THE CORPUS HEBRAICA

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The first President of Corpus Christi, John Claymond (1517–37), was an avid collector of manuscripts and early printed books whose acquisitions are today among the most significant treasures in the College’s library.

When Richard Fox, the renowned statesman and bishop, founded Oxford University’s Corpus Christi College in 1517 as the first Renaissance institution of its type in England, he stipulated that the subjects taught should include the study of the Bible in its original languages. John Claymond, the College’s first President (1517-37), was a dedicated collector of Hebrew Old Testament manuscripts. His gifts to Corpus, among the most important treasures in an extraordinary library praised by Erasmus himself, will at last be revealed to the wider world as part of the College’s quincentenary capital campaign.

Corpus has been closely linked to Hebrew and Jewish studies since its inception. The first Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford was a Corpus alumnus and Fellow, John Shepreve (1509-42), and one of Shepreve’s successors, Edward Pococke (1604-91), another Corpus alumnus, was not only Regius Professor of Hebrew but the first Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford. When King James I charged a group of Oxford scholars with the translation of the major and minor prophets for the production of the King James Bible, it was Corpus’ President John Rainolds who led the team, probably using the College’s Hebrew manuscripts of the prophets and Rashi’s commentaries. John Spenser, the successor of Rainolds, personally funded the instruction of Hebrew at Corpus. In the more recent era, the College welcomed Jewish students and scholars at a time when antisemitism flourished not only in Germany, but even in Britain. Sir Isaiah Berlin, the great philosopher and historian of ideas, was an undergraduate at Corpus, and the College gave shelter to a number of German academics fleeing Nazi persecution, including Eduard Fraenkel, the famous classicist who became the Corpus Professor of Latin and made incalculable contributions to the College.

Today, Corpus is engaged in a number of exciting projects centering on the collection. It is collaborating on digitization projects with the National Library of Israel. The new library and Special Collections Centre will be the focus of a soon-to-be established Research Fellowship in Hebrew Studies (funded by the The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies). To mark its Quincentenary, and its many links with the United States, the College will be bringing its Hebraica collection to the United States in 2017 for major exhibitions of the College’s treasures in Washington and New York City.

This page1 CCC MS 5 (Pentateuch, c.13 cent.)2 CCC MS 6 (Rashi’s Commentary to

The Historical Books, c.13 cent.)

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At the heart of Claymond’s collection are seven Hebrew manuscripts (CCC MS 5–11) that one leading scholar considers to be “the most important collection of Anglo-Jewish manuscripts in the world.” These works “of breath-taking quality and interest” were the product of cooperation between Jewish and Christian scholars in the thirteenth century working to provide tools to non-Jews to learn Hebrew. The great scholar Malachi Beit-Arié has even suggested that vocalizations indicated in them reflect classroom usage. They present texts from the Tanakh (the canon of the Hebrew Bible) in parallel Hebrew and Latin, often with a literal Latin translation written directly above the Hebrew text. Non-Jews used these works to learn Hebrew and better to understand the primary sources of a shared scriptural tradition. Along with the Torah, the Nevi’im (Prophets), and much of the Ketuvim (Writings), are parts of Rashi’s Commentary on the historical, prophetic, and didactic books.

In addition to these seven manuscripts, the collection contains a second, nearly complete copy of Rashi’s commentaries (CCC MS 165) and an Ashkenazi Siddur (CCC MS 133), both produced in northern Europe during the twelfth century.

The Siddur is possibly the oldest such still in existence and therefore the closest to the Siddur devised by Rav Amram Gaon in the ninth century. Whilst there are some suggestions that it was for a time owned by the powerful Kalonymus family, it eventually came into the possession of a Sephardic Jew who settled in England and used some of its blank pages to record business transactions. He did so in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew letters), making this document the only one of its kind: no other texts are known to have been written in this language in England during the Middle Ages. As such, it is a remarkable testament to the transnational experience of European Jews over several centuries.

This page3 CCC MS 165 (Rashi’s Commentary

to the Hebrew Bible, c.12 cent.)4 CCC MS 133 (Ashkenazi Siddur, c.1200,

notes in Judaeo-Arabic script.)

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Front page1 CCC MS 133 (Ashkenazi Siddur, c.12 cent.)

This page 1 CCC MS 11 (Hebrew and Latin Psalter, c.13 cent.)2 CCC MS 9 (Book of Samuel, c.13 cent.)3 CCC MS 7 (The Historical Books c.13 cent.)

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Finally, the collection comprises three manuscripts that attest to the continuing interest in Hebrew at Corpus during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

The first (CCC MS 34 and 35) are a detailed commentary on the Book of Job by Robert Burhill (1572-1641), a former Fellow of the College. The second (CCC MS 273) is a handwritten Hebrew grammar, possibly from the early eighteenth century. The third (CCC MS 469), an item belonging to the so-called European Geniza, contains fragments from a pawnbroker’s Hebrew account book which Robert Proctor (1868-1903), the Junior Librarian of Corpus, found in “disbound” (torn) books towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The collection speaks to a period which can be described as the “Dark Ages” of Anglo-Jewish history — in the period after the Jews had been banished by Edward I in 1290 and before their formal readmission in 1656 by Oliver Cromwell. These remarkable documents reveal how for leading English intellectuals and statesmen, the flame of interest in Jewish culture continued to burn and inform over the ensuing centuries. The Corpus Hebrew Manuscripts, magnificent artefacts in their own right, thus also bear witness to the role of rabbinical scholarship in the intellectual life of Christian scholars at Oxford and elsewhere. Cultural milestones, they illustrate the fruitful collaboration of Jews and Christians, creating a strong legacy of shared humane values and beliefs, relevant to contemporary debates.

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