Monday, July 24, 2006

Geniza research by the Seridei 'Esh and Paul Kahle in 1935

I thought it might be interesting to provide the following article:

Kahle, Paul; Weinberg, Jechiel The Mishna text in Babylonia, fragments from the Geniza. Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935), p. 185-223:



"J. Weinberg" is, of course, R. Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, author of the שו"ת שרידי אש, Seridei 'Esh .

(A brief sketch by Dayan Dr. I. Grunfeld which appeared in the Jewish Observer can be found here, an article in the Edah Journal by Dr. Marc B. Shapiro here.)

The entire HUCA article can be downloaded here.

Now, although it is evident that this article was based on the joint research of Dr. Paul Kahle and R. Weinberg, I wondered at the latter's involvement in the publication of this article. After all, throughout it is the voice of Paul Kahle speaking. ("I have decided to publish as much of this Babylonian material as can be read with certainty. I shall publish these Fragments together with Dr. J. Weinberg, Docent in the Berlin Rabbinical Seminiary; we have divided the work so that I shall deal with the philological publication of the text whilst he, in special investigations, will show the importance of these texts for the history of the Mishna text.")

So I asked someone who knows and was told that as I surmised, it was Kahle who authored the article, but as can be seen from the excerpt I quoted the intention was for the Seridei 'Esh to write the follow-up (and you can download it to read it all in context). In addition, R. Weinberg referred to himself as an author of this essay.

Said person who knows also pointed out a specific example of the Seridei 'Esh's fingerprints on this article, in footnote 10 on page 218 (34 in the PDF) with the reference to the תוספות יום טוב, which is almost certainly a contribution by R. Weinberg.

Since the article is very technical and I know some readers won't download it, here is an image of part of the meat and potatos of the article:

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