1.

“As Anatole France has reminded us, there is nothing so easy, so restful, or so seductive as a catalogue of manuscripts”, wrote Charles Haskins in his famous work on the twelfth-century renaissance.Footnote ¹ I am certain that he did not have book lists from the Genizah in mind when he wrote this; for if Professor S.D. Goitein referred to the documentary texts as the rubbish of the Genizah, I have no doubt the book lists would be considered the rubbish of the rubbish. These lists have reached us in extremely poor physical condition – most of them were, in any case, scribbled quickly on the first available piece of paper: the blank first page of a book, the back of a letter, the margins of a contract, or even in tiny letters between the columns of a manuscript. And given that these lists are written in Hebrew, Arabic, and Judaeo-Arabic, with the volume numbers and prices in several numeral systems,Footnote ² identifying the books demands familiarity and expertise in Jewish literature as well as Muslim and Ancient Greek literature. This, then, is sufficient proof that working on these book lists is far from pure pleasure.

Nonetheless, the book lists in the Genizah have attracted scholars of Jewish history from the very beginnings of Genizah studies. The great researchers of the Cairo Genizah – Schechter, Adler, Bacher, Poznanski, Scheiber, Mann, Assaf and Abramson – studied and published book lists from the Genizah.Footnote ³ These scholars were looking primarily at the literary works, and they viewed themselves, first and foremost, as engaged in the great task of bringing Jewish cultural and intellectual treasures to light. So they focused their energy on identifying the books mentioned in these lists; their meticulous scholarly work paid off and proved its worth. Literary works whose reputation had sunk into time's sea of oblivion resurfaced. Sometimes they also found manuscripts of these works, which were resurrected and published.Footnote ⁴

They were all outdone by Nehemia Allony, who made collecting book lists from the Genizah his life's project (which he was unable to complete) and whose book includes all the lists he discovered over the course of decades, as well as those published elsewhere by other scholars.Footnote ⁵ His title, The Jewish Library in the Middle Ages, seems to hint at a new approach to these lists; it is as if the author were trying to open and display the medieval Jew's bookshelf. This would open a window into the cultural and intellectual life of the Eastern Jewish communities of the period, because the only way to understand a culture is to understand the channels whereby that culture is transmitted to the general public. And during this period, which long predated electronic and digital communications, the only such channel was the written book. But even if Allony's title hints at a new approach, his primary goal in publishing these book lists was still focused on the literature itself. As he wrote in his preface, he intended “to make the cultural treasures of the Jewish people known in order to benefit the study of medieval literature”.

The first scholar – and the only one to date – to use the book lists to understand medieval Jewish society was S.D. Goitein, the “sociographer” of the Genizah. In his Jewish Education in Muslim Countries,Footnote ⁶ Goitein reached interesting conclusions based on these lists even before they had been published and studied in depth, especially regarding methods of learning and of transmitting knowledge. For example, he discovered that monographs on Jewish law (halakhah) by the later Babylonian sages (geonim) such as R. Hai Gaon (939–1038) and R. Samuel b. Ḥofni (d. 1013) were originally given as lectures and collected into textbooks to train religious judges (dayyanim). Such books were necessary because of the chronic shortage of such judges in various communities, which resulted in part from the halakhic requirement (b Sanhedrin 2a, 3a) that cases be adjudicated by a panel and not a single judge. He also concluded that the Bible was the most studied subject in advanced study and that legal codes were of equal status with the Talmud, even before the publication in 1180 of Maimonides’ code, the Mishneh Torah.Footnote ⁷ In other words, for the first time, the book lists were used for social-cultural research in which society – not necessarily literature – was the object of analysis.

2.

Before I propose additional directions for research in this field, I will briefly describe the lists themselves. They are not of a single type: written over the course of some 600 years, from the tenth to sixteenth centuries, they differ in their nature and goal. Several types can be distinguished:

1. 1. Inventories and catalogues of private libraries, which make up the vast majority of the book lists. These are lists of the holdings of private libraries, some of them inventories meant solely for registration and documentation (as is evident from the identification method – by shelf; incipits;Footnote ⁸ and external properties such as colour, size and binding type) – and some meant as an aid to readers, with the entries classified by topic – for example, Jewish law (halakhah), liturgical poetry (piyyut), Bible commentaries – or by author. When such a list references several works bound together in a single volume, it always specifies the entire contents; in other words, the list is by work rather than by volume or codex.Footnote ⁹

2. 2. Lists used in the book trade. Lists compiled by booksellers that specify titles along with their price, or lists drawn up by purchasers. One document even mentions the purchase of an entire library.Footnote ¹⁰

3. 3. Estates. A list of the books owned by a deceased individual, often to be sold to cover outstanding debts.

4. 4. Lists of synagogue property. In special circumstances, such as the appointment of a new sexton or when a synagogue's property was deposited elsewhere to protect it from harm, an inventory was drawn up. These lists include books, which were an important part of the synagogue's property.Footnote ¹¹ It should be noted that the books on these lists are not always solely of a religious nature: on occasion, the synagogues owned a rather eclectic collection that included general works on secular subjects.

5. 5. Lists prepared by professional copyists. These included the titles of books that had been given to a scribe to copy, as well as calculations of the payment he would receive for the job. Such lists sometimes include invaluable information about the copyists’ tools. As Déroche has noted, most of what we know about the equipment used by copyists in the Islamic world comes from authors associated with the milieu of court secretaries and does not reflect how manuscript copyists operated in general society.Footnote ¹² These Genizah book lists may fill this gap, assuming that the long coexistence of Jewish and Islamic traditions in the area was also manifested in a culture of shared penmanship.

6. 6. Lending lists. Lists to jog the memory of book owners who had lent out volumes from their libraries. They sometimes include the amount that a borrower had deposited as security.

7. 7. Fihrist (pl. Fahāris). In Muslim culture, this is a list prepared by a student in which he records the names of his teachers, the subjects they teach, and the works studied in their classes.Footnote ¹³ It may also refer to a library inventory intended to help readers identify the location of manuscripts in the library.Footnote ¹⁴ The lists we have under this title are generally bibliographic monographs devoted to a particular author. We have two such lists – one on Saʿadiah Gaon (882–942) and the other on Samuel b. Ḥofni.

3.

I would like to propose several possible directions for research based on this broad and varied material. First, however, there is a need to undertake the statistical work that has not yet been done and quantify the data provided by the book lists. A quantitative statistical study is an essential start. While researchers on the history of books in Europe have already undertaken this initial stage of constructing data sets, establishing quantitative thresholds, and accumulating a basic body of knowledge, no such work – without which further investigation is inconceivable – has ever been done for the history of medieval Jewish books in the lands of Islam.

Such basic work could provide a good reflection of the dominant social fashions and point to the abandonment or adoption of cultural patterns. We would be able to see what people preferred to study and read: Bible or halakhah, science and philosophy or history, religious literature or secular works. The work that Goitein began on the basis of too little material could be completed on the basis of the broader description afforded by all the book lists.

But there are several possible impediments here. The first is that the book lists that survived in the Genizah actually reflect only part of the Jewish library – works written in Hebrew letters and therefore deposited in the Genizah. We have no way of knowing either the content or relative percentage of books in Arabic, assuming that lists of these works were written in Arabic, but there is no doubt that these were part of the Medieval Jewish bookshelf. For example, the inventory of one thirteenth-century estateFootnote ¹⁵ is headed, in Judaeo-Arabic, “The Hebrew books owned by Rabbi Joseph, may he rest in Paradise”, which suggests that he also owned books in Arabic. Other lists include copies of the entire Quran or of several suras that were copied down, apparently in Hebrew letters.Footnote ¹⁶ We can therefore assume that if the Jewish library “tolerated” such sensitive works, it probably included other Arabic books. Moreover, it is hard to imagine that people involved in buying and lending books and who bore titles suggesting they held high office in the Fatimid and Ayyubid courts (such as ʾAmin al-Dawla, “Trusted Supporter of the Dynasty”, and Wathīqat al-Dawla, “Confidant of the Dynasty”Footnote ¹⁷ ) would not have some Arabic books, too, in their possession. The inference is that an entire field of literature has been entirely lost to us.

Another possible obstacle is that the book lists may not accurately reflect the intellectual world of the times. After all, the mere possession of a book does not shape its owner's worldview if he doesn't read it. For example, the French historian Jacques Le Goff demonstrated that the large number of surviving Carolingian manuscripts does not reflect a cultural and intellectual renaissance because books were viewed as ornamental goods with an economic, rather than an intellectual, value. Manuscripts were produced to expand the collections of the wealthy or of churches. Even the monks – who invested great effort in copying them – viewed their labour as a form of penance that would grant them merit in the afterlife, and were quite apathetic to the books’ content.Footnote ¹⁸ So we cannot assume that the book lists reflect the contemporaneous intellectual world, and we must clarify the connection between the books and their owners. That said, neither can the lists reflect the full extent of the Jewish library, because people did not necessarily own every book they read – some books were borrowed, for example, and did not, therefore, remain on the reader's bookshelf. Furthermore, the lists are fragmentary and their survival was a matter of chance.

Finally, I note that although a statistical analysis of the book lists could provide a measure of the popularity and distribution of a specific type of literatureFootnote ¹⁹ and give us a fairly reliable picture of the overall level of cultural activity in a specific period, it cannot provide a view of marginal literary trends, which certainly existed, or point to the beginnings of change in literary currents. However, even the general picture that the book lists can sketch for us contains highly interesting data.

For example, although the book lists date from a long stretch of time – the tenth to the sixteenth centuries – the vast majority come from the twelfth century. Perhaps the larger number of lists from this era reflects a cultural and literary awakening within Jewish society in Muslim countries.Footnote ²⁰ Obviously, this conjecture needs additional support, especially because a significant portion of the documentary material from the Genizah as a whole dates to the twelfth century. Still, it adds a new element to the ongoing scholarly debate concerning the periodization of the textualization process in medieval Islamic society.Footnote ²¹

The book lists can also provide us with answers to other questions – not only what was read but also who read: who made up the audience for which books were written. Here we encounter a significant social phenomenon that, I believe, can be explored even before we have precise statistics. The pool of readers is very small, limited to one specific social group. The same individuals’ names recur on multiple lists – once as copyist and once as bookseller, another time as borrower and yet again as owner of a library. For example, Meir b. Hillel b. Zadoq, a scribe and rabbinic judge contemporary with Maimonides (1135–1204), who had unique and readily-identified handwriting, wrote at least four of the book lists; he is also mentioned as the owner of his own large library who both bought and sold books.Footnote ²² Solomon Halevi, in the twelfth century, wrote three book lists but was also a bookseller and professional copyist. He also seems to have manufactured books – organizing and reconciling manuscript versions and binding the books – besides being a physician.Footnote ²³

Solomon b. Elijah the Dayyan (thirteenth century), was a broker (simsār) for book purchase transactions; he also bought and sold books, loaned money against books as collateral, and had his own private library.Footnote ²⁴

The names of several book buyers recur in the lists of estates offered for sale: Joseph al-Maghribi, al-Sheikh al-Muhadhab, Abu Saʿīd, al-Thiqa, and others.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, the avid bibliophiles who were the potential buyers at book auctions came from the same well-defined and limited social circle. Sometimes we can even identify family relationships among them. For example Abu al-ʿIzz, a thirteenth-century physician who purchased many books from the estate of Rabbi Abraham the Pious (Abraham he- Ḥasid) that were sold at auction after his own death, was the brother of Sitt (Lady) Ghazāl, the wife of the aforementioned booklover Solomon b. Elijah the Judge.Footnote ²⁶ Many members of the group were physicians and, to judge by their titles, many held public office in the Muslim administration and some in the Jewish community – mostly as judges and cantors.Footnote ²⁷

Some members of this elite were warrāqūn, merchants who traded in books who were also involved in book production – copying and binding books either themselves or by hired workers and copyists. These warrāqūn were usually intellectuals who had their own libraries and, in many cases, were authors in their own right. They were often members of the liberal professions, such as physicians and court bureaucrats. Note that the warrāq was not unique to Jewish society; Ibn al-Nadīm, a Muslim intellectual and writer who composed a famous fihrist, was one such warrāq, i.e. a bookseller who hired copyists to copy works for his own use and to sell.Footnote ²⁸

This phenomenon is especially notable in the book lists. We have a warrāq’s notebook that contains: medical prescriptions; commercial ledgers; a list of bills for grocery items such as a lemon drink, oil, almonds and sugar; and books for sale and lending.Footnote ²⁹ In another list, a book broker who was the son of a judge from Alexandria sends a medicinal prescription to the teacher whose books he is selling. At the end of the list he adds, “I am concerned about the state of your health, and if you should happen on appropriate merchandise, notify me of its price” – in other words, he is both a merchant and a physician.Footnote ³⁰ So too Solomon Halevi, who wrote three of the book lists in his own hand and was both a merchant and a physician. Besides copying books, he cut them to a common size (ʿaddala) and bound them (rabbaṭa). Among the items offered for sale from the estate of Abraham the Pious (thirteenth century) was his misṭara, the implement used to rule lines for the copyist. Apparently, then, Abraham also copied books. In a letter to a certain R. Solomon, Solomon b. Elijah asks the former to copy books for him: “Would the honoured and esteemed master, Rabbi Solomon, may his Maker preserve and aid him, be so kind as to fulfil his promise regarding the translation of the Book of Kings. And if Kings is not possible, let it be the translation of the hafṭaroth [i.e. those sections of the prophetic writings read publicly in the synagogue]”.Footnote ³¹ We can assume that the book was meant for commercial purposes rather than study, because the actual content of the book seems not to have been crucial.

Here we are witness to an interesting social phenomenon that is well-known from other fields of medieval Muslim culture, namely, a fluid definition of roles that permits overlapping professions and positions. This is the same phenomenon that Albert Hourani identified in the Islamic city with regard to political and administrative positions.Footnote ³² Abraham Udovitch expanded the attention to the phenomenon, which he also identified in the delicate relations between trade and government. He pointed to the existence of a class of intermediaries who belonged simultaneously to both worlds: they worked as both merchants and government officials and held two or three positions.Footnote ³³ The book lists allow us to identify the same type of overlap and fluidity of job definitions in Jewish society in Muslim countries, which exposes social patterns that are identical to those in the Muslim host society.

The fluid status of the literati in medieval Muslim countries, and within Jewish society in these lands, is further emphasized if we compare the warrāqūn to the stationarii, the copyists and booksellers who lived on the margins of the universities in Western Europe of the twelfth century. The stationarii, like the warrāqūn, produced books: they copied and bound them or hired workers to manufacture the books, which they then sold or lent out. They, too, were essentially merchants. But unlike the warrāqūn, they were not intellectuals or authors in their own right and certainly did not hold governmental or public posts. Their position was well defined: they were the guardians of the original copies – the exemplaria – of the manuscripts used as university textbooks, and were officially subject to the university and town authorities. The latter set book prices and determined the fines for selling defective copies. In other words, in total contrast to the warrāq, the stationarius belonged to a formally and legally defined profession that was an intrinsic part of the overall structure of the European city.Footnote ³⁴

In my book on the medieval Jewish community of Alexandria, I showed how the Jewish elite in Islamic lands functioned as an extensive cosmopolitan network of both commercial and intellectual connections.Footnote ³⁵ Book lists from the Genizah illustrate how books came to be a crucial factor in this network by serving several functions all aimed at preserving and consolidating this cosmopolitan elite. Prominent community leaders, such as Nehoray b. Nissim, Maḍmūn b. Yefet and Ḥalfon b. Nathaniel, traded in books or were entrepreneurs who produced, copied and sold books. They also probably wrote some of the book lists that were prepared as instructions for the copyists they employed. This is manifested in a Genizah letter in which one of Ḥalfon b. Nathaniel's commercial agents urges him, in advance of a forthcoming business trip, to draw up a list (tadhkurah) of the books Ḥalfon wanted to copy so that the agent would be able to order them (li-nastasikhuha lahū). Hence, to use Bourdieu's terminology, the field of cultural production was situated within the field of the sovereign and hegemonic social class, which constituted a reading and writing community.

Further questions: What were the attitudes towards books and reading? Why did people read? Why did they buy books? The answers are partially embedded in the physical attributes of the books presented in the lists. Roger Chartier has already examined the importance of books’ materiality: “There is no text apart from the physical support that offers it for reading … hence there is no comprehension of any written piece that does not at least in part depend upon the forms in which it reaches its reader”.Footnote ³⁶

Book lists of all kinds offer much information about books’ physicality, including their size, cover, and the quality of paper. A book bought for a collection or as decoration is usually of monumental dimensions with an elaborate artistic cover, elegant and laborious calligraphy, and sometimes (especially in Europe) ornate illustrations. But the books on the lists are quite modest, sometimes even lacking a cover (mujarrad). Their dimensions are generally standard – one-quarter or one-eighth of a Baghdadi sheet. Often, the entry refers to what is merely a juzʾ, i.e. one quire of an entire book.Footnote ³⁷ As for calligraphy, it suffices to quote from the following order for a book: “Dear sir, perhaps you could be so kind to your servant [as to copy] the tafsir of Rabbi Saʿadiah [Gaon] to Daniel and Ezra. … Let it not be like the tafsir of Psalms which was written in ‘difficult’ script, and I was unable to copy anything from it. Do not send something like that at all”.Footnote ³⁸ In other words, it seems that a good book needed to be written in a hand that was functional, legible and clear, but not necessarily especially elegant. Jacques Le Goff pointed out that calligraphy – even more than cacography (bad handwriting) – is a sign of a culturally backward age when there is minimal demand for books, which are seen as economic more than intellectual assets and viewed as decorative collectors’ items.Footnote ³⁹ The impression gained from consideration of the external and physical aspects of the books on the book lists is that the book was viewed as a tool and not an object, and that the interest in books was primarily intellectual. There are, of course, ornate books with multicoloured calligraphy, in tanned leather covers with silver buckles and golden nails,Footnote ⁴⁰ but these are few in number and the exception to the rule.

The attitude towards books can also be gleaned from the formulas and mottos that people inscribed after buying a certain volume. These are stock sayings, to be sure, but they would seem to provide a true reflection of the basic attitude towards the book and its role.

In the margins of his booklist, an anonymous sixteenth-century owner wrote: “These are all the books I have purchased. May G-d grant me to read them and to know, obey, and perform what the Creator, Blessed be He, has commanded us”.Footnote ⁴¹ In other words, the book was meant for reading, which in itself was seen as a religious and educational goal of primary importance.

In another instance, to mark the purchase of an ancient manuscript that contained seven halakhic works and had been owned by Daniel b. Ḥasdai the Exilarch, and had been given as a present to the lad Naḥum ha Kohen b. Manṣur, the following note was written: “May he merit to learn and teach”.Footnote ⁴² Despite the banality of this statement, we should not ignore the fact that it epitomizes the perception of the nature and purpose of books.

Sometimes reading and study were channelled towards the practical needs of teaching. In the thirteenth century, R. Joseph “Rosh ha-Seder” (i.e. a senior instructor in a yeshiva (talmudic academy)), who left us 17 overflowing book lists in his own hand, wrote himself comments, reminders, thoughts, and even doodles in their margins.Footnote ⁴³ He also wrote tentative curricula for his students. As rosh seder, R. Joseph also taught,Footnote ⁴⁴ and his notes can be seen as a sort of curriculum plan for his students. Scholars who have studied R. Joseph Rosh ha-SederFootnote ⁴⁵ – including Allony himself – mistakenly believed that the verbs (אדרס, אקרי) in the following text should be understood as Form I, meaning “study” and “read”. I believe, however, that the verbs should be parsed as Form II and Form IV, respectively, meaning “teach” and “have (someone else) recite”. Thus, the text should be read as follows: “If I desire, I shall teach [not study] the Talmuda Rabba (a book on various talmudic themes arranged according to the weekly Torah readings, which he planned to write) … and if I desire I shall have [them] read [not read myself] something from the halakhot (a treatise on Jewish law)”.Footnote ⁴⁶ If so, this refers to two primary methods of pedagogy employed in Muslim countries during the Middle Ages: ʾiml āʾ (“reading”, lit. “dictation”), in which the teacher read aloud the text being studied and the students wrote down his words; and tadrīs, in which one of the students read a text aloud and the teacher explained and commented.Footnote ⁴⁷

Indeed, most of the books in the library of R. Joseph Rosh ha-Seder, as well as those he wrote himself, are of a decidedly didactic nature. Thus books were a professional tool or a method of transmitting information, through which a person could enrich himself and better his conduct. Hence they have a religious function of prime importance.

The information transmitted in the books was freely available, a fact expressed by the extreme ease with which books were passed from person to person and distributed.

Planning his future literary projects, R. Joseph Rosh ha-Seder wrote: “And the copies that I am unable to buy, I will request as a gift, with God's help”.Footnote ⁴⁸

Another man, looking for Saʿadiah Gaon's commentary on the book of Daniel, asked his friend to copy the work for him “or borrow it from one of your friends”.Footnote ⁴⁹ Another list, dated 1244, documents all the volumes that had been lent out during the year against a minimal monetary deposit, so small that Allony mistakenly thought it was a type of charity for poor, needy scholars. It is clear, however, that the borrowers were among the community's rich and powerful and the sums listed are token deposits left by them as security.Footnote ⁵⁰

The absolute ease with which books were lent out and transferred from hand to hand is unique to Jewish society and stands in contrast to the attitudes of Muslims and European Christians about loaning books. Muslim society was rather inconsistent on this point. On the one hand, it was home to free public libraries as early as the tenth century and, moreover, these libraries encouraged people to use them by providing free paper, ink and pens to poor scholars and foreigners. They even allowed books to be taken off the premises for a limited time, against a deposit.Footnote ⁵¹ On the other hand, according to al-Maqrīzī’s description of the library in Cairo, the books were stored in cabinets divided by partitions into separate units (hājiz), each of them under lock and key.Footnote ⁵² We also hear of reading rooms, from which books could not be borrowed but only read on the premises. The founder of the Madrasa Maḥmūdīyya in Cairo, in 1395, stipulated that books could never be removed from the library.Footnote ⁵³ Many books were donated to libraries on condition that their use be limited. For example, the 1396 waqfīya (donation charter) in which Ibn Khaldūn donated his Kitāb al-ʿIbar to the library of the Qarawin Mosque in Fez requires that the book be lent out only to trustworthy individuals, for a maximum of two months, and against a deposit, because he believed that period to be sufficient to copy or study the book.Footnote ⁵⁴ A note on the copy of Miskawayh's Tajārib al-Umam (“Experiences of nations”), also located in the Maḥmūdiyya library in Cairo, reads: “The donor requests that this work not be lent from the library, neither in whole nor in part, whether against a deposit or not”.Footnote ⁵⁵ It seems, then, that the free lending policy of endowed public libraries, as described by Hirschler, was practised only in later periods and was more of a general ethos of charity and benevolence towards the needy than a concrete practice.Footnote ⁵⁶

The attitude of European-Christian society to this matter was similarly inconsistent. Although the lending of books by monastery libraries was seen as a charitable act of the highest order, there are many examples of official edicts forbidding the removal of works from the monastery; violators are threatened with excommunication. The actual process of borrowing a book from the monastery library was long and exhausting and involved an entire ritual of cleaning. The librarians of Dominican monasteries were given explicit instructions regarding the lending period.Footnote ⁵⁷ The deposit (memoriale) that was demanded when the book was lent out had to at least equal the value of the book;Footnote ⁵⁸ on the day for the general return of books to the library, a special carpet was laid on the stone floor on which the books were placed. Monks were expected to use handkerchiefs or their sleeves to avoid coming into direct contact with a book.Footnote ⁵⁹ University libraries, too, were wary of lending books. Richard de Bury, for example, warned his readers not to lend books to students during the dead of winter, lest their runny nose drip on a book and ruin it.Footnote ⁶⁰ At the college libraries at Oxford, books were chained to the shelves from the time the separate library building was constructed in the late fourteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶¹

The Jewish communities’ unusual attitude to lending books can be explained by the fact that most Jewish libraries were private and loaned books within a limited and well-defined group of bibliophiles who knew and trusted one another; in other words, it was a matter of personal acquaintance and mutual trust. But this approach can also be seen as expressing an open attitude towards information, which was not intended to be guarded and stored away but to be transmitted and disseminated.

This approach also relates to the process of producing a book. In Europe, at least until the thirteenth century, this remained a complicated procedure involving the tedious labour of precise and exacting copying. Performed by monks in a scriptorium, it was viewed as having equal value to agricultural work or other physical toil and, like those tasks, earned them a reward in the afterlife. There are many descriptions of the monks’ arduous labour, which resulted in hunched backs, weak knees and frozen fingers.Footnote ⁶² Perhaps the best reflection of this is the colophon at the end of a manuscript of the Summa Theologiæ: “Here ends the second part of the title work of Br. Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order, very long, very verbose, and very tedious; thank God, thank God, and again, thank God”.Footnote ⁶³

A radically different viewpoint is afforded by R. Joseph Rosh ha-Seder, whose attitude about copying texts was the polar opposite of Aquinas's copyists.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the margins of his booklists, R. Joseph noted his plans for future writing and copying. They included reorganizing the book Tadbīr al-Abd ān, the Arabic version of Galen's medical treatise, in the format of the Halakhot pesuqot Footnote ⁶⁵ and the Talmud. He intended to apply the same methodology to the rest of Galen's works as well as to those by Hippocrates, which he also wanted to rewrite.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even before he began writing, he had already composed in his head and penned the introduction to one of these rewritten medical books: “In this Book of Cures, I will bring their words and arrange them in the most proper order and explain it clearly and provide an introduction to each chapter”.Footnote ⁶⁷ With respect to some halakhic work, he wrote: “I will revise the order, explain the difficulties, correct the errors, and fill in what is omitted”.Footnote ⁶⁸ He had a five-stage plan for the prayer book (Siddur) of Saʿadiah Gaon: (1) explain the importance and loftiness of its ideas; (2) note his criticisms in a few places; (3) fill in material that Saʿadiah had overlooked or had omitted for the sake of brevity; (4) explain the plain meaning of the Hebrew citations from the prayers as well as the ʾazharoth Footnote ⁶⁹ and penitential prayers; and (5) provide a commentary on those citations.Footnote ⁷⁰

There is no doubt that R. Joseph Rosh ha-Seder's open and free approach to the written text, as expressed in his literary plans, is light-years from the pedantic and technical approach of the monks in the scriptoria, but it is also distinct from that of early modern European compilers and note-takers.Footnote ⁷¹ Their notes were copied by scholars from excerpts from their reading and were perceived as treasuries of information worthy of being kept and circulated for reuse in the future. R. Joseph's notes, on the other hand, are pieces of writing meant for his own private use as mnemonics. The way he scribbled them on leftover sheets of paper demonstrates that they were certainly not meant for circulation or for any public use, but were destined to be discarded after completing their short-term function as memoranda for his future writing plans; indeed they found their way to the Genizah, where they were forgotten. Hence, it would not be appropriate to study R. Joseph's notes as tools for managing textual information, as Blair suggested for the early modern collections of notes she studied, but rather as works “oriented to the care of oneself”, which may offer a quasi-psychoanalytic insight into the thinking of the individual reader, as suggested by Foucault.Footnote ⁷²

Disposable writing like R. Joseph's notes was made possible because paper was readily available, relatively cheap, and easy not only to manage but also to discard.Footnote ⁷³ The Genizah provides more instances of disposable writing. Efrayim b. Shemarya (1016–55), head of the Palestinian congregation in Fustat, for example, reused the paper from Fatimid decrees to write personal notes to use when he delivered his public sermons and also to adapt and abridge existing works in a very similar way to R. Joseph's plans.Footnote ⁷⁴

No less significant are R. Joseph's proposed works themselves, which must strike modern readers and authors, for whom the printed text is authoritative and sacrosanct, as very strange indeed. In modern print culture, a single known author stands behind the work and bears sole responsibility for its content. His or her name appears prominently on the cover, and he or she possesses a copyright maintained and protected by the force of law. Yet here, thanks to R. Joseph's charming tendency to jot down his thoughts and plans, we have an unmediated peek into the mind of a copyist-author of his mould. I assume that his attitude was not at all unique, but faithfully represents the cultural view prevalent in his circle during the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁷⁵ At face value, it seems that a copyist-author like R. Joseph Rosh ha-Seder arrogated to himself the full authority inherent in the production of a primary text and had no compunctions about making an earlier text his own. His approach appears to be practical and pragmatic: what he deemed useful or relevant could stay; what was not useful was deleted; and what could be improved was fixed up to suit his needs. The text was an open datum that could be improved, expanded and updated. The ideas and content of the original text remained unchanged, but the copyist-writer could refashion it, in a dialectical process, according to his own understanding, personality and needs.

This view of the nature of the written text, as it emerges from the scribbled musings of R. Joseph Rosh ha-Seder, can shed new light on the ongoing debate about “textual criticism” of medieval manuscripts. The method most commonly employed in textual criticism of medieval manuscripts, European as well Islamic and Jewish, used to be the stemmatic method associated with German philologist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851). This method aims at reconstructing the archetype – the earliest recoverable form of the original text – from all the surviving manuscripts, after the relationship among them is established in the form of a family tree or stemma codicum. This method rests on the assumption that manuscripts are imperfect reflections of some ideal text. The textual variants and emendations are relegated to the apparatus in the margin; the goal is to create a unitary text that is as close as possible to the assumed original text produced by the original author. Later deviations are viewed as detracting from the authentic text. Textual criticism was severely criticized from the late 1950s onwards. The French school of histoire du livre, led by Lucien Febvre,Footnote ⁷⁶ and post-structuralism in general, stressed the central role of historical and social forces in the process of text production and diminished the importance of the single author, thus undermining the basic assumptions of textual criticism. Works in orality and literacy in the late 1970s and 1980s, like those by Brian Stock, Walter J. Ong, and Jack Goody, had the same impact.Footnote ⁷⁷ The German school of the history of transmission, Überlieferungsgeschichte, in the 1980s,Footnote ⁷⁸ as well as Anglo-American bibliography, called for studying bibliography as the sociology of texts, inasmuch as the history of the book must consider the social, economic and political motivations of writing, publishing and consuming books.Footnote ⁷⁹ They all viewed literary works as social rather than personal or psychological products, thus challenging the most basic assumptions of text criticism. But the most influential and direct attack on textual criticism arrived in the 1990s in the form of Bernard Cerquiglini's polemical essay Éloge de la variante, in which he argued that variation is an indispensable quality of medieval manuscripts. Cerquiglini's work marked a clear turning point in the history of medieval textual studies, as it was followed a year later by the publication of a special issue of Speculum, edited by Stephen Nichols and dedicated to the “New Philology”.Footnote ⁸⁰ New Philology emphasized the inseparable affiliation between texts and their physical form, and it called attention to the social aspects and historicity of the book production process, as well as of the book's dissemination and reception. New Philology affected a broad range of medievalists and raised serious methodological questions concerning the editing of medieval texts and the status and interpretations of these texts. Traditional textual scholars were not about to let this critique go unanswered: the most famous rejoinder was a volume of collected articles edited by Keith Busby, Towards a Synthesis? Footnote ⁸¹ Busby himself attacked New Philology for being too dogmatic and for refusing to take into account the “vastly different circumstances in which different texts and genres were composed”. Certain forms of literature, claimed Busby, lend themselves well to the New Philology's stance which “dispenses with the notion of the authorial text, and reduces scribal function to … variance”, but other forms most surely do not.Footnote ⁸² Another critic of the New Philology was Hijo Westra, who emphasized Cerquiglini`s ideological posture. He argued that Cerquiglini portrayed the medieval textual scene to suit his own radically deconstructive worldview: “No authorship, no authority, no hierarchy, only different points of view, universally accessible, and fluid, ergo considered to be radically democratic and progressive”. “But”, continues Westra, “medieval textuality was anything but democratic. Manuscripts were expensive to produce and were typically written for wealthy and powerful patrons; literacy was largely restricted to an educated elite and physical access to manuscripts was severely limited as well”. He concluded that Cerquiglini`s understandings do not reflect medieval reality and cannot always be applied to text editing.Footnote ⁸³

Prima facie, R. Joseph's “works in process” seem to aid the New Philology. They imply that any copy written in his milieu is a work unto itself and embodies the copyist's personality and worldview. Should we wonder, then, whether we are perhaps mistaken when we strive to turn medieval texts into unitary works while ignoring the personal variants added by each copyist – variants that may be the true force and significance of these works?

A second look at R. Joseph Rosh ha-Seder's plans reveals that his revision was meant to serve didactic purposes – he was trying to tailor the original texts to suit his pedagogical needs and his students’ level.Footnote ⁸⁴ His works aimed at facilitating the transmission of ancient scientific texts by adapting them to the format and structure with which his students were familiar and at smoothing the process of learning old medieval religious texts. R. Joseph mediated the classical texts by adding paratextual tools, such as introductions and explanations, and by “updating” them. Therefore, R Joseph was actually engaged in a didactic enterprise of writing textbooks to help contemporary students and readers better understand classic traditional texts.

At the root of R. Joseph's project lies the perception of wisdom being a large common pool out of which writers are entitled, or even compelled, to draw concepts and ideas, as well as to mix and fuse them into something entirely new. In this respect he betrays an approach that is fundamentally different from that of later medieval compilers and encyclopaedists, Islamic as well as Christian.Footnote ⁸⁵ While later compilers saw themselves as “neutral reporters” whose mission was to transmit “information”,Footnote ⁸⁶ R. Joseph reflects a different approach in which the author is committed to conveying bits of wisdom from the past to his contemporaries in a way that they will understand. Wisdom resides in many places and can be pronounced in many ways.Footnote ⁸⁷

Unlike later compilers, his works do not entail mechanical transmission of information from earlier sources by “cut-and-paste” methods, but rather internalizing old wisdom and reworking it into the literary language and conventions of his own time. Similarly, R. Joseph's endeavours do not involve selecting and aggregating information in the manner of an encyclopaedia, but rather reworking whole compositions and preserving their original unity.

In other words, medieval authors like R. Joseph were concerned with “works” from the past and with their content; they cared less about the “texts”, in which they felt entitled to intervene in order to improve and update them.

This did not necessarily imply that the concept of intellectual property was non-existent. F. Bauden has already shown that in the scribal milieu of the Mamluk court, the concept of plagiarism was well established and articulated in a variety of terms – sariqah, akhdh or ghafla – which suggests that the idea of intellectual property was well known and accepted. On the other hand, Bauden remarked that “old books were considered a common heritage and as such could be plundered without paying one's debts towards their authors. Older sources sometimes circulated for several centuries and were consequently widespread and known to the general readership. Anyone sharing a common cultural heritage could identify the sources without problem”.Footnote ⁸⁸ As seen in R. Joseph's notes, the idea of reworking recent compositions did not occur to him, and he was concerned only with old classical oeuvres.

To sum up, book lists from the Cairo Genizah are not just a useful tool for a better understanding of the cultural and social history of Jews in the medieval lands of Islam, they also raise a whole set of questions concerning conceptions of authorship, intellectual property, working methods and readership, which call for a comprehensive research that will trespass into the narrow circles of Islamic scribal culture and will encompass the whole medieval Islamicate world. Such research will have to take into consideration the New Philology and its various branches, which, although not totally ignored in Islamic studies, have to date been applied mainly to European contexts.