A Rare Monumental Ashkenazic Torah Scroll, [Northern Italy, ca. 1400]

An extraordinary, carbon-dated survival of late medieval Ashkenazic diasporic culture.

While German Jewry flourished for much of the High Middle Ages, growing Jew-hatred in the late medieval and early modern periods, including both persecutions and expulsions, led many Ashkenazim to immigrate either eastward to Eastern Europe or southward to Northern Italy. Yiddish-speaking communities quickly established themselves in their new homes, where they continued to observe many of their traditional customs, albeit with certain modifications. The present Torah scroll is a prime example of Ashkenazic scribal practice as transplanted to Northern Italian soil in this era.

A number of this Torah’s features help establish its provenance. The scroll’s smooth, white parchment is consistent with Italian processing methods, while its text is inscribed in the blank space between ruled lines, in typical Ashkenazic fashion. Similarly, the script itself is North Italian-Ashkenazic in form; the letter zayin surmounted by a single stroke is particularly distinctive in this regard. Also noteworthy are the (erased) final-form letters nun that appear in the margins of the start of most of the weekly Torah portions, as well as the (erased) dots placed on the headline between each verse—two features most often found in Italian Torah scrolls.

In modern Torah scrolls, the letters shin, ayin, tet, nun, zayin, gimel, and tsadeh are always adorned with “crownlets” comprised of three vertical tagin (serifs). In prior periods, by contrast, some scribes followed the prescriptions of Sefer tagei (The Book of Crownlets), an early medieval listing of nearly two thousand specific instances scattered throughout the Torah where a copyist is meant to alter the shape of a given letter, usually either by adding to it a prescribed number of tagin or by changing its graphic form in some other way. Such modified characters are known in rabbinic parlance as otiyyot meshunnot (anomalous letters), and they can be found throughout the present scroll (except in those instances where a later user eliminated them).

Those who study the history of the biblical text and of the writing of Torah scrolls will find much more of interest here as well. For example, Gen. 4:13 ends with the word mi-neso spelled without a vav (though a vav was later suspended between the letters sin and alef). Similarly, Gen. 9:29 begins with the word va-yihyu (spelled with a vav at the end), as opposed to va-yehi found in modern (non-Yemenite) Torah scrolls. Additionally, the last verse of the Song of the Sea was originally written out as prose in two long lines in accordance with an ancient Ashkenazic practice (though these were subsequently broken up to look like poetry). Finally, an old scribal custom requires six columns in a Torah scroll to begin with the letters bet, yod, heh, shin, mem, and vav. While modern (non-Yemenite) scribes fulfill this custom by placing the word mah in Num. 24:5 at the top of a column, the scribe of the present scroll chose motsa in Deut. 23:24 for this purpose.

In the centuries after it was completed, this Torah underwent a series of modifications by later owners, including the erasures and “corrections” mentioned above. (The descenders of some of the letters’ final forms were occasionally lengthened as well.) Indeed, six of its membranes (52-54, 60-62) were replaced entirely (perhaps due to wear) by Italian and Sephardic hands. The scroll thus bears elegant witness to the evolution of scribal law and custom, as well as to the encounter between communities with varying practices, in one of the most Jewishly diverse regions of late medieval and early modern Europe.

Physical Description

Scroll of 69 membranes (approx. 24 1/2 in. x 146 1/4 ft.; approx. 622 mm x 44.595 m) made of parchment; written in Ashkenazic square script in dark brown ink with three or four columns per membrane, except the last, which has two (membrane widths ranging from approx. 20 to 30 1/4 in.; approx. 510 to 770 mm) (total: 235 columns), and forty-eight lines per column; horizontally and vertically ruled in hardpoint on the recto; prickings intermittently visible; letters inscribed in blank space between ruled lines, rather than suspended or supported; corrections in hands of primary and secondary scribes. The Songs of the Sea (Ex. 15:1-19) and of Moses (Deut. 32:1-43) are laid out to look like brickwork (ariah al gabbei levenah and ariah al gabbei ariah, respectively); majuscular, minuscular, dotted, and otiyyot meshunnot (anomalous letter-forms) customs observed (the latter sometimes erased); sha‘atnez gets and bedek hayyah letters “crowned” in most of first membrane (up to Gen. 3:16) and in replacement membranes 52-53; endpoints of verses generally spaced and dotted (dots subsequently erased). 

Literature

Malachi Beit-Arié, Hebrew Codicology: Historical and Comparative Typology of Medieval Hebrew Codices based on the Documentation of the Extant Dated Manuscripts until 1540 using a Quantitative Approach, trans. Ilana Goldberg, ed. Nurit Pasternak (Hamburg; Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2021), 434.

Mordechai Weintraub, “Simanim paratekstu’aliyyim be-sifrei torah” (MA thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021), 40-43, 55-56.