Hebrew Manuscripts of East and West

Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages were the products of highly marginalized Jewish communities, widely dispersed within the great Christian and Islamic civilizations around the Mediterranean and further afield. Created by a religious, cultural and ethnic minority, they not only mirror the intellectual activity and interests of their producers, but also provide evidence of cross-cultural influences in all areas of book production during the period. In this illustrated survey, the record of the eighth series of Panizzi Lectures held at the British Library in 1992, Malachi Beit-Arie examines the art and craft of Hebrew bookmaking, the shaping and transmission of Hebrew texts, and their relationship with the Christian and Islamic traditions of book production alongside which they were created. Emphasizing the role of Hebrew manuscripts as cross-cultural agents, bridging East and West, he argues that they also provide useful common ground for the quest for the "universal grammar" of the codex book.