The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

REIF The Cairo Genizah and its Treasures 31
particularly in the USA and Israel but also to a significant degree in
Europe, has ensured that it is not only linguists who deal with the literature
written in Jewish languages. 2 As far as the history of Jewish
and Christian traditions is concerned, the contemporary tendency is to
question whether each religion was quite as monolithic as was once
thought and thus to challenge the assumption that there were standard
and watertight ideas, practices and texts characteristic of the two theological
streams of thought. 3 Further, it is not insignificant that the
major source materials for recent research are no longer authoritative
and impressive codices alone but also the thousands of fragmentary
items to be found among the collections from the Dead Sea of the
Second Temple period and from the Fatimid Egyptian capital of the
medieval centuries. Representing, as they so often do, what was once
alternative as well as what ultimately became standard, such manuscripts
widen the horizon of learning and invite novel interpretations
of Hebrew and Aramaic literary history. 4 The purpose of the present
paper is to offer a summary of what the kind of scholarship highlighted
in this volume owes to the Semitic and Judaic treasures
discovered among the stained, worn and crumpled folios rescued from
the Cairo Genizah. First, a few words are in order about the origin of
2. It is also clear from the membership and activities of the World Union of
Jewish Studies centered in Jerusalem, the Association for Jewish Studies in the
USA, the European Association of Jewish Studies and the British Association for
Jewish Studies that the artificial and earlier distinction between Jewish scholars of
post-biblical subjects and Christian specialists in the Hebrew Bible (or 'Old
Testament', as they preferred it) is fast becoming a thing of the past. See also
J. Neusner (ed.), The Study of Judaism: Bibliographical Essays (New York, 1972),
and N. Marsden (ed.). Register of Research in Jewish Studies in Great Britain
(Oxford, 1975).
3. This emerges clearly from conclusions reached in recent studies of the
Second Temple period, such as The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus
Christ (ed. G. Vermes, F. Millar, M. Goodman and E. Schiirer; 3 vols.; Edinburgh,
1973-87); H. Maccoby, Early Rabbinic Writings (Cambridge, 1988); and
E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief: 63 BCE-66 CE (London and
Philadelphia, 1992). Cf. also J. Neusner, W.S. Green and E.S. Frerichs (eds.),
Judaisms and their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era (Cambridge, 1987).
4. Useful overviews of the Qumran and Genizah materials and their significance
are to be found, respectively, in G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in
Perspective (Philadelphia, 1981) and S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The
Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo
Geniza, I (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1967), pp. 1-74.