Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries


Book Description

Representing four centuries of collecting and 1000 years of Jewish history, this book brings together extraordinary Hebrew manuscripts and rare books from the Bodleian Library and Oxford colleges. Highlights of the collections include a fragment of Maimonides' autograph draft of the Mishneh Torah; the earliest dated fragment of the Talmud, exquisitely illuminated manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible; stunning festival prayerbooks and one of the oldest surviving Jewish seals in England. Lavishly illustrated essays by experts in the field bring to life the outstanding works contained in the collections, as well as the personalities and diverse motivations of their original collectors, who include Archbishop William Laud, John Selden, Edward Pococke, Robert Huntington, Venetian Jesuit Matteo Canonici, Benjamin Kennicott and Rabbi David Oppenheim. Saved for posterity by religious scholarship, intellectual rivalry and political ambition, these extraordinary collections also detail the consumption and circulation of knowledge across the centuries, forming a social and cultural history of objects moved across borders, from person to person. Together, they offer a fascinating journey through Jewish intellectual and social history from the tenth to the twentieth century.













The Hebrew Bible Manuscripts: A Millennium


Book Description

In The Hebrew Bible: A Millennium, manuscripts, texts, and methods applied in Hebrew Bible studies are considered through time. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Cairo and European Genizot, as well as Late Medieval Biblical Manuscripts are examined.




Kennicott Bible


Book Description










Moritz Steinschneider. The Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages and the Jews as Transmitters


Book Description

This book surveys Hebrew manuscripts of Aristotelian philosophy and logic. It presents a translation and revision of part of Moritz Steinschneider’s monumental Die Hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher (The Hebrew Translations of the Middle Ages and the Jews as Interpreters). This resource was first published in 1893. It remains to this day the authoritative account of the transmission and development of Arabic and Latin, and, by way of those languages, Greek culture to medieval and renaissance Jews. The editors have updated Steinschneider’s bibliography. They have also judiciously revised some of his scholarly judgments. In addition, the volume provides an exhaustive listing of pertinent Hebrew manuscripts and their whereabouts. The section on logic, including texts hitherto unknown, represents the latest research in the history of medieval logic in Hebrew. This publication is the second in a series of volumes that translates, updates, and, where necessary, revises parts of Steinschneider’s bio-bibliographical classic work on Hebrew manuscripts of philosophical encyclopedias, manuals, and logical writings. Historians of medieval culture and philosophy, and also scholars of the transmission of classical culture to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, will find this volume indispensable.