The Sources for Early Medieval Jewish History

Medieval Transformations

While witnessing important demographic, political, and religious transformations, the Middle Ages also saw significant changes in the way Jews engaged in text production and thought about the act of writing itself. 

A New Attitude Toward Authorship

In this period, self-conscious authorship first became widespread in all quarters of Jewish society. Many, if not most, ancient and late antique Jewish works were composed over multiple generations and their authors’ identities, despite later attributions, are completely lost to us. For every Philo or Josephus there are countless ancient writers whom we shall never be able to identify, the fruits of their labors having been assimilated into the pseudepigraphic compilations that were the compositional norm for Jews in antiquity. 

In the early medieval period, the situation changed dramatically. While pseudepigraphy continued to flourish throughout the medieval period, more and more authors began to assert their individuality and proudly attach their names to their writings. 

The early tenth-century Iraqi scholar Se‘adya Ga’on is often seen as a pioneer in this regard. Not only did he break with his rabbinic predecessors in producing a broad range of ambitious and highly original works, but he also paid novel attention to distinctive editorial aspects of his literary creations. Among the new features of his monographic works are the titles he assigns to them (earlier rabbinic writings tended to bear titles given to them by later readers), formal introductions in which he addresses his readers directly and describes the concerns that led him to compose the work, and explicit descriptions of the contents, akin to tables of contents. In all this, it is possible to glimpse the emergence of an entirely new attitude toward authorship, one that comes shockingly close to our own understanding of the idea.

Writing Technologies: The Codex

Such changes in perspective occurred alongside and in tandem with innovations of a more technological nature, the most important of these being the adoption of the codex, or bound book format, in place of the scroll (roll), and the introduction of paper as a writing support. A Roman invention, whose origins may go back to the third century BCE, the codex was adopted relatively early on by Christians; evidence suggests that it was already in widespread use in Christian circles by the second century CE. It is often maintained that Jews, by contrast, exhibited greater ambivalence toward the new design, a cultural stance reflected in the rabbinic requirement that a scroll be used for the public reading of the Torah in the synagogue. Jews, according to this argument, began to experiment with the codex only in the eighth century and did not fully embrace it until the tenth. Various explanations have been advanced to account for the diverging paths taken by Jews and Christians in this regard, but given how few examples of Jewish writing of any sort have survived from before the tenth century, the question may need to be reexamined. 

In any event, Jewish adoption of the codex is on full display no later than the tenth century, and its regular use marked an important turning point in the history of Jewish literary activity. Among the numerous advantages of the codex over the roll were reduced production costs, as both sides of the bound sheets could be written upon, enabling the production of substantially longer texts. Codices were also easier to handle and store than rolls. 

Because they permitted readers immediate access to any point in a text, codices encouraged cross-referencing and a comparative approach to textual study. It is hard to imagine, for example, how the ambitious twelfth- and thirteenth-century Tosafistic enterprise of northern France and Germany, which entailed the juxtaposition and comparison of statements from across the vast talmudic corpus, could have been undertaken without the technological assistance of the codex.

Writing Technologies: Paper 

The ability to manufacture paper, which arrived in the Near East in the eighth century, affected in still other ways the production of, and engagement with, the written word. Acquired from central Asia, knowledge of papermaking spread quickly throughout the Islamic world and displaced, as a cheaper and lighter alternative, popular writing supports such as papyrus and parchment. Paper, which also could be produced in larger quantities than either parchment or papyrus, further encouraged a cultural shift in favor of books and the written word. By the middle of the ninth century, Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Empire and the religious and intellectual center of the Jewish world, was flush with bookshops, libraries, and copyists. 

Paper also became a key tool of governance. During the Middle Ages, rulers in the East came to rely on it as the main instrument for implementing their will and developed vast professional chanceries that pressed the new medium into effective use as an arm of government. Together, the more convenient codex format and the ready availability of an abundance of paper laid the groundwork for a new emphasis on the production of texts of many sorts.

From Oral to Written Culture

The new technologies for writing and the new attitudes toward the written word that they engendered affected the medieval Jewish community at every level and left a decisive imprint on the kinds of sources they produced. These developments were closely linked, for instance, to the momentous transition in the study of rabbinic teachings from a largely oral-aural culture that relied upon memory to one increasingly dependent on books and written texts. While scholars debate the details, the overall trajectory is quite clear. By the twelfth century, study of what Jews still referred to as the “Oral Torah” was conducted almost exclusively on the basis of written formulations. It should come as no surprise, then, that a broad range of biblical and talmudic commentaries, halakhic codes, responsa literature, and the like appears in the pages that follow. Such sources not only illuminate a major area of cultural concern; they also reflect a radically new approach to the conceptualization and organization of traditional knowledge.

Textualization and Access to Knowledge

But the effects of textualization were not limited to traditional areas of Jewish learning, for books facilitated access to all types of information. Jews benefited tremendously from the profusion of textual knowledge in the Islamic world and as a result encountered many new disciplines. It is often observed that Arabic-speaking Jews were integrated into their cultural environment and actively participated in virtually all the intellectual pursuits of the day. Less often, however, do we stop to consider the material medium—books—that enabled such integration and participation. Thanks to their availability, studious autodidacts could absorb on their own such disparate fields as mathematics, philosophy, literature, and history. 

An Expanded Intellectual and Literary World

Medieval Jews read broadly and soon began to write on a wide variety of topics, too. This extraordinary expansion of Jewish society’s intellectual and cultural horizons is reflected in the tremendous growth of new subject areas and types of writing included in this volume, from astronomy to medicine, literary theory to theology, and even erotic poetry. 

Our own familiarity with some of these genres can jade us to their genuine novelty in the Middle Ages and, as a consequence, obscure their historical significance. There is perhaps no better example than the field of Hebrew grammar. Although its mere mention can induce acute somnolence in many modern readers, it was an important and lively field of scholarship for medieval Jews, in part because of its implications for how the Bible was understood. What’s more, it was an entirely new discipline, an innovative area of inquiry that emerged as a direct result of efforts by Jews to apply the insights of Arabic grammarians to the Hebrew language. And so, despite its arguably tedious subject matter, Hebrew grammatical writing, as a field, exemplifies the dramatic changes that took place in Jewish intellectual life during the early Middle Ages.

In countless ways paper also revolutionized the lives of ordinary men and women. Its advent was a boon not only for scholars and writers but for rulers and bureaucrats as well, as it quickly became an indispensable tool in the practice of governance. Merchants took advantage of paper, too, using it to exchange information about fluctuating markets, to transfer funds across considerable distances, and to keep accounts of their business dealings. 

The Cairo Geniza

The Cairo Geniza, a remarkable trove of medieval manuscripts and documents discovered in a Cairo synagogue, clearly reveals the effects of this textualization of daily life as it played out within the Jewish community. The contents of the Geniza, which include some fifteen thousand pages of ordinary, day-to-day writing—records of the local Jewish community, legal documents, and correspondence of all sorts, in many cases composed by women—demonstrate the decisive role that paper came to play in the operations of communal institutions, in the economic activities of Jewish traders, and in the way families shared news and kept in touch over great distances. No survey of the cultural achievements of Jews between 600 and 1200 would be complete without a rich sampling of these writings, for both the intrinsically fascinating personal stories and the innovative insights into the way daily life was conducted.

Material Culture

Finally, the impact of these new writing technologies is also evident in material culture. Relatively few physical objects produced by Jews or samples of what we would consider Jewish visual art have survived from the early Middle Ages compared to discoveries from the periods before and after. The reasons behind this scarcity are not entirely clear. 

What has survived, however, points in various ways to the importance of written texts as both material objects and works of art. Three of the most celebrated biblical codices are the Aleppo Codex, the Leningrad Codex, and the First Gaster Bible. These texts are crucial early witnesses to the text of the Bible, but in their craftsmanship and exquisite decorative elements, they are also prime examples of the way the new codex format became a medium for visual art, transforming the book into an object of value. Other images, whether of an illuminated ketubah (marriage contract), a ruling board used by medieval scribes to create lines on both sides of a sheet of paper, or the earliest surviving examples of micrography, offer additional glimpses into the way Jewish visual and material culture was shaped by textualization. 

The Decline in Figural Imagery in Jewish Art

Curiously, this aesthetic shift in favor of writing came on the heels of a noticeable decline in the use of figural images in Jewish art at the very beginning of this period. Despite the claims of nineteenth-century historians, Jews in antiquity actively participated in the visual culture of the Greco-Roman world and into the sixth century adorned their synagogues with representations of biblical characters, zodiac wheels, and a variety of ritual objects. After the sixth century the available evidence is more meager; there is nonetheless an observable change in the record demonstrating a rejection of representational art. The reasons for this change are still very much debated—was it linked to opposition to images among contemporary Christians and Muslims, the result of internal Jewish aniconism, or some combination of both?—but the phenomenon itself is well documented and may have contributed to the preference for ornamentation based upon geometric shapes and text that can be observed in later centuries. 

What Languages Were Jewish Sources Written in?

Finally, what can we say about the languages in which these sources were written? While Jews everywhere spoke the language(s) of their local region, nearly all the texts included in this volume were written in just three languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, and using a single alphabet, Hebrew. A mere handful were composed in other languages, among them Greek, Judeo-Persian (Persian in Hebrew characters), and Latin; here, too, a preference for writing in Hebrew characters stands out.

Hebrew and Aramaic

Hebrew and Aramaic were the languages of the classical texts—the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud—and they continued to influence Jewish literary activity during the Middle Ages, Hebrew much more so than Aramaic. Arabic was a new addition that was soon recruited by Jews living in Arabic-speaking lands for many of the roles formerly served by those older languages. Indeed, reports that the community in Fez had abandoned its reading of the traditional Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch, the translation of Onkelos, in tandem with its adoption of Arabic as a spoken language, prompted Judah Ibn Quraysh in the early tenth century to compose his “Epistle” defending the importance of Aramaic and encouraging its study.

Greek and Judeo-Greek

The paucity of texts in Greek requires some explanation, as Jews had been writing in that language—and in Greek script—since antiquity. Although Greek continued to be used as a spoken language in the Byzantine Empire throughout the medieval period—witness the Hebrew-Greek glossaries that were produced as aids for the study of the Bible—it was largely replaced by Hebrew as the Jews’ primary literary language in the ninth century. And after that point, when Byzantine Jews did occasionally write in Greek, they did so using Hebrew letters.

Persian and Judeo-Persian 

A substantial number of Jews were to be found in Persian-speaking lands, and we know that by the ninth century they were writing in Judeo-Persian. But what we have from this early period is minimal in quantity. At least in terms of what has survived, the true heyday of Judeo-Persian literature commences only in the thirteenth century, after the period covered in this volume, culminating in the fourteenth century with the epic compositions of Shāhīn, whose versified retellings of biblical narratives were deeply influenced by the Shah-nāmah (Book of Kings) of Firdowsī (d. 1010), the great masterpiece of medieval Persian literature.

Maimonides’ Linguistic Choices

Ideological as well as practical considerations could determine the choice of language when several options existed. As a young man, Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) composed two significant works on rabbinic law in Judeo-Arabic, yet when it came to his monumental code, Mishneh Torah, a book he hoped would be accepted by Jews everywhere and for all time, he opted for mishnaic Hebrew, so that it might be accessible to the entire nation. But when he wrote his “Letter to Yemen” to offer comfort and reassurance to the Jews of that land during a period of persecution, he made a different calculation. Maimonides explains that he decided to compose that work in Arabic because he intended it to be read aloud in public, and he wanted all members of the community, “men, women, and children,” to be able to understand and derive benefit from his words. In other contexts, language appears to have served as an important marker of religious identity. Rabbanite Jews, who adhered to the traditions of the talmudic sages, retained use of Aramaic, the iconic language of the rabbis, for that most consequential of legal documents, the marriage contract. Their Karaite opponents, who denied the validity of rabbinic teachings and institutions, wrote theirs in Hebrew. 

Linguistic Options in Christian Europe

In Christian Europe, where the literary trail starts later, the linguistic options for Jews were more limited, and most of the writing from our period is in Hebrew, although on occasion liturgical poems, such as the famous Akdamut milin (“At the beginning of my words”) of Meir ben Isaac of Worms (eleventh century), were composed in Aramaic. 

Jewish inscriptions in Latin from southern France, datable to the eighth century, or perhaps earlier, when Latin was still spoken, demonstrate that in early medieval Europe, Jews were as comfortable using that language as their Christian neighbors. But as it ceased to be a spoken language and its mastery came to demand intensive study, Jews largely abandoned Latin. And by the point at which significant Jewish literary activity can first be detected in France, Germany, and England, in the eleventh century, this linguistic transformation was already complete. While individual scholars, including the French biblical exegete Joseph Bekhor Shor (b. ca. 1140), would continue to make the effort to learn Latin, on the whole Latin literacy was uncommon among Jews, and its use as a language for writing rarer still.