The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

THE CAIRO GENIZAH AND ITS TREASURES WITH SPECIAL
REFERENCE TO BIBLICAL STUDIES
Stefan C. Reif
In the nineteenth century the broad academic study of the Hebrew
Bible and its related Aramaic traditions was much influenced by the
newly developing Jewish propensity for critical scholarship
(Wissenschaft des Judentums) and its gradual recognition in university
circles, by the conviction that the religious traditions of Judaism and
Christianity, constituting two independent corpora, could be
researched to their mutual illumination, and by the identification and
exploitation of major codices. 1 On approaching the same topic of
study towards the end of the twentieth century, one is struck by the
changes that have taken place in its underlying suppositions. Jews certainly
now enjoy more than a token representation in many academic
centres devoted to Hebrew and Aramaic outside their own religious
seminaries. What is more, the expanding field of Jewish studies,
1. For various aspects of these developments, see J. Rogerson, Old Testament
Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London, 1985);
S.D. Sperling (ed.), Students of the Covenant: A History of Jewish Biblical
Scholarship in North America (Atlanta, 1992); R.E. Clements, 'Heinrich Graetz as
Biblical Historian and Religious Apologist', in Interpreting the Hebrew Bible: Essays
in Honour of E.I. J. Rosenthal (ed. J.A. Emerton and S.C. Reif; Cambridge, 1982),
pp. 35-55; J. Parkes, Judaism and Christianity (London, 1948), pp. 140-64;
F. Knight, 'The Bishops and the Jews, 1828-1858' and S. Gill, '"In a Peculiar
Relation to Christianity": Anglican Attitudes to Judaism in the Era of Political
Emancipation, 1830-1858', in Christianity and Judaism: Papers Read at the 1991
Summer Meeting and the 1992 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society
(ed. D. Wood; Oxford, 1992), pp. 387-407; and Hebrew Manuscripts: A Treasured
Legacy (ed. B. Richler; Cleveland and Jerusalem, 1990), with bibliography on
pp. 144-45. Of particular relevance is the kind of impact made by Adolf Neubauer in
Oxford as well as Solomon Marcus Schiller-Szinessy and Solomon Schechter in
Cambridge in the last decades of the nineteenth century.