Document of the Month: A Judeo-Arabic Bible Commentary

The online series, Document of the Month, presents some of the most interesting and revealing medieval documents from the desks of Invisible East researchers and their colleagues worldwide.

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. 

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