探花直播 of Cambridge - Genizah

New, handwritten Maimonides texts discovered at Cambridge 探花直播 Library

sjr81 — Thu, 11 May 2023 15:41:27 +0000

900-year-old paper fragment verified as the handwriting of legendary philosopher Maimonides.

Ghost Words: Reading the past

zs332 — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 11:04:19 +0000

A new聽exhibition from Cambridge 探花直播 Library聽is set to bring to life the hidden words buried in some of our oldest manuscripts - known as palimpsests.聽聽

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鈥檚, J Rendel Harris of Clare, and Charles Taylor of St John鈥檚.

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

To mark the centenary of Schechter鈥檚 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 鈥淚 can鈥檛 just lie down here doing nothing鈥�.

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鈥檚 life 鈥� from his work on ancient, medieval and modern Jewish history to his close relationships with his Cambridge contemporaries.

鈥淪olomon Schechter was only the second Jew to be appointed to a teaching position at Cambridge. He was the quintessential absent-minded but brilliant scholar,鈥� says Dr Theodor Dunkelgr眉n of CRASSH and St John鈥檚 College, who is convening the conference.

鈥淗e 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.鈥�

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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 words 鈥渁s if a grocer had used it for something greasy鈥�. 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. 探花直播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. 探花直播precious fragment of text that had, according to Gibson, made Schechter鈥檚 eyes glitter with excitement came from such a Geniza, a vast repository of documents stored, in haphazard fashion, in the oldest of Cairo鈥檚 synagogues, the Ben Ezra.

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

Sponsored by his friend Professor Charles Taylor, Master of St John鈥檚 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.

鈥淎 battlefield of books鈥� 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 探花直播 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 鈥渨hole mass of rugged, jumbled, dirty stuff into huge sacks鈥� which were dispatched to Cambridge. A black-and-white photograph reproduced in Sisters of Sinai shows Schechter sitting in a room in the old 探花直播 Library surrounded by boxes brimming over with documents that range from love letters and children鈥檚 doodles to hymns and religious texts.

Today these 193,000 manuscript fragments make up the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection in the Cambridge 探花直播 Library 鈥� 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.

Dunkelgr眉n says: 鈥淪chechter鈥檚 name will always, and justly, be associated with the Geniza, but he was much more than a Geniza scholar 鈥� 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.鈥�

聽A postdoctoral research fellow at CRASSH, 聽Dunkelgr眉n is contributing to a European Research Council-funded project on 探花直播Bible and Antiquity in 19^th-century culture. He insists that Schechter鈥檚 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.

鈥淪chechter 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.鈥�

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

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

探花直播Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter is best remembered for his work on the Cairo Geniza.聽 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 Dunkelgr眉n

Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge 探花直播 Library

Solomon Schechter at work in the old 探花直播 Library

探花直播text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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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

探花直播campaign was officially launched this week at the British Academy in London.

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

探花直播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 探花直播 Librarian Anne Jarvis said: 鈥淚n the late 19th century, Oxford鈥檚 Bodleian Library and Cambridge 探花直播 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.鈥�

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.

探花直播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 鈥榟and-picked鈥� 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鈥� (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鈥檚 translation of the Bible into Arabic.

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

Dr Polonsky, Trustee of the Foundation, said: 鈥淚 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.鈥�

Bodley鈥檚 Librarian Dr Sarah Thomas said: 鈥淭his 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.鈥�

探花直播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 鈥� and of the study of the wider history of the Middle East 鈥� forever.

Professor David Abulafia, author of the acclaimed 探花直播Great Sea: a human history of the Mediterranean believes that the Genizah is a unique historical archive.聽 He said: 鈥� 探花直播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.鈥�

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.聽

Cambridge 探花直播 Library and the 探花直播 of Oxford鈥檚 Bodleian Libraries have today announced their first ever joint fundraising campaign to purchase the 拢1.2 million 鈥楲ewis-Gibson Genizah Collection鈥�, currently owned by the United Reformed Church鈥檚 Westminster College.

Governors of Westminster College, Cambridge

Mrs Gibson on a camel in the Sinai, 1893.

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