Tentative Typology of Hebrew Liturgical Manuscript Fragments in Italy from the “Books Within Books” Database

This paper will display the summative results of a survey of liturgical fragments, retrieved from the Books within Books: Hebrew manuscript fragments in European libraries research website. This investigation has been organized around a series of criteria (e.g. date, origin, size, script, content, layout, etc…) which have been applied to over 450 liturgical fragments from 10 countries. The collecting of data has provided comparisons among the fragments, resulting in important observations such as the date and geo-cultural origins of the fragments, sometimes foreign to their place of discovery; the amount of parchment versus paper fragments or the type of liturgical contents and their possible reconstruction into virtual volumes. Moreover, the identification of small, medium or large size fragments, has allowed to not only detect how they were re-used by the Christian bookbinders but more interestingly, reveal whether they originally were part of prayer books for private or synagogal use. The objective of this survey on Hebrew liturgical manuscript fragments has been above all, to search for new evidence and further understanding of Jewish book production and the religious practices among Jewish communities of western and eastern medieval Europe.