Wednesday, September 25, 2019

New: Site offers free access to ancient Jewish texts


http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/269430

The British Library, the largest national library in the world by number of items cataloged, has for the first time ever put some of its rarest and most ancient religious texts online for the general public to be able to access them from around the world.

The unparalleled online collection titled ‘Discovering Sacred Texts’ includes some which subsequently became the authoritative texts for Jews around the world. They include one of the only copies of the Talmud that somehow escaped the public burnings suffered by most of the other Jewish law books during the Middle Ages and was left unmutilated or uncensored, the first complete printed text of the Mishnah, and the Gaster Bible, one of the earliest surviving Hebrew biblical codices, thought to have been created in Egypt around the 10th century CE.

Some of these over 250 texts, many available to the public for the first time, include Johann Gutenberg’s Bible, probably the most famous Bible in the world and the earliest full-scale work printed in Europe using movable type, the earliest surviving copy of the complete New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus, which dates from the 4th century, and the Ma'il Qur'an, one of the very earliest Qur'ans in the world, dating back to the 8th century.

Discovering Sacred Texts provides access to the richness and diversity of the texts from the world’s great faiths. Designed for Religious Education students, teachers, lifelong learners, and the general public, it features nine faiths: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, the Baha’i Faith and Zoroastrianism.

The project has been generously supported by Dangoor Education since its inception and by Allchurches Trust, alongside other funders.

5 comments:

  1. If only we could access those ancient Jewish texts that the Europeans burned.

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  2. It would cause more trouble than it's worth. We'd discover that most of the contradictions that appear in later editions of those works, the ones that has stymied great poskim and led to countless works trying to explain them, were actually the results of misprints and that lots of what we think is settled halacha was actually different.
    I recall a lecture by an OU rabbi who visited the Vatican and was given access to a handwritten version of the Mishneh Torah written by the Rambam himself. He looked up a specific halacha where the Mishneh Torah forbids something in one part and then permits the same thing elsewhere. When he looked up those sections in this original Mishneh Torah he discovered that the Rambam had written that it was permitted in both parts. There was no contradiction, just a copyist's error.
    Now imagine what that'll do to the Schottenstein crowd when we find out how much that happened with the Talmud!

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  3. "We'd discover that most of the contradictions that appear in later editions of those works, the ones that has stymied great poskim and led to countless works trying to explain them, were actually the results of misprints and that lots of what we think is settled halacha was actually different."

    I don't see this as a problem. That sounds more like a fact-based solution to things to me. (Not to say our current scenario is a problem per se, but just to go on the same language theme). It could be important context for everything we learn and do.

    Facts don't care about our feelings, or our nostalgia, or whatever weird sensation it is that we have to believe people from earlier time periods, without access to critical information, should somehow still be correct about that information. Had you showed them this kind of information (if it was available), they would have immediately evaluated it and accepted whichever facts were reliable.

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  4. It was Rabbi Binyomin Blech. He's an Aish Rav too. (Not OU). Formerly of Oceanside.

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  5. Add to previous comment: The National Library in Yerushalayim has a ktav yad of Rambam's perush haMishnayot supposedly in the Rambam's own hand.

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