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Hello. Welcome to this podcast. My name is Samuel for news, find the publisher at the body and library.

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And my guest today is the author, editor and journalist Rebecca Abrams, right?

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Hello, Rebecca. Rebecca is the author of numerous books.

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Her most recent title is Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries, which she has co-edited together with, says Suzanne Martian Hamman.

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And she's joining me today to speak about her book Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries.

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Rebecca, perhaps I could begin by asking you, how did the body and collection of Jewish books and manuscripts begin?

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Yes, well, that's a very good question. The Jewish books, some advocates actually began with the library itself at the very end of the 16th century.

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The the idea for the library was the brainchild of Thomas Bodley of the whom is named,

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and he in 598 proposed to the university that they re-established the library of Oxford, which would be very neglected.

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And it actually suffered very badly at the hands of Protestant reformers in 15 50,

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and Thomas Bodley came from a staunchly Protestant background of a humanist tradition.

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And that always included a Hebrew along with Greek and Latin.

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So his vision for the library included Hebrew manuscripts from the very start.

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And in fact, the very first book The Body and acquired in sixty one was a Hebrew manuscript of Genesis with its linear Latin translation.

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So really, the the Hebrew and Jewish aspects of the collections of the body were were absolutely central from the very beginning.

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And from there, how could the collections grow and how did Oxford become such an important repository of Jewish manuscripts and books?

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Well, I think like all of these things, in part, it was just due to good timing and the 17th century and as I said,

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the library this this project to set up the library again to rehabilitate the library began at the very end of the 16th century.

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So it coincided with the 17th century, which was a period of huge interest, burgeoning interest in oriental studies.

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And Oxford was at the intellectual centre of that from again from from the start.

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So you have a lot of top scholars and top collectors in this burgeoning field at Oxford or with close

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connexions to Oxford that I'm thinking about people like John Selden and Edward Peacock and Huntingdon.

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And they were also all connected to one another.

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So you have these network people who are connected to each other intellectually, physically, geographically,

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and they left significant collections of Hebrew manuscripts and which would then either given or sold to the university on their deaths.

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So in other words, Oxford was just the best place to be having this particular library setting up this particular library at this particular time.

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And we should, of course, mention a particular key figure in the first half of the 17th century was William Lord,

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who was the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chancellor of Oxford. He endowed the first chairs in Hebrew and in Arabic at Oxford.

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It was the other way around with Arabic and then Hebrew, and he really embarked on a full scale sort of intellectual arms race is how it's described

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in the chapter on the Lord's collection to acquire manuscripts for the university.

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So in other words, the battalion was collecting these Jewish manuscripts and books at a really, really good time.

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And then then as time went on, as the centuries went on,

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it built from there on these strong early foundations and in turn then became an attractive place for collectors and collections to come.

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Although in some cases that was actually quite controversial.

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And one of the later collections, the Michael Collection, there was actually fierce opposition to it,

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leaving Germany coming to Oxford, but nevertheless Oxford became a strong magnet for the poor for this kind of material.

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I like that description intellectual arms race. You, you you talk about William A. And the book is in fact structured in such a strong figure.

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The book is structured around individual collectors and collections.

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Why have you and Suzanne, your co-editor, chosen to structure the book this way?

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Well, the manuscripts and books within the collections the Jewish manuscripts books have been written about in some cases before.

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Not all of them, but but some of them have. But the stories of the collectors,

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the stories of how these collections came to exist and the stories of how the collections found

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their ways works that have not been told before and not been told all in one place before.

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So many of the collective names will mean very little to the general public, to most people,

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and they're very well known within their scholars in the field, but not beyond.

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So things like Edward Percoco, Hermann Michael, Matteo Nietzsche, you know, most people, most people.

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I certainly didn't know anything really about these people before working on this book.

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So one reason for one really important reason for structuring the book in this way is that we

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wanted to tell the stories of these remarkable collectors to explain who they were and why.

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The historically interesting now second reason is that we wanted to explore the

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relationship between each collector and the manuscripts and books they collected.

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So it's easy to forget, I think that the collections only exist because of their original collectors.

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We tend to think about what's in the collection rather than how it came to exist in the first place,

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why it came into being what purpose it said for the collector.

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So we wanted also to tell that previously rather neglected story of the collections in relation to their original collectors.

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OK. Let's take a look at the book itself for a moment, I've got a copy here in front of me and I'm just flicking through it.

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And one of the first things that struck me about it is that it's a highly illustrated work,

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and I wanted to ask, how did you and are your co-editor go about choosing the images for the book?

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Yes, we had them together and I had various objectives.

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I mean, three objectives really in mind in relation to to the book and in relation to the choice of visual images.

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First of all, we wanted to showcase the beauty of the collections, you know,

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for readers who wouldn't normally see them or know about them, we wanted to show in beautiful detail how lovely they are.

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Gorgeous they are. The second thing that was important to us, we wanted to show both the visual and the textual interest.

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And in that, I was very much guided by Caesar's extensive knowledge of the collections,

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and we were directed by the authors of each of the chapters in the book and who are all scholars and experts on the collections.

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And they obviously knew which texts they wanted to illustrate to accompany the stories that they were telling the chapters that they'd written.

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So and then the third very important criteria for us was that we wanted to convey that visual range.

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We wanted to show the diversity of influences and regional differences.

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I mean, it's very it's very extraordinary and what's there.

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So we have Sephardic and visually Sephardic influences Ashkenazi, Islamic, Christian Gothic.

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There are examples of Spanish heraldry and some manuscripts, you know, Italian renaissance, floral designs and others.

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It's a very, very visually diverse collection. We wanted to show that as lavishly and as as much detail as we possibly could.

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I'll come back to the diversity issue that you raised, which is very interesting.

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I come back to that in a moment.

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But I just want to pick up on the individuals and the collectors themselves and ask you, why did these individuals make these collections?

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Were they driven by the same motives or were there with a different differing motives in each case?

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Well, they in fact, they were driven by very different motivations, really quite to my surprise,

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how different they were just to give you a sort of rough idea of that.

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I mean, you had somebody like Edward Post-hoc in the early 17th century who was really motivated by a wonderful

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kind of a great integrity in terms of his intellectual and scholarly curiosity and appetite.

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He was a real scholar.

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Then you have William Lord, who we've spoken about before and also the early 17th century who was fuelled by political and religious ambition.

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Absolutely no question. I mean, Lord ended up being executed in the Tower of London.

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But, but he was. He rose a long way. You know, he was a very, very influential, important, powerful figure in the early 17th century.

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And his motivation were for collecting was, you know, he wasn't uninterested.

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He was the Archbishop of Canterbury. He wasn't uninterested in the scholarly content.

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But his main purpose was to secure the prestige of Oxford University,

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which he was by then chancellor and to secure the position and the safety and the security of the Reformed Church of England, both at home and abroad.

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He was a very political animal in his collections. We were driven by that.

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Then, you know, at the end of the same century, at the end of the 17th century, you have David Oppenheim,

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chief rabbi in Prague, one of the one of the only two Jewish collectors behind these collections.

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In the book, the ones that have chapters in the book, there were more than that, in fact reflected in the collections.

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But but David Oppenheim, he he was driven by a hugely ambitious goal,

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which was to amass the largest library of Jewish manuscripts and books in the world, and he had three reasons for doing that.

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He wanted as a practical resource, as a Jewish leader. It was a passion project for him to do with his, his commitment to Judaism.

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And it was also an intellectual mission to collect and preserve Jewish intellectual culture.

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So completely different, really, of compared to William Lord.

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And then again, you have somebody like Canon Matteo, e.g. Nietzsche,

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who is an 18th century former Jesuit priest in Venice, born in Venice, working in and around northern Italy.

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And he was passionate about books, but he was primarily motivated by the need to make money.

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And he was constantly complaining about how he didn't have enough money. You know, this was his trade, his profession.

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And then just as a fourth example, you have such, I think, was my fifth example.

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You have Benjamin Kennecott in the middle of the 18th century, an Oxford scholar.

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Some of them think he came from Thomas.

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He came quite lowly beginnings, but he became a very important Oxford scholar and librarian of the right camera directed library.

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Sorry. And he was motivated again, frustrated for reasons he was mostly about.

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Made it but mad and brilliant idea, which was to compare letter by letter every single copy of the Hebrew Bible.

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In existence in the British Isles, and it's far beyond as possible.

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And why did he want to do that well to identify the oldest and most authentic versions of the original biblical text?

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But so as you can see, you know, just from those five individuals, their motivations were very different,

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and I found that a really exciting and fascinating and unexpected aspect of the book.

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Yeah, I think so. We've gone from from Oxford to Prague to Venice, three cities you mentioned in your answer to the last question.

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What is the geographic spread of the manuscripts and books discussed themselves as opposed to the collectors?

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Do they range across the the across the globe?

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Yeah, absolutely. There's a there's a big time spread.

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We should say they span 10 centuries and they reflect Jewish culture and religion under the Arab, Ottoman and Christian rule.

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And they stretch from Syria and Persia to the Iberian Peninsula to Italy, Germany and France.

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So you've got a big geographic spread. Partly because people sourcing the manuscripts and books, what we're working globally, they often were located.

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People like Pope and Huntington were actually based in Aleppo, but some of the time that they were doing,

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they're collecting people based in Oxford, nevertheless using agents spread all around the world to try to find things for them.

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And then partly, of course, because people travel and the manuscripts of books that they have travel with them.

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So you might get a single manuscript that's that's moved from Spain to North Africa and then into northern Europe.

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So there's a big geographic spread represented in different ways and also reflecting

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that we have a big range of scripts and languages reflected in these manuscripts.

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So Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo, Arabic, Portuguese written in Hebrew characters and so on, and different scripts, as I said as well.

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So yes, it's a very, very diverse collection in terms of where the material comes from and how it appears visually.

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And what about the books themselves, Rebecca? What kinds of books and manuscripts are in these collections, for example?

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Are they all books that are relevant to scholars or are they books of scholarship?

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Or are there different genres and types of of of books as well?

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Well, they're certainly all relevant to scholars, but they're enormous, enormously various in that, in that, in what they are.

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So you have we have a biblical text, liturgical, Talmudic, philosophical, cabalistic.

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There are books about medicine, there are books of grammar and lexicography, and there's other materials.

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Besides, there's poetry, the letters, the account books as there's all sorts of stuff.

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And there's one of the things I think is very interesting as well is it's not just the text themselves.

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That's very interesting and revealing. In some cases, the marginalia and the bindings contain equally interesting information to the text.

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So, for example, we have the signatures of the Italian censors on some of the manuscripts.

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Many of these sentences were themselves Jewish converts to Christianity and working for the Vatican, the Vatican in Rome.

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But so there's a code that's a sort of slightly bizarre thing that you can see this evidence of the

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constraints on Jewish intellectual life being enforced by people who themselves had been raised as Jews.

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Another example of interesting marginalia is you have the signatures of the scribes, so I'm thinking of the manuscripts and the Kennecott collection,

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and we can see who, who, who made these texts and that reveals 10 10 really interesting connexions between them.

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They were obviously aware of each other. In some cases. Sometimes they were working from copies of other people's work.

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It shows a network, a professional network of these scribes working at a very, very high level.

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And then the third area in which the marginalia can be interesting is the signatures of the owners.

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You can see how a particular text is passed through different hands and in different places.

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So all of that, that is terribly interesting. So. So what these manuscripts yield is often often goes far beyond the the overt and explicit content.

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And are there any that? Can I ask a slightly invidious question?

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Are there any that stand out as particularly significant to you? Yeah.

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Well, that's a really difficult question.

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I mean, it's almost impossible to choose one because they're all so interesting and important in different ways.

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But I can give you just two examples of of what things that are contained in these collections, which are really important.

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One is that the works by the mediaeval rabbi and scholar Moses, My Monarchies,

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is enormously influential figure of his commentaries on the Torah and his codes for how to live, according to Jewish law.

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We have various copies of that, those owned by different people at different times, but also really importantly,

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we have the the two versions amended by him in his own hand and one one copy is signed off by him.

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So it's the version that he was said, Yes, this one's okay to go to print or not to print.

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But City's mediaeval times, it wouldn't be print. But to be to be fair copy.

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So, so you know, we have really important insights into how he was thinking and working in areas which maybe he changed his mind,

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but also what he was authorising. So that's really important.

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And so just just for readers who just for listeners who may not be familiar with my monitors, could you just remind us very briefly who he is?

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Yes. So he was he was a mediaeval scholar.

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He was the rabbi in Egypt. He had held various different positions, but he was also a physician to Saladin.

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He was a I mean, it's really almost impossible to underestimate his influence.

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And he wrote two key texts. One was the mission of Torah, and the other was the guides.

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The perplexed that both of these have become an absolutely similarly important books in in the evolution of Jewish life and Jewish thinking.

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Thank you. Thank you. Sorry, carry on you, as he was saying.

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Well, so the other I think I think, you know, it is really, really difficult to single out anyone in particular.

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But the other I mean, there's a collection. I think the Kennecott collection is also very important, is very small in size.

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One of the smallest, the smallest is only ten manuscripts of Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible in all.

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But it's extremely important in terms of its quality, both the aesthetic beauty it's the centrepiece of the Kennecott Bible.

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The 15th century comes the 15th century. Spain is the most beautiful surviving mediaeval Hebrew Bible anywhere in the world,

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and it's certainly one of the the the absolute jewels of the of the Bodleian Library collections that the Kennecott collect these 10 managed.

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They also show the skill of the scribes and, as I said, the professional geographical connexions between them.

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But the contents of the manuscripts are also very important, not least because in a way,

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they achieve the exact opposite of what Benjamin Kennecott intended.

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So they preserve the Jewish Nazaret tradition of textual transmission, which Kennecott himself was keen to diminish.

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The Kennecott was trying to say, actually, this way of transmitting the text is unreliable.

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But in the process of collecting these texts, he's helped preserve them.

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So. So it's also a really important example. There are other examples within the collections,

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but it's an important example for me of how the people collecting the these manuscripts and books originally might have had one purpose in mind.

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But the collections have a life of their own, and they they might.

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So they've gone on to serve different purposes and to reveal different information and to be valued and valued.

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Is that again almost understatement to be hugely, hugely important? There may be quite quite different reasons than the original collectors intended.

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So that's that's another example of why the Kennecott collection is important, but it's not.

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It's not alone in being important in these in one way or another.

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So it is really, really difficult to single out one collection or one collector.

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Well, speaking of collectors in the individual collections,

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all the chapters in this book are dedicated to individual collectors or the collections they made,

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except for one, and that's the Guineas a collection.

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Can you tell us, Rebecca, what a Guineas is and what it contains?

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Yes. So a Gansa is is the word for a repository which is in a synagogue and in synagogues all around the world,

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a repository for sacred texts or for texts written in the sacred language of Hebrew.

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So anything that has the word of God is considered sacred and can't be just thrown away.

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It has to be carefully buried in the right way.

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So while any text with with anything, I mean, it's been interpreted in different ways, in different places, but in this particular,

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and these are that we're talking about in the collection, it's from the Ben Ezra synagogue and for STAT, which is now Cairo.

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Kyra, now, but first, that was the capital of Egypt before Cairo in the mediaeval period.

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And in the case of the Ben Ezra synagogue, the organiser really came to just contain everything written in Hebrew because they didn't they?

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They wanted to be on the safe side, I think. And what would happen is to stuff everything would be just gathered in the

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Khanyisa and then eventually it would be interred in the kind of necessary way.

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But the can in an influence that just became absolutely full of stuff, and I'm not quite sure why it didn't get moved on.

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But what happened then in the 19th century was that it gradually came to light that there was buried in the Ganges itself that become buried,

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which is kind of interesting because it's the word itself means that it conceals so, but it becomes just become overgrown with rubbish from centuries.

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And then this material began to come to light and people realised scholars and collectors realised that was a really,

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really valuable repository of stuff that they didn't work, then weren't quite sure what stuff.

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And then it came to light that it was really important material from the organiser of the Benin's synagogue.

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So then there was a race against time.

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It was very exciting moment, really in collecting history between Noboa,

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who was the librarian of Oxford and gives the deputy library in Oxford and a very colourful character in Cambridge called Solomon Schechter.

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And these two men were kind of going head to head to try and get material for their libraries,

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the Cambridge Library and the body in Oxford from the Gansa and the now.

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Now there's been a collaboration fantastically.

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In 20th century century, there's been a collaboration between the two universities, so they now work together and they pool their resources.

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But but at the time, at the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century,

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it was a very, very fierce, quite bitter battle between these two very interesting men.

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And if you could get the most material from the Gansa and what it contains is again astonishingly diverse,

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and it provides a really wonderful window onto mediaeval Jewish life in the in the Mediterranean area, but also beyond.

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Because this this community was very connected. It was a very important community, was very connected out in all directions.

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And you have everything in there, from sacred texts to recipes to children, school books to love letters, almost everything.

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A lot of the the the what's the word?

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You know, the ordinary stuff is actually much more that is in Cambridge than in Oxford,

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because the Neubauer and his team in Oxford were much more interested in collecting the very sort of scholarly texts.

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So there's more of that in Oxford. Hugely important texts, but that.

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But as a whole, what's really interesting is that when you pull what's in Oxford and Cambridge,

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you just have this fabulous window onto a world that would, you know, would have been lost otherwise.

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And these images, the the images of the Guineas are fragments and the many books and manuscripts that are reproduced in your book.

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And is it only only available to scholars who come to Oxford?

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Or can people see the images themselves elsewhere?

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So in the case of the Khanyisa fragments, they have been digitised thanks to very generous benefactors and Polanski Foundation.

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And I think maybe some others as well that the so that that collection is actually mostly available online and there

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has been huge efforts to digitise as much of the what what else is in the collections as possible and the art.

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The aim is to get everything digitised eventually, although of course,

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that requires support from from outside, but it's very expensive and costly business.

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But more and more of what's in the Oxford collections that both in the libraries of Oxford and in the body and library itself are available online,

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which is just fantastic. Obviously, there's nothing compares with actually seeing a physical manuscript drop physical book.

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But but they are available online and the aim is for more and more of them to become available online.

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And just to remind listeners the those images are can be seen that you've been talking about Rebecca.

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They can be seen at Digital Dot, Bodleian Dot, 0x Dot AC Dot UK.

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And of course they are. Many of them are reproduced in the book we've been discussing today.

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Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries edited by Rebecca Abrams My Guest Today.

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And together with, say, The Martian Herman Rebecca.

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It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you very much. Thank you.