Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries
Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries

Author: Rebecca Abrams

Publisher: Bodleian Library

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781851245024

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Representing four centuries of collecting and 1000 years of Jewish history, this book brings together extraordinary Hebrew manuscripts and rare books from the Bodleian Library and Oxford colleges. Highlights of the collections include a fragment of Maimonides' autograph draft of the Mishneh Torah; the earliest dated fragment of the Talmud, exquisitely illuminated manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible; stunning festival prayerbooks and one of the oldest surviving Jewish seals in England. Lavishly illustrated essays by experts in the field bring to life the outstanding works contained in the collections, as well as the personalities and diverse motivations of their original collectors, who include Archbishop William Laud, John Selden, Edward Pococke, Robert Huntington, Venetian Jesuit Matteo Canonici, Benjamin Kennicott and Rabbi David Oppenheim. Saved for posterity by religious scholarship, intellectual rivalry and political ambition, these extraordinary collections also detail the consumption and circulation of knowledge across the centuries, forming a social and cultural history of objects moved across borders, from person to person. Together, they offer a fascinating journey through Jewish intellectual and social history from the tenth to the twentieth century.

Crossing Borders
Crossing Borders

Author: Piet van Boxel

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781851243136

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This book tells the largely unfamiliar story of intellectual transmission, cultural exchange and practical cooperation, social interaction, and religious toleration between Jews and non-Jews in the Muslim as well as Christian world during the late Middle Ages. The story is composed of ten narratives, each of which brings to light a different aspect of Jewish life in a non-Jewish medieval society. The book is beautifully illustrated with images from the Hebrew holdings at the Bodleian Library, one of the largest and most important collections of Hebrew manuscripts worldwide. They range from Christian codex fragments as early as the 3rd century to a copy of Moses Maimonides' Mishneh Torah signed by Maimonides himself.