The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

20 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
By the mid-1980s, the number of known manuscripts of Palestinian
Targum from the Cairo Genizah had increased to 38, and the total
number of pages of text had exceeded 200. Most of the new discoveries
were facilitated by the conservation project undertaken by
Dr Stefan Reif, Director of the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge
University Library. Indeed, most of the newly discovered fragments
belong to the New Series and Additional Series of the Cambridge
Collection, most of which had been virtually neglected and inaccessible
previously. As many of you know, I had the privilege of collecting
all of these fragments into a single edition that was published
in 1986. 5
With the production of microfilm copies of some of the major
Genizah collections, much of the initial work of search and
identification could be carried out just about anywhere in the world.
However, this modern expedient had its limitations. First, certain
major collections have not yet been filmed, for example, the Antonin
and Firkovitch Collections in St Petersburg (Leningrad), to which I
shall return shortly. Secondly, many frames of the microfilms, even
of the finest libraries, such as those of Cambridge University and of
the Jewish Theological Seminary, are not always fully legible. As a
result those scholars who initially avail themselves of the microfilms,
have to subsequently collate their transcriptions against the originals
at the respective libraries, before publishing their new finds.
Unfortunately, the visits undertaken for this purpose have usually
been too brief to enable any single scholar to survey entire Genizah
collections—and certainly not the 140,000 fragments at Cambridge.
Another impediment to research was the relative inaccessibility of
the Russian Genizah collections to Western scholars, until the late
1980s. In the fall of 1987, and again in spring 1989, I made two
three-week visits to Leningrad on an IREX Senior Scholar Exchange
between the American Council of Learned Societies and the Soviet
Academy of Sciences. With the assistance of Dr Victor Lebedev, I
scanned the handlist and card catalogue of Antonin and Firkovitch
Collections at the Saltyokov-Shchedrin Library. Dr Lebedev, who at
(ed. E.Y. Kutscher, S. Lieberman and M.Z. Kaddari; Ramat-Gan: Bar-Han
University, 1974), pp. 99-163 (Hebrew).
5. See n. 3, above. This two-volume work contains an introduction,
transcription in Aramaic, English translation, glossary and full facsimile of the
manuscripts in 182 plates.