Norzi and the Minhat Shai Commentary on the Hebrew Text

Among the many printed aids to the reading of the Hebrew Bible, few have had so lasting an effect on the text itself as the Masoretic commentary of Jedidiah Solomon ben Abraham Norzi of Mantua. Completed in 1626 after decades of work, and published more than a century later, in 1742–1744, under the title Minḥat Shai, it is a running commentary on the whole Bible devoted not to the meaning of the text but to its exact form: its spelling, its vowels, its accents and the many small signs by which the Masoretes had fixed the reading of each word.¹ Norzi compared printed editions with manuscripts, Masoretic notes, the citations of the Talmud and Midrash and the opinions of earlier grammarians and commentators, and he recorded his conclusions verse by verse. His work was later printed alongside the biblical text in Rabbinic Bibles and consulted by editors who sought to restore the Masoretic text to its correct form, and it remains in print today.² This article describes Norzi and his circumstances, the problem that his work set out to solve, the methods and sources he employed, the curious history of the book’s publication and its long influence on the printed Hebrew Bible.

The subject belongs to a sequence of articles on this site concerning the transmission of the Hebrew text in the age of print. The articles on Daniel Bomberg’s Venice press, on Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible and on Elias Levita’s Masoret ha-Masoret describe the first great printed Bibles of the sixteenth century and the earliest printed guide to the Masorah. Norzi’s work was a response to the state of the text that those Bibles had produced, and it may be read as the most thorough attempt of the early modern period to correct it from within the Jewish scribal tradition.

Norzi and Mantua

Jedidiah Solomon Norzi was born around 1560 and died around 1626. He belonged to a family long established in the Jewish community of Mantua, a city ruled by the Gonzaga dukes that was, in the late sixteenth century, one of the principal centres of Jewish learning and culture in Italy.³ The community of Mantua included scholars, physicians, printers and musicians, and Hebrew books had been printed in the city since the fifteenth century. In 1612 the Jews of Mantua were confined to a ghetto, as those of Venice and Rome had been earlier, but the community remained active and prosperous until the war of the Mantuan succession and the sack of the city in 1630, which occurred a few years after Norzi’s death.⁴

Norzi was a rabbi and a scholar of the Bible, and he devoted most of his working life to a single project. In the introduction to his commentary, which was not printed in the first edition and was first published in 1876, he explained his reasons for undertaking the work and gave an account of the sources he had collected and the efforts he had made to obtain them.⁵⁶ The introduction has been valued by later scholars both as a statement of method and as a portrait of its author, who emerges as a patient, exacting and somewhat isolated figure, conscious that the study of the Masorah and of grammar was not highly regarded among many of his contemporaries.⁷

The problem of the printed text

The invention of printing had transformed the transmission of the Hebrew Bible. In the manuscript period, each copy of the Bible was produced by a scribe who was expected to follow a model and to check his work against the Masorah, and the best manuscripts were the products of a tradition of training and supervision. With the advent of printing, a single edition could be reproduced in hundreds of copies, and later editions were usually set from earlier printed ones rather than from manuscripts. Errors introduced in one edition were therefore repeated in its successors, and new errors were added at each stage.

The Second Rabbinic Bible, edited by Jacob ben Hayyim and printed by Bomberg at Venice in 1524–1525, became the standard text for later printings, but it was not free of error, and the editions that followed it multiplied the problems. By the end of the sixteenth century there was considerable variation between printed Bibles in the details of spelling, vocalisation and accentuation. These details mattered a great deal to readers who used the Bible in worship, since the public reading of the Torah required an exact text, and to scholars who studied the Masorah, since the notes of the Masorah referred to particular forms that the printed text might no longer contain.⁸

Norzi was not the only scholar of his time to address this problem. His older contemporary Menahem de Lonzano, a scholar who had travelled widely in the eastern Mediterranean, had collected manuscripts of the Pentateuch and Masoretic works and had prepared a Masoretic commentary on the Pentateuch, published at Venice in 1618 under the title Or Torah. Adolf Jellinek, in the preface to his edition of Norzi’s introduction, presented Lonzano and Norzi as the two scholars of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who had devoted their lives to cleansing the Masoretic text of the errors of copyists and printers.⁹ Lonzano had worked on the Pentateuch alone, and with very limited means. Norzi extended the same enterprise to the whole Bible.

Jellinek’s portrait of Lonzano is vivid. He described him as half blind, nearly lame and entirely poor, so devoted to scholarship that he allowed his family to go without in order to carry out his literary projects. For his commentary on the Pentateuch Lonzano had used, in addition to manuscripts of the Masorah, ten manuscripts of the Pentateuch, some of which were, by his estimate, five or six hundred years old. He had also collected rare manuscripts of rabbinic works which, Jellinek remarked, he would surely have printed had he not been so poor.¹⁰ The contrast with Norzi, who worked in the settled environment of an Italian community and was, in Jellinek’s phrase, equally famous among Jews and Christians, illustrates the different conditions under which the two scholars pursued the same goal.¹¹

Why exactness mattered

The care that Norzi devoted to small details of the text may seem disproportionate to a modern reader, but it reflected the place of the biblical text in Jewish religious life. A Torah scroll used for public reading in the synagogue must be written with exactly the correct letters, and the halakhic literature on the writing of scrolls specifies that a scroll with a missing or superfluous letter is unfit for use until it is corrected. The arrangement of the text into open and closed sections, the special forms of certain passages such as the Song of the Sea, and the enlarged and reduced letters are all prescribed. Maimonides, in his code of Jewish law, explained that in matters of the arrangement of the text he had relied on a famous codex then in Egypt, corrected by Aaron ben Asher, which scholars have identified with the Aleppo Codex.¹²

The vowels and accents are not written in the Torah scroll, but they govern its public reading, and the reader must know them precisely. Printed Bibles and the books used to prepare readers therefore needed to record them correctly. Errors in a printed Bible could lead to errors in the preparation of scrolls and in the public reading, and an authoritative guide to the correct text had practical value as well as scholarly interest. Norzi’s commentary served both purposes. It was consulted by scribes and readers who needed to know the correct form of a word, and by scholars who wished to understand the history of the text and the evidence for its readings.

The concern for exactness also had a theological dimension. The rabbinic tradition regarded the text of the Torah as fixed in every letter, and some interpretive traditions drew meaning from the form of individual words, from full and defective spellings and from the special marks of the scribal tradition. An error in the text could therefore affect not only the reading of the Bible but also the interpretations that depended on its exact form. Norzi frequently cites rabbinic interpretations that presuppose a particular spelling, and uses them as evidence for the form of the text known to the rabbis.¹³

The scope of the commentary

Minḥat Shai follows the order of the biblical books and comments on individual verses, often on a single word within a verse. Its subject matter is the form of the text. Norzi discusses whether a word should be written with or without a letter marking a vowel, whether a particular vowel or accent is correct, whether a letter should carry a dagesh or a rafe, whether a word is joined to the next by a maqqef, whether a secondary accent such as ga’ya belongs on a given syllable, and how the notes of the Masorah bear on these questions.¹⁴¹⁵ He also discusses the readings recorded as qere and ketiv, the distinction treated in the article on Ketiv and Qere, and the special features of the scribal tradition, such as enlarged and reduced letters, inverted letters and the dots placed over certain words.

Most entries are short. Norzi typically cites the form found in the printed editions, notes the evidence of the manuscripts and the Masorah, records any discussion in earlier authorities, and states which reading he considers correct. Some entries extend to longer discussions where the evidence is complex or where earlier authorities disagree. The cumulative effect is a commentary that touches on many thousands of points in the text and that provides, for each, a record of the evidence available to a careful scholar of the early seventeenth century.¹⁶

Norzi's sources

The value of Norzi’s work lies chiefly in the breadth of his sources. He used printed editions of the Bible, including the Rabbinic Bibles, and compared their readings. He used manuscripts, some of considerable age, which he obtained or consulted in Italy and elsewhere. He used the Masorah, both as it was printed in the Rabbinic Bible and as it was found in manuscripts. He drew on the citations of biblical verses in the Talmud and Midrash, which sometimes reflect a particular spelling or reading. He also used the works of the medieval grammarians and Masoretic scholars, including the work of Meir ben Todros ha-Levi Abulafia of Toledo on the Masorah of the Pentateuch.¹⁷¹⁸

Norzi’s introduction records that the acquisition of Abulafia’s Masoretic work required him to undertake a difficult journey. Jellinek noted that the work, preserved in a copy made in 1585 from a manuscript of 1383, was first printed at Florence in 1750 and then at Berlin in 1761, long after Norzi had consulted it.¹⁹ The episode illustrates the circumstances in which Norzi worked. The sources he needed were rare and scattered, and many existed only in manuscript. A scholar who wished to establish the correct text had to locate them, obtain access to them and compare them line by line.

Yosef Ofer, in a study published in the journal Textus in 2009, examined Norzi’s methods and sources in detail, analysing the manuscripts and printed works he cited and the ways in which he weighed their evidence.²⁰ Studies of this kind have shown that Norzi’s conclusions were not always correct, and that some of the manuscripts he regarded as authoritative are now known to be less reliable than others he did not have. But they have also confirmed the care with which he recorded his evidence, which allows modern scholars to check his reasoning and to evaluate his conclusions in the light of sources unavailable to him.²¹

Principles of judgement

Norzi’s work rested on the assumption that there was a correct Masoretic text, which had been obscured but not lost, and that it could be recovered by the careful comparison of the best sources. He gave great weight to the Masorah, since the Masoretic notes record the forms that the Masoretes themselves regarded as correct, and he treated agreement between the Masorah and good manuscripts as strong evidence. He was cautious about readings found only in printed editions, which he regarded as liable to error, and about readings that conflicted with the Masorah.²²

At the same time Norzi recognised that the Masoretic sources themselves were not always consistent. Different manuscripts of the Masorah contain different notes, and different Masoretic traditions disagree on certain details. Where the evidence was divided, Norzi recorded the divergent views and stated his own preference, often with a note of the reasons. In this respect his work is not only a corrected text but a record of disagreements, and it has been valued by later scholars for that reason. His approach may be compared with that of the modern critical editions described in the article on Biblia Hebraica Quinta, which record the evidence of manuscripts and versions alongside the editors’ judgements, although Norzi’s aim was the restoration of the Masoretic text rather than the reconstruction of an earlier form.²³

A work completed and set aside

Norzi completed his commentary in 1626, eight years after the publication of Lonzano’s Or Torah.²⁴ He had prepared a title page, a long introduction and a closing word to be printed at the end of the work. But the commentary was not printed during his lifetime, and it remained in manuscript for more than a century. The reasons are not fully clear. The work was long and technical, the cost of printing it with the biblical text would have been considerable, and the disruption of the Mantuan community in the years after Norzi’s death may also have played a part.²⁵

An autograph manuscript of the commentary survives in the British Library as Add. MS 27198, and its contents include Norzi’s introduction, the commentary on all the books of the Bible and a section of Masoretic material and essays at the end.²⁶ Jellinek also recorded that an autograph had been presented by the rabbis of Mantua to Count Firmian and had passed into the collection of the Parma Hebraist Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi, who described it in his catalogue; the relationship between these manuscripts is a question for specialists.²⁷

The edition of 1742–1744

The commentary was finally printed at Mantua in 1742–1744, in four volumes, with the full text of the Hebrew Bible. The edition was prepared by Raphael Hayyim Basila, with the participation of the scholar Mazliach, or Felice, Marini as corrector.²⁸²⁹ The four volumes contained the Torah and the Five Scrolls, the Former Prophets, the Latter Prophets, and the Writings, with the Masoretic material and essays at the end of the last volume.³⁰

Basila gave the work the title by which it has been known ever since, Minḥat Shai, “an offering of a gift”, a phrase drawn from biblical language about gifts brought in homage, replacing the title Norzi had chosen.³¹ He also omitted the author’s title page, introduction and closing words.³² Jellinek, in 1876, criticised Basila for these decisions, describing the praise that Basila lavished on the author as composed in poor taste and accusing him of lacking the simplest respect for the dead.³³ Whatever Basila’s reasons, the result was that the first edition of the work lacked the author’s own explanation of his purposes and sources, and for more than a century readers knew Norzi’s commentary without knowing his account of how it had been made.

The publication of the introduction

Norzi’s introduction was eventually published by Adolf Jellinek, the preacher of the Jewish community of Vienna and a prolific editor of medieval Hebrew texts, from a copy of the autograph that he had obtained through an intermediary in Lemberg. Jellinek published the introduction, title page and closing words in 1876, with a German preface and notes, explaining that he had done so both out of respect for the author and because of the value of the manuscript for the history of scholarship.³⁴³⁵ He mentioned a report that the introduction had been published earlier, at Pisa in 1819, but noted that no one other than Samuel David Luzzatto seemed to know of that edition.³⁶

Jellinek’s notes identify many of the works that Norzi cited, including rare grammatical treatises and medieval commentaries, and they place Norzi’s work in the context of the history of Jewish biblical scholarship. In particular, Jellinek used the occasion to comment on the decline of grammatical and Masoretic studies in some periods of Jewish history, a decline that Norzi himself had lamented and that Jellinek associated with the dominance of Talmudic casuistry or Kabbalistic enthusiasm.³⁷ The publication of the introduction allowed later scholars to study Norzi’s sources systematically, and it underlies much of the modern work on his methods.³⁸

Minḥat Shai in later Bibles

Once printed, Minḥat Shai quickly became a standard reference for editors and printers of the Hebrew Bible. Its readings were adopted in many editions, and it came to be printed alongside the biblical text in later Rabbinic Bibles. In the Vienna Miqra’ot Gedolot of 1859, edited by Shlomoh Zalman Netter and frequently reprinted in the twentieth century, Minḥat Shai follows each book of the Torah.³⁹ Many later printings of the Rabbinic Bible include it in a similar position, so that generations of readers have had Norzi’s notes at hand when studying the text.

The influence of Minḥat Shai on the printed text was particularly strong in the editions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that aimed to provide a corrected Masoretic text. Wolf Heidenheim, whose edition of the Torah began to appear at Rödelheim in 1797, belonged to a tradition of careful Masoretic editing in which Norzi’s work was a central authority.⁴⁰ Later editors, including those who prepared the widely used editions of Seligman Baer and Christian David Ginsburg, consulted Norzi alongside the manuscripts and the Masorah, and his conclusions on many points entered the standard printed text.⁴¹

In the twentieth century the critical study of the Masoretic text shifted its attention to the great early codices, especially the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex, which preserve the Tiberian tradition in a form earlier and more authoritative than the sources available to Norzi. Comparison of Norzi’s conclusions with these codices has shown that he was often right, sometimes wrong, and frequently aware of the problems that the codices resolve. His work thus remains of value both as a record of the textual tradition of the early modern period and as a guide to the questions that any editor of the Masoretic text must address.⁴²

The commentary as a guide for readers

For the ordinary reader of a Rabbinic Bible, Minḥat Shai served as a guide to the places where the printed text was uncertain. A reader preparing to read the Torah in the synagogue could consult it to learn whether a particular word should be read with a given vowel or accent, and a student of the text could learn where the editions disagreed and why. Because the commentary was printed in the same volumes as the biblical text, its notes were immediately accessible, and they shaped the expectations of readers about what a correct text should contain.⁴³

The commentary also served as a model of method. Norzi did not simply assert the correct reading; he showed his evidence and his reasoning, and he acknowledged disagreement where it existed. Readers who followed his notes learned to think of the text as something established by the comparison of sources rather than as something given once for all in a particular printed edition. This habit of mind was essential to the later development of critical editions of the Masoretic text, which rest on the same principle of comparison, applied to a wider and older range of sources.⁴⁴

Translation and modern study

In the late twentieth century Minḥat Shai attracted renewed scholarly attention. María Josefa de Azcárraga Servert, working at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid, published annotated Spanish translations of the commentary on the Minor Prophets in 1987 and on Isaiah in 1993, within the series of Masoretic and biblical studies associated with the Madrid school of Hebrew philology.⁴⁵⁴⁶ These volumes were reviewed in several international journals, and they made Norzi’s work accessible to readers without Hebrew and demonstrated its value for the study of the Masoretic text.

Ofer’s study of Norzi’s methods and sources, and Jordan Penkower’s survey of Norzi in the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, represent the current state of research.⁴⁷⁴⁸ Both treat Norzi as a central figure in the history of the printed Hebrew Bible, whose work bridged the scribal and Masoretic tradition of the Middle Ages and the critical editions of the modern period. The digitisation of the first edition of 1742–1744, of the London autograph and of Jellinek’s edition of the introduction has made the primary sources freely available for the first time.⁴⁹⁵⁰⁵¹

Norzi's place in the history of the text

Norzi’s achievement may be measured against the problem he set out to solve. In the century after the invention of printing, the Hebrew Bible had acquired a standard printed form, but that form contained errors and inconsistencies that could not be corrected without a return to the sources from which it had been derived. Norzi undertook that return. He collected manuscripts, Masoretic works and rabbinic citations, compared them with the printed text, and recorded his findings in a systematic commentary on the whole Bible. His work was the most comprehensive of its kind before the modern period, and it set a standard of care and documentation that later editors followed.⁵²

The history of the book’s publication is itself a lesson in transmission. The author’s title was replaced, his introduction omitted, and his explanation of his purposes and methods withheld from readers for more than a century. The recovery of the introduction in 1876, and the modern study of the manuscripts, have restored to view the work as Norzi intended it. The case is a reminder that the transmission of works about the biblical text, no less than the transmission of the text itself, is subject to the decisions of editors and printers, and that the recovery of an author’s intentions may depend on the survival of a single manuscript.⁵³⁵⁴

Assessment

Jedidiah Solomon Norzi devoted his life to establishing the correct form of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. His commentary, completed in 1626 and published in 1742–1744 as Minḥat Shai, records his judgements on many thousands of details of spelling, vocalisation and accentuation, based on the comparison of printed editions, manuscripts, the Masorah, rabbinic literature and the works of earlier scholars.⁵⁵⁵⁶ The work became a standard authority for later editors, was printed in Rabbinic Bibles and influenced the form of the printed text for two centuries.⁵⁷⁵⁸

Modern scholarship, with access to the great early codices, has been able to evaluate Norzi’s conclusions more precisely than was possible in his own time, and has found much to admire in his method and in the care with which he recorded his evidence. Minḥat Shai remains a work of reference, a monument of early modern Masoretic learning, and a link between the scribal tradition of the Middle Ages and the critical study of the Hebrew Bible in the modern period.⁵⁹

Notes

1. Jedidiah Solomon Norzi, Minḥat Shai, first edition with the Hebrew Bible, 4 vols (Mantua, 1742–1744), digitised from the copy of David and Jemima Jeselsohn via the National Library of Israel. ↩
2. Miqra’ot Gedolot, ed. Shlomoh Zalman Netter, 5 vols (Vienna, 1859), in which Minḥat Shai follows each book of the Torah. ↩
3. Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩
4. Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩
5. Adolf Jellinek (ed.), Jedidjah Salomo Norzis Einleitung, Titelblatt und Schlusswort zu seinem masoretischen Bibelcommentar (Vienna: Brüder Winter, 1876), preface by Jellinek. ↩
6. Jellinek, Einleitung, introduction by Norzi. ↩
7. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface. ↩
8. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312; Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩
9. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on Lonzano’s Or Torah and the completion of Norzi’s work eight years after its appearance. ↩
10. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on Lonzano’s poverty, his near-blindness and lameness, and the ten Pentateuch manuscripts he consulted. ↩
11. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on Lonzano’s Or Torah and the completion of Norzi’s work eight years after its appearance. ↩
12. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah and the Torah Scroll 8:4. ↩
13. Ofer, “Methods and Sources”. ↩
14. Jedidiah Solomon Norzi, Minḥat Shai, first edition with the Hebrew Bible, 4 vols (Mantua, 1742–1744), digitised from the copy of David and Jemima Jeselsohn via the National Library of Israel. ↩
15. Ofer, “Methods and Sources”. ↩
16. Ofer, “Methods and Sources”. ↩
17. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312. ↩
18. Jellinek, Einleitung, introduction by Norzi. ↩
19. Jellinek, Einleitung, notes to p. 13 and p. 21 of the text, on Norzi’s journey to obtain a copy of Meir Abulafia’s Masoretic work and its later printing at Florence (1750) and Berlin (1761). ↩
20. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312. ↩
21. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312; Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩
22. Ofer, “Methods and Sources”. ↩
23. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312; Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩
24. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on Lonzano’s Or Torah and the completion of Norzi’s work eight years after its appearance. ↩
25. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface. ↩
26. Norzi, Minḥat Shai, autograph manuscript, London, British Library, Add. MS 27198 (1626), scan of the National Library of Israel microfilm. ↩
27. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on the autograph that passed through Count Firmian to Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi; for the London autograph, Norzi, Minḥat Shai, autograph manuscript, London, British Library, Add. MS 27198 (1626), scan of the National Library of Israel microfilm. ↩
28. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on the publication at Mantua in 1742 and the change of title by Raphael Hayyim Basila. ↩
29. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on the corrector Mazliach (Felice) Marini. ↩
30. Jedidiah Solomon Norzi, Minḥat Shai, first edition with the Hebrew Bible, 4 vols (Mantua, 1742–1744), digitised from the copy of David and Jemima Jeselsohn via the National Library of Israel. ↩
31. Isaiah 18:7; Psalm 76:12. ↩
32. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on Basila’s omission of the title page, introduction and closing words. ↩
33. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on Basila’s omission of the title page, introduction and closing words. ↩
34. Adolf Jellinek (ed.), Jedidjah Salomo Norzis Einleitung, Titelblatt und Schlusswort zu seinem masoretischen Bibelcommentar (Vienna: Brüder Winter, 1876), preface by Jellinek. ↩
35. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on the autograph that passed through Count Firmian to Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi; for the London autograph, Norzi, Minḥat Shai, autograph manuscript, London, British Library, Add. MS 27198 (1626), scan of the National Library of Israel microfilm. ↩
36. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface. ↩
37. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface. ↩
38. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312. ↩
39. Miqra’ot Gedolot, ed. Shlomoh Zalman Netter, 5 vols (Vienna, 1859), in which Minḥat Shai follows each book of the Torah. ↩
40. Wolf Heidenheim (ed.), Sefer Torat ha-Elohim (Rödelheim, 1797). ↩
41. Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter); Jedidiah Solomon Norzi, Minḥat Shai, first edition with the Hebrew Bible, 4 vols (Mantua, 1742–1744), digitised from the copy of David and Jemima Jeselsohn via the National Library of Israel. ↩
42. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312; Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩
43. Miqra’ot Gedolot, ed. Shlomoh Zalman Netter, 5 vols (Vienna, 1859), in which Minḥat Shai follows each book of the Torah. ↩
44. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312; Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩
45. María Josefa de Azcárraga Servert, Minḥat Šay de Y. S. de Norzi: Profetas Menores, Textos y Estudios “Cardenal Cisneros” 40 (Madrid: CSIC, 1987); reviewed by N. R. M. de Lange, Vetus Testamentum 38 (1988), and E. J. Revell, Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989). ↩
46. María Josefa de Azcárraga Servert, Minḥat Šay de Y. S. de Norzi: Isaías (Madrid: CSIC, 1993); reviewed by Johann Maier, Biblische Zeitschrift 41 (1997). ↩
47. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312. ↩
48. Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩
49. Jedidiah Solomon Norzi, Minḥat Shai, first edition with the Hebrew Bible, 4 vols (Mantua, 1742–1744), digitised from the copy of David and Jemima Jeselsohn via the National Library of Israel. ↩
50. Norzi, Minḥat Shai, autograph manuscript, London, British Library, Add. MS 27198 (1626), scan of the National Library of Israel microfilm. ↩
51. Adolf Jellinek (ed.), Jedidjah Salomo Norzis Einleitung, Titelblatt und Schlusswort zu seinem masoretischen Bibelcommentar (Vienna: Brüder Winter, 1876), preface by Jellinek. ↩
52. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312; Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩
53. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on Basila’s omission of the title page, introduction and closing words. ↩
54. Jellinek, Einleitung, preface, on the autograph that passed through Count Firmian to Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi; for the London autograph, Norzi, Minḥat Shai, autograph manuscript, London, British Library, Add. MS 27198 (1626), scan of the National Library of Israel microfilm. ↩
55. Jedidiah Solomon Norzi, Minḥat Shai, first edition with the Hebrew Bible, 4 vols (Mantua, 1742–1744), digitised from the copy of David and Jemima Jeselsohn via the National Library of Israel. ↩
56. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312. ↩
57. Miqra’ot Gedolot, ed. Shlomoh Zalman Netter, 5 vols (Vienna, 1859), in which Minḥat Shai follows each book of the Torah. ↩
58. Wolf Heidenheim (ed.), Sefer Torat ha-Elohim (Rödelheim, 1797). ↩
59. Yosef Ofer, “Methods and Sources of Yedidya Shelomo Norzi in his Treatise Minhat Shay”, Textus 24 (2009), pp. 287–312; Jordan S. Penkower, “Norzi, Jedidiah Solomon”, Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (Berlin: De Gruyter). ↩