Nick Posegay

Itinerant Scholar

About This Site

Thank you to me for making this site. Thank you to academia./edu for forcing my hand by making their own site unsuitable for hosting academic materials. Most of all, thank you to you, dear reader, for finding this weird sidebar.

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Category: Articles

The Arabo-Tiberian Vocalisation System: An Undocumented Set of Medieval Vowel Signs for the Hebrew Script (2025)

The three main Hebrew vocalisation systems—Tiberian, Palestinian, and Babylonian—are well-known in the history of Semitic languages. This article describes another previously undocumented Hebrew vocalisation system, the ‘Arabo-Tiberian system’, a sub-variant of the Tiberian system that appears only in Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts around the tenth and eleventh centuries. In addition to the typical Tiberian vowel marks, the
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Some Notes on Melody: Saʿadya Gaon and Why ‘Naghma’ Means ‘Vowel’ in Judaeo-Arabic (2025)

The article explores the historical and linguistic contexts behind the use of the term ‘naghma’ in medieval Judaeo-Arabic to signify ‘vowel’, a meaning distinct from its Classical Arabic usage denoting ‘melody’, ‘tone’, or ‘sound’. Focusing on Saʿadya Gaon’s work, particularly his al-Qawl fī al-Nagham (‘Discourse on Melody’), the study highlights how the concept of ‘tone’
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Following the Mediterranean Paper Trail: A Study of European Paper in Late Medieval Cairo (c. 1350–1600) (2024)

This article seeks to cross disciplinary boundaries while examining watermark paper in the ‘Cairo Genizah’ manuscript collections at the Cambridge University Library. Mainly dating between 1100 and 1897, this corpus provides a continuous cross-section of Egyptian-Jewish literary activity during the entire transition to watermark paper, including samples of paper stocks used in Cairo, Alexandria, Rosetta,
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Ernest James Worman and the Victorian Genizah: A Salt-Miner’s Tale of Romance, Tax Evasion, and Sudden Death (2024)

Ernest Worman was the first scholar to experience what many of us have come to recognise as the ‘salt-mine’ of the Genizah. Already seven decades before the founding of the Genizah Research Unit (GRU), he toiled away in the depths of Cambridge University Library (CUL), documenting fragment after fragment that, for the most part, did
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Five Qur’anic Papyri from the Michaelides Collection at the Cambridge University Library (2024)

The Michaelides manuscript collection at the Cambridge University Library contains approximately 700 papyrus fragments collected by George Michaelides in Egypt in the middle of the twentieth century. While a preliminary handlist exists for this collection, most of the papyri have not been fully described. Among them are five Qur’anic papyri that have thus far evaded
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Hebrew Printing and Printers’ Colophons in the Cairo Genizah: Networking Book Trade in Europe and the Ottoman Empire (2023)

The Cairo Genizah is famous as a source of manuscripts for the study of the medieval Mediterranean world, especially Jewish communities during the High Middle Ages. However, among the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern manuscript fragments in Genizah collections are more than 12,000 moveable-type printed items, most of which come from Europe. They are
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Searching for the Last Genizah Fragment in Late Ottoman Cairo: A Material Survey of Egyptian Jewish Literary Culture (2022)

The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cambridge
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