Sunday, June 25, 2006

WITH REFERENCE TO Manchester University's grant to digitize its Cairo Geniza collection, Manuscript Boy writes:
The article seems to say that the library has 30,000 fragments, all written by Maimonides.

Of course, this is a mistake. And I am sure that it was the journalist who misunderstood.
Actually it says 300,000 fragments, but he's right that it doesn't make any sense that all of them should belong to Maimonides. Curiously, I can't find any reference to the award at the website for Manchester's Centre for Jewish Studies or at the AHRC's awards listings website. The John Rylands University's web page on its Hebrew Manuscripts collection mentions "almost 10,600 [Geniza] fragments in Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic," including "several autograph fragments of Maimonides." There must be some garbling in the article, but I'm not sure what the actual story is. If I see Philip Alexander at the International SBL Conference a week from now, I'll ask him.

Manuscript Boy goes on to tell an interesting anecdote about the Cairo Geniza and Maimonides, so have a look at his posting.

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