My profile picture on this website is a cropped detail from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mich. 311 (Neubauer 377), fol. 139v. I photographed the manuscript back in 2013 while collecting material about Jewish scholars active in Prague in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for my PhD dissertation.
The manuscript is a true Ashkenazic collection of miscellanea, containing halakhah (e.g., Isaac ben Meir of Düren’s Sha’arei Dura, Abraham Klausner’s Minhagim), Biblical exegesis and homiletics (an unidentified commentary on the Torah with gematriyot, Jacob Anatoli’s Malmad ha-talmidim), as well as an introduction to Hebrew grammar, a Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary, and some magical diagrams and spells. It was copied by multiple scribes at different stages between the mid-fifteenth and late-sixteenth centuries.1
What struck me as I was taking the photographs was several elaborate and rather charming doodles and probationes pennae on the folios towards the end of the manuscript. My guess is that it was used as a textbook and its perhaps slightly bored young owners left their marks on the empty folios.
The drawing appears accompanied by three others figures, which look as if they were scribbled by a young child, and an inscription in German: Daz sint dy Juden kopff – “These are Jewish heads”.
The manuscript contains further drawings and glosses in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German, which I hope to describe here in greater detail in the near future.
For more information about the content of the manuscript, see its catalogue entry at the National Library of Israel website.
The image is reproduced here by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
The first text (fols 1r–51v), a commentary on the Mishnah attributed to Rashi, was copied in 1433. The rest of the manuscript is later. See Malachi Beit-Arié, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: Supplement of Addenda and Corrigenda to Vol. 1 (A. Neubauer’s Catalogue)(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 58. ↩︎