Hebrew Voices #156 – Bibles Written by Medieval Jewish Kids

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Estara: Gosh, we've got everything. We've got…

Nehemia: Aren’t there recipes and love letters?

Estara: … legal documents, we've got a sheet of music.

Nehemia: Wow!

Estara: We've got everything! We've got a whole society preserved in the Genizah.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I'm here today at Cambridge University with Dr. Estara Arrant. So, tell me about some of the research you did on your doctorate. I learned about this, and I was fascinated, because in my background dealing with Hebrew Bible manuscripts, a lot of it is, you look at the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex, and if you're really advanced, then you look at maybe a few other manuscripts, and these are like these monumental, kind of official manuscripts. And what you looked at in your research was really a completely different angle. Tell us about that.

Estara: I looked at everything that wasn't your nicest Bible, everything that was something people might consider informal, or scrappy, or less than formal - still nice, but not three columns, beautiful parchment, lots of decoration, full vowels. I looked at everything else because that had never been looked at before. People… you're right, they focus typically… all these are generalizations, they focus typically on the most complete specimens, the most beautiful specimens, the most famous specimens.

Nehemia: And maybe the most accurate specimens.

Estara: Well…

Nehemia: Or what they hope are the most accurate specimens.

Estara: Yeah. Well, the famous Tiberian codices, which we know are obviously the recensions of the text. But there are thousands of Bibles being written in the same period as the Masoretes, during and then after, which don't look like a Masoretic Bible. Some of them are written by children, some of them are written by adults for their own study. They look completely varied, and they had just not been studied.

Nehemia: When I first met you, I asked you this question. I’m like, “How would you know a child's Bible?” And you showed me one, and I'm like, “Oh, obviously that was written by a child!”

Estara: Scrolls, absolute scrolls. Yeah.

Nehemia: So, tell us… so no one's done that before. I mean, has anybody done that before, where they looked at children's Bibles from Hebrew… children's Bibles from the Middle Ages?

Estara: So, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger has written a fantastic article on children's writing exercises in the Genizah. She looked at… typically, they have writing done by a scribe that’s teaching the child, and then the child copies, and they're very colorful and they've got lots of artwork and decorations. And it's very obvious what it is.

Nehemia: What do you mean artwork? Like doodles?

Estara: Uh, no. Some of them are illuminated with figures, I think probably to keep the child's attention. They're very beautiful works of art.

Nehemia: Oh, so that’s one that the children studied.

Estara: Yes, yes, yes.

Nehemia: Not that they wrote.

Estara: Well, they would write in them. So, they would copy, the teacher would have…

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Estara: … and they would copy after. Those have been studied, and it was very clear what they are. But if you present me with a fragment of Leviticus that is poorly written, the handwriting is barely legible, people haven't paid much attention to that, because we know what Leviticus is. We can study a nice Tiberian recension of Leviticus. And why would anyone care about a scrappy little piece of paper?

Nehemia: That’s sometimes literally paper.

Estara: Literally paper.

Nehemia: It’s not always parchment.

Estara: Well, a couple of these Bibles are written on parchment. You don't want to call them Bibles; they're little fragments. They might not be full Bibles. A couple of them are written on parchment, but the vast majority of these fragments that are written in this really poor quality, uneducated, or semi-educated script, are on paper, because paper was cheap.

Nehemia: What period are we talking about?

Estara: Eleventh and onwards. The paper boom in the Middle East started around the 11th century.

Nehemia: Okay.

Estara: So before then, no, but onwards you see… and I have some quite late, very nice-looking paper Bible fragments.

Nehemia: What’s late?

Estara: Fifteenth, 16th century.

Nehemia: Okay, that's late.

Estara: That's late!

Nehemia: So, between the 11th and the 15th and 16th century, most of it is…

Estara: The majority of it is 11th to 13th century, on paper.

Nehemia: Alright. And so, these are Bibles written by children. Are they also sometimes written by semi-educated adults?

Estara: You can't truly know. If you look at my handwriting, I can write a nice cursive Hebrew script, but it probably doesn't look professional.

Nehemia: Well still, some of the ones you've shown me, they're obviously written by children.

Estara: Some of them are very scrolled. And I'm currently writing an article…

Nehemia: What do you mean by scrolled?

Estara: Scrolled, like scribbled.

Nehemia: Like a scrawl?

Estara: Yeah, just not very well done. You can barely tell that that's an Alef, or that's a Bet, or that's a Kaf. You just can't tell, or if you can tell, you can tell it’s done very badly. I'm currently writing an article on how to differentiate levels of ability in this kind of writing. It's a very challenging thing to do because terminology is very specific, and it's very hard to get quite right; there's a lot of inference that has to be made. It's not like traditional paleography, which deals with established scribal styles over time. It's chaotic writing that sometimes is more advanced and sometimes is less advanced. There have been studies on Greek writings of children.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Estara: But nothing that I’ve seen done on Hebrew writing.

Nehemia: Okay. And what you have here at Cambridge - we're sitting here in the Genizah research unit - and you have something really unique here, which is access to 200,000 fragments, and they’re not all Bible.

Estara: About 25,000 are Bible.

Nehemia: So, 25,000 Bible fragments, and altogether something like 196,000 is the number I heard, of fragments altogether.

Estara: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, what can you learn from the children's Bibles?

Estara: Well, first I'll say I want to be very careful in describing them as children's Bibles.

Nehemia: Okay. What's the correct term? Popular Bibles? Or…

Estara: There’s not really a correct term.

Nehemia: You're the ones coining the terms! Or you are the one coining the terms.

Estara: So, for Bibles that are written in a hand that is less than beautifully calligraphic, there's no real… this is uncharted territory.

Nehemia: Okay.

Estara: There's not really a scholarly accepted term, and each term is a bit problematic. If I say it's children's - but as I was saying earlier, I'm not a child, but if I were to write a comparative bit of script, it might not look very nice, because let's say I may not be trained. I can do paleography, and I've done some calligraphy with the right pen, but if I'm just writing with just a general ink pen, it's not going to look like that. But I'm an adult. If you call it children's… but if you call it informal, what about a scribe in training who's learning how to do the calligraphy? That's formalized writing.

Nehemia: So, the ones you’ve shown me would have to be the first or second day of training. Like, come on!

Estara: There's a spectrum. There's a huge, wide spectrum of ability.

Nehemia: Fair enough. Okay. So, some of these could have been writing exercises, and you've explained to me, and you’ll talk a little bit more about this, how some of them maybe weren't writing exercises, but it was somebody who was in synagogue and wanted to have a Bible to read from.

Estara: One of my favorite ones is this Bible, and it's well done. It’s very consistent writing, the shape of the letters is very consistent and measured. The most boring script, it’s just a line, “Bet, Alef,” we have about 60 pages of that.

Nehemia: Wow.

Estara: It's 60 pages that we know of, so probably quite a bit of the Torah, probably someone's personal study Bible. And it’s on cheap paper; it's not at all calligraphic, educated. It's written with the most basic pen and the most basic stick figure letters you can imagine. But it's one of my favorites because it shows that everyday people - not trained scribes writing in some monastery somewhere, as you kind of think about the conception - but everyday people would write 60, 70, 80 pages…

Nehemia: That's what survived. It might have been a much bigger…

Estara: Exactly, it might have been a complete Pentateuch.

Nehemia: Yeah, Okay. So, somebody could have been studying from that. He could have been sitting in the synagogue following the Torah portion.

Estara: Well, the size is something he could carry with him.

Nehemia: Okay, that's interesting. So, talk a minute about the Cairo Genizah. We skipped over that. So, you've got this big collection…

Estara: Right, right.

Nehemia: So, the most important discovery in Jewish history, I would say - tell me if you disagree with this - before the Dead Sea Scrolls, was the Cairo Genizah.

Estara: Obviously, yes!

Nehemia: Well, I guess it’s subjective.

Estara: We have so much history… we can uncover and trace more Jewish history because of the Cairo Genizah than… I can't think of another field.

Nehemia: Right.

Estara: But there are many findings that may have importance in other ways, so I don't want to diminish the importance of other findings. But of course.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough. But in the scope of the material, it's not just Bibles, 25,000 Bible fragments out of 196,000 fragments…

Estara: We have more writing represented by everyday people in the Genizah than you have for most of medieval Europe.

Nehemia: Wow! That's a profound statement.

Estara: I had 300 fragments in my PhD thesis, which I deemed written in a less formal, less than… 300!

Nehemia: Children, children! Yeah, go on!

Estara: I think 300, or a bit more than 300…

Nehemia: Okay.

Estara: … 300. And where I found that certain fragments belonged together is more than one page, and I counted that as one.

Nehemia: And you counted that as one? Okay. So, it's a lot more than 300 fragments.

Estara: No, it’s 300.

Nehemia: Three hundred manuscripts or 300 fragments? You're saying if they connect then that's counted as one.

Estara: That's counted as one.

Nehemia: So, 300 what we call…

Estara: 300 manuscripts, at least.

Nehemia: Okay, yeah.

Estara: At least 300 manuscripts. But where else in history of the same period can you find 300 papers written by someone who's barely educated?

Nehemia: You're saying that's not common. So, here's where I wanted to…

Estara: Also, I should say not barely educated. Literacy was very high in the Middle East at this time.

Nehemia: So that’s what I wanted to ask you…

Estara: Most everybody learned to read and write.

Nehemia: So, let's go back to the Cairo Genizah before we get to that. So, the Genizah was this room in the synagogue, or kind of a closet actually.

Estara: It’s a closet, in the upstairs part of the…

Nehemia: And they would kind of throw stuff over the top pole, or something, I heard.

Estara: Yeah.

Nehemia: And then some of it actually comes from the cemetery, maybe. In any event, it came from Cairo, because Cairo is so dry it survived. And what blows my mind is that if you would have gone to any synagogue in the Jewish world, and if it had been the right climate conditions and maybe right geopolitical conditions, you could have found the Cairo Genizah in almost, maybe, any Jewish town. And the reason we didn't is because the synagogue was destroyed by wars and floods and fire, and it was moist, and then it was put in a cemetery. But it survived in Cairo.

Estara: And this is not the only Genizah that's been discovered.

Nehemia: So, what are some other genizahs?

Estara: There are genizot in Eastern Europe that are full of manuscripts that have been destroyed or have been lost.

Nehemia: Right. So, the point is, this is one synagogue out of what must have been hundreds across the Jewish world, thousands.

Estara: Every synagogue has a genizah.

Nehemia: Right.

Estara: Or is supposed to have a genizah.

Nehemia: Right.

Estara: The synagogue here in Cambridge has a genizah!

Nehemia: So, in Israel we have genizah dumpsters. Did I ever tell you about that?

Estara: No!

Nehemia: It’s a giant green dumpster, and it says that it's for anything that has God's name written on it. You can put it in that dumpster and it's going to be treated with respect.

Estara: Okay. Even though it’s in a dumpster.

Nehemia: Well, because there's just such a great quantity! And there's no room. In Israel we don't have a lot of room.

Estara: It's not an old rusty dumpster?

Nehemia: It kind of is. It's an outdoor giant green… we call them tzfarde’a, “frog”. It's a giant green dumpster, and it looks just like a regular garbage dumpster, except in big letters it says, “This is not for garbage, it's for holy books.”

Estara: It’s for holy books.

Nehemia: Anything with holy writing on it. And you think about it, there's a synagogue and they run off a bunch of photocopies, what are they going…

Estara: I've had this problem. I've printed up a bunch of photocopies of Bibles that have God's name on them. I need to put them in our genizah, I'm not going to throw them away, as you said. I'm a religious Jewish woman, I wouldn’t do that.

Nehemia: So, the Cairo Genizah has these documents that have survived. And they’re not all Bibles though, that’s the interesting thing.

Estara: No, no, we’ve got… Gosh, we've got everything. We've got…

Nehemia: Weren't there recipes and love letters?

Estara: … legal documents, we've got a sheet of music.

Nehemia: Wow!

Estara: We've got everything! We've got a whole society preserved in the Genizah.

Nehemia: That's amazing. And that's one synagogue. That's amazing. So, the informal Bibles that you were looking at in the Cairo Genizah… This is the question I wanted to ask - the average Christian and Muslim in this period, could they read and write?

Estara: Muslims, yes. I'm not an expert in Christianity. I'm assuming that in the Middle East, yes.

Nehemia: I’m talking about in Cairo.

Estara: Being able to read and write in the Middle East in an Islamic society, under Islamic government, was essential.

Nehemia: That's interesting. So, you're saying the average Middle Easterner who wasn't Jewish could probably read and write.

Estara: Yes. We do have evidence, and I write about this in my thesis, of multicultural schools.

Nehemia: What?

Estara: Yes, the Jews and Muslims, and I think Christians.

Nehemia: In the same school?

Estara: In the same school.

Nehemia: Wow.

Estara: Yeah.

Nehemia: That's interesting.

Estara: So, I think there's no question it was widespread, literacy. You taught your children, including many girls, to read and write because they had to be able to do that. They had to be able to engage with wider society. One of the first articles I published was on begging letters in the Genizah. So, these are letters…

Nehemia: What’s begging letters?

Estara: A begging letter is… often someone who is poor or who’s traveled to Cairo or Egypt, or in the surrounding areas - not everything from the Cairo Genizah is from Cairo, in fact it’s from across the Middle East.

Nehemia: And it ends up in Cairo.

Estara: And ends up in Cairo. So, someone who traveled or someone who's destitute and who, say, needs a meal, needs food. A lot of it has to do with bread; they want food. They’ll write a letter to one of the trustees in the synagogue. In Egypt at this time, they had funds to provide for poor people, and they'd say, “I need…” They even had a weekly dole of bread; on certain days of the week, they'd give out bread. So, you'd have letters saying, “I'm requesting this” or, “I need that”. A lot of these letters are written… most of them are in Judeo-Arabic, some of them are in Hebrew.

Nehemia: So, tell us what Judeo-Arabic is.

Estara: Judeo-Arabic is… Well, it's controversial whether it’s its own form of Arabic, but essentially for the layperson to understand, it's Arabic written in Hebrew letters. It often has its own dialectal features, forms of Jewish Arabic, but also can have features of wider non-Jewish Arabic as well.

But what I was saying about these begging letters is, the majority of them were written in Judeo-Arabic. Some of them are written in Hebrew, and those hadn't been studied as much, so I did an addition of three, and two of the three were written in handwriting which wasn't, again, wasn't calligraphic handwriting. And it could have been someone who was a scribe who was just writing in basic handwriting. He needed to write a quick letter and send it off. But some of the syntax and some of the personal nature of one of the letters made me think perhaps… I can't prove it, perhaps it was written by the person themself, someone poor asking for food.

Nehemia: And so maybe he doesn’t have all that much education. So, it doesn’t have to be children using informal Bibles is what you’re getting at.

Estara: And some scholars believe that maybe these begging letters in Hebrew were written by travelers who didn't know Arabic and would write in Hebrew.

Nehemia: That makes a lot of sense.

Estara: From Europe, so that we know that there is some literacy coming in from Europe as well.

Nehemia: We've got the Kiev Letter. The Kiev Letter is this letter, and we don't know… There is a place there where it says that there’s this guy from Kiev and he’s fallen into debt, and so they send him a letter, and he brings it to Egypt and probably a bunch of other places, and he’s basically asking for money to buy himself out of debt, because he’d been in chains. It’s the earliest reference in Jewish sources to Kiev, and it’s dated to around the year 930.

And the most interesting thing about it is it has a signature, a seal or something like that, some sort of an inscription written in what’s claimed to be Khazarian. So, in other words, he’s coming with this letter, and to make it official, some local administrator, signs off, “Okay, this guy isn’t a scam artist, this is legitimate.” And they were under Khazar rule at the time - although some people say it's not Khazarian - and some of the names there are Turkic and some are Slavic, of the witnesses. And those are the Jews!

Estara: Okay.

Nehemia: There’s a guy whose name was something like Hanukkah Bar, and then it’s… I don’t know, some Slavic name.

Estara: A lot of these things have been lost to history.

Nehemia: Yeah. And that’s from the Cairo Genizah.

Estara: The genizahs preserved things that otherwise would have been lost to history, I think.

Nehemia: That's the amazing thing, yeah. Alright, so we have these informal slash children's Bibles. Some of them are definitely children, some of them are semi-educated.

Estara: Some of them are definitely, some of them are probably children training to be scribes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Estara: And at a young age could achieve a high level of writing sophistication.

Nehemia: Now look, if I wrote a Bible today, it would look like it was written by a child.

Estara: That was my point earlier!

Nehemia: And that's fair!

Estara: The thing is, a lot of the things we do inferring the authorship of these documents, is that - it's inference. And so, nothing I say is the final word on this.

Nehemia: And here's the difference though - we don't normally write today. If we want something, we pull it up on the internet; if you live in a society where everything is written, I would think… and I guess this is a question I have. So, when the merchant sends a letter to another merchant, how different is that from the Bibles that you're looking at?

Estara: It’s often written in Arabic or Judeo-Arabic. It's written in a very fast script. He’s not trying to make it look beautiful, he's just writing it off very quickly. It can be very challenging to read, and I mean challenging to read from a graphic perspective.

Nehemia: Like my handwriting.

Estara: A doctor’s handwriting.

Nehemia: Right.

Estara: But a Bible has a level of sacredness, so even somebody who's only basically educated, and most people in the Genizah, or represented by a genizah, had a proper education. So even someone who had a lower end of the proper education would still approach it with a level of decorum, and so you see more care given. I see Bible fragments which are the scrolled kind of… but they still try to vocalize it, and they still try to put the vowels in. They don't do a very good job, but they try.

Nehemia: We’ll talk about how they don't do a good job with the vowels. That's really important, especially in your research.

Estara: I mean even placing it. Sometimes they struggle to place the vowel under the letter.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Estara: So, they’ll place it beside the letter or bit inside the letter.

Nehemia: That’s interesting.

Estara: But they try. And that’s the point, that the difference between - is your question - between a letter sent off is the level of attention given.

Nehemia: So, they're not trying when they're writing the letter, but they are when they're trying to write a Bible.

Estara: It depends on the letter, I guess.

Nehemia: That's true.

Estara: If it's a legal document they do.

Nehemia: But if they're writing, like I said, one merchant writing to another… You’re right, if it's a letter from the Gaon in Babylonia, it's going to be much more formal than it’s…

Estara: Of course. One of the interesting features on signatures of these letters is that some people sign, and the handwriting is starkly bad in comparison to the other signatures or the person who wrote it. You can just tell this person has a basic level of writing skill and they've not gone beyond it.

Nehemia: Oh! So, they don’t write the letter, but they sign it.

Estara: Yeah, someone who may sign it, if it’s a deed or a ketubah, or something and someone signs it. Yeah.

Nehemia: So, the signatures are a lower level of skill than the actual body of the text.

Estara: Sometimes. Sometimes.

Nehemia: That’s interesting.

Estara: Which again, it attests that some people may know enough to be able to do things like sign documents or write passages of Scripture, and that might be all they know to do. But they can still do it, and that's really cool.

Nehemia: Since you used the term “informal”, I want to draw an analogy here, and this might be completely off base, I have no idea. But Yechezkel Kutscher, or Edward Kutscher, was a professor at Hebrew University, and he wrote a very important book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. And he argued that there were two types of Dead Sea Scrolls biblical texts. He said they were formal texts and then informal texts. And he gives the example… I’m drawing an analogy, but he himself draws an analogy to his time, this is in the 50’s. He says, “This is like in churches where they’ll read from the King James Version in the public reading, but at home, you studied the RSV, the Revised Standard Version, because it's in the English of your time.”

And he gives the example… Isaiah has this very obscure word yahelu, from the word halel, which is “bright”. So yahelu means “they will shine”. And in 1Q Isaiah a, that’s replaced with ya’iru, and why ya’iru? Because who knows what yahelu means, right? It’s obscure! Like, what is this, a test? It's this poetic Hebrew, where ya’iru is like an everyday word. And so, his argument is that they were revising some of the language - and certainly their orthography, the spelling - to the way that they wrote, and they spoke, even though they may have acknowledged like, “Yeah, okay. What we've received from earlier generations is yahelu, and you can read that publicly in the synagogue, but I'm sitting at home studying. I don't want to go look up some word, or ask some word or some… I don’t even have a way of looking it up even. I don't want to have to go ask some scholar what this word means,” so they would put in a more modern word and they’d put in the full orthography. And so, he calls those “vulgar texts”. Now, he's not talking about the handwriting…

Estara: No, he’s talking about the content.

Nehemia: … because the handwriting is indistinguishable. It's the content. He calls those “vulgar Bibles” that were used for personal study. So, can you compare that concept to what you're looking at? Is there some parallel there?

Estara: Yes and no. The parallel is that the majority of documents that I looked at in my thesis were written either by a scribe for someone that could cheaply buy it and study it, or, written by someone themselves for their own study. So, I think that's where the parallel ends, because the amount of textual variance in my corpus, the actual content changes… very small.

Nehemia: Really?

Estara: Very, very small. The Bible, by this period of time, was pretty much… I mean the content of the Bible, was standard. I mean, people weren't changing words to try to… at least not in the corpus, and that I looked at… I think my thesis, without the case study I published before, was around 1,500 Bibles, 1,500 fragments in total. Not Bibles; fragments, individual fragments. With the case study, it was around 1,800.

Nehemia: Wow!

Estara: So, of those, I didn't find any major… sometimes they would put a Vav where you don't expect it, or a Yud.

Nehemia: Okay.

Estara: Or they would leave out a Vav where you want to see a Vav. But other than that, it wasn't like they were shifting the register of the text or the content to fit the understanding of someone who's not a scribe. But… that's not that at all.

Nehemia: But still, you have somebody putting in a Vav or a Yud in a place where the standard text doesn't have that.

Estara: But it doesn't adapt the meaning.

Nehemia: So, it’s on a much smaller scale.

Estara: It doesn't change the meaning; they wouldn't substitute a more difficult word with an easier one.

Nehemia: No, that I wouldn’t expect them to. But basically, you're saying that the text was fixed, and even when a child wrote it, it wasn't substantially different from what you'd find in the Aleppo Codex.

Estara: Right. The contents, yes.

Nehemia: That's interesting. Now when it comes to vowels, that's not the case.

Estara: When it comes to vowels that’s not the case.

Nehemia: Let’s talk about vowels. Actually, let's talk about consonants first.

Nehemia: Estara, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a fascinating conversation.

Estara: Thanks for having me, this has been fun.

Nehemia: In this program, we love to talk about the Bible, and the program is called Hebrew Voices, and this wasn't just your Hebrew voice, it's the Hebrew voices of these different children and maybe semi-educated Jews who wrote Bibles.

Estara: How could they know 1,000 years, more than 1,000 years later…

Nehemia: That their voice would be heard.

Estara: …someone would be talking about their homework mistake…

Nehemia: All over the world.

Estara: … got broadcasted.

Nehemia: Thank you for joining us.

Estara: Thank you.

Nehemia: Shalom.

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