A Trip Through English History

Creatures from the Kennicott Bible, an illuminated manuscript copy of the Hebrew Bible, copied in A Coruña, Spain in 1476 by the calligrapher Moses ibn Zabarah and illuminated by Joseph ibn Hayyim 🔮🦇👼🏼🐉🐻🐊🐒🦚🪞

It is regarded as one of the most exquisite illuminated manuscripts in Hebrew and one of the most lavishly illuminated Sephardic manuscript of the 15th century. According to the historian Cecil Roth, one of the most outstanding aspects of this copy is the close collaboration it shows between the calligrapher and the illuminator, rare in this type of work.

In 1476, Isaac, a Jewish silversmith from Coruña, son of Salomón de Braga, commissioned an illuminated Bible from the scribe Moses ibn Zabarah who lived in Coruña with his family on behalf of his patron. He spent ten months to scribe the Bible, writing two folios on a daily basis. Illumination of the manuscript was the responsibility of Joseph ibn Hayyim, who is remembered thanks to this work.

The first documentation of the Jewish presence dates to 1375. Jewish population in A Coruña grew rapidly throughout the Late Middle Ages. It is thought that after the persecution of Jews in Castile, a large number of Jewish people took refuge in Galicia. The Jewish community in Coruña traded with Castile and Aragon, and in 1451 they contributed to the rescue of the Murcian Jews with a large sum of money, which could demonstrate the prosperity of the community.

This writing fragment is nearly 1,000 years old, and it was made by a child who lived in Egypt during the Middle Ages. Several letters of the Hebrew alphabet are written on the page, probably as part of a writing exercise, but the child apparently got a little bored/distracted, as they also left a drawing of a camel (or possibly a person), a doodle that resembles a menorah, and an assortment of other scribbles on the page.

This is the work of a Jewish child from Fustat (Old Cairo), and it was preserved in the collection known as the Cairo Genizah Manuscripts. As the University of Cambridge Library explains:

Sources & More Info:

Girls don’t want boys, girls want a facsimile edition of the “Birds’ Head Haggadah” (Southern Germany, c. 1300)

Image from the Israel Museum: https://www.imj.org.il/en/collections/199815-0

Happy Passover, here's the oldest illustrated Haggadah, which in keeping with the Middle Ages, makes the obvious choice of giving everyone bird's heads.

One theory is that it was a way to obey the commandment against graven images, specifically of humans. The pointed hats were used as a device by Jewish and Christian illustrators alike to denote Jewish characters; some parts of Europe mandated that Jews wear these hats to distinguish themselves from their gentile neighbors.

Drawing with words

These images are not just spectacular to look at, they are also special from a production point of view. The shared feature in all four of them is the manner in which the pictures are formed: with words! The lines that make up the rider and the dachshund are, if you look carefully, tiny scribbly lines of Hebrew. The swan and hare are shaped - filled - with bold ninth-century writing. Cases like this throw our regular distinction of text versus image upside-down: the two can obviously not always be strictly separated.  

More about this unusual practice in this longer blog post I wrote.

Pics: London, British Library, Harley 647 (hare and swan); London, British Library, Add. 21160 (dachshund and rider).

Murano glass Judaica. Italy, XIX-XX century.

The uniqueness of this collection, which has been formed for a long time, lies in the fact that all items intended for synagogue events and domestic rituals are made of glass - a material that has not been used in Judaica, unlike metal, in wide demand. Due to the fragility of the material and the destruction of Jewish ritual objects during the WWII, such things are few and far between and are extremely rare in collections.

If you say (B)CE instead of BC/AD, you aren’t valid.

^^^^^

This is…. dumb. You have to make Christian confessions of faith to do history?

No but it’s entirely a move toward secularism to use the other form and is something obnoxious academics who oppose Christianity insist on. There is no reason to change it when it works perfectly well other than erasure of religious influence.

The move has already been made - like decades ago. I’ve benefited from enough Jewish historians and Bible scholars to not refer to them as “obnoxious academics”.

1) it’s inaccurate - Jesus was born 6-4 BCE

2) It requires making a theological claim about who Jesus was just to state a date and it makes those kind of claims seem routine and insignificant. As a Christian it does nothing for me if someone who doesn’t believe it calls Jesus “Lord” and “Christ”.

I’m not calling Jewish historians obnoxious (but tbh most of them who aren’t religious are) and the fact that it’s 6 years off doesn’t really matter if we don’t actually readjust the dates anyway. I know there’s no inherent value in people just saying something different if they don’t believe in Christ anyway, but it’s important that our society remember where it came from and not find every way to become detached from Christianity even if most of them don’t actually believe it because it’s where we draw the entirety of morality which is obviously essential for a society that wants to last any significant period of time.

Hey you guys did you know society was invented by Christians and Christianity is where all morality comes from

This is why when I am talking about the expulsion of the Jews from England, I must refer to The Year of Our Lord 1290