Un manoscritto ebraico dell’Inghilterra medievale - Cambridge, Gonville & Caius College 404/625 - K93

Abstract

A hebrew manuscript from medieval England - Cambridge, Gonville & Caius 404/625 - K93

The aim of this article is to discuss the main features of a manuscript (n. 93 in Kennicott’s list, hence K93), which contains a large portion of the Hebrew Bible, from Joshua to Malachi. It belongs to a bigger group of manuscripts written in medieval England between the twelfth and thirteenth century. These manuscripts show the social, cultural and linguistic exchanges between Christian scholars and the Jewish community in medieval England. In this study the paleographic peculiarities are examined in details and the text is compared with the textus receptus of the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Daniel is used as a case study. The phonetic and orthographic variants reveal a very particular modus operandi of the Christian scholar, who vocalized the consonantal text; for example, the use of dagesh and the ‘hyper-punctuation’ of qibbûs ̣ below the consonant before the mater lectionis waw. I tried to connect the following three areas: the punctuation of K93, the studies of Olszowy-Schangler on this group of manuscripts and the ‘Christian punctuation’, which is a simplified Tiberian system based on five vowels. Finally, with regard to the book of Daniel, a connection is suggested between the punctuation of the Aramaic sections and the results of a recent article of Heijmans on the vocalization of Western Targum-Manuscripts.
giuseppe.polizzi@live.it