The medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts of the Small Book of Commandments (Sefer Mitzvot Katan, or ‘SeMaK’ for short), which was written by Isaac of Corbeil, attest a scribal culture in which rabbinical knowledge and piety were combined with creative freedom in manuscript design. This study is concerned with the creation, composition and circulation of manuscripts of the SeMaK and concentrates on the book as an artefact. The focus of the author’s attention is the manuscripts’ material nature, their artistic embellishment and the personal touches that scribes added to them. With the act of writing a text and decorating a SeMaK manuscript, they ‘appropriated’ the text, so to speak, giving it a character of its very own. They drew on a visual language in the process – or rather, on visual languages, which occupy a special place between pure writing culture and pure painting culture. It was in this area ‘in between’ the two that spontaneous touches arose, ranging from changes in the physical arrangement of the text (mise-en-page) to drawings and doodles added in the margins. An examination of paratextual elements broadens the reader’s knowledge about Jewish scribal culture and grants insights into medieval book art, material culture and Judeo-Christian co-existence in the Middle Ages as well as throwing some light on Jewish values, ideals and eschatological hopes.

The medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts of the Small Book of Commandments (Sefer Mitzvot Katan, or ‘SeMaK’ for short), which was written by Isaac of Corbeil, attest a scribal culture in which rabbinical knowledge and piety were combined with creative freedom in manuscript design. This study is concerned with the creation, composition and circulation of manuscripts of the SeMaK and concentrates on the book as an artefact. The focus of the author’s attention is the manuscripts’ material nature, their artistic embellishment and the personal touches that scribes added to them. With the act of writing a text and decorating a SeMaK manuscript, they ‘appropriated’ the text, so to speak, giving it a character of its very own. They drew on a visual language in the process – or rather, on visual languages, which occupy a special place between pure writing culture and pure painting culture. It was in this area ‘in between’ the two that spontaneous touches arose, ranging from changes in the physical arrangement of the text (mise-en-page) to drawings and doodles added in the margins. An examination of paratextual elements broadens the reader’s knowledge about Jewish scribal culture and grants insights into medieval book art, material culture and Judeo-Christian co-existence in the Middle Ages as well as throwing some light on Jewish values, ideals and eschatological hopes.

Hebrew manuscripts are considered to be invaluable documents and artefacts of Jewish culture and history. Research on Hebrew manuscript culture is progressing rapidly and therefore its topics, methods and questions need to be enunciated and reflected upon. The case studies assembled in this volume explore various fields of research on Hebrew manuscripts. They show paradigmatically the current developments concerning codicology and palaeography, book forms like the scroll and codex, scribes and their writing material, patrons, collectors and censors, manuscript and book collections, illuminations and fragments, and, last but not least, new methods of material analysis applied to manuscripts. The principal focus of this volume is the material and intellectual history of Hebrew book cultures from antiquity to the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, its intention being to heighten and sharpen the reader’s understanding of Jewish social and cultural history in general.

Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism have long been studied separately. Yet, scholars are becoming ever more aware of the need to merge them into a single field of Jewish Studies. This volume opens new perspectives and bridges traditional gaps. The authors are not simply contributing to their respective fields of Sephardic or Ashkenazic Studies. Rather, they all include both Sephardic and Ashkenazic perspectives as they reflect on different aspects of encounters and reconsider traditional narratives. Subjects range from medieval and early modern Sephardic and Ashkenazic constructions of identities, influences, and entanglements in the fields of religious art, halakhah, kabbalah, messianism, and charity to modern Ashkenazic Sephardism and Sephardic admiration for Ashkenazic culture. For reasons of coherency, the contributions all focus on European contexts between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmud's preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inscription of Talmud—which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later—precipitated these developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that Talmud came to play in Jewish life. What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietism's emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena—the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud—were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life.

Professor Alfred Haverkamp, founder of the Arye Maimon Institute for Jewish History at Trier University, has been a leading scholar and successful mentor for medieval historical research on Jews and Judaism in Central Europe (Ashkenaz) since the 1970s. This Festschrift joins together current multi-disciplinary perspectives on medieval Jewish life and Jewish-Christian relations, in studies based on archival and manuscript sources as well as medieval sculpture and artefacts. With contributions by Elisheva Baumgarten, Thilo Becker, Eveline Brugger, Nicolo Bucaria, Jorn R. Christophersen, Christoph Cluse and Carsten Ginsheimer, Johannes Deissler, Simcha Emanuel, Rachel Furst and Sophia Schmitt, Johannes Heil, Elisabeth Hollender, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Andreas Lehnertz, Ivan G. Marcus, Gerd Mentgen, Rachel Zohn Mincer, Jorg R. Muller, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, Lucia Raspe, Rene Richtscheid, Michael Schlachter, Merav Schnitzer Maimon, Christian Scholl, Sarit Shalev-Eyni, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, Alessandra Veronese, Markus J. Wenninger, and Birgit Wiedl. Foreword by Israel J. Yuval.

In Sefer Tagin Fragments from the Cairo Genizah, Marc Michaels recreates fragments from the scribal manual concerning decorative tagin and 'strange' letters found in some Sifrey Torah.