Marc Michael Epstein (Ed.), <I>Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts.</I> Princeton, NJ: P

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Contents Volume 2 / 2016 Vol. Articles 2 FRANCESCO BENOZZO Origins of Human Language: 2016 Deductive Evidence for Speaking Australopithecus LOUIS-JACQUES DORAIS Wendat Ethnophilology: How a Canadian Indigenous Nation is Reviving its Language Philology JOHANNES STOBBE Written Aesthetic Experience. Philology as Recognition An International Journal MAHMOUD SALEM ELSHEIKH on the Evolution of Languages, Cultures and Texts The Arabic Sources of Rāzī’s Al-Manṣūrī fī ’ṭ-ṭibb

MAURIZIO ASCARI Philology of Conceptualization: Geometry and the Secularization of the Early Modern Imagination

KALEIGH JOY BANGOR Philological Investigations: Hannah Arendt’s Berichte on Eichmann in Jerusalem

MIGUEL CASAS GÓMEZ From Philology to Linguistics: The Influence of Saussure in the Development of Semantics

CARMEN VARO VARO Beyond the Opposites: Philological and Cognitive Aspects of Linguistic Polarization

LORENZO MANTOVANI Philology and Toponymy. Commons, Place Names and Collective Memories in the Rural Landscape of Emilia

Discussions

ROMAIN JALABERT – FEDERICO TARRAGONI Philology Philologie et révolution Crossings SUMAN GUPTA Philology of the Contemporary World: On Storying the Financial Crisis Review Article EPHRAIM NISSAN Lexical Remarks Prompted by A Smyrneika Lexicon, a Trove for Contact Linguistics Reviews SUMAN GUPTA Philology and Global English Studies: Retracings (Maurizio Ascari) ALBERT DEROLEZ The Making and Meaning of the Liber Floridus: A Study of the Original Manuscript (Ephraim Nissan) MARC MICHAEL EPSTEIN (ED.) Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts (Ephraim Nissan) Peter Lang Vol. 2/2016 CONSTANCE CLASSEN The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Ephraim Nissan) Contents Volume 2 / 2016 Vol. Articles 2 FRANCESCO BENOZZO Origins of Human Language: 2016 Deductive Evidence for Speaking Australopithecus LOUIS-JACQUES DORAIS Wendat Ethnophilology: How a Canadian Indigenous Nation is Reviving its Language Philology JOHANNES STOBBE Written Aesthetic Experience. Philology as Recognition An International Journal MAHMOUD SALEM ELSHEIKH on the Evolution of Languages, Cultures and Texts The Arabic Sources of Rāzī’s Al-Manṣūrī fī ’ṭ-ṭibb

MAURIZIO ASCARI Philology of Conceptualization: Geometry and the Secularization of the Early Modern Imagination

KALEIGH JOY BANGOR Philological Investigations: Hannah Arendt’s Berichte on Eichmann in Jerusalem

MIGUEL CASAS GÓMEZ From Philology to Linguistics: The Influence of Saussure in the Development of Semantics

CARMEN VARO VARO Beyond the Opposites: Philological and Cognitive Aspects of Linguistic Polarization

LORENZO MANTOVANI Philology and Toponymy. Commons, Place Names and Collective Memories in the Rural Landscape of Emilia

Discussions

Editorial Board: Rossend Arques (Lexicography, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) Xaverio Ballester (Classical Philology, Universitat de Valéncia, Spain) Francesco Benozzo (Ethnophilology, Università di Bologna, Italy) Vladimir Biti (Slavic Philology, Universität Wien, Austria) Daniela Boccassini (French and Italian Philology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) Salwa Castelo-Branco (Ethnomusicology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal) Mattia Cavagna (Romance Philology, Université de Louvain, Belgium) Louis-Jacques Dorais (Arctic Philology, Emeritus, Université Laval, Québec) Markus Eberl (Pre-Columbian Philology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA) Matthias Egeler (Scandinavian Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany) Keir Douglas Elam (English Literature, Università di Bologna, Italy) Andrea Fassò (Romance Philology, Emeritus, Università di Bologna, Italy) Inés Fernández-Ordóñez (Spanish Philology and Linguistics, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) Fabio Foresti (Sociolinguistics, Università di Bologna, Italy) Roslyn Frank (Ethnolinguistics, Emeritus, University of Iowa, USA) Beatrice Gründler (Arabic Philology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) Mihály Hoppál (Ethnology, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Budapest, Hungary) Martin Kern (East Asian Philology, Princeton University, USA) John Koch (Celtic Philology, Canolfan Uwchefrydiau Cymreig a Cheltaidd, Aberystwyth, UK) Albert Lloret (Digital Philology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) Anna Maranini (Classical Philology, Università di Bologna, Italy) Matteo Meschiari (Cultural Anthropology, Università di Palermo, Italy) Alberto Montaner Frutos (Spanish and Semitic Philology, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) Gonzalo Navaza (Toponimy, Universidade de Vigo, Spain) Ephraim Nissan (Historical and Computational Linguistics, Goldsmith College, London, UK) Stephen Oppenheimer (Genetics, Oxford University, UK) Marcel Otte (Prehistoric Studies, Université de Liège, Belgium) Michael Papio (Italian Philology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) José Manuel Pedrosa Bartolomé (Oral Philology, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain) Andrea Piras (Iranian Philology, Università di Bologna, Italy) Stefano Rapisarda (Romance Philology, Università di Catania, Italy) Uta Reuster-Jahn (African Philology, Universität Hamburg, Germany) Dario Seglie (Archaeology, Politecnico di Torino, Italy) Bora Cem Sevencan (Archaeology, Oulun Yliopistoo, Finland) Wayne Storey (Textual Philology, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA) Marco Veglia (Italian Literature, Università di Bologna, Italy) Philology An International Journal on the Evolution of Languages, Cultures and Texts

General editor: Francesco Benozzo

Volume 2 / 2016

PETER LANG Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · Frankfurt am Main · New York · Oxford · Wien Editorial Address: Francesco Benozzo Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne Via Cartoleria 5 I-40124 Bologna, Italy [email protected]

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Printed in Switzerland Contents Volume II / 2016

Articles

Francesco Benozzo Origins of Human Language: Deductive Evidence for Speaking Australopithecus ��7

Louis-Jacques Dorais Wendat Ethnophilology: How a Canadian Indigenous Nation is Reviving its Language ��25

Johannes Stobbe Written Aesthetic Experience. Philology as Recognition ��47

Mahmoud Salem Elsheikh The Arabic Sources of Rāzī’s Al-Man¡ūrī fī ’¥-¥ibb ��73

Maurizio Ascari Philology of Conceptualization: Geometry and the Secularization of the Early Modern Imagination ��121

Kaleigh Joy Bangor Philological Investigations: Hannah Arendt’s Berichte on Eichmann in Jerusalem ��141

Miguel Casas Gómez From Philology to Linguistics: The Influence of Saussure in the Development of Semantics ��165

Carmen Varo Varo Beyond the Opposites: Philological and Cognitive Aspects of Linguistic Polarization ��217

Lorenzo Mantovani Philology and Toponymy. Commons, Place Names and Collective Memories in the Rural Landscape of Emilia ��237

Discussions

Romain Jalabert – Federico Tarragoni Philologie et Revolution ��255

Crossings

Suman Gupta Philology of the Contemporary World: On Storying the Financial Crisis ��275

Review Article

Ephraim Nissan Lexical Remarks Prompted by A Smyrneika Lexicon, a Trove for Contact Linguistics ��297

Reviews

Suman Gupta Philology and Global English Studies: Retracings (Maurizio Ascari) ��335

Albert Derolez The Making and Meaning of the Liber Floridus: A Study of the Original Manuscript (Ephraim Nissan) ��339

Marc Michael Epstein (ed.) Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts (Ephraim Nissan) ��358

Constance Classen The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Ephraim Nissan) ��395

Marc Michael Epstein (ed.), Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illu- minated Manuscripts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, x, 276 pp., hardcover – ISBN: 978‑0‑691‑16524‑0.

The sumptuous, magnificent book under review surveys handwritten, il‑ lustrated Jewish books and documents (in particular, marriage documents) from the Middle Ages to the present, spanning the wide geography of Jewish manuscript production (Europe, Islamic countries, and Israel), and comprises very insightful coordinated studies, 278 colour illustrations, and 11 halftones. An important aspect of this book is that it shows how both features of the iconography, and aesthetic tastes, of the patrons com‑ missioning the manuscripts and the (Jewish or non-Jewish) artists produc‑ ing them were similar to, or diverged from, those found in the surrounding non-Jewish cultures. The temporal span is conveyed with immediacy in the jacket art, which on the front shows an illustration from 2010, by Barbara Wolf of Psalm 104 — gilded Hebrew wording describes an arc, separating the dark blue firma‑ ment with colourful planets, from an inner yellowish background compris‑ ing three concentric quarters comprising a multitude of realistically drawn plants, land animals or fowl, and aquatic life forms — whereas the image on the back of the jacket consists of two facings pages from a Judaeo-Per‑ sian book of 1853: on the right, the biblical Joseph, his head surrounded by a halo, is granted permission by the crowned angel Gabriel to marry Zulaikha (a changed name in place of the biblical Asenath), and on the fac‑ ing left-hand page, the wedding takes place (cf. on p. 118), with the formal features of Persian iconography. The main title of the book, “Skies of Parchment | Seas of Ink” (sic, with the vertical line usual for separating hemistichs), is wording quote from morning prayers. This sense is conveyed in the book’s half‑title, a full-page reproduction of a page from a 2009 book, drawn by Ilene Winn-Lederer. In front of a medieval chair, a bearded old man in Renais‑ sance attire, holds a huge quill, on the coast of an ink-black sea, whereas the background has the contour of a sheet of parchment, beneath an Eng‑ lish translation of the relevant text from prayer: “Even if all the heavens were parchment, / And all the trees of the forest were quills, / If all the waters of the sea were ink, / And if every creature were a scribe, / They would not suffice to expound the / Reflection of His Majesty in Heaven / And on Earth […]” On the verso, illustrating the frontispiece, one sees an

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 Reviews 359 illumination from a Passover Haggadah from South Germany, ca. 1460, showing five men in mid-15th-century attire, standing around a lectern, while one of them fingers a line of text in an open book. They stand for the five Sages debating at Bnei-Braq (in the years preceding 135 C.E.), from a passage of the Haggadah. The acknowledgements (vii–x) remarks: “This book has been brew- ing for over two decades” (vii). Marc Michael Epstein is the last in a se- quence of editors who tried to make the book into a reality. The intent was for the text’s “tone [to remain[n] scholarly without being daunting to the reader, and relatively stylistically even over the diverse range of authors while allowing each author to retain her or his distinctive voice” (vii). The project is clearly a success. Chapter 1 is Epstein’s “Introduction: For the Love of Books” (1 ff). It begins with his self-deprecating recollection of when he was a very young, supercilious “Judaica expert” — steeling himself for “the sustained and enervating projection of a personal impressiveness composed of equal measures of authority and disdain” (1) — at Sotheby’s in New York, and his manager, a real expert, was modest and humorous. When about to tell off an elderly man who showed him a book of Psalms printed in Warsaw in 1920, the man deflated the arrogant youngster by explaining that he was imprisoned with no food while in Auschwitz, because he was discovered to possess that book. Epstein had been about to tell him “That book is worth whatever you paid for it!”, but after the man’s explanation, “I was struck dumb. ‘This’, I stammered, ‘is too valuable for us to sell’. And I stumbled out of the room, a changed young man, with a new appreciation of what is meant by the words precious, valuable, and treasured” (2). The book under review, Epstein explains, “is the first attempt at a comprehensive survey of this field [Jewish manuscript illumination] in more than thirty years” (2), and the field has much grown in the past thirty years (3). “Moreover, the idea that art is a legitimate form of historical documentation — not just of events but of the attitudes, mentalities, and aesthetics of those who commissioned, and in some cases, created it — has taken off in a dramatic way in that period of years” (3). Apart from Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, Jewish illuminated manuscripts “also routinely include Jewish manuscripts who language is […] Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, or Ladino” [i.e., Judaeo-Spanish] (3), to which I would add Judaeo-Persian (such manuscripts feature prominently in this book) as well as Judaeo-Italian, Jewish

Old French, and Kurdish Jews’ Jewish Neo-Aramaic.1 “A euphemism for Jewish illuminated manuscripts, the expression ‘Hebrew illuminated manuscripts’2 rings hollow and archaic in an era in which only a benighted few are still afraid to use the J word in polite company” (4).3 Jewish illuminated manuscripts “are extraordinarily diverse” (4), and “what they do not represent for the most part is a variety of socioeconom- ic strata. This book is a mirror of sort: it displays for you — a by-and- large urbane, educated,4 and well-to-do audience — the productions of

1 Shalom Sabar, a Jerusalem professor who has contributed to the edited volume, belongs to that community, and was born in Zakho, in Iraqi Kurdistan, like4 his brother Yona Sabar, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a prominent authority on the texts and vernaculars of Kurdish Jews. One may retort that Jewish Old French texts (rather than glosses interspersed inside a Hebrew text), Judaeo-Ital- ian texts, and Jewish Neo-Aramaic manuscripts are not illuminated. Or perhaps any of them does include some imagery? I suspect however that if one also includes amulets, which sometimes included rather crudely drawn imagery along with text, one may supplement the data. I understand this is rather an outlier for the domain of interests of the contributors of the book under review. Moreover, whereas one may include Mesopotamian Middle Aramaic from late antiquity, the medium would be different (text and imagery on clay bowls). Importantly, in the book under review the earliest manuscripts considered are medieval. 2 Which was previously in use, and that was probably motivated by the fact that traditionally, Jewish languages other than Hebrew have been written using the Hebrew script. 3 In fact, it was in the 1980s that, for example, the Unione delle Comunità israelitiche Italiane renamed itself the Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane, and the Bolletti- no della Comunità Israelitica di Milano renamed itself the Bollettino della Comunità Ebraica di Milano. 4 On the facing page, the readers’ ego is either deflated, or reassured: “this work is intended for nonspecialists, but it is necessary from time to time to make use of certain terms that are common in the field” (5), terms which Epstein proceeds to introduce. I must say that this book will also be useful for scholars, as it brings together themes and insights. It is definitely not just a coffee table book, even though “well-to-do audience” suggests that the economic rationale for such a lavishly illustrated volume is the well-founded hope that a significant segment of buyers will be such who buy coffee table books. When published in May 2015, the book was priced $60.00 in the Unit+ed States, and £41.95 in the United Kingdom. Scholars can be expected to acquire the book through their university library, unless they contributed some chapter or section. Or did Epstein expect also scholars to be ipso facto well-to-do? Even with far negligible quarters in Europe displaying what may pass for craving for the 1930s? Or compatible with aspects of the latter including, if not especially, on campuses, where such attitudes have not infrequently been tolerated? Needless to say,

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 Reviews 361 medieval Jewish societies that were socioeconomically the equivalent of your own”, thus, a socially narrow perspective (4). Epstein points out, as an example of standard iconography in respect of the denominational divide, that “in the West, in the Middle Ages, Jews do not generally depict the creation of the world, and when they do, they avoid any depiction of the Creator” (7), contrary to the practice in Chris- tian iconography. Epstein is able to show in figure 9 a departure from such Jewish avoidance, in the opening page of a Hebrew Book of Psalms from 15th-century Italy. “Of course, as soon as we begin to speak of ‘standard’ iconography, we encounter startling exceptions that raise pointed questions about the identity and motives of artist and patron” (8).

How does this book on Jewish manuscript illumination differ from all other such books? In the pages to come, we venture beyond the traditional mode of cataloguing manuscripts chronologically and geographically by means of a sample page from each manuscript and a description of each manuscript’s origin, form, and contents. [This is not done in the book under review.] This is something that has been done to good effect in the past by excellent scholars, whose works are noted in Jenna Siman Jacobs’s fine and useful bibliography (chapter 13). Here, we will engage less in a survey of individual manuscripts than in a survey of iconography, East and West. We’ll look at the way the flow of the narrative is conveyed over sequences of illuminations in various manuscripts, and at the ways in which themes are transmitted, comparing and contrasting East and West and the Jewish and non-Jewish use of motifs throughout various time periods. (10–11)

as a reviewer I got my own copy; which is important for a binational British scholar with nearly 500 scholarly publications who has nevertheless been bereft of a salary for nearly 15 years, that is to say, since the launch of the British academic boycott against my national identity, something which makes me into the moral nemesis for the historical record of (among many others) the Cambridge retired physicist turned media celebrity who (a dozen years after the boycott was launched) has proclaimed the self-righteous precept of such racial exclusion, which was relayed by his university’s spokesperson (unsuspecting it may boomerang). As for review copies being free of charge, in his autobiography the Oxford professor Géza Vermes (1924–2013) — a former priest with Jewish Hungarian ancestry, and an authority on Roman-age Judaism, especially the Dead Sea scrolls — related about when he asked for review the Encyclopaedia Judaica in 1971, and was offered it at a discount, as (he was told) only the Pope and the Queen of England got a copy for free — at which he reasonably retorted: “It is against my religion” to buy a book for review. He then was sent all twenty-something volumes. See G. Vermes, Providential Accidents: An Autobiography, London: SCM, 1998.

Epstein concludes his “Introduction” by explaining the illumination on top of the opening folio of a 14th-century manuscript from Germany of Asher ben Yeḥiel’s commentary on the Talmud. The opening folio appears on the page facing the end of the introduction’s text of the book under review. “Below the charmingly decorated initial word panel” (16), one can see a man, a scholar, sitting “on a plump, tasseled pillow in a grand chair — a cathedra — backed by a velvet cloth sprinkled with stars. A book is open before him, as he studies Torah” (here standing for either the Pentateuch, or, for all we can say, texts on sacred subjects, possibly the Talmud). “At the top of the panel, there is another illumination equal in size and prom- inence, depicting a squirrel, seated on an identical tasseled pillow, and cracking a nut! The juxtaposition seems a bit — well, ‘nutty’ — until you realize that one of the dominant medieval metaphors for Torah itself was the nut: hard to crack, but rewardingly nutritious on the inside, the very food of life. The squirrel invites us to do what the scholar has done — to open the book and enter the text and mine it for the riches it contains. Dear reader, after nearly 700 years, that invitation still stands. Join us…” (16). Page 18, facing the beginning of Ch. 2, is a lavishly illuminated page from a manuscript from Mantua, 1435, of Jacob ben Asher’s Arba‘ah Turim, where a red square depicted frame has four animals enclosed in small squares on the corners. This, too, is a metaphor: inside the square, one can see a “[s]ynagogue scene with elaborate Gothic arc, and the four symbolic beasts that Rabbi Judah ben Temah urges Jews to take as their model in being eager to pray every morning: ‘Be strong as a leopard, and light as an eagle, and swift as a gazelle, and bold as a lion to do the will of your Parent in heaven’ (Mishnah ’Avot 5.23)”5 (19, caption of Fig. 22).

5 It is Avot 5:21. The most popular among the tractates of the Mishnah is Avót [literally: ‘Fathers’], also known as Pirqe Avot [literally: ‘Chapters of Fathers’]. It consists of moral maxims, hence it is known in European languages by the titles Maxims of the Fathers, and Maxima Patrum. Rabbi Ovadiah of Bertinoro (Obadiah ben Abra- ham Yarè) was an important commentator of the Mishnah, and was born ca. 1440 or 1450 in the town of Bertinoro in the Romagna region of Italy. He died ca. 1530 (according to others, before 1516), in Jerusalem. His commentary was first printed in 1548–49, which was in Venice, and eventually became one of the Mishnah commentaries most often resorted to. His gloss to Be as daring as a leopard, and as light as an eagle (or: a griffon vulture), and as swiftly running as a gazelle, and as strong as a lion, to fulfil the wish of thy Father Who is in Heaven” is as follows: “This leopard is born from the boar and the lioness, because at the time of the oestrus of the lions, the lioness introduces her head into the thick of the wood and

Chapter 2, “People of the Book / Books of the People: Illuminating the Canon” (19 ff), is by Hartley Lachter with Marc Michael Epstein. “What, then, was typically on the shelves of the Jews who would have produced or encountered the illustrations we will enocounter? What might a ‘typical medieval Jewish library have looked like?” (19). [D]ue to the vicissitudes of the course of Jewish history, such as migrations, persecutions, attacks, and expulsions, no complete library of Jewish books in a single location survived the Middle Ages intact” (19). There was “the deliberate destruction of Jewish books” (19), decreed by ec- clesiastical authorities and seconded by secular authorities. “Because of a lack of comprehensive library lists or catalogues, particularly of private collections, we cannot say for sure what the average private collection of Hebrew books looked like in the typical medieval Jewish home” (19). “Notwithstanding these significant gaps in our knowledge” (21), we know about “an impressive array of Hebrew books” which “cover a vast literary and conceptual range. Among the books we know were in common use, we find codes of Jewish law and practice; scriptural texts and commentaries; rabbinic texts; Sabbath, Festival, and High Holiday prayer books; devotional books written specifically for women; secular and liturgical poetry; scientific and medical treatises; works on Jewish

growls and requests the male, and the boar hears her voice and mounts her, and a leopard comes out from the two of them. And as he is a bastard, he has a daring face (effrontery), albeit he does not have so much strength. Thou also be daring, and dost not be ashamed of asking thy teacher about that which thou hast not understood, as per what we have learnt: It is not the shy who learns”. To Isidore of Seville (7th century), “The leopard is the degenerate offspring of the adulterous mating of a lion and a pard” (in his encyclopaedia, Etymologies, book 12, 2:11, citing Pliny’s Natural History [cf. 8.42]), and to Bartholomaeus Anglicus (13th century), “The lion knoweth by smell, if the pard gendereth with the lioness, and reseth against the lioness that breaketh spousehood, and punisheth her full sore, but if she wash her in a river, and then it is not known” (De proprietatibus rerum, book 18). It is unclear how it came to pass that the boar replaced the pard, in the tradition to which Obadi- ah of Bertinoro bears witness.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 364 Ephraim Nissan philosophy; kabbalistic texts; fables; and even romances such as He- braized versions of the tales of King Arthur and his knights” (21).6

6 Distinguish Hebrew texts from Early Yiddish texts. I have reviewed for Fabula a book by Jerold C. Frakes (ed., trans.), Early Yiddish Epic (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art), Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. “While one could make the argument that early Yiddish literature was in large part a product of the Ashkenazic sojourn in northern Italy, it is quite especially the case for early Yiddish epic, which is overwhelmingly a matter of Italian provenance: the primary manuscript of the only Yiddish Arthurian epic, Vidvilt (Cambridge, Trinity College ms. F.12.44), is from Italy, probably from Venice. […]” (Frakes, p. xxxv). “There are three closely related sixteenth-century manuscript versions of the earliest recension of the text, all probably of northern Italian provenance” (Frakes, p. 182). “The scribe identifies himself at the end of the cambridge manuscript as ‘Sheftl by name, from the city of Goteyn’ (Kojetein in Moravia) (fol. 84r)” (Frakes, p. 182). “One of the most enduringly popular of the ‘secular’ Yiddish epics (alongside Bovo d’Antona) was the single Arthurian romance adapted into Yiddish by an anonymous poet in the fifteenth or sixteenth century from Wirnt von Gravenberg’s early-thirteenth-century Middle High German epic Wigalois” (Frakes, p. 181), “itself an adaptation and combination of episodes from several earlier Old French epics” (Frakes, p. xxix). The earliest extant Yiddish version reduced by two-thirds the length of Wirnt’s Wi- galois, and made other important changes. “As was the conventional practice, the Yiddish poet de-Christianizes the narrative to a great extent, especially with respect to the divine role in mundane affairs” (Frakes, p. 181). The name of the Divinity is invokes in salutations in the Yiddish text, but the miracles devised by Wirnt for his version were eliminated. I think the reason for that elimination was that the Jewish poet was conscious that fantasy fiction is too frivolous for a text intended for Jewish readers to claim such miracles, as this would transgress on the commandment of not invoking God’s name in vain. Frakes exemplifies: “In Wigalois, for instance, the hero immediately frees himself — by means of prayer — from a split tree trunk into which he had been wedged by a giantess; Vidvilt, on the other hand, needs three days to get free, which he accomplishes by heroic means without prayer” (Frakes, p. 181). I understand from Jerold Frakes that there are no illuminated manuscripts of Vidvilt (in litteram, 14 July 2016). Moreover, in the Yiddish Vidvilt “drastically reduces the violence of the narrative” (Frakes, p. 182): he is not as eager to dispatch his opponents upon defeating them, as Wirnt protagonist was: the Vidvilt poet sees to it that it “is only in the direst of situations that the hero kills his foes; otherwise, he defeats them and sends them as prisoners to Arthur’s court (a characteristically Arthurian knightly mode of action, incidentally, the import of which the Yiddish poet obviously learned from a broader knowledge of the Arthurian repertoire)” (Frakes, p. 182). Interestingly, “the Vidvilt poet quite effectively eliminated the anti-Muslim bigotry ubiquitous in Wigalois that likewise formed a widespread characteristic of medieval and early modern Christian epic” (Frakes, p. 182). For example, “in Wigalois King Lar has been driven off his

There is a lapsus in the caption of Fig. 23, which shows the opening page of a manuscript from Lisbon, ca. 1496, of the biblical book of Isaiah. The caption states it is “the book of Joshua” (21). The two names are somewhat similar in Hebrew. Bibles as found in the houses of afflu- ent families were illuminated. Copies of tractates of the Talmud “were not generally illuminated” (21). Liturgical and ritual texts were (and are) found at private homes and at communal institutions, and within these, two categories that have been famously decorated are the Passover Hagga- dah (containing the home service of the evening banquet) and Scrolls of Esther for the festival of Purim. There is a work in verse, the Kéter Malkhút (‘A Crown of Reign’) expressing cosmological wonder and which at present is read in the night of the Day of Atonement in some communities, and which was authored by the great poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol (who as a philosopher, the author of Fons vitae, was known to Christians as Avicebron). In the caption of Fig. 32 on p. 25, its title is misspelled as “Keter Malḥut”, where “ḥ” is definitely wrong because the phonetic value [x] (a voiceless uvular fricative) is not a pronunciation of the phoneme /ḥ/ (which some communities rather pronounce as a the voiceless pharyngeal fricative), but rather an allophone of the phoneme /k/; the condition of occurrence of the allophone being a voiceless uvular fricative is at the end of a syllable or between vowels. Among the other things, Ch. 2 mentions (and displays two illuminated facing pages as Fig. 23) a collection of tales, Mĕshal ha-ëadmoní (The Parable of the Ancient or of the Oriental), ca. 1282, by Isaac ben Solomon Abi Sahula or Ibn Sahula (b. Guadalajara, 1244), who was also a mystic. It was printed in Venice (illustrated with woodcuts) by Meir ben Jacob Parenzo (1546–1550), but there exist illuminated manuscripts as well: “Meshal ha-Kadmoni is one of the most frequently illustrated texts in the history of Hebrew literature, no doubt due to the fact that it inspires

land by the Muslim Roaz, who is, characteristically for Christian epic, a monstrous giant in league with Satan, to whom Roaz has surrendered his soul in a pact that gives him superhuman strength” (Frakes, p. 182). Not so in the Yiddish reworking: “In Vidvilt the giant is not a Muslim, and Satan plays no part whatsoever. The kind and his land have been ravaged because he refused to grant his daughter in marriage to the giant. In this manner the Vidvilt poet systematically excises the entire bigoted plot motive and substitutes for it an alternative motivation for the romance’s plot that indicates an extensive knowledge of Arthurian narratology” (Frakes, p. 182).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 366 Ephraim Nissan the imagination through its combination of common tales and fables with uniquely Jewish and kabbalistic symbolic allusions — going beyond the simple morality tales of Aesop” (27). The two illuminations in Fig. 23 show human characters: “A king consults astrologers and sages” (26, caption of Fig. 23). Importantly however, it is a book in which animal characters feature prominently.7 I would like to also point out that captions (the example I am going to give is from Parenzo’s Venice edition of Mĕshal ha-ëadmoní) sometimes provided an opportunity for wordplay.

The woodcut from Parenzo’s printed edition shows a hanging in the presence of the king of the birds. The Hebrew caption above the picture, “The image of the nets [i.e., hawk] hanged, and his head is |afúy (covered/ shamed) as galúy (uncovered/in public)”, displays an oxymoron motivated by a wish to employ the word |afúy as being an intertextual reference to the episode from the Book of Esther when, having led Mordecai around on horseback, the wicked and on that occasion thwarted Haman goes home in a dispirited state, only to be told by his wife and friends that this is the

7 One episode in Part One of Mĕshal ha-ëadmoní relates that the Hart, one of the courtiers of the Lion (the King), prays and mentions his contributions to the rabbis (talmidé-|akhamím). In Part Two, the birds attend a banquet, and listen to talks given by speakers. “Then they spend the night in very comfortable beds, and on the day after they go to the synagogue, as befitting Jewish birds”, where the appointment of leaders is announced to them by the Eagle (p. 354 in Jefim Schirmann’s The History of Hebrew Poetry in Christian Spain and Southern France, ed. Ezra Fleisher; in He- brew; Jerusalem: The Magnes Press & Ben-Zvi Institute, 1997).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 Reviews 367 start of his fall (which indeed ends in his being hanged, and later on his sons being hanged, too). The page facing the beginning of Ch. 3 is Fig. 24, showing the colophon of the Cervera Bible (ca. 1300), which comprises a Bible with a grammatical treatise about Hebrew. The individual Hebrew letters in the colophon are zoomorphic letters: they are composed of animal body parts taw) occurs three times) ת in grotesque situations. For example, the letter in the colophon. The second occurrence is composed of a bird’s head (the leftmost vertical segment) looking upwards, and whose long bill punc- tures the feet of a bird whose body lies horizontally (it is the horizontal segment on top) and whose own short bill holds the head of a fish, whose own dangling body is the rightmost vertical segment. The third occurrence ,has its top segment shaped as the woolly body of a sheep ת of the letter with a long tail being the rightmost vertical segment. The leftmost vertical segment is the body of a fish whose mouth touches the forefeet of the sheep, and whose tail is bitten by a dog’s head. Chapter 3, “Parchments and Palimpsests: Scribe, Illuminator, Patron, Audience” (29 ff) is by Epstein, introduces the rudiments of technical con- cepts in a very readable way and with lots of illustrations, and comprises “Focus: The Illuminated Page: Materials, Methods, and Techniques” (40 ff), by Barbara Wolff, who is a New York-based illuminator of manuscripts using medieval methods. The book under review was published during an exhibition of her illuminated manuscripts at the Morgan Library in New York. Epstein explains that unlike goldleaf, “silver, when applied, was much less stable, generally oxidizing after a time, and almost invar- iably eating away at the parchment itself. To avoid this problem, Barbara Wolff, the contemporary illuminator whose work process is detailed later in this chapter, uses platinum in place of silver, although she feels that it is colder and less nuanced” (33, 35). “Hebrew does not have capital letters, so rather than illuminating a single initial letter, an entire initial word would generally be illuminated” (35). In such text that comprises diacritic marks (for vowels or prosody) apart from the letters of the text standing for consonants, the letters of the text were written by a scribe, whereas a punctuator (not necessarily the same person) added the diacritic marks (35). “The illuminator apparently worked under the scribe in charge of the project, choosing and modifying iconography from model books and often drawing elements from the art of the wider culture into the larger project, transforming them to specific ends” (36). On occasion, a scribe would

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 368 Ephraim Nissan produce a beautiful manuscript yet a corrupt text, because he had a fine hand, but “had little understanding of the text” (37). “There is occasional colophon evidence of women as scribes” (37). Such is the case of Paola Anau (Anau is how that still extant Italian Jewish family name is spelled): “Paola ‘Anav (min Ha‘Anavim),8 for example, was a scribe in Rome from 1288–92. The son of an ancestor of hers (not “Her grandfather” as stated

8 The Hebrew adjective ‘anáw means ‘modest’, ‘unassuming’. As for the form min Ha‘Anavim, this is a semantic calque from the medieval Italian onomastic pattern dei Xi, i.e., ‘of the Xs’. Sometimes that onomastic pattern even gave rise to iterative names among medieval Italians (but the iterative pattern is still productive in present-day Italy; e.g., Colonel Bizzarro Bizzarri was the public face, around 1990, of the Servizio Meteorologico dell’Aeronautica Militare, that is to say, for the Ital- ian public he was a highly recognisable weatherman). The Pazzi family, notorious (and direly punished) for the plot against Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother during the Renaissance, was already prominent in Florence during the first crusade. The very first crusader who managed to climb to the top of the walls of Jerusalem (he was prized for that) — before the massacre of all Muslims and Jews in town (apart from some Jerusalemite Jews sold as slaves in Apulia, so the Crusade could show a profit) — was the incredibly named Pazzo de’ Pazzi. A name like that one would be unthinkable in the modern period, even though unflattering family names are not rare. Pazzi literally means ‘madmen’. Pazzo de’ Pazzi is most easily interpreted, literally, as ‘Madman of the Madmen’, but bestowing that name on a male baby of theirs, presumably meant for the Pazzi family an assertion of their pride. They formed the singular Pazzo as a first name, in the sense ‘one of ours: a man from the Pazzi family’. Iterative names also occurred among Italian Jews. Leone Leoni was chief rabbi of Ferrara. On the evening of 21 September 1941, at the start of the Jewish New Year festival. On that occasion, the first devastation by local Fascists took place, of two of the four synagogues in Ferrara, the Scola Fanese and the Scola Tedesca. Rabbi Leone Leoni was slapped. Donato Donati (1880–1946), from Modena, was a jurist. He had first obtained a professorial post (as a professore straordinario) in January 1911. By 1938, he was faculty dean, and was dismissed from Italy’s academia like over ninety Jewish professors. In 1639 in Rome, a Jewish child (the son of Prospero di Tullio) was seized, converted (the same happened to his sister), and renamed Urbano Urbani and Anna Urbani, in honour of Urban VIII (in Italian, Urbano). Cf. E. Nissan, “Persistence of Iterative Personal Names in Italian: Medieval to Early Modern vs. the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” and “Iterative Personal Names Other Than in Italian: A Brief Sample Prosopography, Organised per Language”, in O. Felecan (ed.), Onomastics in Contemporary Public Space (ICONN2). Proceed- ings of the Second International Conference on Onomastics “Name and Naming” = Conferinţa Internaţională de Onomastică „Numele şi numirea”, Ediţia a II-a: Onomastica în spaţiul public actual, Baia Mare, Romania, May 9–11, 2013. Cluj- Napoca: Editura Mega, & Cluj-Napoca: Editura Argonaut, 2013 [2014], pp. 628– 647 and pp. 648–664 in that order.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 Reviews 369 in the book under review),9 Rabbi Nathan ben Yeḥiel (1035–1110),10 was the author of Sefer Ha’Arukh [recte: Sefer Ha‘Arukh], the first great Jew- ish dictionary,11 and her colophon appears in a copy of a legal work that she scribed” (37), namely, the legal decisions of Isaiah of Trani the Elder.12 “Since the patrons would have determined the program, the question of the religious identity of the actual illuminators is somewhat mooted, but it does arise in the literature, since much is at stake” (38), as indeed, if artists were non-Jewish, “why should the iconography necessarily have any peculiarly Jewish significance?” (38). “[R]egardless of the background of the illuminator and even of the patron, the ultimate audience was a Jewish

9 Actually, what she wrote in the colophon, and which the book under review repro- duces and translates (“Paola daughter of R. Abraham the Scribe, son of Yoav, may his righteousness preserve us, from the holy planting of our Master Yeḥiel, the father of our Master Nathan the author of the Arukh”), shows that she was descended on her father’s side from the father of the famous lexicographer, not from the latter. 10 But some give his years of birth and death as 1031 and 1106, and at any rate, 1110 is approximate and speculative. 11 It is a lexicon with entries and definition in Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as glosses from languages known in early medieval Italy. The current, much expanded edition is the one compiled by Alexander Kohut, Aruch completum: sive, Lexicon, vocabu- la et res, quae in libris Targumicis, Talmudicis et Midraschicis continentur, auctore Nathane filio Jechielis (in Hebrew, ‘Arukh ha-shalem), 10 vols. (1878–1892), comprising the ‘Arukh by Nathan ben Yeḥiel, Mussaf He‘Arukh by Benjamin Mussafia (b. 1606, d. 1675], printed by Georg Brög, Vienna, but later volumes by A. Fanto, Vienna; repr. Vienna, 1926. Reprinted with S. Krauss’s supplement, Tosfot he-‘Arukh ha-shalem (Additamenta ad librum Aruch Completum Alexandri Kohuti), Vienna, 1937; Pardes, New York, 1955. 12 Other than a supercommentary to Rashi’s glosses on the Pentateuch, other biblical commentaries ascribed to Isaiah ben Mali, better known as Isaiah of Trani the Elder (c. 1180–c. 1250), are, by a scholarly opinion yet not uncontroversially, by Isaiah di Trani the Younger (Isaiah ben Elijah di Trani, who was active in the 13th and 14th centuries). Isaiah of Trani the Elder was a prolific author, and the foremost rabbinic scholar in Italy in the Middle Ages; as a Talmudic scholar and a rabbinic decisor, in Hebrew he is famous by the acronym Rid. His background was in Trani, in Apulia, in southeastern Italy, but he lived probably in Venice, and he also apparently stayed for a while in the Orient. Isaiah (ben Elijah) di Trani the Younger was his daughter’s son, and was a ritualist as well as the author of commentaries to Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Job. See Elazar Hurvitz, The Commentary of the “Rid” (Rabbi Isaiah of Trani the Elder) on the Book of Jeremiah, New York: Yeshiva University, 1986. On Isaiah of Trani the Elder other than as a biblical exegete, see Azriel Rosenfeld, The Life and Works of Isaiah of Trani the Elder: with special emphasis on his Sepher ha- Makhria‘, D.H.L. thesis, New York: Yeshiva University, 1955.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 370 Ephraim Nissan one, so we must consider not only the origin but the possible reception of the illumination as well” (39). Epstein rejects a theory according to which “in the case of medieval Ashkenazic manuscripts in which Jews appear with distorted faces, a Christian artist may well have inserted anti- Jewish motifs into the iconography” (38). Epstein’s has his own theory about these facial distortions, and he deals with that elsewhere in the book. Barbara Wolff’s section (40–45) shows her ingredients (even rock sugar among the gesso ingredientsand tools, as well as her procedure step by step, when producing an illuminated page using medieval techniques. Gesso was used as a mordfant, acting as a glue and creating a “raised surface. This was the technique that created the illusion of molten gold letters” (41). Gesso is painted on the parchment inside areas enclosed by the contour of letters or ornaments, is left to dry, and then scraped smooth before applying gold leaf. “The gilded page is ready for the addition of colors” (43). Pigments are shown and explained, and the steps of colour- ing up to the final illuminated page (an imitation of a page from the Prato Haggadah, “[w]ritten in Spain over 700 years ago” (45), are illustrated. My only qualm (which actually, as we are going to see, isn’t one) is that in the Hebrew text she lettered at the bottom of Fig. 57, the diacritic marks in the last word are wrong (the rules of “pointing”, i.e., of how to insert the vowels, in Hebrew text, are tricky, so much so that after completing high school, only a minority of Israelis can “point” properly, even though that is a requirement at the maturity exam, and there are exams of “pointing” already at primary school).13 Was the error already in the Prato Haggadah? That is quite a possibility, especially as another word also shows a mor- phologically short a “pointed” as though it was a long a. In fact, getting the length of vowels wrong is something historically known from Sephard- ic texts (because Sephardic and Mediterranean pronunciations, just like present-day Israeli pronunciation, unlike Ashkenazic liturgical pronunciations, pronounce vowels without distinguishing between their historical morphological lengths as expressed in correct “pointing” according to the

13 I have a recollection of teaching a university class in Israel (in computer science, definitely not linguistics students), and at one point I wrote something on the blackboard in Hebrew, and “pointed” the vowels. Students were audibly wondering (especially as they were aware that I had recently moved from Italy). One of them then asked others whether my pointing was correct. Another student told her with a knowing face that my pointing was correct indeed. In contrast, undergraduate students at Hebrew Lan- guage Departments are required to be able to “point” correctly.

Correct spelling, with “pointing”, of the He- Wrong spelling of the last word in brew infinitive lĕhallēl ‘to praise’. Fig. 57, as though the word was the im- possible *lĕhhālēl.

Chapter 4, “Mapping the Territory: ’Arb‘ah [recte: ’Arba‘ah] Kanfot Ha’areẓ — The Four Corners of the Medieval; Jewish World” (4t ff), comprises five sections: “Ereẓ Yisrael / The Land of Israel: Homeland and Center” (47 ff), by Epstein; then Epstein’s “Italia/Italy: The First Western Diaspora” (55), then “Ashkenaz: Franco-Germany, England, Central and east Europe” (63 ff) by Eva Frojmovic with Epstein, “Sepharad and ‘Arav: Spain and the Middle East” (72 ff) by Raymond P. Scheindlin with Epstein, and “The Problem of ‘National Style’” (77 ff) by Frojmovic with Epstein. The Hebrew collocation in the title of Ch. 4, ’arba‘ah kanfot ha’are¡, literally means “the four corners (literally: wings) of the earth”, the similitude being the four corners of an ancient quadrangular garment.14

14 In E. Nissan, “Conniving with the Learned: Gerson Rosenzweig’s Humour on New York Communal Life, in his Talmudic Parody Tractate America” (with the pre-head- line: “2014: The Centennial of the Demise of Gerson Rosenzweig”), International Studies in Humour, 3(1) (2014), pp. 15–93, I included the following relevant con- siderations in Sec. 17.1, “The Four Corners of the Earth, and How Norway’s Fjords Came into Being” (ibid., pp. 64–65): Again in Tsurát ha-Aratsót (= Speculum totius orbis) [a litwerary work by myself, a fantasy history of the world, region by region], one finds a story about chelkei-hayy- ishuv “the continents”, literally “the parts of the Oecumene [inhabited earth]”, like at the very beginning of Tractate America. This occurs when the book playfully discusses the fjords of Norway, as well as when it playfully discusses Russia’s Kamchatka Penin- sula in the far north of the Far East. Tsurát ha-Aratsót claims that the Old World, composed of the three continents Asia, Africa, and Europe, has four “wings” (arba‘ kanfot ha’arets), the four wings of the earth (or, as English has it after the Hebrew Bible, the four corners of the earth). This simile is based on the idea that the landmass is like a

The caption of Fig. 69 explains an illumination against a blue backdrop inside a roundel above a Hebrew caption (“This is Adam and Eve, naked, and the Tree of Knowledge, and the Serpent”) from the original manuscript (Amiens, France, 1277–1286). The caption of Fig. 69 states: “Adam and Eve with the serpent, which is shown with a female human head typical in art made for Christians in this period” (49). I would like to point out that the Serpent in the roundel has a snake’s body and a woman’s head, but that in Christian art, other body shapes are also found. I reproduce here the Serpent facing Eve, detail from an illumination in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, as per a Munich MS, Clm. 146, from the mid-14th century. “Here, as in the many other illustrated manuscripts of this work, the artists naturally followed the text in representing the tempter with a woman’s head. (Lutz and Perdrizet, Speculum humanae salvationis,

garment; in the Hebrew Bible, garments for covering the entire body are typically with four corners. This is why the pentateuchal prescription of wearing a fringe on the four corners of one’s dress is fulfilled by devout adult male Jews by wearing a rectangular prayer shawl during the morning prayer (some even wear a smaller version, called arba‘ kanfot, “four corners”, under their shirt all day long), and that shawl has fringes (tsitsi- yyot) at its four corners indeed. According to Tsurát ha-Aratsót, the northeastern corner of the earth (the landmass) is the Kamchatka Peninsula, or rather kamma shatka, “how silent she is”, as that land (erets is feminine in Hebrew) is the corner of the earth about which you hear less often. The southeastern corner of the landmass is the Malay Peninsula, which is extended into the see in a place where the sea is male iyyim, “full of islands”, hence the name ma- la’iyyim of the Malay people. The southwestern corner of the landmass is the southern tip of Africa, where a metropolis (Capetown) extends under the Table Mountain, sup- posedly so called after the words of the verse Psalms 23:5, “a table against my enemies” (which does not always work). And finally, the northwestern corner of the landmass is the Scandinavian Peninsula, which extends southwards, but is fringed by fjords westwards. Why is it fringed? And why are they called fjords? This is because of the (medieval) rabbis of Fiorda (this is the traditional Hebrew name of the town of Fürth near Nuremberg in Bavaria). An entirely invented myth is proposed, according to which their prestigious court decreed that as by then there were Jewish communities throughout Central Europe, Europe must wear a fringe (a tsisit, as in a prayer shawl), which Europe does indeed on Europe’s own corner of the earth: this is the “fringed” coast of Norway, full of fjords. A man wearing a white prayer shawl and who “holds a Torah scroll with tender af- fection” (2), drawn against a gilded backdrop, appears in an illumination (under the Hebrew wording “How I love Thy Torah, it is my discourse all the day”, a quotartion from Psalms 119:97) at the very opening of a manuscript from Italy, perhaps Perugia, ca. 1400, of the religio-ritual code Mishneh Torah by Maimonides. This full-page figure 1 faces the beginning of Epstein’s “Introduction”.

II, pl. 2.)”.15 Bonnell suggests the following explanation for the adoption of a woman’s head for the Serpent from the Garden: “Is it possible that [Petrus] Comestor [(d. c. 1173), in his Historia Libri Genesis,] having before him the above passage in an ancient and somewhat difficult manuscript partly obliterated by age, made the revolutionary blunder of reading the two words ‘velut organum’ as ‘vultum virgineum’? In twelfth century writing similarity in the appearance of these two phrases is a possibility”.16 While discussing visual representations from the 13th or 14th century, Bon- nell wrote:17

Biblia cum Figuris, Paris, Bibl. Nat., MSS. Fr. No. 9561, fol. 8a. Adam and Eve are on opposite sides of the tree, — Eve at the left and Adam at the right, and each is tast- ing an apple. The serpent, whose enormous folds seem thicker than the trunk of the tree he entwines, bifurcates near the anterior extremity and bears two human heads!

The various modes of representation of the Tabernacle in the illuminations of Jewish manuscripts are discussed on pp. 51–52. For example, Fig. 73 shows the “[c]urtain of the Tabernacle with alternative heraldic-style lions and eagles as backdrop for the decorated opening word of the book of Leviticus. Pentateuch with targum [Aramaic translation] intercalat- ed (The Duke of Sussex Ashkenazic Pentateuch), Germany, Lake Con- stance region, early 14th century. London, British Library, MS Add. 15282,

15 Quoted from p. 267 (cf. Fig. 2 on p. 268) in: John K. Bonnell, “The Serpent with a Human Head in Art and in Mystery Play”, American Journal of Archaeology, 21(3), 1917, pp. 255–291 (), citing Jules Lutz and Paul Perdrizet, Speculum humanae salvationis. Texte critique: Traduction inédite de Jean Miélot (1448). Les sources et l’influence iconographique prinicpalement sur l’art alsacien du XVIe siècle. Avec la reproduction, en 140 planches, du Manuscrit de Sélestat, de la série complète des vitraux de Colmar, de Wissembourg, etc., 2 vols., Mulhouse, Alsace: E. Meininger, 1907–1909. 16 Bonnell, “The Serpent with a Human Head in Art and in Mystery Play”, in a footnote to p. 258. 17 Bonnell, “The Serpent with a Human Head in Art and in Mystery Play”, p. 265. “A much simpler explanation [than the one supplied by Didron] of the duplication of the human head on this serpent would be that the artist wished to suggest motion, the serpent watching both Adam and Eve after the temptation. Progressive action suggested by repeating a figure in the same composition is, of course, familiar in mediaeval art” (ibid., p. 266).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 374 Ephraim Nissan fol. 137r” (51). “The Duke of Sussex Pentateuch contains two depictions of the Tabernacle and one of the Temple, but each is evoked rather than explicitly illustrated (51). The alternation of lions and eagles on the curtain of the Tabernacle reflects a rabbinic tradition. On this, more later.

From Speculum humanae salvationis, 1479 (Bonnell, p. 274, Fig. 7).

The Serpent facing Eve, detail from an illumination in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, as per a Munich MS, Clm. 146, from the mid-14th century.

In the section about Italy, Epstein writes: “After 1492, the Ashkenazic and Italian communities were joined by Jewish refugees from the Spanish Ex- pulsion, who fled to Southern Italy. The paths of all three communities, Italian, Ashkenazic, and Sephardic, intersected in places like Rome, as well as in Venice and in Livorno, where, after the advent of printing, liturgical texts were printed in three versions, one for each community” (57). Note however that the expulsion from France in the early 14th century gave raise to the Old French rite (of course in the Hebrew language) in three communities in Piedmont: Asti, Fossano, and Moncalvo (hence the Hebrew acronym APAM as a name for that rite); the APAM prayer book survives, but was never printed. Neumatic notation of music, with Hebrew words beneath it, appear inside a miniature of two facing pages of a book, inside an illumination showing a choir-leader and a choir, illustrating Psalm 149, from a late 13th-century manuscript (now in Parma) of Psalms with Abraham Ibn Ezra’s commentary (on the margins of the page). This is Fig. 82. The image of the choir with the neumatic notation in the book their read separates two psalms on the page, whereas the image of the choir-leader separates the main text from the commentary. Epstein states: “The poly phonic style of church music, for example, was adopted, replete with Baroque ornamentation, in the service of singing the Psalms in Hebrew (figure 82)” (57); this statement is misleading, because whereas there was a discontinued attempt (by Salamone Rossi, b. Mantua ca. 1570, d. ca. Mantua 1630), in 1622/23, to introduce polyphony into Italian Jewish liturgy, in the main Jewish synagogal music is monophonic,18 including in Italy,19 and certainly so in the Middle Ages, to which the manuscript

18 “Instead of art music, the monophonic chant — ‘monophonic’ meaning music having a single line — of the cantor, who sang alone or together with the congregation, was developed, in the Middle Ages, as an embellished form of textual recitation”. Quoted from p. 20 in Don Harrán, “‘Dum Recordaremur Sion’: Music in the Life and Thought of the Venetian Rabbi Leon Modena (1571–1648)”, AJS Review [Association for Jewish Studies], 23(1), 1998), pp. 17–61 (). “Where cantorial song ends and art music begins is a tricky, though tantalizing, lim- inal question. Perhaps they meet in the domain of postbiblical religious hymns […] Still another bridge between cantorial song and art music is in the mode of their rendition” (ibid., p. 26). 19 Cf. in Leo Levi’s encyclopaedic entry “Italy: Musical Tradition”, in the English-language Encyclopaedia Judaica, 18 vols. (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), vol. 9, 1142–1147.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 Reviews 377 of Fig. 82 belongs.20 Epstein actually refers to Salamone Rossi explicitly on p. 61. There is a superfluous right double quotation mark in the fifth line from the bottom of the caption of Fig. 89 on p. 64. Shown is a page from a book of year-round festival prayers, now in Budapest, and written in Germany, in the lake Constance region, ca. 1322. The illumination is of the first Hebrew word in “Come from Lebanon, my Bride”, wording from Song of Songs interpreted allegorically and recycle in a hymn. The caption explains the illumination: “Jousting knights — the warlike nations of the world — whose battle is paralleled by the intertwined dragons below. They

20 See an article by Don Harrán, “Tradition and Innovation in Jewish Music of the Later Renaissance”, The Journal of Musicology, 7(1), 1989, pp. 107–130 (). It cites “Alexander Altmann [“The Rise of Art Music in the Italian Ghetto”, in Id. (ed.), Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Cam- bridge, Mass, 1967), pp. 321–364] (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 321–64, esp. 340– 47; idem, ‘La pénétration de la musique savante dans les synagogues italiennes au XVIIe siècle: le cas particulier de Venise’, Gli ebrei e Venezia: secoli XIV–XVIII, ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Milan, 1987), pp. 527–35; and Massimo Torrefranca, ‘«I Canti di Salamone» di Salamone Rossi: un caso di confluenza fra tradizioni italiane ed ebraiche nel primo Seicento’ (unpubl. tesi di laurea, University of Rome, 1986); Tor- refranca is now preparing a doctoral dissertation on Rossi’s Shirim [i.e., Songs] at Hebrew University” (Harrán, ibid., p. 108, fn. 6). [I found no trace of Torrefranca’s PhD thesis; see however Sec. 3, “I rapporti con la cultura musicale occidentale fra Cinque e Settecento” (pp. 487–491), in Massimo Acanfora Torrefranca, “Sulle mu- siche degli ebrei in Italia”, in Corrado Vivanti (ed.), Gli ebrei in Italia, 2 vols. (Storia d’Italia, Annali, 11), Turin: Einaudi, 1996, Vol. 1, pp. 475–493. Of his own works, concerning Rossi Torrefranca only cites there “I canti di Salomone, di Salomone [sic] Rossi: un caso di confluenza di tradizioni italo-ebraiche, Tesi di Laurea, Università “La Sapienza”, Rome 1986.] Cf. Don Harrán, “Salamone Rossi, Jewish Musician in Renaissance Italy”, Acta musicologica, 59 (1987), pp. 46–64; Fritz Rikko, “Salamon Rossi, Hashirim Asher L’shlomo (The Songs of Solomon)”, The Musical Quarterly, 5(2), 1969, pp. 269–275. Salamone Rossi also authored secular music; see Franco Piperno, “I quattro libri di musica strumentale di Salamone Rossi”, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 13 (1979), pp. 337–357; Don Harrán, “Salamone Rossi as a Com- poser of Theater Music”, Studi musicali, 16, pp. 95–131; Id., Salamone Rossi: Jew- ish Musician in Late Renaissance Mantua, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Id. (ed.), Salamone Rossi: Collected Works, 13 vols. (Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, 100), Stuttgart: Hänssler-Verlag on behalf of the American Institute of Musicology, 12 vols. (Rossi’s secular music) in 1995, and later Vol. 13 (Rossi’s synagogal music); F. Rikko (ed.), Hashirim Asher Lish’lomo (The Songs of Solomon), 2 vols., New York: Mercury Music Corp., 1967; N. Zaslaw’s review of the latter in The Musical Quarter- ly, 55(2), 1969, pp. 269–275 ().

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 378 Ephraim Nissan are counterbalanced by the squirrels eating nuts above (symbolizing the in- tellectual as opposed to the physical life), and mocked by a man dropping his pants and exposing and pointing to his rear end as an illustration of the ultimate futility of their conflict”. Actually the squirrels, facing each other, are at the top near the corners of the frame of the illumination, whereas the man, between them, is too stylised to state that he is dropping his pants. Rather, he is naked (except around his head), he is bent rightward (i.e., to his left), and his right hand appears to point to his backside (rather than just happening to be in that position, had he been running). The motif of the mocking man exposing his backside is well-known from the Marcolfian literature: Marcolf, the smart boor from medieval and early modern texts from Western Christendom, is condemned to death by King Solomon for lèse majesté, because Marcolf had Solomon find Marcolf with the latter’s naked bottom outside an oven, inside which the boor’s body was. Marcolf gets away with that, notwithstanding his death sentence (he just cannot de- cide on which three they are to hang him), and goes away after his release. In the section entitled “The Problem of ‘National Style’”21 (77–87) by Frojmovic with Epstein, they note that on the very year, 1897, of the first Zionist congress in Basel, “the first facsimile of a Jewish illuminated manuscript, the Sarajevo Haggadah (illuminated in Catalonia, around 1350) was published in Vienna, a collaboration between three scholars — two Christians and a Jew” (77). As for the national movement entering its political phase on the international scene:

The Jewish people, in order to be accepted as a nation under the terms of European nationalism, had to claim all the distinctive cultural features of a nation: shared history, language, and “culture” — for example, music and, last but not least, art. All the nations in Europe were engaged in defining their national art, and the young Jewish national movement was no exception. But to claim an essentially Jewish art proved to be an elusive project. An art historical practice founded on an emphasis on form over content, and artistic style over iconography, could not but be challenged by the diversity of styles adopted in artworks made by Jewish artists of for Jewish patrons. A common syllogism, adopted both by non-Jewish and many Jewish scholars, was that since there was no Jewish style, there could be no such thing as Jewish art. […] A few critics sought to respond to the allegation of Jewish “artlessness”22 by adopting an iconographic mode of analysis — that is to say, they focused on content rather than style. (77)

21 On p. 77, line 6 from the bottom, a period should be a comma. In the caption of Fig. 104 on p. 80, the festival name “Hannukah” should be “Hanukkah”. 22 The images in the book under review is an obvious refutation of the canard of Jewish artlessness.

Two recent political developments have provided important impulses for a rethinking of the nexus of stylistic closeness and cultural identity in the case of Jewish mi- norities operating and creating within Christian majorities: the new formations are feminism and postcolonial thought. […] First, we have to eliminate two notions: that styles are owned by nations, and that influence implies inferiority. We must, rather, be insistent that Jewish manuscripts illuminated in Italy look Italian because their owners were Italian (as well as Jewish). […] If we expect German Jews to use a rad- ically different style from German Christians, we perpetuate the myth of the totality of Jewish exclusion from majority society and culture. Style could, furthermore, be adapted specifically in order to identify with a given cultural milieu. (85).

At the very end of a 18th-century illuminated manuscript from Pinczów, Po- land, of the Book of Esther, for the liturgy of the festival of Purim, one come across the image of a rhino, with big ears and a small horn. The caption of Fig. 108 reads: “Scroll of Esther with a reasonable facsimile of Dürer’s rhinoceros. Was it created by non-Jewish artists attempting to demonstrate their sophistication or by Jewish artists trying to keep up with trends in wider society? Or does it speak more to questions of the taste of patrons than the religious identity of the artists?” (84). I wonder whether the image was taken from a source such as Orbis pictus,23 presumably from a German-language edition.

23 Orbis pictus was published in various languages. John [Johann] Amos Comenius = Jan Amos Komensky. 1659. Orbis Pictus. [ = Orbis sensualium pictus.] London: J. Kirton (1659). Facsimile of the 1st English edn. of 1659: John E. Sadler (introd.), Oxford University Press (1968). Ch. Hoole English transl., Menston, UK: Scholar Press (1970). 3rd Latin edn.: London: S. Mearne (1672). Facsimile of the 3rd edn. of 1672, Sydney, Australia: Sydney University Press & London: Methuen (1967). Joh. Amos Comenii Orbis sensualium pictus, hoc est, Omnium principalium in mundo rerum, et in vita actionum, pictura & nomenclatura = Joh. Amos Comenius’s Visible World, or, A Nomenclature, and pictures of all the chief things that are in the world, and of men’s employments therein (written by the author in Latin and high Dutch …; translated into English by Charles Hoole). London: John Sprint (1705). London: S. Leacroft (1777) = 12th London edn. (corrected & enlarged). New York: T. & J. Swords (1810); 1st American edn., from the 12th London edn. corr. and enl. (En- gravings by Alexander Anderson). Early American imprints. Second series, no. 19817 (microfilm). Also: Jan Amos Komensky (1835 = 1979), Neuer Orbis pictus fur die Jugend: oder Schauplatz der Natur, der Kunst und des Menschenlebens in 322 lithographirten Abbildungen mit genauer Erklarung in deutscher, lateinischer, fran- zosischer und englischer Sprache nach der fruheren Anlage des Com (bearbeitet und dem jetzigen Zeitbedurfnisse gemass eingerichtet von J.E. Gailer) [English, German, French, Latin]. Reutlingen: Macken (1835) = 3rd edn. Moreover: Facsimile, Dort- mund: (Die bibliophilen Taschenbucher, 116), Harenberg Kommunikation, 1979.

Chapter 5, “No Graven Image: Permitted Depictions, Forbidden De- pictions, and Creative Solutions” (89 ff), by Frojmovic and Epstein, comprises “Focus: Exploring the Mystery of the Birds’ Head Haggadah” (97– 104), by Epstein. “In reality, the commandment comes to prohibit only the making of three-dimensional art intended for worship by Jews, which is why book arts of the most phantasmagorical types were so frequently tolerated” (89). “Before the thirteenth century, manuscript illumination for Jewish patrons had flourished mainly in countries under Muslim domina- tion. There, Jews participated in the visual culture of their neighbors by adopting and even exceeding the strict norms of aniconism — the avoidance of visual depiction — that were considered binding by Muslims in their religious art. Accordingly, the beautiful Jewish manuscripts surviving from Muslim countries [except Persia!] adopt ornamental or symbolic schemes that avoid the human figure” (89) “In the Christian West, Jews encountered a different challenge: how to respond to a Christian visual culture saturated with what Jews might have considered idolatrous images” (89), a visual culture that for Jews “was simultaneously religiously problematic and aesthetically appealing, as is evident even in many images of Abraham smashing the idols. In an example from an eighteenth-century haggadah, the idols, designated in the Yiddish caption as bilder (images), are nonetheless beautifully and sensitively rendered with an understanding of classical style (figure 113)” (89). “For the first time, in the 1230s, Jewish patrons adopted the emerging fashion of owning beautifully illuminated books of devotion furnished with narrative illustrations” (91). The problem of art and idolatry was debated since the 12th century, and this is explained (92). Sometimes, representations of the human form were rendered faceless (94), and sometimes the perceived need was satisfied by “the careful erasure of a single eye” (95). In “the three-volume Ambro- siana Bible” (95), made between 1236 and 1238 in Germany, “more than one solution to the problem of representation was adopted. Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, and Moses have their faces veiled by their ample hair that falls forward to hide (figure 122). Other figures, such as those in the initial illustration of the book of Ruth, King David, King Aḥasverosh,24

24 Why the hybrid transcription “Aḥasverosh”? Let is be either “Ahasuerus”, or “Aḥashverosh” (as done on pp. 139, 140, 156, and 191).

The angels Gabriel and Michael, from a Hebrew prayer book (ca. 1300). Bodleian, MS Laud. Or. 321, folio 166, discussed on p. 31 in Ameisenowa’s “Animal-Headed Gods, Evangelists, Saints and Righteous Men”.

25 Zofia Ameisenowa, “Animal-Headed Gods, Evangelists, Saints and Righteous Men”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 12 (1949), pp. 21–45 (), proposed a parallel between the animal-headed, human-bodied visual representations of saintly biblical characters in medieval Jewish manuscripts from Germany, and the animal-headed evangelists from Christian iconography — in a ninth-century manuscript, “the Evangelist Mark is represented with the head of a horse instead of that of a lion” (ibid., p. 40) — and the originally pagan lore of the 36 Dekans from astrology. The Dekans were “the divine rulers of every ten degrees of the ecliptic, the period which corresponds to the ten days of the Egyptian week” (ibid., p. 22). “Their most important characteristic was and has always remained their heads, their ‘faces’. Instead of Dekans, they were often called in Greek texts simply prosopa, and in Latin, facies, their faces being, for the most part, those of animals” (ibid.). Ameisenowa (ibid., p. 40) claimed that an illumination of the Vision of Ezekiel from the Ambrosiana Hebrew Bible (MS B 32 inf.) “is an evident imitation of the Christian representation of the animal-headed Evangelists. Why the artist who illustrated the three-volume Bible with such interesting pictures, among them this miniature of the messianic banquet of the just, pictured only three ‘chajjoth’ [i.e., the mystical animals in the Vision of Ezekiel] with the faces of the lion, the man and the bull, and depicted an animal of prey with sharp claws and gleaming eyes instead of the usual eagle-headed creature, is a puzzle to me. He seems to some extent to have disregarded the tradition, for elsewhere he also substituted a cock’s head for the human head” (ibid., pp. 40–41).

In Epstein’s section “Focus: Exploring the Mystery of the Birds’ Head Haggadah” (97–104), his departure point is “[t]he so-called Bird’s Head Haggadah, probably illuminated in Mainz around 1300, now in the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (MS 180/57)” (97).26 “Through the manuscript’s forty-seven remaining folios, two full-page miniatures and thirty-three pages with marginal illustrations depict a variety of figures, old and young, male and female, portraying the narratives of the Exodus and engaged in the religious observances of Passover Eve […] But curi- ously, although provided with the bodies of human beings, these figures are in most cases represented not with human heads, but with the counte- nances of sharp-beaked and sharp-eyed birds. In some cases, these birds’ heads are supplemented with animal ears” (97).

Look carefully at the illumination of Pharaoh and his host, pursuing the departing Israelites on fol. 33v (figure 127). You will note that they are depicted without birds’ heads, with the exception of two ‘Egyptians’ situated directly behind Pharaoh who do sport birds’ heads. These figures represent Datan and Aviram, the two Jewish task-masters, one with a whip and the other with a club, who according to legend, remained in Egypt, and, riding out with him to the Red Sea, advised Pharaoh as to how to capture the Israelites. (99)

Epstein remarks that “all the Jewish characters in the manuscript” (99), even ones “having ‘gone over’ to the Egyptian side” (100) are represented as bird-headed. “On the other hand, all non-Jewish figures in the manuscript, like the Egyptians, as well as all nonhuman, celestial figures, like angels, and the sun and moon, are depicted with blank human heads” (100). Note however that the angel in the scene of Isaac’s prevented sacrifice has a bald human head, but it is not defaced, as the eyes, a partial contour of the nose, and the mouth are there. But perhaps the area around the yes was darkened?

26 My thanks to Mrs. Gioia Perugia Sztulman of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, for providing me with images from the Birds’ Head Haggadah, including the ones I reproduce her by her kind permission on behalf of the Israel Museum.

The biblical episode of Abraham receiving a counter-order from an angel, namely, not to sacrifice Isaac, whereas is ram (greenish with yellow horns) is trapped in a bush. Detail of the bottom of Folio 15v from the Bird’s Head Haggadah. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem / Moshe Caine. By kind permission. One should not make too much of the face expressions in this image. The head of the angel is balding, and his face is perhaps good-natured, but perhaps he was simply badly drawn. (Did the miniaturist consider drawing it better normatively problematic? it is a human face indeed.) The lowered eyelids and the inside beak lines are turned down, and this would suggest a befittingly sad mood, were it not for other imagery which shows bird-men with the same features, even though in their own circumstances they should rather be glad because of the Giving of the Law.

The scene of the manna coming down from the sky, being the bottom of folio 23r the Bird’s Head Haggadah. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem / Moshe Caine. The text in black above the cloud with the hands coming down is part of a hymn enumerating heavenly gifts accompanying the Exodus, and the given two lines refer to the manna indeed. (Some text from the other side of the parchment page looks through into this side of the folio. So do the funnel-like contours of hats, from miniatures on the other side of the folio.) The caption Man ‘manna’ is repeated, and appears on both sides. The man on the left wears a dark red dress, whereas the man on the right wears a dark green dress. There is a tearing in the manuscript at the corner behind the man in green.

A detail from the bottom of folio 22v of the Bird’s Head Haggadah. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem / Moshe Caine. By kind permission.

Bottom of folio 22v. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem / Moshe Caine. A man in a greenish dress, with the beak of a bird and a pointed mammalian ear, with his legs in a posture which apparently represents his making an effort, is raising a red-bodied ram on a spit, above a bonfire (itself not filled with colour). The ram is horned and adult, yet the caption above it reads se, ‘lamb’. The eye of the man raising the pole is wide open (befitting the effort), unlike the lowered eyelid in the face of the man on the left, belonging to the Law-giving scene.

According to Epstein, the bird’s heads were actually meant to be heads of griffins. This is cogent indeed. “Like the cherubs on the Ark and the curtain of the Holy of Holies, they represent a combination of three of the four creatures of the Divine Chariot [from Ezekiel] — lion, eagle, and human (the fourth, the ox, hints at the sin of the Golden Calf and is this not included)” (101).

The kruvim, the cherubs on the kapporet, or covering, of the Ark of the Covenant, had human faces and eagle’s wings […] According to some sources, they had the bodies of lions […] Lions and eagles appeared on the curtain of the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple. Some sources describe the veil as having been woven translucently, with the lions on the outside and the eagles on the inside, arranged in such a way that when one looked at the curtain one saw the illusion of lions with eagles’ wings, or griffins […] The griffin appears often in later examples of art made by and for Jews, from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century […] (101)

For that matter Biblical Hebrew /krub/ and the European lexical type griffin may be etymologically related, as claimed sometimes. Epstein “feel[s] most comfortable simply asserting that the griffin was chosen because of those aspects of its nature that make it a symbol of positive identification for Jews” (101). We have already considered the similitudes of the maxim ‘Be strong as a leopard, and light as an eagle, and swift as a gazelle, and bold as a lion to do the will of your Parent in heaven’ (Mishnah ’Avot 5.23). Epstein se- lectively proposes “Be brave as a lion … and light as an eagle … to do the will of your Parent in Heaven” (101). According to Epstein (101), the sun, the moon, and the angels have no free will, and defacing them represented denying their power; defacing such other characters as Pharaoh, “worshippers of stars and constellations”, appears to be a referent to Psalm 115:8,27 that (in the imperfective tense, arguably in the optative mode) likens the worshippers of idols to the idols themselves: these and those are powerless. Chapter 6, “Iconography: Telling the Story”, by Epstein, consists of two sections: “Geographical distinctions” (105 ff), and “Approaches to the Biblical narrative” (122 ff). “[N]o less than twenty-four ox-carts load- ed to bursting with Jewish manuscripts were consigned to the fire during what is usually called the ‘Burning of the Talmud’ in the Place de la Grève (now the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville) in Paris on 6 June 1242. In that one

27 The chapter and verse are not indicated in the book, but some wording in English is given.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 386 Ephraim Nissan tragic conflagration, nearly every Jewish book in the whole of the Île-de- France — a great center of Jewish learning — was utterly destroyed” (105). “So although the Jews were avid consumers of books in the Middle Ages, this and similar purges have left us with only an extremely frag- mentary remnant of the many beautiful volumes that they once treasured” (105). The theme of Ch. 6 is expressed in this sentence: “Iconography is the way in which narratives, persons, places, or symbols are depicted in art” (106). “It is hard to tell what were common and what were unique approaches to depicting particular subjects. But from what remains, we can glimpse or patch together the major iconographic themes in Jewish illumination in the West, in order to understand the uses to which Jews put art” (106). “Throughout most of their history in the diaspora, Jews lived in a valley of reality between the twin peaks of memory and expectation — the reality of their subjugation to the nations. The cognitive dissonance between this reality and the historical memories and future hopes of the Jewish people is what breeds in their art — as far back as the ancient frescoes in the third-century synagogue of Dura Europos [in Syria] (the earliest surviving example of narrative, figurative art made for Jews), and probably before — unique religious and political sensibilities” (109).28 After its general discussion, Ch. 6 has a section on Jewish illuminated manuscripts from the Muslim world (111–122). For example, there exist “twelve or so known surviving illuminated Judeo-Persian manuscripts of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries” (115).29

28 See now Jewish Art in Its Late Antique Context, edited by Uzi Leibner and Catherine Hezser (in the series Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. 29 Mention is made of the spread of the Persian style of figurative illumination “far and wide, even to the Mughal court in India and the Ottoman court in Turkey” (114). See my review of a volume edited by Rosemary Crill and Kapil Jariwala, The Indian Portrait, 1560–1860 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2010), in Quaderni di Stu- di Indo-Mediterranei, 6 (2013 [2014]), pp. 330–338. I also reviewed (in Fabula, in press), Meir Bar-Ilan’s critical edition of a non-illuminated Hebrew manuscript from Cochin, Kerala, southwestern India: Words of Gad the Seer: Printed for the first time from Cambridge MS O0.1.20, Copied at Cochin, India in the 18th Century (Hebrew: Divrei Gad haḤozé), priovately published by Meir Bar-Ilan, 2015. As for narratives from Mughal India, see E. Nissan, “Eude and Eglon, Eleazar the Maccabee, and Two Early Modern Indian Narratives: Factors Explaining the Convergence of Phyloge- netically Unconnected Tales”, Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies, 10 (2009), pp. 81–92; Id., “A Formal Representation from the AURANGZEB Project. I: An Episode from

There is mention of epic poems in Persian in the Hebrew script.30 As for the iconography of Jewish manuscripts from Iran, “[w]hen biblical scenes appear that are featured neither in the Quar’an nor in Muslim ‘romances’, it should clue us in to the fact that these are indigenously Jewish images, although executed in the prevailing style and adopting common iconographical elements” (117). In the caption of figure 151 on p. 121, there is a misidentification of the theme of the image (itself from a Judaeo-Persian 19th-century manuscript). The caption states: “Joshua battling the giant Siḥon.” But in the line of text that in the manuscript itself appears under the image, as well as in large let- tering (in Judaeo-Persian in the Hebrew script) at the bottom of the facing page inside the reproduction in figure 151, the dramatis personae are clearly identified as Moses ( mwsy in Judaeo-Persian spelling, rather than the Hebrew mšh for Moshe) and Og ( ‘Og, in the original spelling of

the Succession War: A Formal Representation from the AURANGZEB Project. II: A Formalism for the Capture of Murad”, Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 18(3), 2007, pp. 281–305 and 307–327; Id., “A Formal Representation from the AJIT Subproject Within AURANGZEB”, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelli- gence, 54(4), 2008 [2009], pp. 293–362. In the 20th century, there has been a British Jewish-born Pakistani woman painter of renown in her adopted country (generally unfriendly to Jews); see Western Jews in India: From the Fifteenth Century to the Present, edited by Kenneth X. Robbins and Marvin Tokayer (New Delhi: Manohar, 2013; distributed, Lancaster, England: Gazelle Book Services), in Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei, 7 (2014 [2015]). For a Jewish diplomat at the Mughla court, see a study by Walter J. Fischel, “Abraham Navarro: Jewish Interpreter and Diplomat in the Service of the East India Company (1682–1692)”, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 25 (1956), pp. 39–62; 26 (1957), pp. 25–39. On the early modern period and the Enlightenment in India, see my review of L’Inde des Lumières: Discours, histoire, savoirs (XVIIe–XIXe siècle), edited by Marie Fourcade and Ines G. Županov (Collection Puruṣārtha, 31, Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales [EHESS], 2013), in Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei, 6 (2013 [2014]), pp. 323–329. Jewish traders in 18th- and 19th-century India often were from Iraq. Jewish traders in India from the Muslim world are the subject of India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) by S.D. Goitein (posthumously) and Mordechai Akiva Friedman (Études sur le Juda- isme Médiéval, 31), Leiden: Brill, and Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 2008, which I reviewed in Quaderni di Studi Indo-Mediterranei, 6 (2013 [2014]), pp. 339–344. 30 Judaeo-Persian epics were discussed by Vera Basch Moreen, in her study “The ‘Iranization’ of Biblical Heroes in Judeo-Persian Epics: Shahin’s Ardashīr-nāmah and ‘Ezrā-nāmah”, Iranian Studies, 29(3/4), 1996, pp. 321–338 ().

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 388 Ephraim Nissan the Hebrew Bible). Moses in person killing the gigantic King Og is a scene from early rabbinic homiletics.31 According to the biblical narrative, Siḥon, King of the Amorites, and Og, King of Bashan, were two kings defeated by Moses in Transjordan, and the iron bed of Og was very large32 (Deuterono- my 3:11), which suggests that he was an exceedingly tall man. There exists a tradition about not only Og, but also Siḥon having been gigantic.33 It is Og

31 This is only a small overlap between how (a) early rabbinic homiletics dealt with giants, and (b) tales of Giants in the Dead Sea Scrolls and extracanonical literature on biblical themes, as traded down by Christian scribes. (a), (b), Greek Titans (c), and (d) Enochic traditions in Manichaean texts from Central Asia and China are the subject of an important edited book, Ancient Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan, edited by M. Goff, L.T. Stuckenbruck, and E. Morano (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 360), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. 32 Reminding of the biblical bed of Og is the extravagantly large size of the haunted Great Bed of Ware (pp. 351–352 in J. Westwood and J. Simpson, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends, from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys, London: Penguin Books, 2005): an author “in 1736 spoke of the twenty-six butchers and their wives who had slept in it on the night that King William III was crowned” (352). “Although the date 1463 is painted on the headboard, […] the bed is actually thought to have been made as a publicity stunt for the White Hart of Ware around 1590. It was famous enough by the time that Shakeaspeare wrote Twelfth Night (first performed 1601) for him to include an allusion to it (Act 3, scene 2)” (352). The bed is reputedly haunted, too. The dimensions of Og’s bed are the same as those of the nuptial bed of Marduk and Zarpanutu at the Etemenanki ziggurat in Babylon. See Maria Lindquist, “King Og’s Iron Bed”, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 73 (1011), pp. 477–492; Timo Veijola, “King Og’s Iron Bed (Deut 3:11): Once Again”, in Studies in the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, and the Septuagint: Presented to Eugene Ulrich on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Peter W. Flint, James C. VanderKam and Emanuel Tov (Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, 101), Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. pp. 60–76; Ulrich Hübner, “Og von Baschan und sein Bett in Rabbat-Ammon (Deuteronomium 3, 11)”, Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 105 (1993), pp. 86–92; and on p. 20 in Ancient Tales of Giants from Qumran and Turfan. 33 The following is quoted from Louis Ginzberg’s modern digest, now a classic (and valuable for scholarship, because of the citations of the sources in its endnotes). L. Gin- zberg, Legends of the Jews, 7 vols., Philadephia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909–1938. “It was at Arnon, too, that Sihon, the king of the Amorites, and his people who, hardly a month after Aaron’s death, rushed upon Israel, were complete- ly destroyed by them.666 This Amorite king, and likewise Og, the king of Bashan, were sons of Ahiah, whose father Shemḥazai was one of the fallen angels.667 In accordance with his celestial origin Sihon was a giant whom none could withstand, for he was of enormous stature, taller than any tower in all the world, his thigh-bone alone measuring eighteen cubits, according to the big cubit of that time.668” (Ginzberg, Vol. 3, p. 430).

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 Reviews 389 however who was the subject of especially wondrous narratives.34 The Bab- ylonian Talmud, tractate Berakhot 54b, states that when slaying Og, Moses

34 “The battle against Og took place in Edrei, the outskirts of which Israel reached toward nightfall. On the following morning, however, barely at gray dawn, Moses arose and prepared to attack the city, but looking toward the city wall, he cried in amazement, ‘Behold, in the night they have built up a new wall about the city!’ Moses did not see clearly in the misty morning, for there was no wall, but only the giant Og who sat upon the wall with his feet touching the ground below.685” (Ginzberg, Vol. 3, p. 343). The citations of the sources in the corresponding endnotes, in Ginmzberg, Vol. 6, p. 117, are as follows; note 666: Seder ‘Olam, Tanhuma (Buber’s version) 4:130, Tanhuma at Huqqat 24, Numbers Rabbah 19:32. The latter states: “Aaron died in the month of Ab, and the war against Sihon took place in the following month, that is in Elul.” Note 667: Babylo- nian Talmud at Niddah 61a, and moreover: “According to an unknown Midrash, quoted by R[abbi] Bahya, Hukkat (end), they were the sons of Shemhazael.” There even exist stories about Og being so long-lived, that he clung outside Noah’s Ark and survived, and that he was active in Abraham’s days, coveted Sarah, and informed Abraham that Lot was made captive, hoping that Abraham would perish in war. (Og sitting akimbo on the back of the unicorn, itself tied behind Noah’s Ark, is shown in an illustration by Saul Aronson, on p. 30 in a book by “Aunt Naomi” [i.e., Gertrude Landa], Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends, New York: Bloch, 1919.The elephant and the giraffe, which watch out of windows on the Ark, are tiny in comparison. The book is now online; see and the image at the webpage of the story “The Giant of the Flood”, clickable ibid., at ). There is even a tale about Abraham making a bed for himself out of a tooth of Og (his servant) that had fallen off (Ginzberg, Vol. 3, p. 344, and Vol. 6, note 688, which cites tractate Sofĕrim 21). This was probably inspired the wording “those who lie down on beds of ivory (lit. tooth)” (Amos 6:4), which implies that “beds of tooth” are a luxurious commodity. Cf. “And the King made a throne (lit. chair) of ivory (lit. tooth)”, big” (1 Kings 10:18, 2 Chronicles 9:17), where ‘big’ is applied to ‘throne’, but may be taken to be applied to ‘tooth’ instead (it is typical of Semitic languages that the adjective follows the noun). Also cf. “palaces of ivory/tooth” (Psalms 45:9), “and the house of ivory/tooth he had built” (1 Kings 22:39), “and the houses of ivory/ tooth shall be lost” (Amos 3:15). Concerning Og’s death, there is this account (again, as retold by Ginzberg): “Og met his death in the following fashion. When he discovered that Israel’s camp was three parasangs in circumference, he said: ‘I shall now tear up a mountain of three parasangs, and cast it upon Israel’s camp, and crush them.’ He did as he had planned, pulled up a mountain of three parasangs, laid it upon his head, and came marching in the direction of the Israelite camp, to hurl it upon them. But what did God do? He caused ants to perforate the mountain, so that it slipped from Og’s head down upon his neck, and when he attempted to shake it off, his teeth pushed out and extended to left and right, and did not let the mountain pass, so that he now stood there with the mountain, unable to throw it from him. When Moses saw this, he took an axe twelve

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 390 Ephraim Nissan jumped up as high as he himself was tall, and that even so, he only reached Og’s ankles. In the Judaeo-Persian manuscript, the picture shows Moses’s stature being up to the giant’s waist; Og, with a blond beard and a black moustache, is shown wearing only a short red skirt and a bracelet, whereas Moses wears a red coat and turban, has a yellow halo around his head (like

cubits long, leaped ten cubits into the air, and dealt a blow to Og’s ankle, which caused the giant’s death” (Ginzberg, Vol. 3, pp. 345–346, cf. notes in Vol. 6, p. 120). Parḥon, s.v. dukhifat (hoopoe), “quotes a Midrash to the effect that it was the hoopoe which perforated the mountain, whereas the Midrash Aggada [i.e., rabbinic homiletics] as- cribes this feat to the raven” (Ginzberg, Vol. 6, p. 120, note 695). The subnarrative about the giant’s head becoming inextricably encased in the mountain surmounting it, because his mouth suddenly developed tuskas left and right, locking the head in the rock, is tantalising, and in my opinion lends much support to the insight that tales about exceedingly large human giants may have been motivated by unearthed pro- boscidean skulls. The large middle hole, corresponding to the place where the trunk was attached, was believed to be the only eye of a Cyclops, as convincingly suggested in the scholarly literature. Concerning the link between giants and elephant skulls was discussed by Natan [sic] Slifkin in Ch. 3, “Gigantic Giants”, Sacred Monsters: Mysterious and Mythical Creatures of Scripture, Talmud and Midrash, Jerusalem: Zoo Torah, 2007 ( ). Giants are also the subject of A. Mayor, “Giants in Ancient Warfare”, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, 2(2), 1999, pp. 98–105. It is a survey of legendary and historical battles with giants, from Goliath to the Germanic tribes defeated by the ancient Romans, and medieval giant knights to the Prussian regiment of giant soldiers. Adrienne Mayor, a folklorist and classicist, argued for fossils as an aetiology for giants and some mythical animals in her book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times,Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Whereas this is relevant for the giant Og in early rabbinic homiletics, consider that Scripture only states that Og had a very large iron bed, an indicator of status rather than of his own stature. As for the other defeated king, Og’s neighbour, Sihon, the King of the Emo- rites, note that after reproaching his contemporaries for their sins and idolatry, Amos 2:9 remarks that by divine design thedy supplanted the Emorites, whose stature like like that of cedars, and whose strength was like that of oaks. This contains wordplay: ĕmorī ‘Emorite’ vs. the lexical root Moreover, arguarbly human groups with a moderately elongated body (such as on average the present-day Dutch and Bosnians) may well have been considered peoples of giants in the ancient Mediterranean. See the discussion of late antique rabbinic lore about giants in Y. HaCohen-Kerner and E. Nissan, “Information Retrieval and Question Answering for Assisting Readers of the Late Antique to Medieval Corpora of the Aggadic Midrash”, in N. Dershowitz and E. Nissan (eds.), Language, Culture, Computation: Essays Dedicated to Yaacov Choueka, Vol. 3: Computational Linguistics and Linguistics (LNCS, vol. 8003), Hei- delberg: Springer-Verlag, 2014, pp. 82–102.

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 2/2016, pp. 335–404 Reviews 391 in Islamic Persian imagery of holy characters), and raises his long wand against Og. Elsewhere,35 I have written the following, concerning an episode related to the 1263 Barcelona disputation which was forced upon the Jews, and in which the arguments against Judaism were put forth by an apostate, Pablo Christiani:

Before the disputation took place, it was already known that Pablo Christiani was going to use, as an argument against Judaism, the presence of legends hard to believe in the extra-biblical Jewish tradition. A diplomatic, yet trenchant letter in Hebrew to Pablo Christiani was authored by Jacob ben Elijah (Jacob de Lattes, Jacob ben Elijah ben Isaac of Carcassonne), a Provençal rabbi, and apparently a relative of the apostate. In 1868, Joseph Isaac Kobak published it,536 and in 1926, Jacob Mann discussed it.37 Kobak and subsequent scholars believed that the author was Rabbi Jacob of Venice, whereas it was Mann who identified him with Jacob de Lattes. At any rate, the author of the epistle was a cousin of the apostate. The family had suffered also because the apostate had taken his children from his wife, who had remained Jewish: Jacob’s epistle mentions this sorry family matter in rhymed prose. What makes the epistle extraordinary, for folklore studies, is that Jacob ben Elijah developed a sober, rationalistic argument about why the place of folkloric tales about characters from religion has a tolerable, if not necessarily desirable place in a culture. And this, even when such tales defy reason. He claimed that the common people have a demand for such tales. And yet, he wasn’t happy about those who originate such tales, as in fact he states: “if only they stopped!”. He adopts a practical viewpoint, and claims that a Jew has an incumbent obligation to believe in the Hebrew Bible, and it is indifferent whether that person also believes anything that is not incompatible with it. As an example, he mentions Og, the King of Bashan, who was defeated by Moses. Scripture states the length of Og’s iron bed. Were I to say that Og was very tall, this is unproblematic for orthodoxy, unlike if I was to claim that Og was a dwarf (actually Rashi, whose commentary to the Bible is the one most widespread among Jews,

35 Section 2 (pp. 238–239) in E. Nissan, “On the Report of Isaac de Lattes Concerning the Death of the Apostate in Taormina”, in: G. Musotto e L. Pepi (eds.), Il bagno ebraico di Siracusa e la sacralità delle acque nelle culture mediterranee: atti del seminario di studio (Siracusa, 2–4 maggio 2011) (Machina Philosophorum: testi e studi dalle culture euromediterranee, 42), Palermo, Sicily: Officina di Studi Medie- vali, 2014, pp. 237–266 (+ abstract on pp. 345–346). 36 J.I. Kobak [ ], “Iggeret (Vikkuach) R. Ya‘akov mi-Venetsi’a, ‘im he‘arot me’et ha-me’assef ” [Hebrew, “The Epistle (Polemic) of Rabbi Jacob of Ven- ice, with Notes by the Editor”] Jeschurun (Lemberg [i.e., Łwów]), 6 (1868), pp. 1–34. 37 J. Mann, “Une source de l’Histoire juive au XXXe siècle: La lettre polémique de Jacob b. Élie à Pablo Christiani”, Revue des Études Juives, 82 (1926), pp. 363–377.

stated in a gloss that the measure in cubits of the length of the bed was in Og’s own cubits, but this implies that we don’t know how tall Og was: his bed may have been as small as a box of matches, provided that he could fit inside). What is fascinating about the epistle, is that Jacob ben Elijah translated into good medieval Hebrew several Christian hagiographic legends, in order to prove to Pablo Christiani that his argument against Judaism could be made quite forcefully against his new faith, too. But the fact stands, that because of those circumstances, a collection of such legends appears in medieval Hebrew literature. The Provençal rabbi who translated them left them with no commentary, considering the fabulous nature of the stories themselves quite eloquent, for the purposes of his counterpolemic. Those tales he related in Hebrew were not about articles of faith: those Christian legends, too, do not require the believer to believe in them. In this respect, they are like tales from Jewish homiletics.

The lengthy discussion of Judaeo-Persian illuminated manuscripts is followed (122) by a section entitled “Approaches to the Biblical Narrative”, comprising a subsection entitled “Ashkenaz” (122–127), and then one entitled “Sepharad” (127–136), and then “‘Arav” (136–144) for Jewish illuminated manuscripts from the Islamic world, but which again, is esclusively about Persia. So why entitle this “‘Arav”, rather than “Paras”? Chapter 7, “Dialogue and Disputation: Cultural Negotiation”, by Ep- stein, consists of two sections: “Under Edom” (145 ff), i.e., Jewish communities under Christian rule, and “Under Ishmael” (153 ff), about Jews in Muslim countries (such as Persia and Yemen). In the caption of Fig. 183 on p. 149, from the Barcelona Haggadah (ca. 1340), where “[t]he lower margin and central illustration depicts the slaving Israelites” in Egypt, Ep- stein wonders why “at top, a hare is served a drink by a dog” (above the large initial Hebrew word for ‘slaves’): does this articulate the wish for reversal? In the main text, we are told: “This illustration at first seems out of place — perhaps the unimaginative artist had exhausted the available supply of iconography depicting forced labor and simply filled the space with a humorous image. This image certainly seems to be a typical example of the standard iconography of a ‘world turned upside-down’ — a world in which, instead of pursuing the hare, as dogs are wont to do, this one serves a hare. But there may be a deeper meaning” (149–150). In the Sarajevo Haggadah instead, “a dog pursues a hare as an allegory of the Egyptian oppression of the Jews” (150). The image of the dog serving the hare in the Barcelona Haggadah expresses the hope for a reversal of fortunes (150–151).

Chapter 8, “This World: Centered on the Home — Women, marriage, and the family” (159 ff), by Shalom Sabar,38 comprises “Focus: ‘Glimpses of Jewish Life’: Reality or Illusion?” by Epstein (175 ff), “Focus: ‘Inciden- tal Details’: Margins and Meaning” by Epstein (182 ff), and “Focus: ‘Sa- cred and Prophane’: Naked Ladies in the Haggadah?” (188 ff), by Ágnes Vető (who is Epstein’s wife and colleague at Vassar College). Chapter 9, “Other Worlds: Fantastic Horizons and Unseen Universes” (193 ff), is by Hartley Lachter with Marc Michael Epstein. Chapter 10, “Zion and Jerusalem: ‘The Sum of All Beauty, the Joy of All the Earth’” (205 ff), is by Shalom Sabar. For example, Fig. 245 on p. 211 shows a “[t]ablet with a panoramic map of the Land of Israel. Written and illustrated by Moshe Ganbash, Istanbul, 1838–39”. In the forefront, a steamboat is shown in the sea. The landscape-cum-cartography is stylised, stratified, rather remotely from actual geography. Chapter 11, Epstein’s “In the Roy- al Court: Jewish Illumination in an Age of Printing” (215 ff), comprises “Focus: A Yiddish Minhagim Manuscript” (225 ff) by Diane Wolfthal. Chapter 12, “Illuminating the Present: Contemporary Jewish Illumi- nation” (229 ff), is by Susan Vick with Epstein. This chapter is especially interesting, an eye-opener indeed, because it shows how in the 20th and 21st centuries, artists (usually in the United States or in Israel) are still producing illuminated pages (sometimes, quite complex) as illustrations for books, or as stand-alone documents, such as marriage contracts. This is for couples that want their very own, unique splendidly illustrated document, which does not even have to be with a rectangular contour (actually, historically there used to be Jewish marriage contracts from Rome with a triangular edge). A marriage contract (ketubbah) of 2013 painted and scribed by Batya G.W. Srolowitz is a landscape of a canal in Burano, near Venice, whereas the text of the document is framed inside a circle on the right-hand side of the canal.

Much of the contemporary work we’ve39 been examining begs the question of what illumination is in the first place. One could argue — very traditionally — that the exclusive meaning of illumination is outlined and painted drawings — generally on parchment, more rarely on paper — highlighted with precious metals, designed to accompany text. But that already excludes any number of medieval and early modern

38 “The prominent status of the Italian-Jewish woman is reflected not only in biblical- historical episodes, but also in those depicting scenes from Jewish life” (161). 39 I do not feel that “we’ve” instead of “we have” is proper for scholarly writings, or even for scientific popularisation of the kind found in New Scientist magazine, which adopts precisely that kind of journalese features.

works that this book includes (see, for example, figures 33, 105, and 232, among many others). And certainly the late twentieth and early twenty-first century [recte: centuries] have seen artists working with a variety of media to achieve the effects of illuminations, which broadly and poetically defined, might be understood as relatively small, mostly two-dimensional works of art that capture and project an inner light to the eye of the viewer. In that sense, illumination becomes a big tent, a broad church, if you will, that can encompass everything from the very traditional techniques of a Malla Carl to the acrylics of Batya Stolowitz. (247)

Chapter 13, “Continuing the Journey: Annotated Bibliography and Man- uscript Description”, is by Jenna Siman Jacobs with Epstein, and consists of four sections: “Manuscripts and Facsimiles” (255 ff), “Surveys” (261 ff), “Collection Surveys and Exhibition Catalogues” (263 ff), and “Studies” (265 ff). “The serious researcher should not neglect to consult such [periodical] publications as Jewish Art, Ars Judaica, Images, Studies in Iconography, Art Bulletin, Speculum, Gesta, and Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, among others, for cutting edge-research” [sic] (255) (recte: “cutting-edge research”). The book is concluded by contributor biographies (267–268), a fair- ly detailed index (269–275), and photo credits (276).40 This is a splendid book, in both its insightful and comprehensive text and lavish and mostly rare-to-come by or even previously unpublished illustrations.

Ephraim Nissan Goldsmith College, London

40 The misspelling “Spinéa” appears on p. 171 in the book under review in both the main text and the caption of figure 209. It should be “Spinèa”. Spinea is a town near Venice. On p. 201, read “one’s” in “the flows of ones past lives”. “Let’s” (for “Let us”) at the beginning of the next paragraph is jarring in a scholarly text; it is acceptable in a journalist’s. The proper name “Shavtai” occurs four times in the caption of figure 285 on p. 252; it should be “Shabbetai”, or at least “Shabtai”. In naming the Persian Ardashir Nama, misspellings occur: “Adrashir” twice on p. 139 (where the correct spelling “Ardashir” also appears twice), and then again “Adrashir” (156) — this time even though the correct “Ardashir” is found on the facing page — or then “Ardrashir” (153). In the caption of figure 146 on p. 115, in the Arabic title “Ma|zan al-asrār (Treasury of Secrets)”, the | should rather be ² (i.e., kh), as this is inside the Arabic noun ma²zan, not the Modern Hebrew mahsān ‘storehouse’ (which is actually pronounced makhsán).