Beschreibung:

(Genesis 28:7-47:3), in Hebrew, manuscript scroll on parchment [Sephard (most probably Spain, perhaps Toledo), late thirteenth or fourteenth century (perhaps c.1300)] 6 membranes from a scroll, with 23 columns (last membrane complete but with 3, not 4 columns as others) of 50 lines of a fine Sephardic Hebrew square script, text complete from Genesis/Bereshit 28:7-43, not written according to vavei ha’amudim, with 63% of the standard number of canonical unusual letters and Tagim (special characters) and a large number of non-Canonical unusual letters and Tagim (here agreeing with the late thirteenth-century scroll sold in Sotheby’s New York, 24 November 2009), C14 tested by University of Arizona, Tucson (95% probability in range 1280-1390), some brittleness to edges of leaves, small scuffs in places, a small section cut from the foot of the last membrane and a tiny number of modern repairs, else in excellent and clean condition, 630 by 3348mm. Despite being a fragment of Genesis only, this scroll stands among the earliest witnesses to the original form of the Old Testament. The Torah (or Pentateuch) is the bedrock of the written culture of the Jews and Christians alike. It is, most probably, the oldest section of the Hebrew Bible, and is a text quite apart from all others to survive in manuscript, because of the extreme care and attention of countless generations of scribes to keep it in as close a form as possible as that known in the ancient world. While accepting that the earliest copies of their holiest texts would eventually moulder away, early Jewish populations attempted to replicate those scrolls in as close a format as possible in subsequent copies. They are written on scrolls, the oldest surviving format for written (rather than inscribed) texts, and on material prescribed by Talmudic law: gevil (that which Moses reportedly used for the scroll which he placed inside the Ark of the Covenant, and that which the majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls are written on). The text’s 304,805 letters and the spaces between them must be copied in accordance with strict laws from a correct exemplar and by a professional scribe. In our modern world, with digital images and facsimiles at our fingertips, the monumental effort of such a task can easily be overlooked. What is produced is a monument to countless generations of exacting toil, as well as a text stripped bare of any illustration or illumination in which the raw beauty of the script stands alone. The strict laws regarding the production of Torah scrolls have ensured that few early examples survive, as those with any damage to their text or wear are almost always placed with great ceremony in a Genizah (a ‘hiding-‘ or ‘storage-place’) in the synagogue and left to decay naturally. The oldest substantial manuscripts of the Old Testament in Hebrew are late ninth and tenth century in date. The Aleppo Codex (tenth century) is, perhaps rightly, regarded as the most accurate early witness to the Masoretic tradition of the text (the sections of that book relevant for this scroll were destroyed during the riots in Aleppo in 1947, but have been reconstructed by Professor Jordan Penkower). Only a handful of scrolls and fragments survive for each following century throughout the Middle Ages. Thus, all medieval Torah scrolls are exceedingly rare, and this scroll is among the oldest known to survive from southern Europe. Only two definitively older than this have come to the open market: (i) the scroll dated to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, sold in Sotheby’s London, 4 December 2007, lot 38, for £276,500; (ii) another dated to the early thirteenth century (c.1222-41), in Sotheby’s London, 6 July 2010, lot 32; and to these should be added that dated to the late thirteenth century, sold in Sotheby’s New York, 24 November 2009, which may be the contemporary of this fragment. In addition, the present fragment is most probably a witness to a crucial time in the history of the Hebrew