Some Reflections on the Publication of a New Thesaurus of Talmudic Manuscripts

In 1806–7, the Reverend Claudius Buchanan (1766–1815) paid a visit to Malabar, on the southwest coast of India, and met members of the Jewish community of Cochin. Although a Scot, and a graduate of the University of Glasgow, he had also studied at Queens’ College in the University of Cambridge and been ordained as a priest by the Church of England. As with many Christian missionaries of his day, he was devoted to learning more about non-Christian cultures and was enthusiastic about obtaining from that community some of its precious manuscripts. Obviously, as an Anglican missionary he wished to spread his faith among the locals, but he was also a scholar and the vice-provost of the College of Fort William, an institution in Bengal devoted to mastering and researching Indian culture. This was, it should be recalled, some sixty years before the University of Cambridge appointed its first professor of Sanskrit.¹

Buchanan attempted to convince the Jews of Cochin that it would be to their advantage to exchange their old and worn manuscripts for some handsome, newly printed publications (missionary tracts?) that he had brought for them. Although he had to argue the point, enough members of the community were impressed by that proposed exchange for him to depart with some literary treasures that still adorn the manuscript stacks at Cambridge University Library.² I am reminded by this incident of an experience of my own. I was showing a foreign visitor around the colleges of Cambridge and pointing out to him a medieval house, a Tudor building, and numerous historical edifices and their unusual characteristics. “Is the University very poor?” he inquired. “Not really,” I replied. “It is fairly well endowed.” “In that case,” he continued, “could they not afford to replace these ancient structures with some modern ones?”

It is not obvious to everyone that the old is better than the new and that manuscripts may be more valuable to scholars than printed texts. Indeed, the diffusion of the latter medium and its growing popularity from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries appears to have convinced many people that one was better served by a contemporary edition than an ancient handwritten text. It seems difficult to get our minds around the fact that Jewish scholarship paid little attention to the evidence of manuscripts, as such, until the nineteenth century. The medieval experts had, of course, no choice; for them, texts were manuscripts. But once Hebrew literature became available in print, it took some four centuries before there was a renewed interest in the form of texts that predated Gutenberg’s invention.

Many of us will have experienced the great joy of the baalabos and baalaboste who show you with much pride their Vilna edition of the Talmud published by the Romm family in the latter part of the nineteenth century. They are somewhat at a loss to understand why you would wish to point out to them (if, cruelly, you do) that their pristine volumes were set in type some thirteen centuries after the original texts were composed. Indeed, it would probably pain them to be told that many of the texts in that handsome Vilna edition have been corrupted in the course of centuries of transmission and that problems that have broken the heads of generations of learned talmudists may sometimes today be solved by a simple correction on the basis of an early medieval manuscript. What is even more intriguing is that talmudic study was not one of the earliest realms of modern Jewish scholarship to seek manuscript evidence to assist its researches. It took until the last decades of the nineteenth century before such a development began, and the process of catching up with the world of classics in the production of scientific and critical editions is still virtually...