The History of the Jewish Book in the Islamicate World

中世纪的伊斯兰世界囊括了世界上最书生气的社会。手抄本以前所未有的数量被生产出来，新的图书材料和技术出现，书法和收藏成为知识精致的标志，穆斯林尺子建立了图书馆。伊斯兰世界的书籍文化不仅在穆斯林中蓬勃发展，而且在那些被《古兰经》恰当地定义为ahl al-kitāb的宗教少数派中也蓬勃发展。犹太人(像基督徒一样)参与了书本革命，并制作了大量手稿，这些手稿构成了当时犹太人智力生活的历史和哲学研究的主要来源。学者们对这些手稿进行解读、语境分析和编辑。然而，尽管它们在学术上具有重要意义，但我们往往对它们的生产模式、制作者、何时何地生产、它们的文化和美学模式以及导致它们制作和发行的经济和社会互动知之甚少。为了填补这一空白，拟议的项目首次对伊斯兰世界的犹太书籍进行了全面和多方面的研究。它使用了一个大型语料库，其中包括精心挑选的9-13世纪埃及和近东地区生产的日期明确的手稿：世界主要图书馆保存的抄本、卷轴和圆形手稿，以及开罗Genizah和Firkovitch藏品的片段。该项目的总体目标是审查这些手稿的制作，包括材料、剧本和手写；它们的制作背景；以及阅读习惯。我们将调查穆斯林书籍的生产在多大程度上影响了犹太人的书籍文化，使其与古董和晚期古董模式截然不同。我们将分析对犹太书籍的物质和美学以及相关知识和社会方面的影响，如扫盲的传播、口头和书面传播之间互动方式的变化、专业图书生产的增长、其经济基础以及犹太图书馆和学术机构的建立。这个项目将两个私人投资机构在伊斯兰霸权下少数民族图书制作领域的独特专业知识结合在一起，不仅从根本上增加了我们对犹太图书最具形成性的历史的了解，而且还抵消了图书历史学家对前现代和现代欧洲背景下图书历史学家的普遍关注。它将出版两种创新的出版物，一本东方希伯来语文字古籍指南和一本《伊斯兰世界犹太书史手册》，这两本书将与有关直接和间接资料的在线开放式数字储存库连接起来。

The medieval Islamicate world encompassed the world’s most bookish societies. Hand-copied books were produced in unprecedented numbers, new book materials and techniques emerged, calligraphy and collecting became marks of intellectual refinement and Muslim rulers founded libraries. Book culture in the Islamicate world flourished not only among Muslims, but also among those religious minorities that the Quran so aptly defines as ahl al-kitāb “the people of the book”. Jews (like Christians) partook in the bookish revolution and produced a multitude of manuscripts, and these constitute the primary sources for historical and philological research on Jewish intellectual life of the time. Scholars decipher, contextualise and edit the manuscripts. However, despite their scholarly importance, we often know too little of the modes of their production, their makers, when and where they were produced, their cultural and aesthetic models and the economic and social interactions that led to their making and distribution.To fill this gap, the proposed project undertakes for the first time a comprehensive and multifaceted study of Jewish books of the Islamicate world. It draws on a large corpus of carefully selected dated and datable manuscripts produced in Egypt and the Near East in the 9th–13th centuries: codices, scrolls and rotuli kept in major world libraries, as well as fragments from the Cairo Genizah and the Firkovitch collections. The project’s overall aim is to examine these manuscripts in terms of their making, including materials, scripts and handwriting; their context of production; and practices of reading. We will investigate to what extent Muslim book production affected the book culture of the Jews, making it depart drastically from antique and late-antique models. We will analyse the impact both on the materiality and aesthetics of Jewish books, as well as on connected intellectual and social aspects, such as the spread of literacy, changing modes of interaction between oral and written transmission, the growth of professional book production, its economic basis and the foundation of Jewish libraries and institutions of learning. The approach is that of the History of the Book, with its multidisciplinary focus on books as objects and as essential actors in the transmission of texts, practices and ideas.By bringing together the unique expertise of the two PIs in the field of minority book making under Islamic hegemony, this project will not only fundamentally add to our understanding of the history of the Jewish book in one of its most formative periods, but also counteract the prevailing concentration of book historians on pre-modern and modern European contexts. It will produce two innovative publications, a palaeographical guide to Oriental Hebrew script and a Handbook on the History of the Jewish Book in the Islamicate World, which will be linked with an online open-access digital repository of relevant direct and indirect sources.