Michael Pollak is the only scholar to take a serious and long look at the Torah scrolls of the Kaifeng Community. This is historically ironic, as procuring a Torah Scroll from the Kaifeng Community was a long term goal. Now that they are in European and American libraries and museums they seem all but ignored. We will look at Pollak's work on the extant Kaifeng Scrolls with an eye to further developing his work.
This is taken from part three of his book The Torah Scrolls of the Chinese Jews, Soferic Traditions and Textual Integrity. Pollack's study is marred by the ahistorical character of nearly all studies of Kaifeng Jewish books: their Torah scrolls are judged by some ideal soferic standard.
In this regard, an important question that is unanswered is what was/is a 'fit' Torah scroll for use in the 1600s, when most Kaifeng scrolls were produced. Was there a standard that was adhered to by ALL Jewish communities across the world or was there a variety?
Taking for granted that variety was the situation - were the standards complimentary or mutually exclusive? That is, if the Kaifeng scroll do not have taggin (crowns, and they do not) does it mean other communities would not accept their Torah scrolls for use? Or was variety accepted across a range of differences? Is this kind of question answerable? I can't find any academic work on this subject.
Back to Pollak. He isolated "Selected Textual Details"
1. Large and Small Letters: modern Torah scrolls have large and small letters in various places. Pollack discovered that the "extent Sifrei Torah (and Scroll 9 as well) have absolutely no Large or Small Letters," pg 93. The number 9 scroll was kept in Hong Kong, and examined for large and small letters before it went missing during World War Two.
Since none of the extant scrolls have these special letters, nor does the older, a probable 1400s or 1500s century scroll at the ABS, we can safely say that there was never a scroll with such letter in Kaifeng. Pollak asks this about the letter issue: "Should the inference be drawn that the Kaifeng scrolls are patterned after an original (or originals) which came from an area (or from areas) where the Large and Small Letters were of the soferic tradition?
I would say yes, and our task if to find such scrolls from the 1400s - 1500s that could be the basis for the Kaifeng examples. Would they be from Bukharian scrolls? Or scrolls from Yemen or India? It is not easy to find accessible examples of such scrolls.
2. The Columnar Letters: Pollack tells us that for "many centuries" and I would ask how many, as this is important, it has been common practice (again, where, when, how was it a common practice) for "most soferim to start all columns but five in the Torah with a word that begins with the letter vov." Five columns begin with letters other than vav. They spell out two words: b'yah sh'mo, Whose name is the Lord, from Psalm 68:5. Torah scrolls from western regions take these letters from the following:
Genesis 1:1 from bereshit
Genesis 49:8 from yehuda
Exodus 14:18 from hebaim
Exodus 34:11 from sh'mor
Numbers 24:5 from mah
Deuteronomy 31:28, vav
There is a difference in the Kaifeng scrolls in the placement of three of these letters:
Genesis 49:14 from yeshkhar
Deuteronomy 16:18 from shoftim
Deuteronomy 23:24 from motzaih
From this, Pollak concludes a bit obviously: "...for the b'yah sh'mo pattern which characterizes the Kaifeng Torah scrolls tends to indicate an Asiatic rather than a European influence." I have no doubt this is true but what is that influence? Central Asian? Yemeni? Indian?
3. The Inverted Nuns: nun hafukah appear before Numbers 10:35 and another immediately after Numbers 10:36 are found at each of these places in the Bridwell, Oxford and Vienna but does not appear in JTS, British Museum and Cambridge scrolls. The ABS scroll does not contain the Book of Numbers.
4. Broken Vav: Scribal tradition (what tradition and when!) the vav in the word shalom in Numbers 25:12 is "broken"
None of the Kaifeng scrolls have this feature. The ABS scroll does not contain Numbers.
5. Chedorlaomer: this name in Genesis 14:1 is sometimes treated as one, or two names, in Torah scrolls. So the name can be one or two words, and if two is permissible to treat it as to carry it from one line to the next? The Kaifeng scrolls show all three variations: ABS has is as one word. JTS, Oxford, British Museum, and Vienna have it was 2 words on one line. Bridwell and Cambridge has two words, with Chedor as the closing word on the line, and Laomer as the first word on the next line. Pollak asks this question:
6. Pedahzur: the tractate Megillah of the Jerusalem Talmud states that in Numbers 10:23 the proper name Pedahzur should be written as one word. It appears as two words in Bridwell, Cambridge, Oxford, JTS and British Museum scrolls. The word is missing from microfilm that Pollak used for the Vienna scroll, but I was able to find it in the microfilm available from the Vienna National Library as two words:
Pollak asks this question about the spelling of this name as two words: "Do we know of any particular group, or groups of Jews who customarily wrote Pedahzur as at least four Kaifeng soferim did - as two words?" Why does he not say 5, and now that we know the Vienna scroll spells this word as two letter, 6 scribes in Kaifeng?
7. The Punta Extraordinaria: these are marks of varying shapes found in many Torah scrolls, for reasons that are not always apparent
Genesis 16:5, one puncta required: present in the ABS, absent from the British Museum, Cambridge, Oxford, Vienna, JTS, and Bridwell scrolls.
Genesis 18:9, three puncta required: present in the ABS, absent from the British Museum, Cambridge, Oxford, Vienna, JTS, and Bridwell scrolls.
Genesis 19:33, one punctum required: present in the ABS, absent from the British Museum, Cambridge, Oxford, Vienna, JTS, and Bridwell scrolls.
Genesis 33:4, six puncta required: present in ABS, British Museum, Cambridge, and Vienna. Absent from Oxford, JTS, and Bridwell.
Genesis 37:12, two puncta required: present in ABS, absent in British Museum, Cambridge, Oxford, JTS and Bridwell scrolls. Pollak has a defect in his microfilm of the Vienna scroll, and was unable to see if was missing the puncta. I found it without:
Skin 44, 26 lines up from the bottom.
Numbers 3:39, five puncta required: present in the British Museum and Vienna scrolls, but absent from the Cambridge, Oxford, JTS and Bridwell scrolls. ABS does not contain numbers.
Numbers 9:10, one punctum required: absent from Cambridge, Oxford, Vienna, JTS, and Bridwell. Pollak's British Museum copy was damaged at this part.
Numbers 21:30, one punctum required, not in any Kaifeng scrolls
Numbers 29:15, one punctum required: absent from all the Kaifeng scrolls, but Pollak's British Museum microfilm was damaged.
Deuteronomy 29:28, ten punctum required, present in Cambridge and Oxford, absent from British Museum, Vienna, JTS, and Bridwell scrolls.
Pollak wraps up the discussion of the punctum telling us that the ABS scroll, the oldest Kaifeng scroll, definitely from the 1500s, and possibly one of the scrolls brought to Kaifeng from Yangzhou or Ningbo, has puncta in the positions expected to find them in the surviving skins. The JTS and Bridwell scrolls have no puncta at all. Pollak wonders in the increasingly less frequent use of puncta in the scrolls is indicative of sequence in which they were copied. So scrolls with more punctum are the oldest. Those with none the youngest.
Pollak's eight example is less helpful for us, and his "Miscellaneous Discrepancies" are more indicative of possible spelling errors than scribal trends. This spreadsheet makes a case that there is no easy way to understand relationship between the Kaifeng scrolls:
What we can say with some certainty is that if the ABS was the Scroll of Moses, it was not followed at all. Even if it is not, and the Scroll of Moses is lost somewhere in the English countryside, not even that theoretically model was followed closely. How else do we explain the example of the six puncta in Genesis 33:4 which is found in the ABS, British Museum, Cambridge but absent from Oxford, JTS, and Bridwell. The did Oxford, JTS, and Bridwell scribes have a copy with the puncta in front of them, and make an error? Or, the more likely scenario, did they not have a copy with these puncta in front of them?
Pollak's comments in Chapter 3, What the Scrolls Reveal, are all interesting, but I will focus here point 2 and 3.
2. Pollak explains that it has been reported in the literature the scrolls copied after the flood of 1642 were copied from the Scroll of Moses. In actuality, the Scroll of Moses is never mentioned in a Jewish source, but by Domenge in 1722. Do any other sources mention the Scroll of Moses? The 1663 stones simply calls it the scroll collated from the scrolls pulled out of the Yellow River. This appears at least partly legendry.
Pollak says: "the evidence which has been assembled in the present study indicated that there scrolls were copied from more than a single model." I would agree with Pollak. But why would the Kaifeng Jews tell this story about a single scroll as a copying model? In the years after 1642, did this legend take hold even though many of the people who witnessed the copying project from different scrolls and sources were still very much alive?
3. Pollak notes that although the Kaifeng scribes are not consistent in the features they share in their scrolls, there is an "underlying soferic tradition which all these men held in common." They all employed the b'yah sh'mo pattern, and none wrote Large or Small letters. The traditional reason to explain the other anomalies, like the use of inverted nuns are from copying errors. But the Kaifeng scribes most likely are copying from examples in front of them, just from different sources.
Pollak calls the Kaifeng scribes "rote copyists," yet the problem with that assertion is that there is no evidence that they were rote copyists, with the exception of discrepancies in their texts. This leads to a circular reasoning of sorts: the Kaifeng Jews were rote copyists, because their texts have errors. Their text has errors as they were rote copyists. A far better route to take in examining these scrolls is the see them from different versions of Torah scrolls that made their way to Kaifeng.
Indeed, Pollak says this himself: "The text which they copied, I believe, did not all stem from the same scribal scroll." This makes a great deal of sense, as it seems in times when they Kaifeng Jews lost scrolls in floods, they were replaced with whatever scrolls they could find, as we saw above of the scrolls from Ningbo and Yangzhou. Did the Jews in these coastal cities get their Torah scrolls from maritime trade, and not the overland route the Kaifeng Jews apparently used to enter and settle China? Were they produced in China or elsewhere?
We need to do what Pollak suggests with some modifications: "[i]t is possible, therefore, that a comparison of the Kaifeng Sifre Torah with early non-Chinese Torahs may bring to light valuable bits of information which will help answer the question of when and from where Jews first immigrated to China." Far from telling us where the Kaifeng Jews hailed from, their Torah scrolls only tell us what other Jewish groups arrived in China and shared their resources with the Kaifeng community. It is extremely unlikely that the Kaifeng Jews had any of the books from the early years of their arrival in Kaifeng by the 1400s.
Comments
Post a Comment