Document of the Month: A Judeo-Arabic Bible Commentary

Document of the Month 4/25: A Judeo-Arabic Bible Commentary

A Judeo-Arabic Bible Commentary in the Bamiyan Papers: A Family Heirloom or a Scholar’s Tool?

Author

Nadia Vidro

Summary

This month’s document, NLI Ms.Heb.8333.6, stands out in several ways: it is the only Judaeo-Arabic fragment among the Bamiyan Papers; it preserves a portion of Saadya Gaon’s Bible commentary not found elsewhere; and it represents a rare literary fragment that employs script-switching for the aesthetic purpose of margin keeping. Assuming it is an organic part of the cache – and not an admixture from a dealer’s collection – the presence of NLI Ms.Heb.8333.6 in the Bamiyan Papers may suggest that at least some Bamiyani Jews originally came from Arabic-speaking regions of the Middle East, and their descendants may have kept the manuscript as a family heirloom. Alternatively, it may have belonged to a scholarly member of their community who had learned Arabic to engage with contemporary developments in Jewish religious thought.