UCL 2020 Online Lecture – 25/11, Prof. Schlanger, The Munich Talmud

The Munich Talmud: a unique manuscript and its place in Jewish Book History

Chair: Sacha Stern (UCL)

The Hebrew manuscript 95 of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich (BSB Cod. Hebr. 95) or the “Munich Talmud” is without doubt one of most important and intriguing medieval Hebrew manuscripts in existence. Its 14th-century scribe accomplished a challenging feat: in a relatively small volume he copied the six orders of the Mishna, all the existing Gemara Tractates of the Babylonian Talmud, and added some more extra-canonical texts. In this lecture, we will discuss the possible origin of this manuscript, its unique material features and its unique place in the history of
the founding text of Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud.

Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, FBA (PhD University of Cambridge, 1995) is President of the Oxford Centre of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, and Professor of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic Manuscript Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. She has published extensively on Hebrew codicology, palaeography, diplomatics, Cairo Geniza Studies and the study of Hebrew among medieval Christian Hebraists. She is the head of the international project “Books within Books: Hebrew Fragments in European Libraries”.