In July 2023, Dr. Marie Frey Rébeillé-Borgella drafted a preliminary catalogue of 38 re-used manuscripts in several archives from the Swiss canton of Lucerne.1 Among the Latin biblical and liturgical fragments, two were identified as a Hebrew fragment and a fragmentary folio «Un fragment et un feuillet fragmentaire en hébreu». The Hebrew fragment is hosted in an early 16th-century «Jahrzeitbuch»2from Escholzmatt parish, and shelfmarked according to the online...
Abstract This short paper studies a single folio of a 17th century Hebrew/Aramaic manuscript found in a bookbinding. It suggests that this manuscript contained one of the lost sources used by Rabbi Bezalel Ashkenazi in his Shiṭṭah Mequbbeẓet on b. Bava Metzia. Rabbi Bezalel ben Abraham Ashkenazi (henceforth: RBA; c. 1520-1591/4), the teacher of Rabbi Isaac Luria, is probably best known as the compiler of Shiṭṭah Mequbbeẓet (henceforth:...
Journée d’étude, BwB-EFR On 11th September, the Italian part of Books within Books Project organized a colloquium titled “Du fragment au livres : manuscrits hébreux en Italie médiévale ”. The colloquium took place at the magnificent École Française de Rome at Piazza Navona as part of the project : “Culture scribale fragmentée : vestiges des manuscrits hébreux en Italie – paléographie et histoire du livre “. 10 papers...
The Biblioteca “Gennaro Maria Monti” of the former Istituto di Storia del Diritto Italiano, now Department of Law of the University of Bari hosts one the richest collections of juridical sources and studies on Southern Italy dating from the late 15th to the first half of the 19th century. In 2017, during the first cataloguing campaign of the 451 printed volumes dating from the 16th century, two Hebrew...
Hebrew books within books often are found in the most surprising places and often reveal much more than their small size may indicate. At times, full pages are revealed, within the bindings of early printed books; at other times only a tiny fragment is visible. This month’s fragment is devoted to a stellar example of the latter. While working on the collection of Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books...
Historical enquiries into Romanian Jewry rely mainly on sources external to the Jewish communities in question(1). Earlier attempts to work with internal documents were not the result of single-handed endeavours to make these available to a wider readership, rather than a systematic historiographic approach(2). Books within Books provides nowadays a platform where Jewish voices are at the forefront and tell their own story. For this reason, I travelled...
In January 2020, I was informed about the presence of various fragments of Hebrew manuscripts in the Camerino division of the State Archive of Macerata in the Marche region of Italy. I immediately traveled to Camerino, where I was welcomed by Dr. Daniela Casadidio, Director of the local State Archive Section. I was able to locate and photograph some twenty-three Hebrew fragments reused as bindings for a series...
The Destruction and Preservation of Hebrew Books one-day virtual conference was held on 15th November 2021. The workshop, organised by Miriam Benfatto (University of Bologna) and Elena Lolli (University of Oxford), was hosted by the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna with the support of the Books within Books – Hebrew Fragments in European Libraries research cluster and the Italian Association for Jewish Studies...
An Exhibition of manuscript fragments at the Modena State Archives. The seventh centenary of the death of Dante Alighieri (1285-1321) was celebrated with a wide range of events across Italy. The municipality of Modena in Emilia Romagna sponsored several initiatives on the occasion of its yearly edition of the Philosophy Festival. This time, from September 17 to 19, the festival was dedicated to the theme of “freedom” and...
The Order of Preachers was associated from its origins with the rise and growth of the largest universities: this is why Dominic of Guzmán (1170-1221) himself decided, a few years after the approval of the rule of the order by Pope Honorius III, to settle with his companions in Bologna, in the convent that would soon become a religious, intellectual and cultural landmark (image 1). The wealth of...
A few months ago, I saw on the Ktiv website a description of two fragments of Tractate Berakhot of the Babylonian Talmud in the holdings of the Cambridge University library (Add. 474,2). My attention was drawn to this description because it contained no additional details, and it was stated that the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem did not possess a...
The parchment fragments in Hebrew from the archive of the Biblioteca Comunale Sperelliana (Gubbio, Italy) are perhaps among the most impressive ones that our team has uncovered thus far while working on the project Fragmenta Iguvina.[1] The fragments are still in situ, as they were mostly used as external covers of large early printed texts which are now being preserved in the library’s archive (cf. images 1 and...
The Books within Books General Assembly took place virtually on June 21st and 22nd, 2021. The Books within Books– Hebrew Fragments in European Libraries research group, coordinated by the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, consists of an international network of scholars who deal with the finding, cataloguing, and dissemination of knowledge on the re-use of medieval Hebrew manuscripts recovered from book bindings and notarial files found in libraries and archives around the...
It is not rare that sheets from a manuscript dismembered in one town and reused in bookbindings became scattered across Italian provinces and regions, and even in other countries, sometimes hundreds or thousands of kilometres from the place in which they were reused. How can one explain the reasons why different sheets of the same original Hebrew codex are found in locations so far from each other? One...
Moyen Âge – Calenda
