British Library Journal (volume 21, number 1, spring 1995)

British Library Journal (volume 21, number 1, spring 1995)

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Creator (organisation)
British Library
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English
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    Item type:Journal article,
    Yiddish manuscripts in the British Library
    (1995-05)
    Prager, Leonard
    ;
    Hill, Brad Sabin
    FEW Yiddish manuscripts predating the age of printing have survived the storms of Jewish and general history. The oldest extant dated Yiddish document is a rhymed inscription of a dozen words in the Worms Mahzor ('festival liturgy') of 1272, now in the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. By far the most important Yiddish manuscript is the dated 1382 Cambridge Codex from the famous Cairo Genizah in Fostat, Egypt. The Cambridge Codex has been the centre of a heated linguistic debate, Yiddishists maintaining that the language is Old Yiddish and many Germanists claiming it is High German in Hebrew letters. The historiography of this more than merely terminological question is itself a gripping chapter of cultural history, and one linguist has mounted what at present seems to be an unassailable defence of the Yiddishist position. This question of language is fundamental to bibliographical as well as linguistic investigation, and librarians have often been puzzled as to how to classify Yiddish materials. Today, librarians no longer describe Yiddish books as 'Judaeo-German', as was common practice in the British Museum Library and elsewhere until about fifty years ago. Yiddish, quite rightly, is classified linguistically among the Germanic languages; but owing to the script in which Yiddish has almost always been written - the Hebrew alphabet - Yiddish books and manuscripts are often found in Hebrew or Oriental collections.
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    Item type:Journal article,
    A 'catalogue of Hebrew printers'
    (1995-05)
    Hill, Brad Sabin
    FOR most of this century, an unbound manuscript of nearly a thousand leaves lay in the offices of the Hebrew Section of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books of the British Museum (later the Oriental Collections of the British Library). Despite its bulk, the manuscript remained unaccessioned, apparently unrecognized or unnoticed by curatorial staff, and unknown to researchers in the Hebrew collections of the British Museum Library. Mercifully, the manuscript was not lost or discarded overtime, as was the fate of similar material in the past, although it was certainly forgotten. At the time of the move of the Oriental Collections from Store Street in Bloomsbury to Orbit House near Blackfriars, in 1991, its yellowed leaves were boxed and labelled, and for the first time brought to the attention of scholars.
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