Early Square Italian Hebrew Script in the Epitaphs of Worms and Mainz from the Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries, and the Reused Hebrew Manuscript Fragments

By examining Hebrew scripts used in epitaphs of the 11th-12th centuries matzevot in the ancient Jewish cemeteries of the Rhineland, in particular those of Worms and Mainz, one can notice the similarity between the writing used to engrave these funeral inscriptions and the Hebrew funerary epigraphy of southern Italy (8th-12th centuries). This consideration is confirmed by Malachi Beit Arié, who states that the Italian script made a significant contribution to the development of the Ashkenazi one, which began his evolution from the middle of the 13th century onward. My presentation will show the strong similarity between these two corpora, namely the southern Italian one and that used in Rhineland at the time of the first Jewish settlement. I will compare the epigraphic script with the writing of a selection of reused manuscript fragments, which will permit me to stress the link between the Ashkenazi and the Italian traditions. According to the account of the migration from Italy to Germany of the Qalonymos family (9th-10th centuries), their scribal technique was transferred to the Rhineland region. The Italian type of writing, as attested in Hebrew inscriptions documented in Venosa, Otranto, and in manuscripts fragments, was still close to the oriental one. In a final note, I will underscore how the medieval Hebrew script from the Po Valley, is to be considered, substantially, as part of the Ashkenazi writing tradition.