Jewish Parchment, Muslim Prayer – Uncovering an Early Abbasid Palimpsest (2021)
Sometimes it takes a while to identify a Genizah fragment. No one is an expert in all the languages, genres, and scripts that appear in Genizah collections, and even for experts, it is often difficult to decipher severely damaged manuscripts. The Genizah Research Unit has worked for almost five decades to catalogue the Taylor-Schechter Collection, but it is not uncommon to spend several hours identifying a single fragment, so many thousands have still never been read.
I first tried to identify T-S Ar.51.73 in 2018 while surveying Genizah collections for manuscripts of the Qurʾan. The fragment stood out because it has an old style of Arabic script that usually indicates Qurʾanic writing. Damage to the manuscript meant I could not immediately decipher the entire text, but it quickly became clear that this was not a section of the Qurʾan. It went on a list of unidentified classmarks I have labeled “Suspicious Fragments,” and then I promptly forgot about it.
That is, until March of 2021, when I suddenly remembered T-S Ar.51.73 while cataloguing another Arabic fragment. I searched up the manuscript again when I was supposed to be doing my job, and it seems that no one else identified it in the interim, so here we are.
Cite this work: Posegay, Nick. 2021. “Jewish Parchment, Muslim Prayer: Uncovering an Early Abbasid Palimpsest (T-S Ar.51.73).” Fragment of the Month (June). Cambridge: University Library Genizah Research Unit.
