Khanmeti Palimpsest Fragments of the Old Georgian Version of Jeremiah

• Published in: The Harvard theological review 1932-07, Vol.25 (3), p.225-272
• Main Author: Blake, Robert P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic libraries; Incense; Old Testament; Parchment; Pottery; Subjunctive mood; Theology; Verbs; Vowels; Words
• ISSN: 0017-8160; 1475-4517
• DOI: 10.1017/S001781600002126X

Among the innumerable fragments and scraps of manuscripts which have percolated through to Western Europe from the renowned Rümpelkammer at Cairo, there have been found not a few palimpsest leaves bearing the marks of other milieus and having traced upon them characters in tongues other than Hebrew. Chance brought the writer on the trail of one such vagrant parchment during a visit to Oxford in the summer of 1921; an investigation of the hand-list of Georgian MSS. at the Bodleian Library showed that this institution possessed a “fragment of Jeremiah in capitals.” As soon as I glanced at it, I realized that a perplexing puzzle had been solved. In 1902 Professor P. K. Kokovtsov of the University of St. Petersburg published a facsimile and collation of the Hebrew text on a Hebrew-Georgian parchment palimpsest leaf, a photograph of which had been sent anonymously to Professor N. Ya. Marr. The Hebrew text proved to be a portion of the Jerusalem Talmud; from the photograph it was difficult to tell which was the original writing. The late Sir A. E. Cowley kindly informed me that the fragment had been acquired in 1894 along with several others from Rabbi S. Wertheimer in Jerusalem, and that its provenance from the Genizah collection was almost certain. Professor F. C. Conybeare had already identified the Georgian text as a fragment of Jeremiah, and presumably had at the same time sent the photograph to Professor Marr, the covering letter probably having been lost.