The Cervera Bible of 1300

In the summer of 1299 a professional Hebrew scribe named Samuel ben Abraham ibn Nathan broke his leg in a small town called Cervera. Unable to travel, he accepted a commission from a well-to-do member of the local Jewish community to spend his convalescence copying a complete Hebrew Bible. Ten months later the main text was finished, and over the following months other hands added the Masorah, a set of grammatical treatises by David Kimhi and a programme of painted decoration. The result, known today as the Cervera Bible and kept in the National Library of Portugal in Lisbon, is one of the earliest and most important illuminated Hebrew Bibles to survive from medieval Iberia.¹²³

The manuscript is valuable for several reasons at once. It is precisely dated and located by its own colophons. It names its main scribe, its Masorete and its illuminator, which is rare in medieval Hebrew books. Its Masorah, written in minute script and shaped into geometric and animal figures, is a fine example of the art of micrography. Its decoration records an encounter between the Sephardi tradition of the Bible as a sanctuary, with its carpet pages and depictions of the Temple implements, and the figural repertoire of Gothic book art north of the Pyrenees. And its later influence on other manuscripts, above all the Kennicott Bible of 1476, shows how a single book could serve as a model across nearly two centuries.⁴⁵⁶

This article describes how the Cervera Bible was made, what it contains, the people who worked on it, its place in the history of the Hebrew Bible in Spain, and the route by which it came to Lisbon.

The manuscript

The Cervera Bible is catalogued in the National Library of Portugal as MS IL. 72. It is written on parchment and consists of 451 folios measuring about 282 by 220 millimetres. The biblical text is arranged in two columns of 31 lines each, the standard layout for Sephardi Bible codices of the period. The book contains the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible, the Masorah in the margins, and grammatical writings by the Provençal scholar David Kimhi placed before and after the biblical text. It is decorated in gold and colours throughout.⁷⁸

The binding is not original. The present covers, of boards covered in red leather with gilt tooling and with marbled endpapers, date from the eighteenth century, when the manuscript was in private hands in northern Europe.⁹ The book has been digitised in full by the National Library of Portugal and can be read page by page online, which has made it accessible to scholars and readers well beyond the small circle who could consult it in Lisbon.¹⁰

The Library of Congress, which presented the manuscript in its World Digital Library project, describes it as among the oldest and most significant Sephardi Bibles to survive the destruction of most Jewish communities in Castile and Aragon from 1391 onwards and the expulsions from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century. That description places the book in context: the illuminated Hebrew Bibles of medieval Iberia were once numerous, but most were lost in the violence of the late fourteenth century and in the upheaval of the expulsions, and those that survive are scattered across the libraries of Europe, Israel and the United States.¹¹¹²

Samuel ben Abraham ibn Nathan and the colophon

The fullest account of the making of the book is given by the main scribe himself. At the end of the biblical text, on folio 434 recto, Samuel ben Abraham ibn Nathan wrote a colophon that occupies a whole page. In it he records that he began the work on the new moon of the month of Elul in the Jewish year 5059, corresponding to 30 July 1299, and that he completed it at the end of the month of Iyyar 5060, which corresponds to 19 May 1300.¹³¹⁴

The colophon also explains why he was in Cervera at all. Samuel had arrived in the town shortly before he began the work, for a reason that he does not state, and while there he broke his leg. The injury forced him to remain until he recovered, and he used the time to copy a Bible for a local patron. The arrangement seems to have been the usual one for a commissioned book: the patron supplied the parchment, the other materials and the exemplar from which the text would be copied, and probably provided the scribe with room and board while he worked.¹⁵

The colophon originally named the patron, but the name was later erased, probably by a subsequent owner who wished to remove the evidence of earlier ownership. Erasures of this kind are common in Hebrew manuscripts that changed hands. In this case the loss is partly made good by other parts of the book. The Masorete, as will be seen, worked the patron’s name into several of his own signatures in the margins, and from these scholars have recovered it as Sassoon, a member of the Jewish community of Cervera.¹⁶¹⁷

Samuel also recorded the number of quires, or gatherings of leaves, that made up his work, giving the figure of thirty-six in two different forms. A codicological examination of the manuscript has confirmed that the main biblical text does indeed consist of thirty-six quires. Samuel arranged his quires in gatherings of twelve leaves, a format he shared with other Bibles produced in the same circle. He left spaces at the end of each biblical book for small frames that would contain the count of its verses, and he left a blank leaf at the end of the Prophets for a full decorated carpet page.¹⁸¹⁹

The colophon is thus a precise record not only of when and where the book was written but of the way in which it was planned. Samuel did not merely copy the text; he laid out the volume so that the Masorete and the illuminator who followed him would find spaces prepared for their work.

Which Cervera?

The place named in the colophon has usually been identified as Cervera in Catalonia, a town in the present-day province of Lleida that in 1300 belonged to the Crown of Aragon. That identification is the one given in the catalogue of the National Library of Portugal and in many published descriptions.²⁰²¹²²

Katrin Kogman-Appel, in her study of the decoration of Hebrew Bibles in medieval Spain, has proposed a different identification: Cervera del Río Alhama, a small town in the present-day region of La Rioja, about forty kilometres west of Tudela in Navarre. Sarit Shalev-Eyni has developed this suggestion. She notes that a document of 1297 mentions a Jew acting for the cathedral chapter of Calahorra in relation to tenants of the chapter’s estates in Cervera, which indicates a Jewish presence in the Riojan town at the time, and she shows that the later stages of the manuscript’s production can be linked to Tudela.²³²⁴

The question matters because it determines the artistic and cultural setting of the book. If the Catalan Cervera is correct, the Bible was made in the Crown of Aragon, in a region with its own Hebrew book traditions. If the Riojan Cervera is correct, the Bible belongs to a group of manuscripts produced in the borderlands of northern Castile and southern Navarre, among them the works of the scribe and Masorete Joshua ibn Gaon of Tudela and Soria. The evidence of the Masorah and of the decoration, discussed below, has led recent scholarship to favour the second view, though the older identification remains in common use.²⁵²⁶²⁷

Joshua ibn Gaon and the Masorah

Like other Sephardi Bibles of the period, the Cervera Bible carries the Masorah, the body of notes that records the spelling, vocalisation and frequency of words and phrases in the biblical text and so guards its exact form. The short notes, known as the Masorah Parva, are written in the side margins; the longer notes, the Masorah Magna, are written above and below the columns. In the Cervera Bible the Masorah Magna is written in micrography, minute script arranged to form geometric interlace, plant motifs, dragons and other creatures.²⁸²⁹

The Masorete was Joshua ben Abraham ibn Gaon, one of the best documented Hebrew scribes of the period, whose career has been reconstructed from the colophons he left in a number of manuscripts.³⁰³¹ Joshua had a habit of concealing his name and other information within the minute script of the Masorah. In the Cervera Bible he did so about twenty times. These hidden colophons give dates and places, the patron’s name, and, on one page, the wish that he might one day make such a codex for himself.³²³³

From these signatures it has been possible to follow his part in the work. According to a note at the top of the first folio of the biblical text, Joshua began writing the Masorah and its decoration on 20 Sivan, about 8 or 9 June 1300, some twenty days after Samuel had completed the main text. Another note, later in the book, shows that he was still working in the following month of Tammuz. Shalev-Eyni concludes that the manuscript had by then been taken from Cervera to Tudela, where Joshua was active.³⁴³⁵

Joshua did not complete the Masorah for the whole Bible. Some quires were provided with Masorah by a second hand, and in others both hands appear. The most likely explanation is that Joshua left part of the work unfinished, perhaps because he was engaged on other commissions, and that a colleague completed it.³⁶³⁷

Joshua’s Masorah in the Cervera Bible uses geometric patterns that he had already used in another manuscript attributed to him, the so-called Second Kennicott Bible in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Shalev-Eyni treats the two books as the poles of a group of codices produced around 1300 by the same circles of scribes and artists in the region of Burgos, Tudela and Soria. The comparison shows the Masorah not only as a textual apparatus but as a field for decoration, in which the same scribe could display a recognisable personal style.³⁸³⁹

The Masorah of the Cervera Bible is a reminder that in the Sephardi tradition the exact transmission of the text and its beautiful presentation were not separate tasks. The Masoretic notes were the guarantee of the text’s accuracy, and the scribes who wrote them shaped them into ornament. Readers of the site’s article on biblical micrography will find the wider history of this practice there.⁴⁰

The grammatical treatises of David Kimhi

One of the unusual features of the Cervera Bible is the inclusion of grammatical writings by David Kimhi, the scholar of Narbonne who died about 1235 and whose works on Hebrew grammar and lexicography became standard throughout the Jewish world.⁴¹ The National Library of Israel describes the arrangement as Kimhi’s two-part work, the Mikhlol, comprising a grammar and a book of roots, binding the Bible from the front and back: the manuscript opens with a text on Hebrew vocalisation and closes with a text on the correct pointing of Scripture, with the biblical books between them.⁴²

The descriptions differ in the titles they assign to these texts. The Library of Congress identifies the treatise as Kimhi’s Sefer ha-Nikkud, better known as Et Sofer, “the scribe’s pen”, a short guide to the vowel points and accents written for scribes and readers of the Bible. Shalev-Eyni likewise identifies the text added at the end of the book as Et Sofer.⁴³⁴⁴ The difference reflects the complexity of Kimhi’s writings, which circulated in several forms and under several titles, and the fact that the material in the Cervera Bible was not copied in full: the treatise at the end of the volume was left incomplete.⁴⁵

The grammatical texts were not written by Samuel ibn Nathan. Although the whole codex has often been attributed to his hand, palaeographic examination shows that another hand copied the grammatical material, which is written within double arches and other shaped frames at the beginning and end of the volume. Shalev-Eyni argues that this stage did not take place in Cervera but, like the Masorah, probably in Tudela. The frames were drawn before the texts were copied into them, and in some places the space provided does not match the length of the text.⁴⁶

The addition of grammatical treatises to a Bible codex was, according to Shalev-Eyni, an innovation without parallel in other biblical codices of the time. It reflects the close connection in medieval Sephardi learning between the study of the biblical text and the study of Hebrew grammar. A reader who owned the Cervera Bible had in one volume both the text of Scripture, with its Masorah, and a guide to its correct pronunciation.⁴⁷⁴⁸ The site’s page on David Kimhi describes his life and works in more detail.

Joseph Asarfati and the illumination

The decoration of the Cervera Bible is the work of an artist who signed his name in a manner that has no close parallel in Hebrew manuscripts. On folio 449 recto, near the end of the book, a single leaf carries a colophon of seven words written in large letters formed from the bodies of animals and human figures. It reads, in translation, “I Joseph the Frenchman illuminated and completed this book.”⁴⁹⁵⁰

The name Asarfati, or ha-Tsarfati, means “the Frenchman”, and it indicates that Joseph came from France or was of French origin. Signed works by Hebrew illuminators of the period are rare; most medieval Hebrew artists remain anonymous, and the Cervera colophon is therefore an important document for the history of Jewish art.⁵¹⁵²

Unlike the colophons of Samuel and Joshua, Joseph’s says nothing of place, date or patron. Shalev-Eyni suggests that his contact with the patron may have been indirect, perhaps through Joshua ibn Gaon. She also draws attention to the words “and completed”, which are unusual in an illuminator’s signature. In scribes’ colophons, the verb normally refers to the completion of the text, and she raises the possibility that Joseph was also the second hand that completed the Masorah in the quires that Joshua had left unfinished. She notes too that Joseph designed the enlarged letters that tradition requires at certain points in the biblical text, turning the outlines that Samuel had prepared into golden zoomorphic letters similar to those of his own colophon. The size and visibility of his signature may have served to make his work known at a time when, as a newcomer, he had no local reputation.⁵³

The decoration itself combines several traditions. Some of it belongs to the established repertoire of Sephardi Bibles: carpet pages filled with interlace and geometric patterns, full-page depictions of the vessels of the Tabernacle and the Temple, and ornamental frames around the verse counts at the ends of books. Some reflects the mudéjar visual culture of the Iberian kingdoms, in which Islamic geometric ornament was adopted by Christian and Jewish patrons alike. And some is drawn from the Gothic art of northern Europe: hunting scenes, drolleries, hybrid creatures and figures in the margins.⁵⁴⁵⁵⁵⁶

The Temple implements

Among the full-page illuminations are depictions of the objects used in the worship of the Tabernacle and the Temple, among them the seven-branched lampstand. Such pages are characteristic of Sephardi Bibles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They express the idea, current in Jewish thought in Spain, of the Bible as a miqdashyah, a “sanctuary of God”, in which the text itself takes the place of the lost Temple and the depiction of its vessels recalls the worship that would be restored in the future.⁵⁷⁵⁸

The Cervera Bible is one of the outstanding examples of this tradition. Its depiction of the Temple implements has been compared with that of other Spanish Bibles, and it helped to establish a pattern that later Sephardi illuminators followed.⁵⁹⁶⁰

Heraldry and Gothic figures

Some pages of the manuscript include heraldic motifs: the castle of Castile, the lion of León and the fleur-de-lis associated with the French monarchy. These symbols also appear in the Second Kennicott Bible, where they belong to a mudéjar context of ornament. In the Cervera Bible, Shalev-Eyni observes, Joseph often detached them from that context, setting them in sequences of medallions with birds, fish, dragons and hybrid creatures, so that they lose their clear character as emblems.⁶¹

Joseph’s Gothic training is most evident where he worked without preliminary mudéjar designs. At the end of Psalm 72, for example, he painted a man grasping the necks of two dragons that attack him, and two intertwined dragons, which recall the initial panels of Latin manuscripts. On a leaf in the grammatical section he filled the spaces of an interlacing frame with musical animals: a monkey and a half-human creature blowing trumpets, a hound playing the viol, and a goat playing another instrument. On another, a hen with her chicks is shown at one side while a hound chases an eagle that has seized a chick, and two centaurs with bows occupy the lower corners. These are the motifs of the margins of French and English Gothic books, transferred into a Hebrew Bible.⁶²⁶³

Shalev-Eyni argues that these pages record an actual meeting point between Gothic visual culture and the Sephardi tradition, before the two had merged into a single style. In some cases the two stages can still be distinguished on the page: a mudéjar interlace drawn first, then filled and surrounded by Joseph with Gothic pen-work and creatures. The Cervera Bible thus preserves the evidence of a process that, in later manuscripts, can no longer be separated into its parts.⁶⁴

Not all the decoration was finished. Two carpet pages at the beginning of the book were left uncoloured, and in places the illuminator added ink drawings, among them a pair of lions, to fill empty spaces between the text and its frame. These unfinished and improvised areas allow modern scholars to observe the stages of production that are hidden in more fully completed books.⁶⁵

The Cervera Bible and the Kennicott Bible

The importance of the Cervera Bible for later Hebrew book art is clearest in its relationship with the Kennicott Bible, the most richly decorated Hebrew Bible to survive from medieval Spain. That manuscript was completed in La Coruña in Galicia in 1476 by the scribe Moses ibn Zabara for a patron named Isaac, son of Solomon di Braga, and it was illuminated by Joseph ibn Hayyim. It is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.⁶⁶⁶⁷

Art historians have long recognised that Joseph ibn Hayyim took the Cervera Bible as a model for many of his designs. Elements of the decoration of the Cervera Bible, including its depictions of the Temple implements, its arrangement of the grammatical treatises within decorated frames, and some of its figural motifs, reappear in the Kennicott Bible. Even the colophon of Joseph ibn Hayyim, written in letters formed of human and animal figures, recalls the signature of Joseph Asarfati. The Kennicott Bible likewise includes Kimhi’s Sefer Mikhlol, following the example of the earlier book. These correspondences indicate that the Cervera Bible was in La Coruña in the 1470s, available to the scribe and illuminator of the later manuscript.⁶⁸⁶⁹⁷⁰

The relationship between the two books illustrates the way in which a model manuscript could transmit both a text and a visual tradition. Nearly two centuries separate the Cervera Bible from the Kennicott Bible, and the later book was made in a very different region and for a different patron. Yet the earlier book was evidently valued not only as a text but as an exemplar of how a Bible should look. The site’s article on the Kennicott Bible discusses the later manuscript in detail.⁷¹

The text of the Bible

The Cervera Bible belongs to the Sephardi tradition of the biblical text, which by 1300 was closely aligned with the Tiberian text of the school of Ben Asher. The Spanish scribes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries worked from model codices that were regarded as authoritative, and the work of scholars such as Meir ha-Levi Abulafia of Toledo had established a carefully controlled standard for the spelling of the text, especially of the Torah.⁷²⁷³

The scribe’s plan, as revealed in his colophon and the layout of the book, reflects that standard. The biblical books are written in two columns, with the verse counts recorded at the ends of books, and the Masorah written in the margins provides the apparatus by which the accuracy of the text could be checked. The site’s article on the Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian standard describes the tradition to which the Sephardi Bibles of this period belong.⁷⁴

The textual character of the Cervera Bible has received less study than its decoration. Like other Sephardi Bibles of its period, it is a witness to the accepted text of the Middle Ages rather than to an older or independent tradition, and its value for textual history lies chiefly in what it shows of the transmission of the Tiberian text in Iberia and of the Masoretic apparatus that accompanied it.⁷⁵⁷⁶

From Iberia to Lisbon

The history of the manuscript between the late fifteenth century and the early nineteenth is largely unknown. If, as the evidence of the Kennicott Bible suggests, it was in La Coruña in the 1470s, it was probably still in Iberia when the Jews were expelled from the Spanish kingdoms in 1492. Many Spanish Jews went first to Portugal, from which they were expelled or forcibly converted in 1497, and many illuminated manuscripts were carried by the exiles to North Africa, Italy, the Ottoman Empire and the Low Countries.⁷⁷⁷⁸

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the Cervera Bible was in the Netherlands. In 1804 it was acquired at The Hague on the initiative of António Ribeiro dos Santos, the head librarian of the Royal Public Library of the Court in Lisbon, for the sum of 240,000 réis.⁷⁹ The purchase brought the manuscript to the city in which, three centuries earlier, the Jewish community had produced its own school of Hebrew book illumination before the forced conversions of 1497.⁸⁰

The Royal Public Library became the National Library of Portugal, and the Cervera Bible has remained there since. It is among the treasures of the library, and in recent years it has been the subject of renewed study by Portuguese scholars, who have examined both its codicology and the stages of its decoration.⁸¹⁸²

Modern study

The Cervera Bible has attracted the attention of historians of Jewish art since the twentieth century. Bezalel Narkiss included it among the outstanding examples in his survey of Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, and Thérèse Metzger studied the Masorah of Joshua ibn Gaon in detail, publishing the hidden colophons and showing how they document the stages of the work.⁸³⁸⁴ Narkiss and Gabrielle Sed-Rajna studied the first Bible copied by Joshua ibn Gaon, which allowed the Cervera Masorah to be placed within the scribe’s wider career.⁸⁵

Katrin Kogman-Appel discussed the manuscript in her study of the decoration of Hebrew Bibles in medieval Spain and proposed its identification with Cervera del Río Alhama. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, in a study of Sephardi illumination around 1300 in the region of Burgos, Tudela and Soria, reconstructed the sequence of production from Samuel’s copying through Joshua’s Masorah to Joseph’s decoration, and she identified the second hand responsible for the grammatical texts.⁸⁶⁸⁷ A team of Portuguese scholars, J. A. Ramos, L. U. Afonso and T. Moita, has examined the decorative programme and the question of how far the manuscript should be considered a fully illuminated Sephardi book.⁸⁸

The digitisation of the manuscript by the National Library of Portugal has made it possible for scholars and general readers to study every page, and the Library of Congress has presented it to a wider audience as one of the great surviving works of medieval Sephardi culture.⁸⁹⁹⁰

Assessment

The Cervera Bible is a document of three kinds. It is a text of the Hebrew Bible, copied with care according to the Sephardi tradition and furnished with the Masorah that guaranteed its accuracy. It is a work of art, in which the ornament of the Iberian Bible and the figures of northern Gothic illumination met on the same pages. And it is a record of the people who made it: a scribe stranded by a broken leg, a Masorete who hid his name and his hopes in the margins, an illuminator who signed his work in letters made of animals, and a patron whose name was erased and later recovered.⁹¹⁹²

Few Hebrew manuscripts allow their history to be followed so closely. The colophons of the Cervera Bible fix its beginning to a single day in July 1299 and the completion of its main text to a single day in May 1300, and they allow the later stages to be followed into the summer of that year. The influence of the book on the Kennicott Bible shows that it was regarded within the Sephardi world as a model, and its survival, after the expulsions that destroyed the communities for which such books were made, preserves one of the finest examples of the Hebrew book art of medieval Iberia.⁹³⁹⁴⁹⁵

Notes

1. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
2. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, [Bíblia], Cervera, [1299–1300], Biblioteca Nacional Digital (catalogue record and full digitised manuscript). ↩
3. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
4. Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 123–126; The Masoretes, “Katrin Kogman-Appel”. ↩
5. Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter, 1969), pl. 52; The Masoretes, “Bezalel Narkiss”. ↩
6. The Masoretes, “The Kennicott Bible”. ↩
7. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
8. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, [Bíblia], Cervera, [1299–1300], Biblioteca Nacional Digital (catalogue record and full digitised manuscript). ↩
9. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
10. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, [Bíblia], Cervera, [1299–1300], Biblioteca Nacional Digital (catalogue record and full digitised manuscript). ↩
11. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
12. Grokipedia, “Alhambra Decree”; The Masoretes, “The Expulsion of 1492”. ↩
13. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
14. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
15. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
16. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
17. Thérèse Metzger, “Josué ben Abraham ibn Gaon et la masora du Ms. Iluminado 72 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Lisbonne”, Codices Manuscripti 15/5 (1990), 1–27. ↩
18. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
19. Malachi Beit-Arié, Hebrew Codicology (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1981). ↩
20. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
21. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, [Bíblia], Cervera, [1299–1300], Biblioteca Nacional Digital (catalogue record and full digitised manuscript). ↩
22. Grokipedia, “Crown of Aragon”; Grokipedia, “Cervera”. ↩
23. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
24. Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 123–126; The Masoretes, “Katrin Kogman-Appel”. ↩
25. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
26. Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 123–126; The Masoretes, “Katrin Kogman-Appel”. ↩
27. J. A. Ramos, L. U. Afonso and T. Moita, “A Bíblia de Cervera: um manuscrito sefardita iluminado?”, Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 14 (2015), 171–201. ↩
28. Grokipedia, “Micrography”; The Masoretes, “Biblical Micrography and the Masorah Figurata”. ↩
29. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”; The Masoretes, “The Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian Standard”. ↩
30. The Masoretes, “Joshua ibn Gaon”. ↩
31. Bezalel Narkiss and Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, “La première bible de Josué ben Abraham ibn Gaon”, Revue des études juives 130 (1971); Bezalel Narkiss, Aliza Cohen-Mushlin and Anat Tcherikover, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Isles, vol. 1: Spanish and Portuguese Manuscripts (Jerusalem and London, 1982), 22–34. ↩
32. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
33. Thérèse Metzger, “Josué ben Abraham ibn Gaon et la masora du Ms. Iluminado 72 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Lisbonne”, Codices Manuscripti 15/5 (1990), 1–27. ↩
34. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
35. Thérèse Metzger, “Josué ben Abraham ibn Gaon et la masora du Ms. Iluminado 72 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Lisbonne”, Codices Manuscripti 15/5 (1990), 1–27. ↩
36. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
37. Thérèse Metzger, “Josué ben Abraham ibn Gaon et la masora du Ms. Iluminado 72 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Lisbonne”, Codices Manuscripti 15/5 (1990), 1–27. ↩
38. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
39. The Masoretes, “Joshua ibn Gaon”. ↩
40. Grokipedia, “Micrography”; The Masoretes, “Biblical Micrography and the Masorah Figurata”. ↩
41. Grokipedia, “David Kimhi”; The Masoretes, “David Kimhi”. ↩
42. National Library of Israel, “The Cervera Bible”, Hebrew manuscripts feature (online). ↩
43. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
44. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
45. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
46. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
47. National Library of Israel, “The Cervera Bible”, Hebrew manuscripts feature (online). ↩
48. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
49. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
50. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
51. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
52. Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter, 1969), pl. 52; The Masoretes, “Bezalel Narkiss”. ↩
53. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
54. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
55. Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 123–126; The Masoretes, “Katrin Kogman-Appel”. ↩
56. Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter, 1969), pl. 52; The Masoretes, “Bezalel Narkiss”. ↩
57. Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 123–126; The Masoretes, “Katrin Kogman-Appel”. ↩
58. Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter, 1969), pl. 52; The Masoretes, “Bezalel Narkiss”. ↩
59. Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 123–126; The Masoretes, “Katrin Kogman-Appel”. ↩
60. Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter, 1969), pl. 52; The Masoretes, “Bezalel Narkiss”. ↩
61. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
62. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
63. J. A. Ramos, L. U. Afonso and T. Moita, “A Bíblia de Cervera: um manuscrito sefardita iluminado?”, Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 14 (2015), 171–201. ↩
64. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
65. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
66. The Masoretes, “The Kennicott Bible”. ↩
67. Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter, 1969), pl. 52; The Masoretes, “Bezalel Narkiss”. ↩
68. Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter, 1969), pl. 52; The Masoretes, “Bezalel Narkiss”. ↩
69. The Masoretes, “The Kennicott Bible”. ↩
70. Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 123–126; The Masoretes, “Katrin Kogman-Appel”. ↩
71. The Masoretes, “The Kennicott Bible”. ↩
72. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”; The Masoretes, “The Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian Standard”. ↩
73. The Masoretes, “Meiri’s Kiryat Sefer and the Laws of Writing a Torah Scroll”. ↩
74. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”; The Masoretes, “The Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian Standard”. ↩
75. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”; The Masoretes, “The Aleppo Codex and the Tiberian Standard”. ↩
76. Malachi Beit-Arié, Hebrew Codicology (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1981). ↩
77. Grokipedia, “Alhambra Decree”; The Masoretes, “The Expulsion of 1492”. ↩
78. The Masoretes, “Bible Scholarship in Lisbon”. ↩
79. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
80. The Masoretes, “Bible Scholarship in Lisbon”. ↩
81. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, [Bíblia], Cervera, [1299–1300], Biblioteca Nacional Digital (catalogue record and full digitised manuscript). ↩
82. J. A. Ramos, L. U. Afonso and T. Moita, “A Bíblia de Cervera: um manuscrito sefardita iluminado?”, Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 14 (2015), 171–201. ↩
83. Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter, 1969), pl. 52; The Masoretes, “Bezalel Narkiss”. ↩
84. Thérèse Metzger, “Josué ben Abraham ibn Gaon et la masora du Ms. Iluminado 72 de la Biblioteca Nacional de Lisbonne”, Codices Manuscripti 15/5 (1990), 1–27. ↩
85. Bezalel Narkiss and Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, “La première bible de Josué ben Abraham ibn Gaon”, Revue des études juives 130 (1971); Bezalel Narkiss, Aliza Cohen-Mushlin and Anat Tcherikover, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Isles, vol. 1: Spanish and Portuguese Manuscripts (Jerusalem and London, 1982), 22–34. ↩
86. Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 123–126; The Masoretes, “Katrin Kogman-Appel”. ↩
87. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
88. J. A. Ramos, L. U. Afonso and T. Moita, “A Bíblia de Cervera: um manuscrito sefardita iluminado?”, Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas 14 (2015), 171–201. ↩
89. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
90. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, [Bíblia], Cervera, [1299–1300], Biblioteca Nacional Digital (catalogue record and full digitised manuscript). ↩
91. Library of Congress, “Cervera Bible”, catalogue item 2021668000 (World Digital Library description) of Lisbon, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, MS IL. 72. ↩
92. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
93. Sarit Shalev-Eyni, “Artistic Innovation and Cultural Exchange: Sephardic Book Illumination ca. 1300, Burgos – Tudela – Soria”, Codex Aquilarensis 36 (2020), 117–140. ↩
94. The Masoretes, “The Kennicott Bible”. ↩
95. Grokipedia, “Alhambra Decree”; The Masoretes, “The Expulsion of 1492”. ↩