Jewish Parchment Dates From 1020

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30945, 29 December 1965, Page 11

Jewish Parchment Dates From 1020

(N.Z.P.A. Reuter —Copyright)

CHICAGO. Dec. 28.

An 11th century parchment, said to have been classified as an “illegible document at Oxford University, has been found to be the oldest extant legal document relating to the Jewish community of Sicily, the Chicago University announced yesterday.

Its significance was discovered by Mr Norman Golb, a member of Chicago’s faculty of oriental languages and civilisations, who visited Oxford last year. He found the document Interesting enough to request an ultra-violet photograph, which brought out longvanished traces of JudaeoArabic writing Arabic language written in Hebrew characters. The document concerned Elijah, son of a silk merchant of Syracuse, Sicily, who had been found guilty by community judges in 1020 A D. of appropriating some silver ingots from another person’s inheritance. Elijah went to the Moslem officials who ruled in Syracuse

at that time, and brought them back to the Jewish court.

There, before an open Torah (scroll containing the five books of Moses), Elijah was made to recite the 10 commandments and to swear that he had not taken the silver. „ , , The Moslem officials recovered the money that Elijah had been required to pay as surety for the silver. The document, recorded on Thursday, April 21, 1020, is one of the so-called Genizah manuscripts found towards the end of the nineteenth century in an old synagogue, south of Cairo. A valuable collection of the Genizah manuscripts is now in Oxford’s Bodleian library.