Physical Location: The John Rylands Library
Collection: Hebrew Manuscripts
Classmark: Hebrew MS 24
Alternative Identifier(s): Crawford MS 24
Title: Amidah prayer for the additional service of New Year
Alternative Title(s): Amidat musaf le-Rosh ha-Shanah; עמידת מוסף לראש השנה
Language(s): Hebrew
Date of Creation: 18th or 19th century
Note(s): Tiberian vocalisation. Some marginal signs appear in the manuscript in the margins, indicating specific sections of the text (see folios
2b,
4b,
11b).
Format: Codex
Material(s): Paper
Extent: 16 ff. (no flyleaves) Leaf height: 301 mm, width: 302 mm. Written height: 207 mm, width: 214 mm.
Foliation:Modern pencil foliation in Arabic numerals at the top outer corner of side a of each folio. Hebrew foliation at the top inner corner of side b of each folio from 1 [א] to 8 [ח].
Collation:One quire of 8 bifolia. Diagonal catchword at the bottom inner corner of side b of each folio.
Condition:The manuscript has been folded along the middle vertical axis.
Layout:Long line with written 13 lines. Pencil ruling.
Script:Chinese-style Hebrew square script.
Additions:Folio
13a: Handwritten note in pencil reading "Ps. cxxii".
Binding:Brown packing paper used as binding. Reinforcing modern paper strip in the middle of the quire.
Origin:Produced in the province of Henan in China in the 18th or 19th century.
Provenance:Front cover: Handwritten note reading: "ף
〚ר〛קרבן מוס / This Liturgical MS. of the Honan Jews / delivered by them to the Reverend Solomon / Carpenter, at Shanghai, in 1851, was / by him deposited among the Hebrew MSS. / at Mill Yard, 15 Third 1859. / W.H. Black".
Back cover: Handwritten labels reading "Heb [...]" and "2599/2".
Back paste-down: Bookplate reading "Endure Fort. / Bibliotheca Lindesiana", with shelfmark "5 / F".
Acquisition: Acquired by Enriqueta Rylands in 1901 from James Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford of Haigh Hall and later bequeathed to the The John Rylands Library.
Date of Acquisition: 1901
The Royal Ontario Museum continues to have two fragments of manuscript. A sheet from the Rosh Hashanah service:
And three pages of Genesis in a distinctly Kaifeng Jewish hand of the mid-seventeenth century (see here for a more extended discussion of this leaf):
Pollak points out the possible issue of the missing square sections, as well as a numbering problem with HUC series "missing" book 9. In fact, it was not bound in with manuscript 28, as he speculates, but "missing" and soon to be sold to the Museum of the Bible benefactors.
There has always been a sense that more manuscripts from the Kaifeng synagogue have yet to be discovered. Pollak writes:
"One expects that the synagogue of Kaifeng would have held many more liturgical and biblical manuscripts than those listed above... The missionaries Jean Paul Gozani and Jean Domenge, writing in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, thus report the presence in the synagogue of an array of such works that includes the various books of the Tanakh... It may have owned, through at some undetermined time before its first contacts with missionaries were made, a number of talmudic tractates."
Our main sources of information about the manuscripts at Kaifeng, are visits to the synagogue of Jesuit missionaries in the late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries. As Leslie writes in "The Survival of the Chinese Jews," that "[s]econdary sources have always presumed that Domenge" a Jesuit who visited the synagogue, and wrote about books in the synagogue, "saw the various books of the Bible they supposedly held" but that is less than certain. He may have been recounting the names of the books that the Kaifeng Jews could remember, but now longer held.
We have a similar list of the books of the from Gozani, another Jesuit who visited at this time. He wrote this list with the chief Rabbi of Kaifeng at that time, Pinchas. The Portuguese is from Gozani, while the Hebrew is of Rabbi Pinchas. See more about this list here.
It is difficult to know if this list reflects the books currently owned by the KJs. Gozani was at the Kaifeng synagogue in 1721 and early 1722. It is unclear if he saw the books, or weather he, the rabbi, and two other Kaifeng Jews proficient in Hebrew sitting with him, told him of their existence in the past.
If indeed the books were there, then in 1722 the Kaifeng Jews had something like a very complete Tanakh. That seems unlikely at this point in the life of the community. By the mid to late 1700s, their fortunes were changing for the worse. Leslie tells us they even if they did exist, the books were no longer extant in 1850-51, or "these would also have been sold." As far as we know, they were never sold. We can make a presumption that they were long gone.
As an aside, one topic that is never broached about the Kaifeng Jews are written material beyond holy books. With the exception of the Memorial Book, no documents, deeds, communal taxes or fees - any paper work all - the archive of a 1000 year old community, is gone. This is seldom brought up because religious scholars are not interested in deeds or rent receipts, but in books and their religious context.
Pollak was far more interested in the whereabouts of the Torah scrolls of the Kaifeng Jews. He was shown a Torah scroll of unknown provenance in 1972, in the library of Southern Methodist University, which had been bequeath to the university by a private collector. Pollak sleuthed and discovered it was a Torah Scroll from the Jews of Kaifeng. This started his career in Kaifeng Jewish studies.
There were thirteen Torah scrolls house in the synagogue created in the years following the flood of 1642. Pollak also states that there was probably a genizah to store old scrolls and manuscripts, but there is no evidence of its existence with the exception of loose, scattered, and damaged parts of Kaifeng Torah scrolls known to exist. But whether they were stored damaged while the Kaifeng Jews held services, or damaged later as the synagogue fell into disrepair, cannot be known.
Amazingly, Pollak examined all seven extent Kaifeng Jewish Torah scrolls. Interestingly, despite examining all of these scrolls, which are as far away as Austria and England, Pollak did not produce a major work about the Kaifeng scrolls. His work was meant to be preliminary. His work was meant to be introductions for more work by other scholars, which, more or less, never took up the challenge of Pollak's charge.
Pollak starts with the whereabouts of the know scrolls...
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