁹³ Burghardt, recalculating his colophon, found that he had not mistaken the day of the week after all.⁹⁴ Both conclusions come down to taking the nakdan at his word.

Notes

1. Élodie Attia, The Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan: An Edition of Ashkenazic Micrographical Notes, Materiale Textkulturen 11 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), open access, record at hal.science, 126–127. *
2. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 127. *
3. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 119. *
4. “Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), at encyclopedia.com; Richard Gottheil and Joseph Jacobs, “Berechiah ben Natronai Krespia ha-Naḳdan,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
5. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. ebr. 14, digitised at digi.vatlib.it. *
6. Élodie Attia, “On Some Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts from the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Studies in Semitic Vocalisation and Reading Traditions, ed. Aaron D. Hornkohl and Geoffrey Khan (Cambridge: University of Cambridge and Open Book Publishers, 2020), 593–616, cited by paragraph, at books.openedition.org, ¶22. *
7. Benjamin M. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex: Samuel b. Jacob in the Cairo Genizah,” Apollo, University of Cambridge Repository, at doi.org/10.17863/CAM.70702; Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 134. *
8. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 134. *
9. Crawford Howell Toy and Caspar Levias, “Naḳdanim,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
10. Toy and Levias, “Naḳdanim”. *
11. “Masorah,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
12. Toy and Levias, “Naḳdanim”. *
13. Toy and Levias, “Naḳdanim”. *
14. Toy and Levias, “Naḳdanim”. *
15. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Masorah”. *
16. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex”. *
17. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex”. *
18. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex”. *
19. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex”. *
20. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex”. *
21. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex”. *
22. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex”. *
23. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 109–110. *
24. Mark Farnadi-Jerusálmi, “Washington, MOTB MS. 858,” Hebrew Palaeography Album, gen. ed. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, at hebrewpalaeography.com; “Hebrew Bible: Pentateuch with Haftarot and the Five Scrolls, England, 1189,” Sotheby’s, The Valmadonna Trust Library, Part I, New York, 22 December 2015, lot 7, at sothebys.com. *
25. Farnadi-Jerusálmi, “MOTB MS. 858”. *
26. Sotheby’s, Valmadonna Trust Library, lot 7. *
27. Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶22. *
28. Sotheby’s, Valmadonna Trust Library, lot 7. *
29. Sotheby’s, Valmadonna Trust Library, lot 7. *
30. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan”. *
31. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan”. *
32. Gottheil and Jacobs, “Berechiah ha-Naḳdan”. *
33. Berekhiah ha-Nakdan, Fox Fables, trans. Moses Hadas, with introduction, in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 3, ed. Arnold E. Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press), at posenlibrary.com. *
34. Posen Library, “Fox Fables”. *
35. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan”. *
36. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan”. *
37. Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Berechiah ben Natronai ha-Nakdan”; Gottheil and Jacobs, “Berechiah ha-Naḳdan”. *
38. Gottheil and Jacobs, “Berechiah ha-Naḳdan”. *
39. Gottheil and Jacobs, “Berechiah ha-Naḳdan”. *
40. Bettina Burghardt, “Taking the Scribe Seriously: The Dating of Vat ebr. 14 Reconsidered,” Corpus Masoreticum Working Papers 1 (2022), at journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de. *
41. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 130. *
42. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 134. *
43. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 12, 134. *
44. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 134. *
45. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 134. *
46. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 119. *
47. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 119, 126. *
48. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 126–127. *
49. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 127. *
50. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 127. *
51. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 127. *
52. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 127, 129. *
53. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 129. *
54. Burghardt, “Taking the Scribe Seriously”. *
55. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 126. *
56. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 126. *
57. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 16. *
58. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 122. *
59. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 12. *
60. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 10. *
61. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 7. *
62. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 7. *
63. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 9. *
64. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 9. *
65. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 14–15; Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶8. *
66. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 15, 18. *
67. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 109. *
68. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 111–112. *
69. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 109. *
70. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 111. *
71. Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, n. 15. *
72. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 109–110. *
73. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex”. *
74. Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶14. *
75. Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶24. *
76. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 110. *
77. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 110–111; Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶23. *
78. Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶10, ¶23. *
79. Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶6. *
80. Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶7. *
81. Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶22. *
82. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 110. *
83. Crawford Howell Toy, Joseph Jacobs and Jacob Zallel Lauterbach, “Moses ben Yom-Ṭob,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
84. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, “Manuscrits hébreux et judéo-arabes médiévaux,” Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études, Section des sciences historiques et philologiques 140 (2009): 43–45, at journals.openedition.org. *
85. Olszowy-Schlanger, “Manuscrits hébreux et judéo-arabes médiévaux”. *
86. “Moses (ben Isaac) ben ha-Nesi’ah,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), at encyclopedia.com. *
87. Crawford Howell Toy and M. Seligsohn, “Jekuthiel ben Judah ha-Kohen,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), at jewishencyclopedia.com. *
88. Attia, “Variants in Ashkenazic Biblical Manuscripts”, ¶7, ¶22. *
89. Outhwaite, “Beyond the Leningrad Codex”. *
90. Sotheby’s, Valmadonna Trust Library, lot 7. *
91. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 127. *
92. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 7, 9. *
93. Attia, Masorah of Elijah ha-Naqdan, 109–112. *
94. Burghardt, “Taking the Scribe Seriously”. *