The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

36 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
of the early medieval contribution to Hebrew and Jewish studies.
First, there was a dearth of primary source material, most manuscripts
dating from no earlier than the thirteenth century and,
secondly, there was a tendency to regard the Middle Ages, as indeed
the name given to the period suggests, as merely the backward era
coming between the great civilizations of the classical and modern
worlds. With the new availability of the fragments from Cairo and a
more tolerant attitude to medieval Catholic, Jewish and Islamic culture
on the part of the Western Protestant world, more recent decades have
witnessed a growing awareness of the importance of developments a
thousand years ago for all aspects of the study of Hebraica and
Judaica. 15 As the Genizah material has been deciphered and identified,
particularly as a result of the efforts and initiatives of the Taylor-
Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library,
previous ignorance has been dispelled by sound information and
earlier theories have been drastically modified. Among the fields of
study that have most benefited from these developments have been the
history of the transmission and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.
Work on describing the biblical fragments in the various Cambridge
Genizah Collections (different blocks of material had arrived and been
assigned classmarks at diverse times) commenced in Schechter's day
and the first sorting of the manuscripts was undertaken by a Jewish
convert to Christianity, Herman Leonard Pass, who had studied at
Jews' College and then at Cambridge, and by the famous German
scholar of the Biblia Hebraica, Paul Kahle. 16 The international flavour
of more recent work in the field is conveyed by the fact that it has
been completed by Dfez Merino in Spain, Yeivin in Israel, Revell in
15. Rosamond McKitterick's introduction and conclusion to the volume The
Uses of Literacy (pp. 1-10 and 319-33) make it clear just how far studies of
the Christian medieval world have recently been revolutionized while the works of
H.H. Ben-Sasson, B. Dinur, J. Katz and S.D. Goitein in the field of Jewish history
in the Middle Ages have drastically altered earlier concepts of that period.
16. For details of Pass see J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, II.5 (Cambridge,
1953), p. 42. Kahle was among the first biblical scholars to examine the Cambridge
Genizah material (see S.C. Reif, 'Introductory Remarks: Semitic Scholarship at
Cambridge', in Genizah Research after Ninety Years: The Case of Judaeo-Arabic
[ed. J. Blau and S.C. Reif; Cambridge, 1992], p. 3) and his researches in the field
are particularly to be found in The Cairo Geniza (n. 9 above), Masoreten des Ostens
(Leipzig, 1913), Masoreten des Western (Stuttgart, 1927-30), and 'Die hebraischen
Bibelhandschriften aus Babylonien', ZAWns 5 (1925), pp. 113-37.