Scholarly Knowledge, Drollery or Esotericism? The Masora of the Hebrew Bible in its Various Material Properties

Project Description

In its third funding phase, Subproject B04 focuses on the change from writing by hand to printing, and in particular on the transfer of handwritten and printed artefacts to the Masora. Printing defined a text and layout tradition for the Masora, in which the Ashkenazi tradition - characterised by a multifaceted masora figurata - was gradually replaced by the less elaborate Sephardic tradition.

The project looks at the incunabula, early prints and related manuscripts. It investigates the reception and significance of the Masora and considers those involved in book production (printers, writers) as well as their altered social fields (synagogue, university). It also explores the philological consequences that have come with book printing and the establishment of a standardised Masora. These consequences are still relevant today. This is the first time that the academic fields of Bible (text) research and Jewish studies, which have been separate since the first universities, have been brought together again.

The praxeological view of the production of Hebrew Bibles and the associated presentation of the Masora in the initial phase of early Hebrew book printing between 1475 and 1500 appears particularly exciting because the disappearance of the masora figurata from the Ashkenazi Bible manuscripts of the 11^th to 14^th centuries was by no means isolated. It was accompanied by a change of writing material (parchment to paper), separation and/or change of producers and recipients ([Christian and Jewish] printers rather than Jewish scribes), Christian Hebraists, Jewish scholars), as well as considerable variation in text stock and volume, layout and layer binding. It was not, however, an abrupt development: at the end of the 15^th century, the first incunabula prints of the Hebrew Bible and the established Hebrew commentaries appeared in Italy and on the Iberian peninsula alongside the handwritten tradition. There is a visible juxtaposition and coexistence of the Bible text (as a hypotext) and its various commentaries (as hypertexts): Bible commentary(s), Targum and Masoretic notations.

Using a comparison of the Bible manuscripts and early 15^th century prints, the project aims to establish key findings regarding the reciprocal reception of Ashkenazi and Sephardic textual traditions (Northern Italy) and Sephardic-Tiberian textual traditions (Spain/Portugal), which was accompanied by the loss of Ashkenazi Masora traditions at the beginning of the typographic age in the first half of the 16^th century. It will also provide findings of praxeological relevance with regard to the affordance of artefacts and their liturgical and/or scientific uses.

DIGITAL EDITION

Digital Edition of Masora Figurata developed by project members Clemens Liedtke and Kay Joe Petzold: http://bima.corpusmasoreticum.de/#/