Judeo-Arabic Dreambooks in the Cairo Genizah

In this presentation I would like to offer a summary of my recent doctoral dissertation devoted to dream interpretation literature. Followed by an introduction to dream books as the main representatives of this lore, the lecture will provide a synthesis of the most significant findings and conclusions achieved in the dissertation. The base of this research is the edition and analysis of all the samples I could find of dream books written in Judeo-Arabic from the Middle Ages, which come with no exception from the Cairo Genizah and surrounding genizot, since no other source seems to have preserved dream books in Judeo-Arabic from that period. The corpus represents 83 manuscripts containing detached pages of dream books. These fragments helped me to partially reconstruct several compositions, some of which do not appear to be preserved elsewhere, and to identify a relevant number of titles. The results of this investigation are particularly revealing owing to the lack of general studies on the production of this literature among Jews during the Middle Ages. In addition, they have an impact in our knowledge of the broader Arabic tradition.