̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Jewish

Astrolabe reveals Islamic–Jewish scientific exchange

ta385 — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 06:30:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��identification of an eleventh-century Islamic astrolabe bearing both Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions makes it one of the oldest examples ever discovered and one of only a handful known in the world. ̽��ֱ��astronomical instrument was adapted, translated and corrected for centuries by Muslim, Jewish and Christian users in Spain, North Africa and Italy.

Discarded history: Cairo Genizah treasures

zs332 — Tue, 31 May 2022 08:00:00 +0000

How the discovery and study of ancient deeds, fables, letters, magical amulets, contracts and lists in a sacred storeroom created unparalleled engagement with a forgotten chapter of Jewish history.

Saving Turkey's Children

sjr81 — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:20:09 +0000

Exiled by Hitler, Albert Eckstein turned his medical expertise to saving Turkey's poorest children from the curse of infant mortality.

Exhibition highlights the untold story of Nazi victims in the Channel Islands

sjr81 — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:18:26 +0000

On British Soil: Victims of Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands, opens today at the Wiener Library for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide, London, and seeks to highlight the stories often omitted from the British narrative of ‘standing alone’ against Nazism and celebrations of the British victory over the Germans.

̽��ֱ��exhibition draws upon the Library’s wealth of archival material, recently-released files from the National Archives, personal items belonging to the victims themselves and current research from Dr Carr.

“For anyone who wants to come and learn about the last untold story of the German occupation of the Channel Islands, this is the exhibition to visit,” said Carr, a senior lecturer in archaeology at St Catherine’s College and the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE).

“ ̽��ֱ��Islands were the only part of British territory to be occupied and the victims of Nazism are almost entirely overlooked by those who prefer (incorrectly) to see the islands as a hotbed of collaboration. There are so many heart-breaking stories. We think of the Holocaust or Nazi persecution as something that happened only on the continent – but it happened on British soil. British citizens experienced the most horrific concentration camps, and Jews were deported from British territory to Auschwitz.”

From the experiences of a young Jewish woman living quietly on a farm in Guernsey and later deported to Auschwitz and murdered, to those of a Spanish forced labourer in Alderney, and the story of a man from Guernsey whose death in a German prison camp remained unknown to his family for over 70 years, the exhibition highlights the lives of the persecuted, and the post-war struggle to obtain recognition of their suffering.

Other exhibits going on display in London include a Christmas card made by a little girl and given to Frank Tuck from Guernsey as he suffered in Neuoffingen hard labour camp and a key of a prison cell from the notorious Cherche-Midi prison in Paris, belonging to Henry Marquand, deported for his role in sheltering two British commandos to Guernsey.

“ ̽��ֱ��search for these unknown stories continues,” added Carr. “ ̽��ֱ��exhibition coincides with the launching of a new website https://www.frankfallaarchive.org/ which is dedicated to finding and reconstructing the full journey of all deported Channel Islanders through various Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Theirs is the last untold story of the German occupation of the Channel Islands.”

Frank Falla, the Guernseyman after whom the archive is named, was a former prisoner and survivor of Frankfurt am Main-Preungesheim and Naumburg (Saale) prisons. In the mid-1960s, Frank took it upon himself to help his fellow former political prisoners in the Channel Islands get compensation for their suffering in Nazi prisons and camps.

In 2010, Frank’s daughter gave Gilly her father’s extensive archives – the most important resistance archives to ever come out of the Channel Islands – and the project was born. Falla’s briefcase, used to collect the testimony of those persecuted by the Nazis is also on display in London from today.

“I’ve been writing the background stories for the website of islanders deported to Nazi prison, concentration and labour camps,” added Carr. “So far I’ve written 75 out of 200 plus. Every story is a labour of love. I see each as a form of ‘rescue’. While I can never go back and rescue any of these people from their camps and prisons, I can rescue their story and experiences for their families and for the Channel Islands.”

Carr says the experience of researching these stories brings about a strangely bonding experience with her subject matter as she becomes a co-witness to the horrors they faced – and responsible for making their stories more widely known.

“Each person whose story I trace becomes a kind of ‘friend’ in a strange way. You get to know them so well and I have been lucky enough to meet many families of those deported. I feel I can be a link between the living and the dead and tell the living what the dead were never able to.

“I’m interested in hearing from anyone in the Channel Islands or further afield who had a family member sent to a Nazi prison or concentration camp from the Channel Islands to help supplement the journeys we have reconstructed from archival materials. Please contact me via the website with photos, documents and stories. I'd love to hear from you.”

On British Soil: Victims of Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands until 9 February 2018, has been supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

̽��ֱ��untold stories of slave labourers, political prisoners and Jews who were persecuted during the German occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War will be revealed from today at a new exhibition co-curated by Cambridge’s Dr Gilly Carr.

Each person whose story I trace becomes a kind of ‘friend’ in a strange way. You get to know them so well.

GIlly Carr

Marianne Grunfeld was born in Poland to a German-Jewish family before taking a farm job in Guernsey in 1939. She was deported in 1942 and was murdered in Auschwitz

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Discarded History exhibition lifts the lid on 1,000 years of medieval history

sjr81 — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 06:07:10 +0000

Discarded History: ̽��ֱ��Genizah of Medieval Cairo opens to the public on April 27 and provides a unique and unparalleled window into the daily life of men, women and children at the centre of a thriving city over the course of a millennium.

From the 9th to the 19th century, the Jewish community of Fustat (Old Cairo) deposited more than 200,000 unwanted writings in a purpose-built storeroom in the Ben Ezra synagogue. This sacred storeroom was called the Genizah. A Genizah was a safe place to store away any old or unusable text that, because it contained the name of God, was considered too holy to simply throw out.

But when the room was opened in the late 19th century, alongside the expected Bibles, prayer books and works of Jewish law – scholars discovered the documents and detritus of everyday life: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, a 1,000-year-old page of child’s doodles and alphabets, Arabic fables, works of Muslim philosophy, medical books, magical amulets, business letters and accounts. Practically every kind of written text produced by the Jewish communities of the Near East throughout the Middle Ages had been preserved in that sacred storeroom.

Dr Ben Outhwaite, Head of the Genizah Research Unit and co-curator of the exhibition, said: “This colossal haul of writings reveals an intimate portrait of life in a Jewish community that was international in outlook, multicultural in make-up and devout to its core; a community concerned with the very things to which humanity has looked for much of its existence: love, sex and marriage, money and business, and ultimately death.

“ ̽��ֱ��Genizah collection is undeniably one of the greatest treasures among the world-class collections at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library. We have translated most of these texts into English for the first time – and most are also going on display for the first time, too. With Discarded History we hope to make this medieval society accessible and recognisable to a modern audience.”

Among the highlights going on display in Cambridge are the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed (Shtar Shiddukhin, from 1119), showing the complex legal relations that existed around marriage, the oldest-dated medieval Hebrew manuscript (a Bible from 9th century Iran) and an 11th century pre-nuptial agreement where the groom, Toviyya – who clearly had a bad reputation – was forced to make a series of promises about his future behaviour.

In the presence of witnesses, he declares that he will avoid mixing with the wrong sort, for the purposes of ‘eating, drinking or anything else’. He also states that he will not spend one night away from Faiza, unless she wants him to, and that he will not buy himself a slave girl, unless Faiza agrees.

̽��ֱ��existence of the Cairo Genizah was first brought to the attention of Western scholars by the fearless and intrepid travellers Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson in 1896. ̽��ֱ��twin sisters, devout Presbyterians who had inherited a great fortune, returned to Cambridge from a research trip to Egypt and Palestine. They brought with them a treasure lost for a thousand years: a page from the original Hebrew book of Ben Sira, accumulated along with thousands of other documents in the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

Cambridge lecturer Solomon Schechter was so excited by the sisters’ remarkable discovery that he raised the money to travel to Old Cairo to see for himself what the Genizah held – although not before swearing the twins to secrecy about the nature of their discovery, lest a rival scholar from Oxford be alerted to their existence.

Upon arrival in Cairo, the Chief Rabbi of Egypt gave Schechter permission to take whatever he liked. Schechter declared that he ‘liked all’, and shipped almost 200,000 manuscripts back to Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��material that arrived in Cambridge, packed in wooden crates, dates from a period when 90 per cent of the world’s Jews lived in Islamic lands. ̽��ֱ��broadly tolerant regime under which they lived contrasted with the usually harsher treatment meted out to Jews in Western Europe. ̽��ֱ��documents paint a picture of economic stability and social growth. Cheques for goods ranging from wax candles to lemon sherbet pay testament to the variety and richness of the 200,000 documents in Cambridge’s possession – almost all of which have been conserved to avoid any further damage to the priceless collection.

“Women and children are invisible in most archives – especially those from medieval times,” added Outhwaite. “But through our collections, myriad individual voices can be heard through children’s copy books, prenuptial agreements and books of magic spells.

“A broad brush picture of the medieval Middle East as a crucible of cruel oppression or, conversely, an interfaith utopia does not do justice to the eye-level history recorded in these sources. Life, for the culturally rich and socially conscious citizens of the medieval Middle East, was more complicated, sophisticated and interesting than that.

“ ̽��ֱ��Cairo Genizah speaks vividly of the community’s links to other lands and other faiths. Its fragile contents, brown with age when Schechter acquired them, give us a picture of life that includes piracy and human trafficking to the intimate drama of domestic life. We can read about ancient cures for headaches and see school teachers complain bitterly about children’s unruly behaviour, just as they do today. It’s this richness that makes the Genizah unique.”

Discarded History: ̽��ֱ��Genizah of Medieval Cairo opens to the public on April 27, 2017 and runs until October 28, 2017. Entry is free.

Treasures from the world’s largest and most important collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts – chronicling 1,000 years of history in Old Cairo – have gone on display in Cambridge today for a six-month-long exhibition at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Myriad individual voices can be heard through children’s copy books, prenuptial agreements and books of magic spells.

Ben Outhwaite

A Brush With History

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Cambridge lecturer Solomon Schechter among thousands of Genizah fragments in his office after their transportation from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo.

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Solomon Schechter (1847-1915): a Jewish polymath with a gift for friendship

amb206 — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 09:49:12 +0000

Solomon Schechter was instantly recognisable in 1890s Cambridge. He was tall and untidily dressed, and he had an unruly red beard that matched his fiery personality. According to his friends, he seldom wore socks that matched in colour. People and conversations, Jewish history and books, were what mattered most to him.

In 1890 Schechter, a Romanian-born rabbi, became Lecturer in Talmudics at Cambridge. Together with his wife Mathilde he entertained a wide circle of people of different faiths. His Cambridge friends included the Presbyterian twin sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, co-founders of Westminster College, William Robertson Smith of Christ’s, J Rendel Harris of Clare, and Charles Taylor of St John’s.

His closest friend was the reclusive James Frazer of Trinity, author of ̽��ֱ��Golden Bough, a monumental comparative study of folklore, magic and religion, who proof-read Schechter’s essays and with whom Schechter liked to take long walks.

To mark the centenary of Schechter’s death, scholars are looking afresh at his remarkable life and afterlife - in particular at the contribution to scholarship made by a man with an omnivorous hunger for learning that drove him from the traditional Jewish Eastern-European world into which he was born to Vienna, Berlin, London, Cambridge and finally New York.

When he collapsed (and later died) after giving a lecture on Jewish philanthropy, his wife recounted that he asked for a book to read, protesting that “I can’t just lie down here doing nothing”.

A conference in Cambridge on Sunday, November 22, will bring together scholars from the USA, the UK, Europe and Israel to examine many aspects of Schechter’s life – from his work on ancient, medieval and modern Jewish history to his close relationships with his Cambridge contemporaries.

“Solomon Schechter was only the second Jew to be appointed to a teaching position at Cambridge. He was the quintessential absent-minded but brilliant scholar,” says Dr Theodor Dunkelgrün of CRASSH and St John’s College, who is convening the conference.

“He possessed a phenomenal intellect and was passionately interested not just in Jewish theology and history generally, but in all manner of literary, social, and cultural issues, including the role of women in Judaism, in ways that were way ahead of his time. A dazzling intermediary between rabbinic and academic worlds, he wrote beautiful, pioneering essays for an appreciative Victorian readership.”

It was a meeting with two of his Cambridge friends that won Schechter a place in history. In May 1896, Schechter was walking along King’s Parade when he met Agnes Lewis who, with her sister Margaret Gibson, had recently returned from Cairo where they had purchased a bundle of interesting documents. Lewis and Gibson, whose remarkable lives are vividly documented in Janet Soskice’s Sisters of Sinai, were self-taught scholars who had learnt Syriac in order to be able to read the earliest known versions of the Christian gospels.

Among the documents that Lewis and Gibson had acquired from a dealer in Cairo was a grubby scrap of paper which looked, in Gibson’s words “as if a grocer had used it for something greasy”. Schechter identified this fragment as part of a medieval copy of a hitherto unknown Hebrew original of the apocryphal book known as Ecclesiasticus to Christians and the Wisdom of Ben Sira to Jews. ̽��ֱ��incredible discovery suggested to him the possibility that there might well be more where it came from.

In accordance with Jewish law, no document containing the Holy Name may be destroyed. Jewish communities collect old texts beyond use in a so-called Geniza, a tomb for texts. ̽��ֱ��precious fragment of text that had, according to Gibson, made Schechter’s eyes glitter with excitement came from such a Geniza, a vast repository of documents stored, in haphazard fashion, in the oldest of Cairo’s synagogues, the Ben Ezra.

̽��ֱ��discovery and importance for medieval history of this unique collection is told in riveting detail by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s book Sacred Trash and in Stefan Reif’s A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo.

Sponsored by his friend Professor Charles Taylor, Master of St John’s College, Schechter travelled from Cambridge to Cairo, where, after winning the trust of the chief rabbi, he entered a windowless room that contained several hundreds of thousands of documents and manuscripts accrued, layer by dusty layer over a period of nearly a thousand years.

“A battlefield of books” is how Schechter described the chaos of handwritten manuscripts mingled with later printed text. Extraordinary as it may now seem, the chief rabbi authorised Schechter to take as much as he liked to deposit in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library. Schechter famously commented that he liked it all.

After spending a month trying to separate out the early material which mattered to him most, Schechter packed a “whole mass of rugged, jumbled, dirty stuff into huge sacks” which were dispatched to Cambridge. A black-and-white photograph reproduced in Sisters of Sinai shows Schechter sitting in a room in the old ̽��ֱ�� Library surrounded by boxes brimming over with documents that range from love letters and children’s doodles to hymns and religious texts.

Today these 193,000 manuscript fragments make up the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection in the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library – a treasure trove that an ambitious digitisation project has recently made accessible to scholars worldwide.

Schechter is not surprisingly best remembered for his contribution to the preservation of an archive that offers a unique window onto daily life of the medieval Jewish past in the Islamic world. But his pioneering study of the Geniza was just one strand in a career that took him from the Hassidic milieu of the small Romanian town where he was born to the rarefied world of late-Victorian Cambridge, and eventually to America.

In 1902, Schechter left Cambridge to take up the chancellorship of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, where he helped shape a generation of scholars and communal leaders and became the unintentional founder of the movement now known as Conservative Judaism.

Dunkelgrün says: “Schechter’s name will always, and justly, be associated with the Geniza, but he was much more than a Geniza scholar – he was a polymath who cared passionately for the entirety of the Jewish tradition, mystical and rational, from antiquity to his own time and beyond, towards the future. He paired this panoramic vision both with the traditional rabbinical education he received at home, in Lemberg and in Vienna, and with the philological skills he acquired in Berlin to produce critical editions of several major Rabbinic texts.”

A postdoctoral research fellow at CRASSH, Dunkelgrün is contributing to a European Research Council-funded project on ̽��ֱ��Bible and Antiquity in 19^th-century culture. He insists that Schechter’s work in Cambridge over a period of 20 years was made possible in large part because of the fascination of Victorian England, and Cambridge in particular, for biblical antiquity.

“Schechter cut an exotic figure, but one that was strangely at home in academic circles already convinced about the importance of rabbinic studies for the early history of Christianity. Schechter was the second in a line of six teachers of Rabbinics at Cambridge, the last of whom was Professor Nicholas de Lange, now formally retired from his post. We hope very much that this conference will draw attention not only to Schechter but also to this unique and precious tradition of Cambridge scholarship, and the importance of keeping it alive.”

Attendance at Sunday’s conference, Solomon Schechter’s Life and Legacy, is free of charge. Particulars and a link to registration may be found here: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26067/

Inset images: Solomon Schechter, before his death in 1915 (Wikimedia Commons); Solomon Schechter at work in the old ̽��ֱ�� Library (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library).

̽��ֱ��Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter is best remembered for his work on the Cairo Geniza. A conference this Sunday will explore the wider impact of a man with an unquenchable thirst for learning.

A dazzling intermediary between rabbinic and academic worlds, he wrote beautiful, pioneering essays for an appreciative Victorian readership

Theodor Dunkelgrün

Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Solomon Schechter at work in the old ̽��ֱ�� Library

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Historic rivals join forces to save 1,000 years of Jewish history

ljm67 — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:02:58 +0000

̽��ֱ��campaign was officially launched this week at the British Academy in London.

̽��ֱ��collection comprises more than 1,700 fragments of Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts, originating from the Cairo Genizah, dating from the 9th–19th century. They represent an invaluable record of a thousand years of the religious, social, economic and cultural life of the Mediterranean world.

̽��ֱ��fragments were brought back from Cairo by the intrepid twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson in 1896 and deposited at Westminster College. Treasures of the collection include the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed (dating from 1119), an eyewitness account of Crusader atrocities, and letters by leading Jewish traders of the 11th and 12th centuries.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “In the late 19th century, Oxford’s Bodleian Library and Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library were rivals in trying to acquire materials from the Cairo Genizah. Today we are taking a different stance, seeking to build on our collections while recognising that there would be a greater benefit to scholarship if we joined together to save the Lewis-Gibson Collection from division and dispersal.”

Both libraries are already holders of substantial Genizah collections in their own right. Cambridge is home to the largest collection in the world with some 200,000 fragments out of the estimated 350,000 to be found in public collections worldwide. Meanwhile, the Bodleian holds 25,000 world-class Genizah folios, the size and quality of which rank it among the most important global collections.

A genizah is a sacred storeroom, a room set aside inside a synagogue for the interment of old religious writings, which, because they contain names of God or use the sacred Hebrew alphabet, cannot be simply discarded. For more than 1,000 years the Jewish community of Fustat (now a suburb of Cairo) deposited all manner of writings (not just sacred texts) into the sacred storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

̽��ֱ��significance of the manuscripts haphazardly stored in the synagogue was recognised towards the end of the 19th century, and the Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection represents some of the earliest fragments to emerge from it. Given its status as a ‘hand-picked’ collection, the Lewis-Gibson Collection contains perhaps more than its share of rare or unique items compared to its modest size.

Other treasures are a large leaf of Moses Maimonides’ (d. 1204) famous Commentary on the Mishnah in his own hand, an autograph poem by the medieval Spanish Hebrew poet Joseph ibn Abitur, the earliest known example of a Jewish engagement deed (Shtar Shiddukhin, from 1119), showing the complex legal relations that existed around marriage, and a rare, very early (10th-century), copy on vellum of the great Jewish sage Saadya Gaon’s translation of the Bible into Arabic.

̽��ֱ��libraries’ fundraising campaign has received an early, significant and much-welcomed boost with the promise of a £500,000 lead gift from the Polonsky Foundation which in 2010 also gifted £1.5m to Cambridge’s Digital Library Project and £2m to the Bodleian Libraries’ initiative with the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana. Both libraries are now appealing for donors to come forward and secure the remaining £700,000 necessary to buy the collection outright.

Dr Polonsky, Trustee of the Foundation, said: “I strongly support collaboration and am delighted to give momentum to the joint venture of these two great Universities in acquiring such an important manuscript collection.”

Bodley’s Librarian Dr Sarah Thomas said: “This is a rare and special opportunity to jointly acquire the Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection by Cambridge and Oxford, which combined hold almost 70 per cent of the fragments in public collections. Together, we will share the work of curating, conserving, digitising and presenting the manuscripts, making the best use of the strengths of each institution.”

̽��ֱ��Lewis-Gibson Collection holds a special place in the modern history of the Cairo Genizah. When the twin sisters showed a selection of their fragments to their friend, Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter, he set off to Egypt to find the source. What followed was the discovery of the Cairo Genizah, changing the study of Judaism – and of the study of the wider history of the Middle East – forever.

Professor David Abulafia, author of the acclaimed ̽��ֱ��Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean believes that the Genizah is a unique historical archive. He said: “ ̽��ֱ��Cairo Genizah documents are like a searchlight, illuminating dark corners of the history of the Mediterranean and shedding a bright light on the social, economic and religious life of the Jews not just of medieval Egypt but of lands far away. There is nothing to compare with them as source for the history of the tenth to twelfth centuries, anywhere in Europe or the Islamic world.”

For those who would like to make a donation to the appeal to purchase this fascinating collection of medieval manuscripts, please visit our online giving page.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library and the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries have today announced their first ever joint fundraising campaign to purchase the £1.2 million ‘Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection’, currently owned by the United Reformed Church’s Westminster College.

Governors of Westminster College, Cambridge

Mrs Gibson on a camel in the Sinai, 1893.

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Ancient Bible fragments reveal a forgotten history

ns480 — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:56:50 +0000

̽��ֱ��study by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� researchers suggests that, contrary to long-accepted views, Jews continued to use a Greek version of the Bible in synagogues for centuries longer than previously thought. In some places, the practice continued almost until living memory.

̽��ֱ��key to the new discovery lay in manuscripts, some of them mere fragments, discovered in an old synagogue in Egypt and brought to Cambridge at the end of the 19th century. ̽��ֱ��so-called Cairo Genizah manuscripts have been housed ever since in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Now, a fully searchable online corpus (http://www.gbbj.org) has gathered these manuscripts together, making the texts and analysis of them available to other scholars for the first time.

" ̽��ֱ��translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE is said to be one of the most lasting achievements of the Jewish civilization - without it, Christianity might not have spread as quickly and as successfully as it did," explained Nicholas de Lange, Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the Faculties of Divinity and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, who led the three-year study to re-evaluate the story of the Greek Bible fragments.

"It was thought that the Jews, for some reason, gave up using Greek translations and chose to use the original Hebrew for public reading in synagogue and for private study, until modern times when pressure to use the vernacular led to its introduction in many synagogues."

Close study of the Cairo Genizah fragments by Professor de Lange led to the discovery that some contained passages from the Bible in Greek written in Hebrew letters. Others contained parts of a lost Greek translation made by a convert to Judaism named Akylas in the 2nd century CE. Remarkably, the fragments date from 1,000 years after the original translation into Greek, showing use of the Greek text was still alive in Greek-speaking synagogues in the Byzantine Empire and elsewhere.

Manuscripts in other libraries confirmed the evidence of the Cambridge fragments, and added many new details. It became clear that a variety of Greek translations were in use among Jews in the Middle Ages.

Not only does the new research offer us a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture, but it also illustrates the cross-fertilisation between Jewish and Christian biblical scholars in the Middle Ages. "This is a very exciting discovery for me because it confirms a hunch I had when studying Genizah fragments 30 years ago," said Professor de Lange.

̽��ֱ��online resource enables comparison of each word of the Hebrew text, the Greek translation - knows as the Septuagint after the 70 Jewish scholars said to have translated it - and the fragments of Akylas' and other Jewish translations from antiquity.

̽��ֱ��resource was created following collaboration between research teams at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, including Dr Cameron Boyd-Taylor and Dr Julia Krivoruchko, and King's College London. "This ambitious piece of collaborative digital scholarship required challenging technical difficulties to be solved," explained Paul Spence, who led the team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's. "It draws together a wide variety of materials under a standards-based framework which provides multiple entry points into the material."

̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Image: Genizah palimpsest with Hebrew (shown upside down) written over the top of a 6th-century copy of Akylas' Greek translation (c. 125 CE) of the Books of Kings (shown the right way up); T-S 12.184r. Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

New research has uncovered a forgotten chapter in the history of the Bible, offering a rare glimpse of Byzantine Jewish life and culture.

̽��ֱ��translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE is said to be one of the most lasting achievements of the Jewish civilization - without it, Christianity might not have spread as quickly and as successfully as it did.

Professor Nicholas de Lange

Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit

Genizah fragment

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