Hebrew Voices #189 - The Cairo Genizah: Part 1 - NehemiasWall.com

that's why the Ganer is so important because you know in addition to preserving some of the best copies and earliest copies of you know important um uh Jewish Tech um you know the main Jewish religious texts and lost works and so on it also preserves an amazing Archive of everyday life of a kind that's not preserved in other archives Shalom this is neia Gordon welcome to Hebrew voices I'm here today with Dr Ben alwe who is the head of the ganesa Research Unit at the University of Cambridge he got his PhD here at University of Cambridge thank you for joining the program oh thanks very much for having me so let's start with a really basic question let's assume my audience knows nothing what is the ganesa and why is there a ganesa Research Unit and why is it here at Cambridge okay yeah all all good questions actually um so what is a ganesa ganar is a you know the usual the usual words we use like sacred store room you know as you know in in in in Judaism there is a there is a practice of ganing of putting away texts that um Are Holy that that you that once you finished with something that has God's name in it you shouldn't leave it lying around to um one just because that's not respectful but two you don't want to leave things that are potentially holy to be misuse so like old Torah Scrolls Bibles prayer books all that kind of stuff so in Judaism and you can see this in the mission already they developed a practice whereby you have to um uh put these things away um where they can be securely stored and and won't be misused and they are treated respectfully and and the sort of the comparison is with a dead body so when when someone has died you know you don't leave the body lying around you bury it with due ceremony um and it's the same it's the same with texts that you practice a kind of holy hygiene and that you you you lock them way now it I mean in England and I think it possibly is still the practice um they will bury books with people so when they bury someone Jew yes Jew will NW don't do that no no no um they will put books in sometimes into the graves as well you know old books that they no longer have any need for but which are hanging around in the synagogue to be disposed of according to the laws of ganesa and so what the um the Ganer is and the chyo Ganer is in particular is the contents of the store room the he a store room of the what's what's now known and has been since some maybe I don't 16th maybe no probably later 17th or 18th century the benra synagogue in Cairo um their store room which was by all accounts quite enormous two-story store room although accounts differ um filled up with the detritus of the medieval Jewish community over a period of nearly a thousand years as they followed this practice of Garing their old texts you said ganing so for the audience who doesn't know any Hebrew what is this word ganaz what does that mean so the word Gan is a it's it's it's it's a noun taken from a root which is originally Persian you find it in the Book of Esther so there's lots of Persian in Esther the story you know yeah and it's and in that case it means the treasury of the King right oh wow okay and so the word the word does mean to kind of you know to store away to like like treasure um and it comes to be used in in in in postbiblical Hebrew um for specifically for hiding away texts in two meanings because you can find it used in two meanings one is to hide away texts that you can no longer use because they are too old too damaged or perhaps the right that is practiced in them is no longer the current one that you practice and therefore uh but since they're holy text you Ganer them away you put them in Ganer the other use of it is texts which are inherently holy because they've got the name of God in but which are not to be used um and at certain times this is included things like the the the book of Ben or or other texts that are regarded as you know not not suitable for for for contemporary consumption and so you you should hide those away but you can't destroy them you can't burn them you can't rip them up you can't cast them to the Four Winds as you can in some other religious so Islam for instance when they finished with a text it's acceptable like even the Quran to rip R it up to put running water yeah yeah to dis wait a minute you're telling Muslims when there's a Quran manuscript maybe not even a manuscript is no longer use they rip it up it is technically possible it is technically allowed to do that now obviously if a non-muslim does that that's a different matter right okay because the intention is that you are stopping it from being Mis misused and you know we can kind of see that in the Ganer already because we have pages of the Quran for instance in the Gesa which were perhaps used by Jews for Magical purposes yeah what does that mean tell well on the grounds that you know your own religion is sacred but other people's religions are um are sort of you know they are they are your source of magic so you know the to yeshu um so the story of Jesus right so Jesus you know performs Miracles and so on so that this is the Jewish version so the Jewish version of the story of Jesus so so this is the polemic against Jesus written and circulated amongst medieval Jews so so they don't deny that Jesus performs mirac Les in it but they say that he stole the ability to do it by stealing the magic or stealing the holy powers of the temple from the rabbis and that's how he does it so basically he's taken Jewish religious power and turned it into magic and so the same idea is if if you were to leave you know so in Judaism if you were to leave pages of the Bible around people might cut them up and use them as amulets you know lucky amulets and you can kind of see that because there was that guy who had um a piece of the Aleppo codex in America wasn't he right he was a he was a Syrian Jew who became a taxi driver in New York and he and he had walked by the synagogue and Aleppo the day that the Aleppo codex was supposedly destroyed and burned and he saw two pieces on the ground and he picked them up and he kept them in his wallet for decades and when he died his daughter turned them over to the that's right is so that was a kind of lucky charm you know but they would do that with the Quran you're saying Jews would do that well we do have we do have quranic passages copied into Hebrew script really in the context of a book that also contains kind of charms for um Good Luck in travel you know F protection in travel and son so the suggestion is that the Quran here is being used specifically for kind of magical good luck purposes okay so all right so we had three questions one is what's a gona what's the chyoa and how did it end up here at Cambridge okay so so so the AA is a store room where you put used or worn out texts that you can't leave lying around because one would be disrespectful to God's name that's in them but also they might be profaned by other people misusing them to talk for a minute about misusing them so so you gave the example of uh well you said they rip it up in the in Islam in order to avoid the misuse so so using it as an amulet it's one type of misuse what's something else well even quite simple things such as accidentally writing an obscene text over the top of it right or it is quite it's I think it's an established fact that um old some old um Roman papy are used subsequently as toilet paper really yeah I that's so interesting so I didn't know that yeah you want to be careful when handling old manuscripts that's inter oh yeah that reminds me of of the the guy the scholar who uh the archaeologist who discovered the the toilet at Kuman and he told me he walked around uh he measured 2,000 cubits and then he walked around the 2,000 Cubit perimeter and just smelled until he found it and after after nearly 2,000 years it still stank so that's interesting so um and then when they did tests on on the feces there they found that every it was endemic to have diarrhea like that cuz so we we used to think they were so clean cuz they went to a Mikvah they immersed in water every day but if you're using the same water for 6 months and you immerse every morning that's not going to be clean water and so so they were it was people were dying in their 30s because they constantly had diarrhea out in the desert probably from the mikas so you're saying you could be handling old manuscripts I didn't know this and you could be touching feet wow yeah they have done some tests on some on some Roman stuff from certain that Roman stuff so I've smelled some Torah Scrolls that had two distinct smells one was the smell of death and that ties into what a ganesa is and what you just said that they bury it with a body right so if they're burying it in a cave at some point maybe somebody went and pillaged that cave but the death smell is still there and the other is a very strong smell of perfume which may also tie in because that's that's a practice in some uh Eastern Jewish communities to uh throw a bottle of perfume into the grave so that the dead person and ask people why do you do that they said well you know he doesn't we don't want our our beloved father to have to smell that that well he's dead right but maybe on some metaphorical level to they don't want it to stink right yeah yeah U so that's so I wondered if those Torah Scrolls of course it could have been there was a ganesa and a rat CW in and died and that's why it SMS of death right I don't know but I like my version better it's a good story uh so so um so yeah so so I mean and you can see this as well so IND are one right so we have we have qurans now we have quranic pages that are you know proper Inta intact and from a Muslim you know almost certainly from a Muslim Providence you know the written Arabic script finally written why they end up in Gin we can't be entirely sure how they've ended up in a stor room you know associated with Jewish objects but the ginesa has be contaminated over time with other things which we we can get aren't there like love letters and things in the ganesa yeah there's everything right so s just things with God's name no so this is so what so so we probably have to make distinction between you know AER in in in in theory and the practice that um you know that is proposed for it by the rabbis and it's not mentioned that often but you can see for instance in the missner um mishna Shabbat talks about so we often quote this bit from mishna Shabbat where it says what you um you know what you what you can do on Shabbat and what you you should do and it says you knowes you um right so so so so all holy writings should be saved from fire so should be safe from destruction so the background of that is that there's two prohibitions in the in rical literature about Shabbat one is you can't start a fire and the other is you can't put out a fire so if you're saving a holy book from the fire if it was a secular book that would be a violation of Shabbat but a holy book okay sa and and it kind it's kind of up there with you know the idea of saving lives on on on on you know holy days when you're not supposed to do any work but you're allowed to you know jump in save someone from a pit or you know and it's the same and and so this they they almost equate you know the idea of um holy books which they don't Define so they say kve CES you know holy writings they don't actually say whether that's because it's got the tetr grammaton in it the Shem hasem or whether it's you know just you know it's a book because you know there are books of the Bible without the sh like Esther for examp um or whether it and and and probably you know at different times and by different communities the idea of kid kurish has been taken in different ways but anyway it it kind of equates that with saving human life and so the idea is that um you should drop everything and you should save holy writings it does say um so whichever language they're written in really and it says um um B umin so whether you read them or not so the implication there is whether holy to you or not so maybe they are you know a different branch of Judaism or maybe even you know if they're holy to Muslims or Christians they're still they still the abrahamic God okay so well we have to unpack that because another way of re of understanding whether you read them or not might be what exactly what we're talking about it's so old you don't read out of it anymore um so whether it's still in use or not still in use that's one possibility and you're saying the other possibility is well maybe it's not your sacred text or your branch of Judaism you know let's say uh something written by the Dead Sea scroll Community the rabbis we have the example of Ben which we'll get to I think um well it's unclear whether they read from it or not I guess they probably did um okay so all right interesting so you save them from the fire and so how does that connect to aenea so and and you you and and then it says and then you should subject them to the laws of ganesa um and because they've been damaged by fire because yeah and so you should you should then you should then put them away and so that's that's Gan in theory but the chyoa in practice so this chamber that was in the benezra synagogue and although we call it the benezra synagogue in the Middle Ages it had a completely different name so nowadays it is known as the benezra synagogue and it's a tourist site in in the oldest part of the City of Cairo in so people can go visit it today yes okay um and in fact it's kind of on the it's it's on the um cuz for start the The Fortress of Babylon the heart of old Cairo it's actually the city The Fortress of Babylon Fortress of Babylon that's the sort of Walled City that's called The Fortress of babyon I didn't know that but babylon's in Iraq so why is it called The Fortress of Babylon it Persians are supposed to have so sort of people came from the eastn supposed to have founded it okay um it's a Roman city uh in it sort of so the synagogue is at the heart it's in the heart of what's known as alphastat alphastat was the first Islamic capital of Egypt so when the Muslims captured Egypt they they camped at fat and they built their first sort of big city there and that grew to be the capital in and and in the 10th century when the fids came the FID um Empire expanded from North Africa a Muslim empire um they conquered Egypt which they had long wanted to do and in the 960s they conquered Egypt and they they decided to found a new city celebrating that and they founded Cairo a little bit north of the old now asyo expanding now it's a huge mega City it's completely encompassed forat but forat used to be a separate City okay and it used to be the most important administrative Center in Egypt and was long after Cairo was founded Kyo is where the um the um cff and then the sultan lived and the Army sort of and the the um Islamic Administration and the the you know the the Amir and the the highest echelons of Islamic Society lived whereas whereas all the people associated with the previous um regime and with the the administration of it under previous Islamic regimes lived in forat and they were you know Christians and Jews for most part so it's a very Christian city um so there was a synagogue in alphastat which nowadays is known as Ben Ezra but in the Middle Ages was one of two Jewish synagogues within the walls of the old city of fat the city of fat was there before the Muslims conquered it it was a a Roman town for a long time um it was a port city because it sat right on the Nile and you can see that there's two big round Towers at the entrance to forat that are now churches or one's a church and one's a ruin um and the railway runs right in front of the old city of fat now the railway actually follows the course of the Nile so the Nile used to run right in front of it but because the nail silts up and moves over time okay it's actually moved away from forat so you don't get the feeling that this was a maritime City but it was really because it sat right on the Nile as a port and between those two round Towers was a canal that went to the to the sea So currently and I've never been to that part of Egypt So currently there's no the Nile doesn't run through this area it's moved to it's moved to the West oh that's so interesting it's still you know within you can probably stand on the tower and see it but there's now a railway that follows the exact route that that the um the Nile ran okay and there used to be a canal that ran through the middle of the city so it was a port city Canal that connected um the Nile with the Red Sea so very important um town in Egypt and the Jews had two synagogues the Jewish community of f had two synagogues within those walls so it's part the oldest part the synagogue of the shami in so there of the the syrians the Palestinians however you want to translate the Leen ties yeah yeah um andam say Syria Lebanon Egypt or S Syria Lebanon Israel and the Palestinian territories and and Jordan today right yes it's it's an Islam when when the Muslims took that part of the world that's that was their administer division they created Asam and it doesn't fit with the you know the the modern geography of of of Syria and Palestine so we say Syria hyen Palestina or something like that um so that's the but it was also known as the synagogue of the jerusalemites so in Arabic this would be canis likea which means synagogue in Arabic like KET aam Ori in um and then the other synagogue which was built right it appears right next to a Christian Church of which there were many infat um known as the hanging Church um was the synagogue of the Iraqi in of the Iraqi Jews or the Babylonian Jews okay now that synagogue by all accounts was originally a church that was purchased from the Christian Community in the 9th century really because the Iraqi Jews arrived later the Palestinian Jews were already there they were the largest congregation in fat but many Iraqi Jews left the abased Empire they settled in North Africa they followed in the footsteps of the Fed and they and eventually they they came to be the majority in in Egypt but not originally so so the oldest synagogue in for start and perhaps one of the oldest synagogues in Egypt is the K shamin so what became the benezra synagogue so when we talk about the KY we mean the story room of that synagogue in the oldest part of the you know the capital city of Egypt and unlike the normal principles of ganesa you know when this when this was opened up by Solomon Shaka and probably have to say a bit more about how that happened MH um what he discovered to his great surprise was that it did not contain you know T Scrolls sidorin prayer books copies of the missioner and tal right you know the holy sort of it didn't only contain that it didn't only contain that had those um but it also contained personal letters philosophical writings poetry in huge abundance not just lurgical poetry so religious poetry but also secular poetry and bad poetry you know poetry about wine and and love for boys the kind of thing that was in was in did you say love for boys that was yeah I mean you know so love expressed in poetry could be towards you know romantic ideals of women or the idea that they get from Spanish um that you find in Spanish Hebrew poetry which as well comes from um Arabic poetry is is is the boy as an object of worship and this is men writing about yeah I okay kind of Ideal love okay um but did okay I'm just going to ask does that mean homos sexual love yeah or is it some kind of ideal of I Love My Dog right no yeah it does but it's a kind of idealized love you know it's a kind of pure love that um and whether or not it actually reflects practice is is is debatable okay but yeah there's a lot of poems about it that's in the G even though that's obviously nobody even them would have considered that sacred no and and it is it there because it's written in Hebrew letters and they just threw everything in there so so this is the big this is the big question because what you know sha when when sh empty out that that that you know the store room he said it was a battlefield of books and you had these strange combinations of you know you would have a Pious rationalistic text arguing against Superstition and magic and stuck to it was an amulet um which you know one well that's why you needed the text against Superstition yeah sought Angel's power to to protect you against you know bad luck or whatever it was and and we can't we don't know know why this happened but there are a number of number of things that are worth bearing in mind and you know you have to sort of adopt the medieval mindset because what we're talking about is text so this synagogue was active from the 10th Century maybe earli we don't really know the building itself dates from about 10:40 but it was built on the on an earlier building that was destroyed by the kif AL Hakim they immediately rebuilt it when he when he did they take the contents I guess this is the big question did they take the contents of the ganesa from the earlier synagogue into the we assume so okay we assume so because we have a lot of material that predates the 11th century mhm so so this synagogue was active from the uh probably at least the 10th Century all the way through to the 19th century when Solomon she a scholar from cage arrived and emptied it out and over the course of time maybe originally their intention was you know we'll put tourist girls in here and we'll put holy books Associated specifically with this synagogue but over time we got got holy books from other congregations there there is material from the Iraqi congregation there is material from the carite congregation we have these strange survivals of Dead Sea sect Works in there um but also all of this what we would regard as purely secular literature and and in sort of the medieval mindset of course it's very difficult to distinguish secular from from from religious because um practically everything you write in the Middle Ages invokes God in some degree so if you write a letter to someone you you know whether it's in Arabic or Hebrew or Aramaic you will near the beginning you will say in the name of God you or you will say God bless you whatever we have letters where um so Solomon Ben Judah the head of the Jews in Jerusalem falls out with an arch rival who attempts to usurp his position as head of the Jews and he describes him in one letter he says he describes him as the suspect he doesn't want to name him because he so hates him um but he says um God kill him um wow yeah yeah wow um that's that's that's a that's literally a curse yes and so there's okay and but because he mentions God there so that actually makes sense why that would show up there but the um you know the love poetry or or so so there a whole other um uh genre which is um like administrative texts of like merchants and things like that right so there all these Merchants letters so how'd those end like the entire archives of merchants how' those end up in there or why did they end up in there well again I mean you know even even a Bare Bones kind of um economic document you know something that that represents a financial transaction will aul invoke God so we have what our Proto checks we have these we have these orders of payment that say um May and and we have them written by various different people but we have a large number by one particular Trader um called um Abu zikri Cohan so he had an Arabic name he's a Jew living in an Arabic speaking land so he adopts an Arabic name but he's he's his name is Judah um um so Oben and he writes these checks that um very to Modern checks they say pay pay to the bearer May the banker and it names the banker um is pay to the bearer um the sum of you know two din or whatever and then it will also on the Note write the number to as a numeral so like a modern day check modern day check like yesterday's check right you write the you write out um the numbers in Long in in words and in numbers right kind of security feature right um the same on these but at the top of it it will have often a BET right which is short for either um no sorry will of it'll have a bet or sometimes it have a or something so it will have some kind of um invocation of God so it be be or it be um you know in in some kind of implying that God is in is guaranteeing this transaction right kind of like American coin saying God We Trust yeah exactly exactly and so trust but pay cash I've got I've got a yeah exactly yeah yeah no well no it's a bit iranic right um this is paper money and this this is I what they're paying is basically it's a it's a it's a you know it's a promise to pay because of the difficulties of moving large amounts of gold and silver across borders um which was tricky I mean It's Tricky as a Jewish Merchant carry large amounts of money when there were Bandits everywhere but also it was AIT it was a bit tricky for Jews rather than Muslims to move large amounts of money around under Muslim rule okay um but also the distances involved they were trading with you didn't want to you know send vast amounts of cash between wait so you're saying a merchant could take this promisory note or sort of check and bring it to India and yeah there would be some Jewish banker there who would get who would be able to that's amazing yeah and these notes could then be traded you know and you mean literally India yeah yeah literally yeah yeah yeah yeah the west coast of India Jews settled there and had factories producing bronze and sending it back to Egypt there was a whole there was a whole Indian Ocean trade route in the 13th century which come most of our information comes out the G MH um but anyway so getting ahead of myself a bit but but so so you can't write something about the name of God so even a shopping list right so we have a shopping list written by judge Elijah a judge from wait we literally have a shopping list oh we have loads of them yeah yeah so have a shopping list written by judge Elijah who was active in the 13th century in Egypt and it says um at the top it says expenditure for and it's in Arabic in Hebrew script because most Jews wrote the Arabic in Hebrew script and it says expenditure for for the Festival of shavat mhm um if I live that long with the help of God and so it's in Arabic so the expenditure is nafaka or whatever but um at the end it's but ISAT Shai right so with the help of the almighty in HEB not in not in Jud Arabic no well it's I mean it's in I mean it's it's a it's Hebrew words in a Jude Arabic sentence right okay I see so it's kind of like if you have a Hebrew word in Yiddish is it Hebrew or is it yish yeah yeah I see and you know you can argue whether this is code switching or whether this is this is well I mean so how would you say with the help of in Arabic um it says so he miss to yeah something like that I guess I and they would say Allah yeah but yeah yeah so so he's well okay so I mean you might say inah or something in in Arabic would be quite common that's that's a whole other maybe Canon worms but do they refer to God as Allah in the he in this judeo Arabic the Jews refer to God as Allah when so Grace think of Middle Ages writes about God he will often you know in in in one of his philosophical contexts he will call him Allah when um a we when we you know a teacher sends a note home of a school boy who's um been bullied at school it it it's in Jud Arabic Arabic in Hebrew characters but it's between two Jews and he says God bless you at the top of it and that's that's Allah right and that's an actual example of a letter sent home to a yeah yeah yeah oh that's really cool and so so it's not only there were even bullies in the Middle Ages well I guess we knew that but W yeah this it's a fantastic little note it's just a little note that um that says your son basically or or you know the child has been getting on very well um in his reading um uh or is it writing I can't remember anyway and and um unfortunately the the another boy in the class conspired with the other kids to break his writing board um because they they don't have tables you sit on the floor okay and you have board on your knees and you use that to write on yeah and so um he uh the other kids broke his writing board just to teach him not to you know not to shine in class I guess wow man things haven't changed um but that that gets preserved in Theo and that's a little piece of really ephemeral writing right because you know that's of an interest to no one other than the boy and his Guardian right well today it's got to be interesting to historians of what life was like in the Middle Ages that's why the gania is so important because you know in addition to preserving some of the best copies and earliest copies of you know important um uh Jewish Tech um you know the main Jewish religious texts and lost works and so on it also preserves an amazing Archive of everyday life of a kind that's not preserved in other archives because nobody intend these were not deliberately put for posterity they just felt they couldn't throw them away well they had the name of God in they're written in Hebrew characters so even most of their Arabic writing is done in Hebrew characters because Jews went to school to learn Hebrew they didn't learn Arabic at school they spoke it at home so when they came to write as adults even the greatest scholar of the Middle Ages Moses my the greatest Jewish scholar of Middle Ages writes his Hebrew in in his Arabic and Hebrew characters um so it's written in L KES written in the Holy language so maybe you know if God chose to transmit the Bible you know to the Jews in the Holy language maybe I shouldn't throw this piece of paper away that's written in that sacred language I mean technically it's not the holy language it's the holy script but I guess they were like when I was a kid and uh we would study the talmud they would you know talk about reading the Hebrew well now I know that it was most of what I was reading was aric but we didn't make that subtle distinction because it was in Hebrew letters right so that's a similar sort of thing what you're saying so yeah and so they do refer to judeo Arabic so Arabic in Hebrew characters they do refer to it as Arabic but sometimes they have to be very clear and distinguish do you mean Arabic in Arabic characters he says you know k um to mean the writing because sometimes that we have one or two letters where they they say things like I need to write to so and so do you know does he read Arabic and what he means is does he read Arabic script because everyone can read J Arabic because they can all read Hebrew and they can all speak Arabic okay but not everyone can read Arabic scripture in the Jewish Community that's that's a skill by the kind you know your parents had to sort of you know pay a bit extra to get you Arabic tuition for that you know pretending that you going to work in the Islamic government or something um anyway so they keep it because it's name got named God on it they keep it because it's in Hebrew script maybe they keep it just because they don't like to throw away anything written down because the Jews are a highly literate Society far more literate than their neighbors the Christians M um and so perhaps that's why they put things in um they put you know rather than let these things be wasted they put them in the Ganer but also there is possibly just a sense of you know what the Ganer is is lots and lots of different archives so at some point you know like the great Merchant Abu zikri say he dies and people clear out his house and you know as a merchant he would also be a scholar you know cuz he would have been educated certain degree so he would he would have copies of books of the Bible he will have poetry to recite he will have prayer books he will have you know missioners and tmas to study and do they really want to sought through all that stuff from his shopping lists and his personal letters and and the dog roll he wrote about you know love or whatever no they may just take it all and deposit that in the synagogue or maybe it was the beetle of the synagogue whose job it was to sort it out maybe the be wasn't the most educated member of the Jewish Community which is possibly quite likely who knows but anyway what for whatever reason they put it all in the Gan H wow so all right how many documents are in the ganesa approximately so in the Cambridge collection that we have we have 197,000 from what's known as the Taylor Shea Kyan collection which is this collection brought back in 1897 by Solomon Shea okay um other people went to this same chamber um before Shea went some people went and took away large pieces um the community associated with that synagogue in Egypt we're also taking stuff out and selling it um and that found its way to different libraries and Museum like in the late 1800s or out okay um and that's one of the reasons why Solomon sha went there you know he found out about the ginesa because um Cambridge was being offered manuscripts for sale from Jerusalem by a dealer in Jerusalem called Solomon ver timer and they he was he was offering um various medieval um bits of medieval fragments of medieval manuscripts um sort of the pages of Bibles you know um bits of mishna kettle Bots marriage Deeds you know that kind of thing and Shea wasn't that interested in it but then um he met these well the story is long involved but he met two Scottish women who had traveled to the Middle East to go to St Catherine's Monastery in the siai um they were great adventurers and explorers and they went to Old monasteries around the Mediterranean to recover texts of the Bible they were Christians very very devout Christian Presbyterians and their intent this is Lewis and Gibson L and Gibson exactly two two immensely Rich widows from Scotland Irving in Scotland raised Presbyterian um but they lived in Cambridge by just this bizarre um combination of coincidences all of the the sort of stars aligned and this the whole ganesa story they lived in Cambridge because one of them had married a Cambridge academic both of their husbands they late in life in their 40s or something and both their husbands were kind of weak Victorian men who died of Victorian illnesses running for trains um run for TR he ran for a train and died on the train after sitting down wow yeah was too much strain on his Victorian heart okay yeah and the other one died in bed ask after asking for flannel underwear what he died after wait what yeah I'm confused cuz he was cold I don't know I don't know but that his last words were apparently you know please buy me some flannel underwear wow oh okay maybe he was going into the shock and he was really cold or something all right so anyway so these these two Scottish women who who had married one was I mean one was a preacher and the other was a librarian their husbands and so they were associated with the university but being being women in Cambridge in the 1890s that you couldn't be employed by the university they were very scholarly they knew all sorts of languages from Greek to Arabic um and they traveled and they they were doing what was in vog in vog at the time which was to go to monasteries and find old manuscripts with a view of improving our knowledge of the of the um you know original um text of the Bible right ticus was found exactly they were following the footsteps of people like tior okay um who had really kind of you know revolutionized the approach you know you that you have printed editions that we've been relying on for centuries but you know how reliable are these we should go and find the best earliest reliable texts you know the critical editions of the Bible is what we want to create and so they were doing that off their own back because they were immensely Rich through some accident of F they had inherited a lot of money from a um Canadian who had built railroads okay who had like a Scot had gone out and you know founded railroads a theme in their lives railroads right they're killing husbands giving them wealth right um and after their husbands died they decided to travel to get over the grief because they' hadd always been great Travelers and they went to St Catherine's monaster in sin and they discovered what was then the earliest Aramaic copy of the New Testament okay is that the um what is that called that's the old um syak I think or something like that yeah I'm I'm a little it's not my area so um and and how they got that because you know obviously tisho had been to to um St Catherine before and he had left behind well you know they don't like him in St Catherine because he he took codex s Atticus away and they never got it back the two women when they went had a very different experience because um one they were kind of unthreatening cuz they were women two um they spoke Greek which Tish Tish had very bad Greek um they spoke Greek they were able to communicate with the the monk librarian okay in Greek oh wow um which was you know cuz scholars in those days didn't speak the languages they knew the anci language right yeah not the sort of modern vulgar dialect that they speak right but they could speak Greek and that's how they' managed to inag their way into all sorts of monasteries around the Mediterranean and made friends with the liberians and in this case um the Liberian um I think galacon his name was showed he opened up like the special this is where we keep the good stuff you know that he hadn't shown Tish andorf and in it they found this aromatic copy now importantly as well the other thing they did is they photographed items in situ they didn't take them away they were pioneers of kind of academic photography of manuscript something that you you know you yeah okay um and and so they came back with a whole Cambridge expedition to photograph the manuscripts oh wow at St Catherine's St Catherine okay on the spot so goal wasn't even the Cairo Gano or Cairo was St cather's monasteri and Si and the Gano was just a byproduct because whenever they passed through um Suz or Cairo or any of those places and they took a tour to Palestine they used to go to like the the book dealers in the market and look what they had and they bought things and in that way they bought some manuscripts that had been only just stolen from St gatherin and they were able to return them to the monastery okay but also they bought a whole bunch of Hebrew stuff now they could read Hebrew um they brought it back to Cambridge like you know scattered um individual leaves of Bibles and that kind of stuff and they brought it back to Cambridge in 1896 and they were they were in their house they built a massive baronial mansion in the middle of Cambridge because they were so rich yeah um and they were in their baronial mansion looking at these and they realized they couldn't in they couldn't understand what all of the pieces were they could recognize some things you know like Bibles and S because they knew the Bible they could read Biblical Hebrew but they couldn't recognize other works so they called in Solomon cha now Shea was then teaching rabins in Cambridge University he was a Jew teaching in an Anglican organization rinic to people intended mainly um you know to I mean Cambridge up until then Cambridge had been a factory for producing Anglican priests it was modernizing a bit but essentially you know the the the University was still kind of like an echo of the monasteries you know that's his job was so Solomon Sher was a professor here at Cambridge but he was teaching uh clergyman or Christian well essentially yes he was people who were learning Hebrew were essentially learning it to enter to enter um okay and and and I'll just make a little note here for American Jews every American Jew I've ever spoken to about Solomon shehar they're like oh I know the school right because there's a chain of schools in the United States called Solomon Cher yeah yeah he is I mean he is he's so immensely famous in um in American Jewish circles and utterly unknown in English Jewish circles and yet his career began here he was he was he was um he was essentially placed in Cambridge University um to improve Jewish learning in England right he um so the Monte fiori family in England had originally brought um tried to bring over Jewish Scholars the finest Jewish Scholars of Europe to to England to improve the intellectual standing of the Jews of England right they they thought they needed one of two kind of tent pole Scholars like to bring up the whole they brought Solomon schillers and Essie in um a Hungarian Rabbi and they put him in Cambridge to teach Hebrew um up until then CA Hebrew had been taught in Cambridge since the 16th century right cambri as long has had a professor of Hebrew since the 16th century you know why do we have a professor of Hebrew because Henry VII wanted to divorce his wife okay right so he's like we better get back to the source so I can find a reason for the and he ran out of reasons in the New Testament so he started looking for the Old Testament and the tals right so the Hebrew Bible and the talmuds and for that he needed specialists okay I didn't know that own a whole copy of the tal word because you know really has that survived yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it was bought by I think it was collected by um was it collected by um the valadon guy um can't remember yeah wow okay yeah so anyway so Henry created reg just professor of Hebrew here in the 16th century to interpret the Old Testament yeah okay um and the idea was really to interpret it in his favor you know the story of the Bal scroll so there was there was this meeting in 1530 between the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope and one of the things they discussed was King Henry's great problem which was he wants a divorce and the Holy Roman Emperor says well you know here in bolognia we have the original pentat written by Ezra which is what they believed is what you know they would tell visitors to this uh Church in bolognia this is this isn't just a Torah scroll it's the original one written by Ezra so they open it up to see does it have the verse that Henry is citing at his justification for the divorce and today we have that scroll and those that verse has been erased ah which is really strange because we have an account from 1531 which says they found the verse and decided we don't care what the verse says we do what the Pope says wow so okay okay that's interesting so that's interesting that that ties into Cambridge and wow it's it's everything ties together it's also I just point out that's not the original scroll written by Ezra because that's the in the Ben Ezra synagogue because that is so that until until today I think tourists are told that that scroll is is in in the synagogue really it was looked at by um Adler when Adler you know what he wrote his book he he he traveled around Jewish communities of the Middle East and he wrote his book about um Jews of many lands and he went to the synagogue and he looked at the scroll and he said it's like a 16th 17th century one oh wow okay so I don't know about this scroll in in the the Benz I don't know I don't it's still there but um um that's really interesting so I just heard last week There's a tour scroll in Germany in a place called Castle and it has an inscription there in I don't remember if it's Latin or German and it says uh that this was written before the birth of Christ although not although we're not sure how many centuries yeah and it's like 14th century or something right so so this was a kind of that's interesting this the kind of story that Jews would tell or maybe Christians would tell as well about the um about these Torah Scrolls that's Tora scrolls are impressive objects and so you see one you sort of I can imagine they crew Legends you know around well so the kit Isel and one of the synagogues have a torist scroll which they believed was an ancient torist scroll and you know thousand or more years old I don't remember the exact Legend and so I got some photos of it and sent them to some people who know Tor Scrolls about dating them and I I want to say it was like a 19th century Syrian scroll or something like that right but it's a much better story to say it's a thousand years old and look it was old right yeah but 19th century isn't really that old um that means it it this Legend couldn't be that old right this is a legend probably from the last generation or two where they're like oh this is a really old scroll and then they project it back further in time it shows you how quickly these Legends can can develop yeah yeah yeah you can yeah you can see that um and maybe you know over time the scroll changes and each time it gets a new you know as they throw away the old scroll this one is the new one but or this is the old one we don't use and then they start to spin stories about when it's from yeah so yeah and you I I think you know the Ezra the Ezra scroll in the Ezra synagogue you know Ben Ezra is becomes associated with in fact that name that name must have been given to it by some ottoman um guy who gave money to rebuild the synagog probably you know it's probably probably some yeah it's probably some donor you know some rich donor so the theory with the bolognia scroll is that when they gave this because the Jews gave it to the Christians to actually the um was it the France no the Dominicans they gave it in 1304 um in southern France and the theory is that they explained the Jews probably explained something like you know this is the original format that the Torah was written in by Ezra according to rules that Ezra established and then that kind of got misconstrued and misunderstood to this was the scroll that Ezra himself wrote right or maybe they just made it up who knows that's it it's the problem yeah the name Ezra always gets he's sort of you know over time everyone always Associates the name Ezra with the Ezra well in the time we have the the temple Courtyard manuscripts of the Torah and that's corrupted in some manuscripts to the Scrolls of Ezra right as ifra himself wrote them so yeah yeah um so yeah so so so you know so we we had a teacher of Hebrew here so rinic um what does that mean Rabin for the audience who may not know well this means teaching everything you know after the Hebrew Bible really okay the idea being that you know so the missionary and so on they are are important for understanding the context in which Jesus uh you know Jesus arose that's it so it's the second temple period that kind of thing so they had that concept even back then cuz cuz I'll often hear that this is something that was kind of revolutionized by um by David floer that up until then Christians didn't really look to the mishna and the tal to understand the life of Jesus well but it sounds like they had some notion of this even better well I think I think this possibly what what what you really do see so these were these were lone Jewish scholars in a Christian University right solom schill Inc um in those days so his his salary I think was paid by the Monte Fury family not by the university but he taught here and sha when sha took when Shi died in I think 1890 Shaka took over I think in 1890 his I think his salary was also still mostly paid by the montori family right so they were kind of like um sort of you know they they did important work but you get the feeling they weren't exactly welcoming Cambridge right they wasn't like you know they weren't rolling out the red carpet for for Jews in the University of Cambridge which you know was still I mean it's a conservative organization even today but in those days you know they'd only just relatively recently allowed fellows um um uh you know teachers in University to marry because until that point they had to be Bachelors yeah yeah like the old monastic principles okay um and and that had changed in the 19th century so Henry can get a divorce but the professors of Cambridge can't get married no no yeah know all um anyway so Solomon shill anessi when he got the job here originally he they um Cambridge is sort of a democracy in that everyone has a vote in the Senate really um all the all the permanent staff have a vote in the Senate and um the account of the vote for shil anessi is that he was much opposed because he was a Jew wow um so here like openly they didn't have a problem saying that yeah it reminds me of and I don't know if this is a apocryphal or not but there's a a story about um Benjamin Disraeli who later became the Prime Minister the I think the first and only Jewish prime minister of the United Kingdom uh I was going to say England I'm not sure that's accurate um and so there was a debate in one of the House of Lords or whatever it was and um sorry for I'm American I don't one of the houses of your Parliament and uh and they called him a barbaric Jew or something to that effect and he and he responded famously perhaps apocryphally um when my ancestor uh ruled the world your ancestors were running around painted blue yeah so yeah true and Israeli was actually a Christian he was a very devout Evangelical Christian he had converted but still he was a barbaric Jew to the his opponents yeah yeah he was also a great novelist the idea of him being a barbarian yeah one I know that I don't know possibly the only Prime no no there's been other prime ministers have written oh Boris Johnson he wrote a novel did he all right sorry h no anyway let's move on from that all right um so so when schill and Essie started teaching here he he definitely brought a different side to the study of Hebrew so um uh he exposed Scholars who previously studied Hebrew essentially you know studying the Hebrew Bible to the range of Jewish commentators on the Bible and you can see this by the time that shehar is here um one of Shea's friends is Charles Taylor who is who becomes the master of St John's College yeah so Cambridge is collegate University lots of these old old sort of again kind of almost monastic houses UMES so unlike in the United States here you have a university and there's a bunch of colleges that make up the university that make up the university and each one of those is is pretty much independent or autonomous or yeah they're they're all independent financial institutions they're all Charities they all got their different Customs they've got different ages the oldest is Peter house which dates back TI at 1284 or something like that I don't know um but a lot of the oldest colleges have been lost to Amalgamated into new ones cuz they were um uh you know sort of religious orders have now disappeared and things and something that really surprised me is um like you could be um you could be on staff here at the University but you don't have privileges at one of the particular colleges cuz you're not a fellow of that college right mean like I encountered that with one of the people who works with you that um we tried to go to this particular library and they said oh well I mean you you know who are you you're you're not a fellow here at this yeah so Cambridge colleges are like what yeah and I'm like okay I understand that for me and it was actually easier for me to get in than it was for her which like that's crazy yeah yeah camri colleges are a bit they're very oldfashioned not as bad as Oxford but um but they're very OD I mean you've seen the college Porters so the guys who you know who control the access to and from often wear bowler hats yeah and they're not actually Porter they don't carry your bags for you no God no so what does porter mean by that is that what it originally meant yeah I know Porter no Porter is something to do with isn't it to do with doors isn't it like G the door I think so um but anyway I'm right so when you go to any so I've when I'm whenever I'm here I stay uh usually one of the D what we call dormitories what do you call accommodations or something or um like where the students sleep yeah College accommodation College rooms College room College rooms okay I call them dormitories in America so and and then you check in with the Porter's Lodge yes so and you're always constantly dealing with the porter por lot yeah it's it's very old and they do wear the bowler hat that's right they do and some of them are rude um because they that is the history of their position in that college so to Trinity Porters are famously very rude because they have always been rude and so every new Trinity Porter who starts work there knows that they has to be rude so I I can say from my experience I've never had a negative experience with them they've always been very plate to me but I never St it at Trinity College so I don't I don't know yeah and and maybe it's changing but but that used to be the cambage thing and and maybe it's the renting up so what what I do usually is I'll go between terms when the students aren't there and so I can sleep in one of the dorms um you know they basically like like a hotel but it's like 4 minutes from this Library so it's amazing fantastic um but no they've always been really polite to me really nice to me um you know it's it's it's kind of it is kind of strange I'm a grown man sleeping in a dorm room but um you know it's uh better than staying somewhere that's 30 minutes away so I appreciate it so well my understanding I I and is is that so the um the scholar of rinic Tex Jacob nner yeah you know um famously productive scholar that he once came to give a lecture and he stayed in a college room uhuh um and I think I got this story from my predecessor Stephan R um which means it must be true um is that new arrived um and the porter was rude to him uhuh so he picked up his suitcase and left without ever giving the lecture wow so that's and that sounds like a real that sounds like a true Cambridge story to me okay um um all right but I'm sure that was quite a few decades ago and yeah that was some and and now you can do a bad review on University rooms.com if they do that so maybe they're more careful I don't know that's right that's right yeah no Trip Advisor has probably changed everything um so anyway so so so so one of Shea's friends and kind of um he he mentored in Jewish texts following in the footsteps of sh an SE had started is was Charles Taylor Who was Master of St John's College became master of St John's College he is he was a mathematician mhm um he he he wrote about maths um cones or something he did I don't know anyway but he was far more interested in in God because like you know he was a devout Christian like most many of them in the university in those days um and he had taken instruction from sh and from Shea and he wrote a commentary on P so on on on a you know traa the mission yeah ethics of our fathers it's usually called at least American English and that and he wrote at that commentary is surprising for the number of Jewish sources which it uses right which would be you know unheard of for a Christian scholar to do that but the fact is he had been exposed by Shan Shea to all the Jewish sources and that and that commentary I think is still regarded today as the best commentary on PK of written by a Christian mathematician so that's really interesting how many have been written by Christian mathematicians to be fair but so it's really interesting so so you do have this phenomenon that some of these Christian Hebrews they would like you know open up some Jewish text and it would be like they were discovering it for the first time like no one had ever read it or commented on it and here you're saying he's within this whole um internal Jewish dialogue of you know what does this passage mean and how do we understand it what are the parallels and yeah and he's drawing on all that that's really interesting and if you look at the college libraries so you know so we're in the University Library which is the main library of the university and has an official role in in in in in you know uh guarding the intellectual knowledge of the nation as well well because we're a copyright Library get a we get a copy of every book published in the UK wait so there's multiple libraries like that in the UK cuz in the US there's only the Library of Congress no no so there's Edinburgh there's us there's um Oxford and Dublin so it goes across to to the you know former member of Dublin of in of Ireland okay so wait when you publish a book in the so in the US you publish a book and you have to send two copies of Library of Congress Israel has a very similar law what's the rule here in the UK do you send it to each of those libraries or do you I there was an office in in London that in the old days when it used to be physical copies that used to collect them and then I think it was up to the libraries to put in a claim oh okay um never having dealt with that side the library I can't be sure that what I'm saying is true at all but now it's electronic deposits oh okay so so many of them we just get electronically okay as far as I know if you print a book in the US today you still have to send two copies of the Library of Congress now whether they keep those or not cuz they couldn't possibly have enough room for every book that's maybe some people don't do it but big publishing houses definitely still do it yeah we do it um so we do it and and the great thing is that we get books that are withdrawn subsequently so we have copies of books that are effectively forbidden wow and we have to put them in a special collection which is known as the ark collection okay so um things like you know first edition of Yas and so on that was that was um banned for a while um the um a recent publication by the Museum of the Bible that was withdrawn by it by its publisher okay has also now had to go into the arc collection so is is this accessible things in the art collection or is it I'm not too sure how you get to see something the idea I think everyone thought that we had like this vast store of pornography because we get everything and we lock it away in actual fact the books that we we lock away are the are the are the ones that people steal or the ones that the Publishers have withdrawn what do you mean they steal some books are very popular to steal Oh you mean readers might steal them or something it's like first edition Harry Potter is worth a lot of money okay um and we've got you know we' got editions of every book you know yeah um and there yeah there's all sorts of weird things get stol um we also have pornography locked away cuz I found that the other the other day I was somebody told me they found a bunch of Publications by our unit the gesi unit in 1970s we did they published these big cataloges and they found a whole store of them unsold downstairs and I had to go and get a special key to access them because they were right next to all the pornographic magazines that were also depositors and they're locked away so Librarians can't go and have a look at them you have to get a key from a from a supervisor wow that's in some ways that's like very like quaint because like I mean yeah that that's that's okay all right let's move on anyway so coming back so so so Solomon sha yeah you know was was was the sort of pointy tip of cambridge's long interest in in in Jewish studies and in Hebrew in particular but cambrid did have a very long interest in Hebrew we've had the we've had the professor of Hebrew since 16th century we've been collecting Hebrew manuscripts since the 16th century and every College library has a collection of Hebrew Books um some of them very old you know from the early days of printing showing that the the you know the people who worked in Cambridge were were were engaging with Jewish scholarship um engaging with Jewish texts engaging Jewish ideas throughout and much of this was the Reformation you know the interest in in in in in in Judaism and the Hebrew Bible at that stage but all through up to the present day and so shto but shto and Shila zanesi his predecessors were were were new because it wasn't just Jewish books these were actually Jews in the University who were teaching which was very unusual and there were Jews who hadn't converted to Christianity who were still within the Jewish were exactly so both both of them were still very much in the Jewish media especially I mean well both of them but especially Shea who who went on to America to you know to to save conservative Judaism and America was his job so just let's Sidetrack for a minute which I love doing um so you mentioned all these ma manuscripts that they're collecting for centuries before Schiller janess and before Solomon shehar and so you have a cash of manuscripts here which were brought over from India by this uh priest named Buchanan um and they include things like a torus scroll from India they include a Hebrew translation of the New Testament or let's be more neutral a Hebrew version of the New Testament um which presumably is a translation um I think we even today well there's a theory today of who translated it um it was this Jewish convert to Christianity in the 17th century in Amsterdam who then went to um India and worked among the Indian Jews and he apparently is according to some Scholars he's the one who translated it you have um the words of GAD the sear yeah which is incred story in itself yeah yeah really OD manuscript that just pops up here and nowhere else a unique a unique text well and so according to well there's a debate now in Israel between two Scholars one is the grandson of the founder of barlan University whose name is Mayor Baron and he claims that that's a copy of an earlier work that was brought from Yemen which goes back to the second temple period and it was something like the book of jubilees meaning it was one of these PSE igraal works is attributed to Gad The Seer the other opinion who is the critique I forget his name Hill something of baralan um he says no no no this was translated by the same guy who translated the New Testament the 17th century Jew who converted to Christianity and he also apparently translated this same 17th century Jewish convert Christianity also translated the Quran into into Hebrew which is now in the Library of Congress so makes sense and I've I've seen some of the evidence like it's frankly really bad Hebrew although really bad Hebrew could just be Hebrew from the second temple period that I'm not familiar with right so so how do you know sometimes um so um but apparently he's also the one who translated the Quran and the New Testament and wrote the words of GAD theere that's the claim of the opponents to by L that's right yeah so so yeah we got the banan manuscripts just sort of by chance that's amazing so so what do you know about that that you can tell us like what's the backstory because I don't know I just know Buchanan brought these manuscripts from India I don't I don't know enough about it I know that they were already here when Shea was here because he was like 1802 Buchanan yeah so he cataloged sha cataloged them and he was Shea was super skeptical about the claims for the Antiquity of gader and so on he he sees kabalar in some of the writing you know he he can see that it's it can't be earlier than 16th century yeah so for for the Hebrew New Testament um from what I've looked at it for example in Acts chapter 2 where they talk about Shavuot the word there is pentec Costa oh so that would suggest it was translated from a European language now W to see sh no there's I mean it's a good collection we've got these um copper plates as well that are tell us about the copper plates they are records of um they are sort of legal Deeds of rights given to the Jews um uh um and they are in sort of Malayalam and various you know these yeah language the language oh the language yeah but they have some Hebrew sort of names on them and that's part of the the buer plates yeah um the the thing is and these were originally in the synagogues and in the and in the and in the um places he went to in India but he made copies of them so these are copper plates produced by Indian Artisans based on the original copper plates okay so these are made under the opes of the cannon and people I think people haven't realized that some people thought he carried away the originals but in fact The Originals I think have now been lost okay but these are copies and we it's just sort of OD these from do we know some of the these are supposedly quite ancient but I I don't I don't know enough about them and since these are copies of you know they're not entirely reliable the copies because they were hand produced in India in the 19 century you know what this evokes for me um wow and this is in the early so like around 1802 I think he made several trips to India because there's different dates on some of the different manuscripts 1802 and a little bit later but what this immediately makes me think about is you know the gold the the gold plates of you know the Book of Mormon right like so I I would I'm actually because I've studied quite a bit about Mormonism and I don't remember anybody ever mentioning this it would be a beautiful parallel to bring um I once asked a scholar from BYU Why are Mormons so interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and he said it makes the and look this was just his personal opinion I guess he said for me it makes the story of the gold plates more plausible because here you have ancient documents that have survived and then you have of course we have the the Copper Scroll which you know they love because okay it's written on metal right and it's survived it's not gold um so I thought that was really interesting when he explained that to me and and then I'm and then I said to him like I mean do you really believe that these gold plates you know were written by an ancient in American Indian um and you don't have them you've never seen them he said well you've never seen the Ten Commandments and the original tablets I'm like that's a fair good point okay but yeah it's an interesting point fair enough okay yeah yeah anyway so wow so you have copper copies of copper plates from India tell us about what all we're going to get back to Solomon shefer cuz that that's where we want to get to but um the Nash Papyrus that's also here isn't it yeah and that arrived probably um that's we got that at the beginning of the 20th century I think so of 19 02 0304 something like that um and that was so it's called the Nash Papyrus because it was the Reverend Nash who gave it to us and he acquired it from a book seller in Egypt MH um I think in the F in Egypt so down the Nile a bit and it is a very small item mhm a it's a strip of Papyrus about I don't know 6 in less maybe um and on it it has a in in a what we now regard as a herodian sort of style script um it has the schma and the Ten Commandments okay and when that was discovered it was the earliest piece of the biblical text it's in an early hand from about the 2 Century BC wow that's amazing so that that really so until the Dead Sea Scrolls that was the oldest known um yeah until 1947 that was the oldest piece of the biblical text that had been discovered now since then you've got the Desi Scrolls plus you got sort of the silver whatever's from um from ketoman Jal the silver Scrolls um but this was this was you know it's it's in character it's very like the dec Scrolls um but it it was not you know it's not a DEC scroll it doesn't it was probably probably written in Egypt it's on Papyrus and is it an amulet of some kind is it a mza to fill in no nobody so nobody knows it it's c yeah the the the size and shape of it suggests that it was of an amuletic property so that it was to be rolled up and put in something you know right um either for some kind of religious ritual or maybe just for protection or these are sort of fundamental parts of the Jewish religion right the Ten Commandments what's interesting about it apart from it is is genuinely very old and it was dated to the second century BC I think by Albright or someone quite early on um various people worked on it but so now you're making me suspicious we we I want to do carbon 14 on it it's too small that's the problem if it's too small okay yeah we can't afford to lose plus it's um over the years it's been um it's not been well handled it's sort of been backed onto cardboard not by us and then it's it appears to be painted over with some kind of some kind of um varish or something was put on it quite early on as well not again not by us so it's and it's very fragile that's probably because the ink was flaking and that would protect the ink but now now you can't really carbon 14 test it because you're getting different layers of different material no you I don't know you'd have to you'd have to strip the layers off and pull a bit out maybe couldn't do that prob um but the thing is it was dated to the second century BC by the early Scholars so burkit published it various others worked on it and there was some skepticism but generally consensus consensus was around second to the first century C and then when the dec Scrolls came along lo and behold it is you know it is pretty good match to the the the handwriting of that period of the earlier Scrolls so you have some incredible Treasures in this library and we're we're going to get to the most important Treasure of all which is the um well maybe it's not the most important treasure but it's the treasure that you're focused on which is the um uh Kyo Gena collection um arguably it is the most important I guess depends what your perspective is like some people might say codex Bez or bezzi um which is also here that's one of the key manuscripts of the New Testament is here in the library yeah one of the outliers because it's it it represents a slight you know considerable differences from the kind of received text but it's one of like the five Great unseals um so that and it was deliberately it was it was ganed in Cambridge no it's absolutely true so Theodore Theodore baser you know who gave it to the university um I think we still have that do we still have the letter that he sent with it I think we do he sent it to to Cambridge one to sort of preserve it but also two to sort of keep it out of the way so that people cuz it was it was sufficiently Divergent from the standard text of the New Testament okay that it's that you know it it better if we you know people don't look at it that much and so interesting so I wonder to what extent that's still the case meaning the test text of the New Testament in the Greek has now you know we have sort of a critical addition with Nestle Allen I think we're at 28 so I wonder how different it is today I think it's less different today and we can see where it fits into the different you know like the alexandrian stream and all that we can see where it fits within those streams it's still a very precious manuscript um and it's one that again we don't show very often because it it's ex it's a it's a beautiful manuscript with with parchment so thin that it's sort of translucent um uh but it's very fragile so like the national papus we tend not to show that although it is it is some it's among our greatest treasures so yes so gri had a has has a pretty good record of kind of biblical Treasures um and also we've got um so in Jewish Treasures I mean we we've got a thousand Hebrew manuscripts of various kinds that you know codes books yeah like one that that is I know often like overlooked is um uh at 17 53 you know add 1753 is um one of the manuscripts that um you know these great Scholars of mtic studies uh like yevin and Doan it's a yeminite one from the 16th century but the claim is that it was copied either directly or or maybe several Generations removed from the Aleppo codex and it includes parts of the leoc CICS that are now missing yes so it it's it's one of the key manuscripts that when like Brer was comparing all the different manuscripts of of the Tanakh he considered this one of the like the key Witnesses like yeah so about we should really digitize that manuscript I don't know why I photographed the whole thing so I'm happy to share the images but you can you can photograph it much better than I can with your sophisticated um well really it's about the lighting right and and you have to spend quite a bit of time to kind of position it but that app absolutely needs to be digitized it's really an important manuscript yes that's true and you we and and it's a good example of how you know medieval manuscripts are important you know it's not just all about the Dead Sea skrulls the Dead Sea skrulls will tell you a story about The Bible but it's actually it's a different story they're not you know you don't it's not the or text you're not you're not searching for the best best addition of the final text for the Dey Scrolls because the Dey Scrolls represent a text still in flux mhm well in this case it's a really late manuscript but may represent a textual tradition 700 years earlier at least that's what breer's claim was right so so a lot of times we'll say oh that's a late man uscript we can ignore that it's not important but sometimes the later texts preserve an earlier version of the text yeah and if and if we you know and if we've decided the alepo CeX is the text that we want then any witnesses to it are important because the great loss that happen he was focusing on things like gaot you know the kind of obscure uh linguistic features um but yeah um and the problem with that is there was this claim by almost everybody who wrote a manuscript in in Yemen that it was based on the Leo codex right it's kind of a formula that you spit out because you cuz my Mones gave a stamp to the Aleppo codex that's right and they and they worship my Mon and whatever my well he basically as they saw it at least saved yeminite jewelry in his you know from persecution so yeah so they became devotees of my monties yeah this has been an amazing conversation uh any last words you want to share about the kyoga the future of the research um well you know the caran has been around a long time 125 years in Cambridge M um you know uh G research since the days especially of digitization right that's that's the thing and you I know what you know a big fan you are of going around in photographic manuscripts and in that you're following the footsteps of the the the Presbyterian sisters as well you know um and and also they good ethical principles to that right so you're not disturbing the original items you're not removing them from their their you know from their rightful home you're just photo photographing and making him available um Cambridge has always you know sought to kind of make the The Collection available because partly it's sort of aware of the fact it's slightly odd that the Kyo Ganer is here in Cambridge you know why isn't it in Cairo you know um it's just an accident of circumstances and fate that meant it got here but had it not arrived here would it be you know as important and well known as it as it is now it's unlikely because it really did take someone like Solomon Shea to sort of show hand point if this had fallen into the hands of noar in Oxford it would probably still be moldering in a chest in Oxford right um you know people wouldn't have realized that so the fact it sat here for a long time it was neglected for many years really until the 1960s you know after Shea's time I mean and yet we're still working on it there's still so much more to be done and part of that is because it's such a huge collection but also the Fashions as I was saying the Fashions and scholarship changes so while you and I today are talking about the Bible and I've always been very big about you know because when I first took over the ganesa no one was interested in the Bibles of the Coan David had done the catalog but even yevin is kind of sniffy about medieval Bibles that aren't the Aleppo codex and big codes right he tends to he he lumps all the Coan a fragments is in his category of most of them are too late to be interesting and yet the work that we've done and especially and you know and by promoting The Collection you know having great Scholars like YF off come in and you Vine now and you know what Kim Phillips has done you know we can find Samuel Ben Jacob the Scribe of Len In you know we can find the earliest tour Scrolls we have outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caran and they've been under our noses this whole time shows that you know it just takes a little bit of change in sort of scholarly Outlook and we find all sorts of new stuff in the Gan so it's it's always going to be the collection that keeps on giving you know 20 years from now we're going to be looking for different things and find all these things we never knew were there in 20 years from now I'm going to be saying I stared at that fragment had no idea how important it was when somebody else discovers it importance exactly thanks so much for joining us this has been amazing conversation no it's a pleasure thank you very much thank you you have been listening to Hebrew voices with nemia Gordon thank you for supporting nimia mcor Hebrew Foundation learn more at nemia wall.com [Music]

Channel: Nehemia Gordon

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Id: Ci69jIhspck

Length: 74min 15sec (4455 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2024