The Memorial Book of the Dead has been a fruitful area of study of the Kaifeng community. There is no other document like it: it contains the names of dozens of community members, and women, who are not listed in any real sense anywhere among the surviving books and documents of the community. Less explored is the relationship of the names in the book and the siddur/service material before the section of the men and the woman. What is the relationship of this material to the names?
It has been speculated that the siddur material and the names are in the book coincidentally. The book is broken down as such:
1-21: siddur material
22-24 : blank pages
22-62 : listing of men
63 : blank pages
64 : siddur material
65-101 : listing of women
102 : blank pages
103 : siddur material
If the siddur material existed beforehand, then it was spread out. It is possible that it was placed around the material with the names, but there is no indication that this is the case (of course, it would be easier to see this from the actual book, and harder on a scan/photo). Is the siddur material from the same hand? Let is look at the letter lamed:
page 1:
page 2:
page 3:
page 4:
page 5:
page 6:
page 7:
page 8:
page 9:
page 10:
page 11:
page 12:
page 13:
page 14:
page 15:
page 16:
page 18:
page 20:
page 64:
page 103:
The hand seems unitary from pages 1-21, although the examples on pages 11-12 might very well be a different hand. The lamed on both pages 64 and 103 display a rounded horizontal stroke, and appear to be the same hand.
Does the fact that one hand wrote the material at the beginning of this manuscript, and another in the middle and end suggest that the siddur material was written one or about when the name entries were made? I think so, very many of the lameds in the name sections appear very close to the examples above:
page 33:
page 58:
page 64:
page 71:
page 96:
101:
In each case, the lamed has discernable differences. What does this tell us? Only two or three hands wrote the surrounding siddur material, whereas the names section, while written neatly and with a similar style, are from different scribes. My estimation is that this shows the work was done at once, with a system behind it. The prayers were written for the first 21 pages, and then representatives of each clan wrote the names. When the men were completed, another scribe wrote the prayers on page 64, separating the men from the women, and then completed the prayers on page 101. But the book was not static after this. Later, names were added in quite a different hand:
Page 50 shows the foundational hand of the names section on the first two lines, and then later additions in both Chinese and Hebrew. Page 61 does this as well:
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