A scroll in the Rare Books Reading Room at CUL

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Diary 51

Diary 51 - A scroll in the Rare Books Reading Room at CUL

As well as being a sofer, in my other life, I'm studying for a PhD at Cambridge and one of the lovely parts of that is access into the Cambridge University Library and the wonderful treasures there. I've been in the Rare Books Reading Room at CUL before to look at fragments from the Cairo Genizah fragments from Sefer Tagin and also a special cantillation fragment that will be featured in a forthcoming Fragment of the Month on the Genizah site. Also a wonderful scribal manual Add. MS 1202.1 which I photographed (more on that another time too). I also spent some lovely time there with the two large volumes of The Hebrew Scripts by Solomon Birnbaum.

But my latest trip, in mid-April 2022, was particularly special as I was able to tag along to the unrolling and photographing of what might be a 13th century Torah written on gevil (unsplit hide) and containing lots of otiyyot meshunot (following Sefer Tagin - my speciality) with friends and colleagues Dr Nehemia Gordon and Dr Estara Arrant.

I say might be, since it had some similarities to a manuscript held in the Vatican (Vat ebr.1) reportedly from the 13th, but also had similarities to Or. 1463 in the British Library that I know well which is from the 16th. I'm sure Dr Gordon will get to the bottom of it!

In the meantime I was able to marvel at his kit - really nice cameras and equipment that looked at infrared and was able to uncover layers of ink to see what corrections may have been made.

Below: the scroll unrolled on the table. Holes and stains quite obvious. Photo © Mordechai Pinchas (Marc Michaels)

Apparently held in 'a library within a library' the scroll is classified as BFBS MS 231 and is very damaged in parts with mold and tears in certain sections and as a result has split into two parts in its wooden box. the conservators would only allow one half to be looked at, though actually the damaged area only went through a couple of yeriot (sheets) depth.

Below: a selection of photos showing the scroll unrolled, areas with particular damage and some of the special letters derived from Sefer Tagin. A particularly spectacular example of correcting by writing between the lines (how they used fix - I did similar with the Tyburn Megillah). Also Dr Gordon examining particular areas, the interesting Ha-azinu poem layout and me holding the final yeriah open (yes that is my arm!)