JEWISH EXPONENT | Thursday, April 18, 1996 - Wednesday, April 24, 1996 | Vol. 199, No. 16
The Hebrew manuscript is more than a vehicle for transmitting text. It represents an important physical artifact for the study of Jewish history -- especially in the medieval period, which did not leave a legacy of monuments or cities to be excavated.
That is the assessment of Professor Malachi Beit-Arié, a leading scholar of Hebrew books and manuscripts, who will discuss "Before Printing: The Manuscript Era of Jewish Culture," on Sunday, April 21, at 4 p.m., in the Van Pelt Library of the Unive rsity of Pennsylvania, 34th and Walnut Sts.
The lecture, which coincides with the opening of an exhibit at Van Pelt titled "From Written to Printed Text: the Transmission of Jewish Tradition," is co-sponsored by the Synagogue-Federation Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and b y Penn's Center for Judaic Studies.
Beit-Arié, former director of Israel's Jewish National and University Library -- the Jewish state's equivalent to the Library of Congress -- focuses on the value of manuscripts as cultural artifacts that contain hidden clues about Jewish life and s ociety through the medieval period.
"Hebrew manuscripts are not just verbal records," said Beit-Arié. "They are cultural artifacts, physical objects."
For a society that did not leave behind much in the way of castles or public works -- at least in the post-exilic period -- the manuscript becomes a focal point for the Jewish historian looking for clues about Jewish society and culture in earlier times, the scholar said.
Reading the clues
Things like the medium on which the manuscript is written -- paper or parchment -- or the density of the lettering can speak volumes about the affluence or poverty of a particular community, he said.
Beit-Arié cited as an example the Cairo Genizah -- a synagogue "attic" where some 40,000 manuscripts were discovered a century ago by Solomon Schechter, then a Cambridge University don.
"Despite the revision voiced lately with regard to the rate of literacy, the proportion of literacy among the Jews was far greater than any other civilization, at least around the Mediterranean basin," Beit-Arié said.
How does he know this? First, the books placed in the Genizah over a period of 250 years -- from about 1000 to 1250 C.E. -- were worn-out, used books, not ones in good condition. That's a significant number of laboriously copied and consumed manuscripts.
Second, the fact that the Genizah held the literary litter of just one of Cairo's three Jewish communities suggests a much larger literary output.
But more importantly, Beit-Arié said, the manuscripts and fragments were largely not made by professional copyists -- as was common in the Christian world -- but by individual scholarly Jews, who copied manuscripts for their own use.
"A fundamental difference between Jewish and Christian society," said Beit-Arié, was that at least half the medieval Hebrew manuscripts were user-produced.
"This attests to an incredible proportion of literacy," he said.
Made to be used
What's more, "these books were not produced to be kept in a royal or monastic collection -- they were produced for consumption," Beit-Arié said.
Relatively few Hebrew manuscripts survive today, said Beit-Arié, who headed the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's project to microfilm all known Hebrew manuscripts.
He believes that the paucity of manuscripts has less to do with pogroms and persecution than with the fact that Jews read voraciously and wore the manuscripts out.
A student of the late Gershom
Scholem, who founded the modern discipline of study of Jewish mysticism, Beit-Arié holds a doctorate from the Hebrew University, where he is professor of codicology and paleography. Codicology is the study of books, or codexes, and paleography is t he study of manuscripts.
He is also chairman of the Jewish National Library's International Advisory Board.
Beit-Arié sees the success of Zionism as not merely the ingathering of Jews from disparate locales, but also as the ingathering of Jewish books and manuscripts.
The Jewish National Library began collecting Jewish books and manuscripts upon its founding in 1892 -- before political Zionism.
"I think Zionism succeeded in two goals: One is assembling the records of Jews and the other is in reviving the Hebrew language," said Beit-Arié, born in 1937 Palestine to Lithuanian immigrants who refused to speak any language other than Hebrew at home.
As a visiting research fellow at Penn, Beit-Arié has begun work on compiling a comprehensive study, or typology, of the Hebrew manuscript.
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