"The Mishnah MS A: Rethinking the Beginnings of Jewish Book Culture" (40 mins.)
Noam Sienna (University of Toronto), Hidden Stories Global Judaica postdoctoral fellow

Until recently, the field of Jewish book history has faced a significant chronological gap between the latest surviving examples of Jewish books in late antiquity (the Dead Sea Scrolls, c. 1st c. CE) and the earliest surviving examples of Jewish books from the Middle Ages (Masoretic biblical codices of the early 10th c. CE). A new proposal for the dating of a Hebrew manuscript in the Judaica collection of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library to the middle of the 9th century CE offers a rare glimpse into the formation of Jewish books in the early Middle Ages, and sheds light on the development of rabbinic culture in Abbasid Iraq. This presentation will share the ongoing research on this important manuscript as part of the interdisciplinary project Hidden Stories: New Approaches to the Local and Global History of the Book. The lecture was recorded on February 9, 2024, at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto as part of the CMS Convivium series.