When historians of the Hebrew Bible and scholars of Semitic paleography survey the surviving monuments of early medieval biblical transmission, the academic discourse is almost universally anchored around a select group of…
Inside the synagogue on Halderstrasse in Augsburg, in the small hours of 10 November 1938, the caretaker was made to unlock his own front door. Twenty or thirty men pushed past him,…
Lying open along its whole length in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is a scroll a little under a metre and a half long, and the eye has to travel sideways across…
Inside the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, in a sealed chamber kept at a constant temperature, rests a book with no beginning. Two thirds of it survive. The Pentateuch is gone,…
On Wednesday, the twenty-fourth day of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 5236, corresponding in the Julian calendar to 24 July 1476, two Jewish artisans put the finishing touches on…
Among the manuscript discoveries of the twentieth century, the small archive of papyri known as the Bar Kokhba Letters occupies a place of quite singular importance for the modern study of Jewish…
On a winter afternoon in 2023, in Gallery 503 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, the second volume of a 15th-century Hebrew manuscript rests open on a low wooden…
