I am sitting in the new building of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin with the Erfurt manuscript of the Tosefta (Ms. or. fol. 1220) in front of me. I have consulted the text of this manuscript (described here) – as transcribed by M. Zuckermandel and used by Saul Lieberman (more on them below) – countless times and have looked at the pictures and digitized version. I have read about the manuscript and its history. But having this volume in front of me and being able to gently page through it is a different experience altogether.
The philosopher Bruno Latour has suggested that we take seriously the possibility that objects have their own agency. Aside from the fact that only a few centuries ago we were much more likely to ascribe actual power to objects, even today our interaction with objects is much more reciprocal than we normally believe. When we interact with objects, we can respond to them. The ozone hole is a classic example (we cause it; its existence forces us to react), but even a ball in motion in a sporting event forces us into an active relationship with it.
I leave to the philosophers the question of whether Latour’s conception of objects is philosophically useful. What has always been clear to me, though, is the pedagogical power of objects. I have long been attracted to the practice of teaching with objects. In the Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project, we attempt to show how objects can open up into wide and interesting stories (see, for example, this one on Jewish gladiators). I confess that in most of my classroom teaching, I have not done enough with objects. Yet as I look at this volume, it seems to encapsulate an entire course on Jewish history.
The Erfurt manuscript is the earliest and best witness to the Tosefta. Yet the Tosefta is itself a somewhat mysterious document. It reads much like the Mishnah, largely following its order. Some parts of it are identical to the Mishnah; others presuppose and comment on passages found in the Mishnah; and yet others seem to precede the Mishnah. While the Mishnah became the base text for two Talmuds (Palestinian and Babylonian), we do not know where, when, or why the Tosefta was redacted as a single document, nor how it was used. The Erfurt manuscript is our earliest manuscript that people were actually reading the Tosefta as an independent document.
That, though, is only preface to the story of our manuscript, which dates to the 12th century. The manuscript itself is hefty, heavy, and must have been expensive to produce. It is made of large parchment pages dotted with pinholes on the margin, to help the scribe keep a straight line. The scribe was also thrifty enough that when a page ripped, he stitched it back together rather than start a fresh one.
The one of many unknown, highly skilled scribes of Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages.
Who commissioned it, and why? There may be a clue at the end, where a note records that the manuscript was pawned by a man named Rabbi Jacob son of Rabbi Simcha Ha-Levi (along, perhaps, with another man who seems unrelated). We do not know if Rabbi Jacob was the original owner or a later one, or the date of the pawn. This raises its own fascinating questions about the pawning of manuscripts between Jews in the Middle Ages. Curiously, the pawn broker here promises to return, upon receipt of the money, “this or a chumash [Hebrew Bible, or part of one] or a machzor [high holiday prayer book].” A manuscript was a manuscript; it seems not to have had any particular value to Rabbi Jacob.
Many heavily read Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages are full of scribal notes correcting and emending the text. Some of the more heavily annotated manuscripts, such as the Sassoon Bible, have notes in multiple hands. Not the Erfurt Tosefta. There a few notes here and there; rarely more than one a page. It is possible that the manuscript, which is still in excellent condition, was actually hardly used.
The Tosefta was one of fifteen extant Hebrew manuscripts used by the Erfurt Jewish community. Some of these manuscripts, such as an enormous Bible, are significant works, and there is a long, complex, and bloody history behind their survival. That story, with pogroms, property seizures, and ultimately the seizure of these manuscripts into Christian libraries, encapsulates the story of German Jews in the Middle Ages.
By the nineteenth century this entire collection of fifteen manuscripts made it to the Royal Library in Berlin (which would become the Prussian State Library, and now the Staatsbibliothek). In the 1870s, it was rebound, oddly, by Paul de Lagarde, a notorious antisemite, at (he drily notes on the first leaf of the manuscript), his own expense – Lagarde apparently thought it was actually the Jerusalem Talmud, although I do not know that it would have made a difference. It then came to the attention of two critical figures in the history of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, or academic study of Jews and Judaism. In his 1878 catalogue of Hebrew manuscripts in the Royal Library, Moritz Steinschneider notes it in his second volume as item 159, and claims that the handwriting is “between German and Italian.” Steinschneider was perhaps the preeminent bibliographer of Hebrew books in his day, and his catalogues both in Germany and at the Bodleian Library at Oxford opened a new era of scholarship. Although of modest means, he amassed his own collection of 4,500 books that ultimately ended up in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. His archive is also there.
Steinschneider mentions in his catalogue the work being done with the Erfurt Tosefta manuscript at the same time by Moses Zuckermandel. Zuckermandel‘s primary scholarly contribution was a critical edition of the Tosefta, using both the Erfurt manuscript and one in Vienna. Unlike Steinschneider, Zuckermandel was a rabbi and is an excellent exemplar of the German rabbi-scholar at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Like Lagarde, he was also allowed (?) to write in the Erfurt Tosefta manuscript. His note(s) in German at the end of the volume (transcribed here) comment primarily on the last bound page of the Tosefta, which is actually a half-page from a different work altogether. The Tosefta manuscript is incomplete, for unknown reasons.
During World War II, the librarians of the Prussian Royal Library divided their entire manuscript collection and shipped them, for safe-keeping, throughout Germany. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind what was shipped where, probably because there really wasn’t any – they scrambled to do what they could with the time that they had. One of the Hebrew manuscripts from Erfurt, for example, ended up in Marburg. For most of the other manuscripts, we simply do not know where they spent the war before somehow making it back to Berlin. Our Tosefta manuscript may well not have left Berlin. We know that some manuscripts were storied in the armored basement of the Reich Ministry for Economic Affairs, which was next to the library. The basement suffered damage from bombing and a fire, which may account for the soot marks on the edges of the manuscript.
Why the Erfurt manuscripts were saved at all is an intriguing question for which we don’t have a clear answer. Perhaps it was part of the deliberate Nazi plan to preserve Jewish artefacts, remembrances of the race they had pledged to exterminate. The Nazis saved and catalogued many Jewish items, both books and ritual objects. We know that the Nazis collected some Jewish books for “research,” to demonstrate the inferiority of Jews. There is also a theory that they planned to open a “Museum of an Extinct Jewish Race,” but there is little evidence to support it. More likely the survival of the manuscript was due to the work of dedicated librarians who were loathe to part with valuable manuscripts, even if they were Jewish. That’s simply how librarians roll.
Beginning in the 1930s, Saul Lieberman became interested in the Tosefta. Lieberman, born in Belaraus in 1898, was a Talmudic prodigy. He attended the Slobodka yeshiva – the Harvard of yeshivahs – and then got a secular education. By 1928 he went to Palestine where he received a Masters at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He began his academic career at Hebrew University (curiously, without a PhD, which he never earned) but after being laid off, moved in 1940 to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, which both trained Conservative rabbis and, at the time, was one of the few centers for the academic study of Judaism in the United States. It is hard to overemphasize the impact that Lieberman had throughout his career (he died in 1983) on the development of Jewish studies in the United States and on the nascent Conservative Movement. His crowning academic achievement was his critical edition of and magisterial commentary on the Tosefta. He began publishing this in 1955, and left the work incomplete. Lieberman thought that the Erfurt manuscript is our best witness for the Tosefta, and while he respected Zuckermandel’s work, he thought it had too many errors. So working from photographs, Lieberman redid the transcription, comparing it with other manuscripts and witnesses. It appears that Lieberman never saw the manuscript itself.
The next chapter of Jewish history has yet to be written, but I wonder what role, if any, this otherwise obscure manuscript of the Tosefta will play in it.
My sincere thanks to Petra Figeac and the staff at the Orientabteilung for allowing me access to this exceptional manuscript on short notice.
