Paleography Solution

A few months ago I posted about a set of paleography problems I was having, signatures of the owners of a manuscript I'm working on: 

I'm sharing pre-publication data because the hive mind of the web was so helpful in my getting it sorted out that it seems only fair. (And the individuals who were particularly helpful are, of course, acknowledged by name in the article.) But this is still pre-publication data and my own drawings (that will appear in a chapter entitled 'Meeting the Mediterranean Halfway: The Material Text as a Map of the Maimonidean Controversies' in an as-yet untitled book to be published by Penn Press in or around 2016). Please don't be a jerk.

The first one remains undeciphered. The second two are as follows:

זה הספר שייך להירשל בן צבי

This book belongs to Hirschell ben Ẓvi.

This was a bit disappointing because it didn't add any new information to the provenance of the manuscript, since I already knew that it had belonged to Solomon Hirschell (son of Ẓvi Hirschell), but it was satisfying to sort it out.

שלי

יצחק

בר מנחם

הצ נע

This belongs to me,

Isaac

bar Menaḥem

the F[rench guy whose] s[oul is in] E[den]

It's been suggested to me that the personal name for this last one should be read Yishayahu rather than Yiẓḥaq. However, the grapheme that would have to be either a letter hey or a letter quf is, in the sixteenth century when this MS was copied, far more likely to be the latter. Plus, I can identify a relevant Isaac but no relevant Isaiah.

The names only get us so far and there is more to the story — hate to be cryptic about it but I don't want to run into issues with the editors, who were very clear that the material for the book had to be all new and unpublished elsewhere. I think I'm ok sharing the images, but I may have to take them down at a later date.

So that's that. It was a lot of work and a lot of frustration and a lot of help from others for two little names. (Of course I'm still more than happy for any additional feedback or critique.)

An Ashkenazi Paleography Puzzle

I'm trying to write a book chapter for an edited volume on the readership and ownership history of a particular Hebrew manuscript that, through a fictional colophon, implicates ones of my translators in the creation of that text in an attempt to accrete his textual, cultural, and intellectual prestige to the text, a life of Alexander the Great. I am writing about the text and the colophon in my book, but this book chapter will be an opportunity to talk about the material history of the text and how and why an Alexander romance falsely attributed to a medieval Andalusi exile was of interest to early modern European readers, who obviously had the text copied, sold it, and circulated it.

There are five owners' marks, and I've been able to read and identify three of them: the two most recent and the one that is probably the oldest of the five. The two newest ones are stamps that are well attested and weren't that hard to sort out; the oldest is a mess — a colleague in a different field looked at it and asked me: "What makes you even think that's language?" — which, not to toot my own horn or anything, was a real triumph to both decipher it and identify it as the mark of a French book dealer with particular known interests in Andalusi work.

But I'm really stuck on the other two.

< self-flagellation > I hate that I'm stuck. I hate that I haven't been able to work this out on my own or with help from people I know. I hate that I"m asking for help in such a public way and feel like it will, in some substantial way diminish the final product, if I ever even get as far as finishing it. I know that asking for help isn't asking other people to do my own work — being able to read the marks is just a first step, obviously, and there would be loads left for me to do and of course I'd give credit where credit would be due — but I can't quite shake the feeling. < / self-flagellation >

I think that the second one might begin: "zeh ha-sefer shayach le-yosef" (this book belongs to Joseph) but I'm not even sure about that. But if anyone out there is more familiar with early modern Ashkenazi hands than I am and can make some sense of these, I'd be beyond grateful, would acknowledge you in an effusive footnote, and would be more than happy to send you a batch of cookies, too, if that's your thing.

So here goes. Click to enlarge:

Codicological Factoids

I spent all of last week at Stanford attending the Islamic Manuscript Association's Introduction to Islamic Codicology workshop, taught be the expert in the field. I would strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the subject matter. The approach of the course was largely taxonomic, but that meant that we worked systematically through all of the relevant technical vocabulary insofar as it is currently understood (read: a lot less well than for western European codicology).

It doesn't make for a hugely compelling post, but here are a few of the punchiest, pithiest factoids I gleaned:

• Arabic has a verb — zakhrafa — the base meaning of which is "to forge," but which can be used used more specifically to mean "to forge Qur'ān manuscripts in polychromatic ink."

• Kabīkaj is the jinn of papyrus, invoked at the beginning of copied codices to protect the book from insect damage.

• Opening supplications are often genre-specific formulae. For example, an astronomical text will begin by praising the God who created the heavens and earth, whereas Qur'ān commentaries will begin by praising the God who ennobled the reader with His book or who caused the truth to be known.

• "The best way to read a difficult passage is not to freak out."

Giv'at Ram Cinematheque

Much of my last week has been spent in the Nehemia Allony Memorial Reading Room of the Institute for Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts. The IMHM is a sort of combined triumph of Zionism and German philology — a repository of microfilmed copies of 90% of the Hebrew manuscripts that existed in the world in the 1950s, obtained sometimes only through great efforts to convince the custodian libraries to let their collections be filmed. If you want to do research on Hebrew manuscripts that are dispersed across many collections, this is the place to start.

Colloquially it's referred to as the "cinematheque" because everyone sits in front of screens with reels of film. (It also features in the film "Footnote.")

The readers are a really interesting mix of secular academics, religious academics and religious lay people who are there to study text.

To be sure, it drives home the problems inherent in reading manuscripts on microfilm, especially films that were created half a century ago with photographic technology that would be considered seriously substandard today. Any flaws in the page or in the script are magnified exponentially. Smudges you might be able to read through on a page obliterate text on film, and lighter marks disappear completely.

Even though some films contain exposures every scrap of paper tucked into the binding (relevant or not), in most cases, things like flyleaves and endpapers, which are really important in ownership studies since that's often where people write their names, are not filmed and so it's really hard to judge certain additional characteristics of the manuscript history.

It's great for a broad survey, but I'd never want to work like this in any kind of sustained way. Nevertheless, it's still a remarkable collection.

And of course, it's always on the last day that you find a page like this one:

Loss (Volumes 1-3, 6-9, 12+)

 

These are three of the four boxes of unbound material in the Israel Abrahams collection in Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies library. As you can see, in his handwriting on the spine of the boxes, there were at least eleven such.

Raiders of the Lost Arc(hive)

I told you this was an Indiana Jones movie.

Today was my day to go looking for a manuscript only to end up scrunching up my face and saying: "Nazis. I hate these guys!"

About half the archive that I am working my way through is here as expected. The other half isn't here because it was in London during the Blitz. As typical British understatement would have it, "enemy action in 1940 destroyed much of the collections."

It's a strange sense of being in a time warp. It's not that the books and papers aren't here because they are in London. They're not here because they were in London in 1940.

The Humanistic Pose

"Is my 'Humanism' really a pose? Do I pretend tolerance to gain a hearing? This has never been charged against me. But what of my own consciousness? Does my own self charge me?

“Partly. Humanism is, I concede, sometimes an affectation. One restrains oneself.

“But only partly. If it be sometimes an affectation, it is always an effort. Perceiving other people’s intolerance, or rather, perceiving that intolerance is natural, one asks: What of my own intolerance? It is just as natural to me as to other people’s to them. What then? I must overlay the natural by the artificial, for the artificial is the truer, not to myself, but to a cause higher than myself. This cause is the cause of all against the one. Truth is not natural, it is artificial, artificial in the good sense. A child is not naturally truthful. He is naturally self-indulgent. Humanism is an artificial process against self-indulgence, and self-indulgence, though natural to each, is unnatural to all.

"Humanism is a pose, but a pose of grace.”

 

Quoted from Israel Abrahams, unpublished papers, Southampton Hartley Library MS 116/58 AJ 172/E.8

Day Two at the London Metropolitan Archives

When I returned to the London Metropolitan Archives today, I found some references to the manuscript collection, but nothing relevant to the provenance of the manuscript I'm interested in. At this point, I am comfortable saying that it may never have existed; and that if it did ever exist, it no longer does.

I found a very late (1918) letter that was sent along with a historical manuscript, entitled Toledot Yisrael, describing the circumstances under which it was found (under a rock during the shelling of Jerusalem!!) and donated to the library. Unfortunately, there was nothing earlier along those lines, and certainly nothing like this from the pre-Neubauer period, before the 1886 catalogue that contains the entry for my manuscript was published.

One interesting thing is that in the early 20th century, the library was willing to send manuscripts out on loans to other libraries (that, of course, all vouched that they had suitably safe and fireproof places to store them).

There were a number of other somewhat interesting letters in this folder. I'll hold off posting them for now for a really mundane technical reason, though, namely I'm on a ridiculously slow internet connection.

'Frankweiler' is a Jewish Name, Right?

I met with the LSJS library volunteer today, and she gave me permission to tool around in the librarian's files that were in the library proper (but not in the archives in the back), and so I did that while she was taking a class.

To paraphrase Sheldon Cooper: Explain to me an organizational system in which fountain pen refills and Maimonides in a desk drawer is valid.

All of the drawers and files were disorganized and just full of bills, invoices, random correspondence, books, pamphlets, labels that look like they might have been from dinky museum exhibitions. Some of it was tenuously in chronological order.

Indiana Jonesing

I arrived in London today not having been successful in making contact with the librarian at the London School of Jewish Studies, where I am hoping to track down the early European provenance of a manuscript I'm working on. It was held for a long time as part of what was formerly Jews' College London, originally a rabbinical college and institution of higher education founded by Moses Montefiore. As the college fell into disarray, its associations with the University of London and SOAS were terminated, and the library was in such a shambles that it sold off its Hebrew manuscript collection, which had originally been assembled by one of the early chief rabbis of England. It's not clear what happened to the library's records for those manuscripts once the collection was broken up.

The librarian finally emailed me this morning to tell me that the manuscript I want records for was never owned by JCL. I was prepared to go in with my iPad and argue that this catalogue entry and this insignia in the manuscript say different. (Only I was planning to be more polite than that.)

 

I arrived at the time that the librarian had indicated, only to discover that she'd had to leave due to a death in the family. The problem was that nobody else in the school could tell me anything about the library. The girl at the reception desk took me to the library at the suggestion (by phone) from a library volunteer that she look at a few card boxes on the librarian's desk. No luck. I do have to say, though, the periodicals in this library are catalgogued well, in detail, and many times over in many places.

The receptionist told me she really couldn't let me into the room, but then relented and let me walk up and down the hall while she watched, and then left me to it with a sort of wink and nod.

It's a disaster zone:

It might not look so bad in the pictures, but the boxes and folders contain odd conglomerations of different types of documents: accession records, random periodicals, invoices, correspondence; and very little of it pre-dates the second world war (actually maybe that's part of the problem?).

This floorplan was the only evidence I found of the manuscript collection even having existed. To be fair, I was shuffling quickly and haphazardly, because I didn't want to get caught and kicked out (since I really wasn't supposed to be in there.) It's not an ideal way to work in a disorganized collection with zero finding aids.

Rule number one in handling archives, rare books, and manuscripts is that you must wash your hands when you're finished, especially before you touch your eyes, because you never know what kind of schmutz, arsenic, or bugs you might have gotten on your hands.

I found a book that contained conservation records for print incunables (close, but no cigar!), that had a mummified spider resting on the first page. There was far more wildlife in this hall than one likes to find in a rare book collection.

 

 

And my hands have never, ever been this dirty walking out of a library.

I'm almost ready to accept that I'll never have anything extra-textual that will help me situate this manuscript. I find it to be an infuriating state of affairs because it's not like it's information that was burned by the inquisition or lost sometime in the late Middle Ages: It's been discarded by an institution that doesn't appear to care about its own history or its cultural/religious heritage. It's such a shame.

I have to go argue with a librarian.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Patna Rice and Manuscripts

I might possibly have chosen which type of rice to buy in the market today on the basis of the proximity of its origin to a major collection of medieval Arabic and Islamic manuscripts.

Using Technology in Manuscript Studies, Part I

One of the techniques I have used to try to identify a problematic owner's mark was a query in Google Image Search. GIS, for those who many not have used it yet, is a search engine that looks for images rather than (or in addition to) key words. I was not expecting this to offer a solution, necessarily, to the problem that the paleography of the signature poses, but at least to see if it exists in any manuscript other than the one I'm working on. So far, it's not proved to be a hugely useful tool.

This is the image, a Hebrew signature about which I'll write in the next post.

And this is a selection from the first page of results:

Just to summarize the results: Not only did Google Image Search not find another exemplar of this insignia, but it seems to think it is a cross between the strokes of Chinese calligraphy and the curvature of a toilet seat. Partly this is a problem of the image just not having been uploaded to the internet for Google Images to find. But it's also clear to me that the visual search engine needs a good bit of tweaking before it can be useful for paleographic or codicological searches.

To be continued.

The Nabokov Genizah

 Bury.

That is what was supposed to happen to a thousand years of documents written in Hebrew characters and hidden away in a room, a genizah, until they were rediscovered by European scholars in the nineteenth century. They were never removed to the Basatin Cemetery for interment and survived in that room until they would become, in the nineteenth century, the single most important source for biblical and para-biblical study, and even moreso for the history and literature of Jews living in the Islamicate Mediterranean and, some argue, for that wider Muslim society as well.

Efface.

Expunge.

Erase.

Delete.

Rub Out.

Wipe Out.

Obliterate. 

All those things were supposed to happen to the index cards, the hand-written fragments, containing the last novel written by Vladimir Nabokov and left unfinished at the time of his death. The list of instructions still exists in his own hand. Like their thousand-year-old counterparts, his cards did not meet their fate.

Instead, they appeared in print.

A book that appears between boards offers the promise of a completed work, if not a coherent narrative. The challenges that it may throw down before the reader usually do not include the very technical aspects of reading. The Original of Laura defies the promises of its outward form, though, and it becomes as much a contemplation of the shape of text and the value of fragments as much as anything else; certainly it is that more than a novel. That old aphorism about not judging a book by its cover is wholly in play here. The novel is unfinished, but the book is not just about the novel. Rather, it is about forms of writing.

The hardcover edition of the book yields one more way of experiencing the text: The index cards are perforated and punch out of the book, leaving a stack of reproduced handwritten cards next to a book whose pages have eight lines of printed text beneath an empty frame with a view all the way to the back cover. The book achieves a wide audience in a form that, usually, definitionally is limited to a single solitary reader at a time. It universalizes and popularizes manuscript reading.

About a third of the way through the reading The Original of Laura, I realized that I was thinking about reading a novel at eight lines to a page: about speed and about prose-poetry and about fonts. I was thinking about Nabokov's handwriting, about the subtle changes in script that dying brings about, a microcosm of the changes wrought over a person's life, from learning to write the letters to owning a consistent and reproducible signature: the paleographic equivalent of a man's life flashing before his eyes. What I was not thinking about, indeed, what I could not have told you about at all, was what the story was about. I had a vague sense of the characters but not of a plot, even the sketchiest outline or faintest sense of where it all was going.

I have a vague sense that the fragmentary nature of the work complements (coincidentally, by nature) the content of the work. A text that can write about "identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult book..." But that mostly got lost in the technical aspects of reading it through the first and second times.

I will have to read the book again before being able to write about how the text relates to its context, but for now it is the form and the act of reading it are what interest me.

I found myself struggling, at first, to read the cards penciled-in in the hand of a dying man, but soon I found myself reading in stereo in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who has read a manuscript with an edition of the text close at hand: First reading the hand-written and casting the occasional eye down at the print, but soon reversing their positions, mostly reading the print and glancing up at the manuscript. The only way to really read is to take the edition away: to choose one or the other.

Fighting the physical form of the text and becoming so fixated upon the words and the shape of the words that the very existence of a bigger picture — well, there is no bigger picture. There is something that the reader absorbs by reading in this way and by pulling back in tiny increments until the reminder of that bigger picture hits her like a shockwave; the details are all there, impressed in her mind, and the result is simultaneously panoramic and high-definition.

And finally, there is the question of the disposition, the thing that both The Original of Laura and the Genizah cache are best remembered for.

Yet ultimately, neither was meant to be destroyed. Transfer to the cemetery stopped by the twelfth century, if not earlier. And Nabokov's son, Dimitri, writes: "The lesser minds among the hordes of letter writers that were to descend upon me would affirm that if an artist wishes to destroy a work of his that he has deemed imperfect or incomplete, he should logically proceed to do so neatly and providently ahead of time. These sages forget, though, that Nabokov did not desire to burn the Original of Laura willy-nilly, but to live on for the last few card lengths needed to finish at least a complete draft."

And so we read them together. In this crossing of intention and memory, the secular approaches the sacred and the modern the medieval.

Archive Archaeology

One of the texts I'm working on for the book project exists in one copy, on the last page of a single manuscript. More than a decade ago it was sold at auction to a private collector who donated it to a university library. The seller was another institution of higher learning, which had acquired the personal collection of its principal who, in turn, had purchased manuscripts from several sources, including a well-placed eighteenth-century European courtier. Unfortunately, this still leaves a void of over two hundred years between the first time the we can identify it being somewhere specific and when it was copied. There are two minimally-legible owners' marks that I am working to decipher. I'm close with the harder one and just starting in with the one that is a bit clearer. I'll go back and see the manuscript again this summer, look at it under UV light and rephotograph it.

In the meantime, I'm trying other avenues to try to put the manuscript in historical context.

The big news at Penn this year (well, in some circles, anyway) has been the accessioning of a private collection of manuscripts assembled by a couple, the Schoenbergs, who are, I am told, primarily interested in scientific and medical texts and the opening of a brand new manuscript and special collections center funded by these same donors. Today was the first day that the reading room was open to readers. And so I went over there to consult with two of the three manuscripts that the Schoenbergs acquired at the same auction sale where my manuscript was sold. My hope was that some of the other manuscripts that ended up in the same twentieth-century collection before it was broken up and sold off might have come, together, from another single collector.

One of the two manuscripts, a Hebrew mathematical treatise, offered some fleeting hope that it had also been owned by the individual I believe to have been the second, Ashkeanzi owner of my manuscript; but by the end of the day I was able to rule that out pretty conclusively.

The other, though, a Hebrew commentary on Aristotle, raised more questions than it answered. It, like my manuscript, was also owned by the third owner, the first one we can really identify with any kind of precision or accuracy or historical context. It has a similar pattern of water damage to the manuscript I"m mainly interested in. In and of itself it's not really that meaningful to be able to pinpoint that the water damage probably happened while it was in the hands of this Prussian collector, but it is another detail, and who knows how that might fit into a fuller picture once I've been able to put it together? However, the small victory of being able to put together a chronology for the water damage is badly overshadowed by

I would expect to find the owner's mark on the upper left-hand corner of either folio 2r or 3r, and as you can see from the photograph of the spread of 2v and 3r, that corner was completely obliterated and repaired with new paper.

And it's clear, as for example in folio 9v, pictured below, that there were diagrams and notes in the margins that were damaged and obliterated with the loss of that corner of the manuscript in its early pages.

So it's possible that this manuscript was in the collection of owner one as well as in the collection of owner three; the content of the two texts themselves also makes that not a totally implausible scenario. But there's no real answer there. This, like the Oxford long-shot was, well, also a long shot. But I'm also nowhere close to the end of this blind alley and will just keep pulling manuscripts that were in the collections of owners three (the Prussian collector) and four (the first institutional owner) until I find another one with the relevant mark. It's so elaborate that I'm very disinclined to believe that it was only used once; it's just a matter of putting in the time.

***

Just as a side note, the new special collections space is gorgeous, all glass and light.

This is just a quick iPhone photo of the exhibition space (which, incidentally, is where the third relevant manuscript may currently be found; I'll have a chance to look at it once the exhibition changes):

And (actually a pretty terrible one) one of the (really quite lovely even though you wouldn't know it from this picture) view from there:

The librarian with whom I had been corresponding asked me to please bear with them through the chaos of the first day. I wrote back to him to tell him that I'd never had a smooth first day in a manuscript library, even when it wasn't also the library's first day. But truth be told, this was actually the smoothest first day I've ever had in a manuscript library. The books were ready and waiting for me, they didn't inadvertently lose them, I didn't get a stern talking to for making requests based on old rather than new shelfmarks. I was just really impressed by the whole operation. 

It makes me that much sadder that I didn't have more of a manuscript focus to the project I was doing this year, and that much more set upon making sure that my next project is very organically and locally manuscript-based (not that it'll be like a hipster farm-to-table cafe or anything). Fortunately, this is close enough that I can come back semi-regularly.