This is the  first Hebrew-language Talmudic dictionary to achieve wide circulation. The present manuscript is among the earliest (if not the earliest) substantial Middle Eastern copy of the text extant and almost certainly the oldest in private hands. Judith Schlanger, the Hebrew specialist in Paris, has started to work on this manuscript, and she thinks the early date is sustainable and that the importance of this manuscript is greater than originally thought.

The first Hebrew-language Talmudic dictionary to achieve wide circulation, Sefer he-arukh has had an outsized impact on Jewish lexicography and Talmudic interpretation for over nine centuries. Despite its status as a classic of traditional rabbinic literature, it has yet to be published in a critical edition that accounts for the many surviving manuscripts and Genizah fragments. The present exemplar is among the earliest (if not the earliest) substantial Middle Eastern copy of the text extant and almost certainly the oldest in private hands.

Text
pp. 1-444, [portions of Rabbi Nathan ben Jehiel’s Sefer he-arukh], incipit, “de-pirka kamma de-nazir hareini nazir hen ahat… tinok be-va-yik[ra] rabb[ah] be-resh tsav am[ar] r[abbi] yosei mi-penei mah.”

With their migration from the Middle East to North Africa and Southern Europe over the course of the early Middle Ages, many Jews found themselves building communities in places where Aramaic was not the lingua franca and where the realia referred to in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds were unfamiliar. This situation naturally necessitated the composition of glossaries that could be used as reference works by those studying Talmudic law. The first of these dictionaries were compiled in Judeo-Arabic by scholars residing within the Islamicate world but were therefore simultaneously inaccessible to many of their brethren living under Christendom (Abramson, 1984).

Into this state of affairs stepped Rabbi Nathan ben Jehiel, co-head (together with his two brothers) of the yeshiva in Rome and a widely respected Italian Jewish legal scholar. In Sefer he-arukh (The Organized Book), completed at the dawn of the twelfth century, Rabbi Nathan explicates, in alphabetical order—and in Hebrew—the many difficult terms in the Talmuds, as well as in other corpora of rabbinic literature; in several hundred cases, he glosses a given term with its Judeo-Italian equivalent. His detailed explanations contain material of historical and bibliographical value, including descriptions of rare Jewish customs, alternate readings of traditional sources, and quotations of otherwise-unknown passages from important works by early sages (Rovner, 1993 and Ta-Shma, 2001). In addition, due to his stature as a rabbinic authority, the interpretations of various Talmudic discussions given in his dictionary carried legal weight with many later scholars. The model for such a lexical-encyclopedic work may have been Papias’ Elementarium doctrinae rudimentum, a Latin dictionary of difficult words found in the Bible and Patristic and other writings composed in Italy c. 1040-1050 (Ta-Shma, 2001).

Sefer he-arukh went on to exert enormous influence on subsequent Talmudic lexicography, with several authors compiling addenda and corrigenda to, as well as epitomes or reworkings of, the original text, often giving their books titles that played on the name of Rabbi Nathan’s magnum opus. Its importance as a tool for study is witnessed by the fact that it was among the very first books to be published when Hebrew printing with movable type began in Rome c. 1469-1472. It would later be reissued four times in the sixteenth century and at numerous points thereafter. It (or perhaps once of its adaptations) even served Christian Hebraists like Sebastian Münster (Basel, 1527), Philippe d’Aquin (Paris, 1629), and Johannes Buxtorf (Basel, 1639) in composing their own works intended for those who wished to understand the language of traditional rabbinic literature. Because of its exegetical value, starting in the nineteenth century attempts were made to entirely rearrange the text of Sefer he-arukh into a kind of commentary on the Talmud and midrashim (Brisman, 2000 and Rafeld, 2003).

The first (and, so far, only) critical edition of Sefer he-arukh was produced in 1878-1892 by Alexander Kohut, who based his text on seven manuscripts to which he had access, as well as on the first seven printed editions. While his version of the lexicon is the best one available, many have drawn attention to its shortcomings, and an updated edition taking into consideration more (and earlier) manuscripts remains a scholarly desideratum (Abramson, 1971-1974 and Abramson, 1984). Only very circumscribed portions of the text have been studied at even close to the necessary depth (see Cuomo, 1974 and Sulkin, 1975).

No doubt due to its popularity, Sefer he-arukh (including its various adaptations) has come down to us in hundreds of codices and fragments. Building on Blondheim (1935), Cuomo (1974) described sixty-eight manuscripts of the non-abbreviated version of the book, of which thirteen were found to postdate the editio princeps. Among the remaining fifty-five, only three Sassoon volumes, including the present one, are still owned privately (the other two are MS Sassoon 986 and MS Sassoon 1008). (Almost all of the early manuscripts discovered more recently in other private collections are fragments of one or two leaves.) Our manuscript was probably originally copied in two volumes comprising about 1,358 pages. In its current state, it contains entries from the letters dalet (pp. 1-8), vav (pp. 9-10), and zayin (pp. 11-12) from volume 1, as well as samekh (pp. 13-48), ayin (pp. 48-103), pe (pp. 103-178), tsadi (pp. 178-208), kof (pp. 208-305), resh (pp. 306-352), shin (pp. 353-417), and tav (pp. 417-444) from volume 2.