Hello. Welcome to this podcast. My name is Samuel for news, find the publisher at the body and library.
And my guest today is the author, editor and journalist Rebecca Abrams, right?
Hello, Rebecca. Rebecca is the author of numerous books.
Her most recent title is Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries, which she has co-edited together with, says Suzanne Martian Hamman.
And she's joining me today to speak about her book Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries.
Rebecca, perhaps I could begin by asking you, how did the body and collection of Jewish books and manuscripts begin?
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.
The the idea for the library was the brainchild of Thomas Bodley of the whom is named,
and he in 598 proposed to the university that they re-established the library of Oxford, which would be very neglected.
And it actually suffered very badly at the hands of Protestant reformers in 15 50,
and Thomas Bodley came from a staunchly Protestant background of a humanist tradition.
And that always included a Hebrew along with Greek and Latin.
So his vision for the library included Hebrew manuscripts from the very start.
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.
So really, the the Hebrew and Jewish aspects of the collections of the body were were absolutely central from the very beginning.
And from there, how could the collections grow and how did Oxford become such an important repository of Jewish manuscripts and books?
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,
the library this this project to set up the library again to rehabilitate the library began at the very end of the 16th century.
So it coincided with the 17th century, which was a period of huge interest, burgeoning interest in oriental studies.
And Oxford was at the intellectual centre of that from again from from the start.
So you have a lot of top scholars and top collectors in this burgeoning field at Oxford or with close
connexions to Oxford that I'm thinking about people like John Selden and Edward Peacock and Huntingdon.
And they were also all connected to one another.
So you have these network people who are connected to each other intellectually, physically, geographically,
and they left significant collections of Hebrew manuscripts and which would then either given or sold to the university on their deaths.
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.
And we should, of course, mention a particular key figure in the first half of the 17th century was William Lord,
who was the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chancellor of Oxford. He endowed the first chairs in Hebrew and in Arabic at Oxford.
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
in the chapter on the Lord's collection to acquire manuscripts for the university.
So in other words, the battalion was collecting these Jewish manuscripts and books at a really, really good time.
And then then as time went on, as the centuries went on,
it built from there on these strong early foundations and in turn then became an attractive place for collectors and collections to come.
Although in some cases that was actually quite controversial.
And one of the later collections, the Michael Collection, there was actually fierce opposition to it,
leaving Germany coming to Oxford, but nevertheless Oxford became a strong magnet for the poor for this kind of material.
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.
The book is structured around individual collectors and collections.
Why have you and Suzanne, your co-editor, chosen to structure the book this way?
Well, the manuscripts and books within the collections the Jewish manuscripts books have been written about in some cases before.
Not all of them, but but some of them have. But the stories of the collectors,
the stories of how these collections came to exist and the stories of how the collections found
their ways works that have not been told before and not been told all in one place before.
So many of the collective names will mean very little to the general public, to most people,
and they're very well known within their scholars in the field, but not beyond.
So things like Edward Percoco, Hermann Michael, Matteo Nietzsche, you know, most people, most people.
I certainly didn't know anything really about these people before working on this book.
So one reason for one really important reason for structuring the book in this way is that we
wanted to tell the stories of these remarkable collectors to explain who they were and why.
The historically interesting now second reason is that we wanted to explore the
relationship between each collector and the manuscripts and books they collected.
So it's easy to forget, I think that the collections only exist because of their original collectors.
We tend to think about what's in the collection rather than how it came to exist in the first place,
why it came into being what purpose it said for the collector.
So we wanted also to tell that previously rather neglected story of the collections in relation to their original collectors.
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.
And one of the first things that struck me about it is that it's a highly illustrated work,
and I wanted to ask, how did you and are your co-editor go about choosing the images for the book?
Yes, we had them together and I had various objectives.
I mean, three objectives really in mind in relation to to the book and in relation to the choice of visual images.
First of all, we wanted to showcase the beauty of the collections, you know,
for readers who wouldn't normally see them or know about them, we wanted to show in beautiful detail how lovely they are.
Gorgeous they are. The second thing that was important to us, we wanted to show both the visual and the textual interest.
And in that, I was very much guided by Caesar's extensive knowledge of the collections,
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.
And they obviously knew which texts they wanted to illustrate to accompany the stories that they were telling the chapters that they'd written.
So and then the third very important criteria for us was that we wanted to convey that visual range.
We wanted to show the diversity of influences and regional differences.
I mean, it's very it's very extraordinary and what's there.
So we have Sephardic and visually Sephardic influences Ashkenazi, Islamic, Christian Gothic.
There are examples of Spanish heraldry and some manuscripts, you know, Italian renaissance, floral designs and others.
It's a very, very visually diverse collection. We wanted to show that as lavishly and as as much detail as we possibly could.
I'll come back to the diversity issue that you raised, which is very interesting.
I come back to that in a moment.
But I just want to pick up on the individuals and the collectors themselves and ask you, why did these individuals make these collections?
Were they driven by the same motives or were there with a different differing motives in each case?
Well, they in fact, they were driven by very different motivations, really quite to my surprise,
how different they were just to give you a sort of rough idea of that.
I mean, you had somebody like Edward Post-hoc in the early 17th century who was really motivated by a wonderful
kind of a great integrity in terms of his intellectual and scholarly curiosity and appetite.
He was a real scholar.
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.
Absolutely no question. I mean, Lord ended up being executed in the Tower of London.
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.
And his motivation were for collecting was, you know, he wasn't uninterested.
He was the Archbishop of Canterbury. He wasn't uninterested in the scholarly content.
But his main purpose was to secure the prestige of Oxford University,
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.
He was a very political animal in his collections. We were driven by that.
Then, you know, at the end of the same century, at the end of the 17th century, you have David Oppenheim,
chief rabbi in Prague, one of the one of the only two Jewish collectors behind these collections.
In the book, the ones that have chapters in the book, there were more than that, in fact reflected in the collections.
But but David Oppenheim, he he was driven by a hugely ambitious goal,
which was to amass the largest library of Jewish manuscripts and books in the world, and he had three reasons for doing that.
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.
And it was also an intellectual mission to collect and preserve Jewish intellectual culture.
So completely different, really, of compared to William Lord.
And then again, you have somebody like Canon Matteo, e.g. Nietzsche,
who is an 18th century former Jesuit priest in Venice, born in Venice, working in and around northern Italy.
And he was passionate about books, but he was primarily motivated by the need to make money.
And he was constantly complaining about how he didn't have enough money. You know, this was his trade, his profession.
And then just as a fourth example, you have such, I think, was my fifth example.
You have Benjamin Kennecott in the middle of the 18th century, an Oxford scholar.
Some of them think he came from Thomas.
He came quite lowly beginnings, but he became a very important Oxford scholar and librarian of the right camera directed library.
Sorry. And he was motivated again, frustrated for reasons he was mostly about.
Made it but mad and brilliant idea, which was to compare letter by letter every single copy of the Hebrew Bible.
In existence in the British Isles, and it's far beyond as possible.
And why did he want to do that well to identify the oldest and most authentic versions of the original biblical text?
But so as you can see, you know, just from those five individuals, their motivations were very different,
and I found that a really exciting and fascinating and unexpected aspect of the book.
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.
What is the geographic spread of the manuscripts and books discussed themselves as opposed to the collectors?
Do they range across the the across the globe?
Yeah, absolutely. There's a there's a big time spread.
We should say they span 10 centuries and they reflect Jewish culture and religion under the Arab, Ottoman and Christian rule.
And they stretch from Syria and Persia to the Iberian Peninsula to Italy, Germany and France.
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.
People like Pope and Huntington were actually based in Aleppo, but some of the time that they were doing,
they're collecting people based in Oxford, nevertheless using agents spread all around the world to try to find things for them.
And then partly, of course, because people travel and the manuscripts of books that they have travel with them.
So you might get a single manuscript that's that's moved from Spain to North Africa and then into northern Europe.
So there's a big geographic spread represented in different ways and also reflecting
that we have a big range of scripts and languages reflected in these manuscripts.
So Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo, Arabic, Portuguese written in Hebrew characters and so on, and different scripts, as I said as well.
So yes, it's a very, very diverse collection in terms of where the material comes from and how it appears visually.
And what about the books themselves, Rebecca? What kinds of books and manuscripts are in these collections, for example?
Are they all books that are relevant to scholars or are they books of scholarship?
Or are there different genres and types of of of books as well?
Well, they're certainly all relevant to scholars, but they're enormous, enormously various in that, in that, in what they are.
So you have we have a biblical text, liturgical, Talmudic, philosophical, cabalistic.
There are books about medicine, there are books of grammar and lexicography, and there's other materials.
Besides, there's poetry, the letters, the account books as there's all sorts of stuff.
And there's one of the things I think is very interesting as well is it's not just the text themselves.
That's very interesting and revealing. In some cases, the marginalia and the bindings contain equally interesting information to the text.
So, for example, we have the signatures of the Italian censors on some of the manuscripts.
Many of these sentences were themselves Jewish converts to Christianity and working for the Vatican, the Vatican in Rome.
But so there's a code that's a sort of slightly bizarre thing that you can see this evidence of the
constraints on Jewish intellectual life being enforced by people who themselves had been raised as Jews.
Another example of interesting marginalia is you have the signatures of the scribes, so I'm thinking of the manuscripts and the Kennecott collection,
and we can see who, who, who made these texts and that reveals 10 10 really interesting connexions between them.
They were obviously aware of each other. In some cases. Sometimes they were working from copies of other people's work.
It shows a network, a professional network of these scribes working at a very, very high level.
And then the third area in which the marginalia can be interesting is the signatures of the owners.
You can see how a particular text is passed through different hands and in different places.
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.
And are there any that? Can I ask a slightly invidious question?
Are there any that stand out as particularly significant to you? Yeah.
Well, that's a really difficult question.
I mean, it's almost impossible to choose one because they're all so interesting and important in different ways.
But I can give you just two examples of of what things that are contained in these collections, which are really important.
One is that the works by the mediaeval rabbi and scholar Moses, My Monarchies,
is enormously influential figure of his commentaries on the Torah and his codes for how to live, according to Jewish law.
We have various copies of that, those owned by different people at different times, but also really importantly,
we have the the two versions amended by him in his own hand and one one copy is signed off by him.
So it's the version that he was said, Yes, this one's okay to go to print or not to print.
But City's mediaeval times, it wouldn't be print. But to be to be fair copy.
So, so you know, we have really important insights into how he was thinking and working in areas which maybe he changed his mind,
but also what he was authorising. So that's really important.
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?
Yes. So he was he was a mediaeval scholar.
He was the rabbi in Egypt. He had held various different positions, but he was also a physician to Saladin.
He was a I mean, it's really almost impossible to underestimate his influence.
And he wrote two key texts. One was the mission of Torah, and the other was the guides.
The perplexed that both of these have become an absolutely similarly important books in in the evolution of Jewish life and Jewish thinking.
Thank you. Thank you. Sorry, carry on you, as he was saying.
Well, so the other I think I think, you know, it is really, really difficult to single out anyone in particular.
But the other I mean, there's a collection. I think the Kennecott collection is also very important, is very small in size.
One of the smallest, the smallest is only ten manuscripts of Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible in all.
But it's extremely important in terms of its quality, both the aesthetic beauty it's the centrepiece of the Kennecott Bible.
The 15th century comes the 15th century. Spain is the most beautiful surviving mediaeval Hebrew Bible anywhere in the world,
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.
They also show the skill of the scribes and, as I said, the professional geographical connexions between them.
But the contents of the manuscripts are also very important, not least because in a way,
they achieve the exact opposite of what Benjamin Kennecott intended.
So they preserve the Jewish Nazaret tradition of textual transmission, which Kennecott himself was keen to diminish.
The Kennecott was trying to say, actually, this way of transmitting the text is unreliable.
But in the process of collecting these texts, he's helped preserve them.
So. So it's also a really important example. There are other examples within the collections,
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.
But the collections have a life of their own, and they they might.
So they've gone on to serve different purposes and to reveal different information and to be valued and valued.
Is that again almost understatement to be hugely, hugely important? There may be quite quite different reasons than the original collectors intended.
So that's that's another example of why the Kennecott collection is important, but it's not.
It's not alone in being important in these in one way or another.
So it is really, really difficult to single out one collection or one collector.
Well, speaking of collectors in the individual collections,
all the chapters in this book are dedicated to individual collectors or the collections they made,
except for one, and that's the Guineas a collection.
Can you tell us, Rebecca, what a Guineas is and what it contains?
Yes. So a Gansa is is the word for a repository which is in a synagogue and in synagogues all around the world,
a repository for sacred texts or for texts written in the sacred language of Hebrew.
So anything that has the word of God is considered sacred and can't be just thrown away.
It has to be carefully buried in the right way.
So while any text with with anything, I mean, it's been interpreted in different ways, in different places, but in this particular,
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.
Kyra, now, but first, that was the capital of Egypt before Cairo in the mediaeval period.
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?
They wanted to be on the safe side, I think. And what would happen is to stuff everything would be just gathered in the
Khanyisa and then eventually it would be interred in the kind of necessary way.
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.
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,
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.
And then this material began to come to light and people realised scholars and collectors realised that was a really,
really valuable repository of stuff that they didn't work, then weren't quite sure what stuff.
And then it came to light that it was really important material from the organiser of the Benin's synagogue.
So then there was a race against time.
It was very exciting moment, really in collecting history between Noboa,
who was the librarian of Oxford and gives the deputy library in Oxford and a very colourful character in Cambridge called Solomon Schechter.
And these two men were kind of going head to head to try and get material for their libraries,
the Cambridge Library and the body in Oxford from the Gansa and the now.
Now there's been a collaboration fantastically.
In 20th century century, there's been a collaboration between the two universities, so they now work together and they pool their resources.
But but at the time, at the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century,
it was a very, very fierce, quite bitter battle between these two very interesting men.
And if you could get the most material from the Gansa and what it contains is again astonishingly diverse,
and it provides a really wonderful window onto mediaeval Jewish life in the in the Mediterranean area, but also beyond.
Because this this community was very connected. It was a very important community, was very connected out in all directions.
And you have everything in there, from sacred texts to recipes to children, school books to love letters, almost everything.
A lot of the the the what's the word?
You know, the ordinary stuff is actually much more that is in Cambridge than in Oxford,
because the Neubauer and his team in Oxford were much more interested in collecting the very sort of scholarly texts.
So there's more of that in Oxford. Hugely important texts, but that.
But as a whole, what's really interesting is that when you pull what's in Oxford and Cambridge,
you just have this fabulous window onto a world that would, you know, would have been lost otherwise.
And these images, the the images of the Guineas are fragments and the many books and manuscripts that are reproduced in your book.
And is it only only available to scholars who come to Oxford?
Or can people see the images themselves elsewhere?
So in the case of the Khanyisa fragments, they have been digitised thanks to very generous benefactors and Polanski Foundation.
And I think maybe some others as well that the so that that collection is actually mostly available online and there
has been huge efforts to digitise as much of the what what else is in the collections as possible and the art.
The aim is to get everything digitised eventually, although of course,
that requires support from from outside, but it's very expensive and costly business.
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,
which is just fantastic. Obviously, there's nothing compares with actually seeing a physical manuscript drop physical book.
But but they are available online and the aim is for more and more of them to become available online.
And just to remind listeners the those images are can be seen that you've been talking about Rebecca.
They can be seen at Digital Dot, Bodleian Dot, 0x Dot AC Dot UK.
And of course they are. Many of them are reproduced in the book we've been discussing today.
Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries edited by Rebecca Abrams My Guest Today.
And together with, say, The Martian Herman Rebecca.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you very much. Thank you.