When Solomon met Solomon: A Medieval Hebrew Bible in Victorian Cambridge

Abstract

Abstract In the Spring of 1869, the Cambridge University Library acquired a medieval Hebrew Bible, first written in 13th-century Spain and decorated and annotated by various hands in subsequent centuries. The manuscript contains what many consider the earliest record of a Jewish reader of Christian chapter divisions of the OT. This article uncovers the story of that manuscript’s discovery by Solomon Marcus Schiller-Szinessy (1820–1890), the first practicing Jew formally appointed to an academic position at that university. It studies Schiller-Szinessy’s published and unpublished descriptions of the manuscript, and it reconstructs his understanding of its history of transmission and reception. It places this story in the distinct but connected contexts of Victorian interests in Rabbinics and in the Massorah, Henry Bradshaw’s renewal of the Cambridge University Library, the development of bibliography as a genre of historical scholarship in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and the late 19th-century understanding of distinct medieval and early modern chapters in the history of Jewish and Christian biblical traditions, their transmission, reception, mutual encounter and critical study. Finally, the essay takes this case study to reflect on the effect of Jewish emancipation on the academic study of the Hebrew Bible.