Esther Scroll (Megillah), in Hebrew, manuscript on vellum

7 membranes, each approximately 500mm. by 310mm., containing the book of Esther 2:12b–10:13 (thus wanting two membranes at the beginning), in its original Hebrew form telling the story of a Jewish queen of Persia, Esther, who thwarts an annihilation of the Jews by the hand of her husband Ahasuerus (usually identified as either Xerxes, d. 465 BC.; his son Artaxerxes, d. 424 BC.; or grandson Artaxerxes II, who was assassinated 45 days after his father's death), with three columns per membrane, each column 195mm. by 135mm., with 17 lines in black ink in Ashkenazi square script, numerous later corrections (surprisingly further distancing this text from the Tiberian tradition), slight water damage to outer membrane but with no loss of script, outer side of last extant membrane discoloured and with a nineteenth-century monogram, a few small holes through wear with modern repairs, some stitching between membranes renewed, some cockling and folding to vellum, else in good and strong condition, in fitted cloth-covered case

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing where appropriate.
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text

When the populations of the Christian West turned their backs on manuscript production in favour of the printing press, the rules and teachings of the Jews concerning the production of certain religious books ensured that they did not. They continued to copy scrolls faithfully in the rigid format in which the text has survived from the ancient world to today. Through this many parts of the texts survive across vast expanses of time, as reflections of lost documents from the ancient world. However, the same strict adherence to these rules also ensures that few medieval examples of Hebrew scrolls exist today. When wear or damage rendered the item unusable, it was not set aside and forgotten in a library or cut up to survive within the bindings of other books as in the Christian tradition, but was buried in a Genizah and left to decay. Thus, few survive as anything more than small fragments.

 

Thus the survival of any medieval Hebrew manuscript is remarkable, and the present manuscript is of particular interest as it is one of the very oldest Esther scrolls to survive. Apart from the present example, only twenty are recorded from the entire Jewish world, and none can be shown to be any older than the present manuscript (for Sefardi scrolls, there are two in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma; two more in the British Library: Or. 1087; Or. 2086; and a further one in the JNUL, Jerusalem: 4⁰197/32; for Ashkenazi scrolls, three are in Parma; one in London: Harley 7620; and another in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; in addition Parma holds another eleven Italian scrolls in various scripts as well as a single example from either Spain or North Africa).

 

Additionally, as Professor Jordan Penkower has shown in a report prepared for the present owner, this manuscript is a valuable record of an early alternative accurate tradition of the text, kept alive only in the Italian and Ashkenazi communities. As with a handful of other Italian and Ashkenazi records there are many spelling differences here which separate the present text from the supposedly more accurate Tiberian textual traditions. However, as the spelling differences are repeated consistently throughout the manuscript these cannot be mere slips of the pen, but are records of early textual variants which descend from an ancient version of the text. An important example can be found in the spelling of היהודיים and היהודים (8:1 היהודים here), which reflect alternate pronunciations of the word. Significantly, a third-century AD. dispute is recorded concerning this word in the Jerusalem Talmud, Megillah 2, 2; 73a (Israel Academy edition: col. 759), in which Rabbi Isaac b. Aba b. Mahsia and Rabbi Hannanel argued in the presence of the founder of the academy at Sura, Abba b. Aivu (Rav), for the two possible pronunciations. No verdict is recorded, and as a result of this debate the Tiberian traditions use the spelling היהודים in the book of Esther, and the Ashkenazi texts consistently use either of the two conflicting spellings. Another striking example is the spelling of the name of אחשורש (Ahasuerus; here in 2:21; 3:12; 8:7; 10; 10.1), which in its variant here would appear to go back to the Second Temple era, and crucially can be shown to be more phonetically accurate than the received Tiberian tradition. A number of sources attest to the original Persian pronunciation of this king's name as Khshayarsha, without an 'o' vowel at the end (as it is in the Greek version of Herodotus: Xerxes; and the Aramaic pronunciation found in contemporary correspondance: חשיארש). However, when the name was transferred to Hebrew, an 'o' was added to the end of the name, and crucially, it is this that is absent from the present manuscript. There are further traces of this alternative tradition in the divisions into sections in the present manuscript, and in the unique arrangement of the sons of Haman.

 

These variant traditions are recorded in only a few medieval manuscripts, none of which is in private hands (some thirteen Ashkenazi manuscript books in institutional libraries in Oxford, London, Paris, Munich, Wroclaw, Parma, Jerusalem and Princeton, stretching in date from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, and two Ashkenazi scrolls, one in London and the other in Parma, both fifteenth century; as well as four Italian manuscript books, all of the thirteenth century, and in institutional libraries in London, Cambridge, Rome and Parma, and seven scrolls of the fifteenth century, which are all in Parma or London), and with its unique arrangement of the sons of Haman, and later corrections which take it even further away from Tiberian practises, the present manuscript may prove to be the most valuable witness to this almost forgotten Ashkenazi/Italian textual tradition.