Vatican Hebrew MS 133
Vatican Hebrew 133, usually known in Hebrew as the Rome MS, is a handwritten manuscript of a portion of the Jerusalem Talmud copied in the late 13th or early 14th centuries, containing approximately a quarter of the entire Jerusalem Talmud, Seder Zerai'm and Tractate Sotah from Seder Nashim.
Vatican Hebrew MS 133 originally belonged to the Heidelberg Palatina collection, acquired in the early 16th-century, and later transferred to Rome in the 17th-century, as a gift to Pope Gregory XV.
Layout
It is written on parchment, each sheet containing two columns. There are normally between 36 and 38 lines per column, with the exception of Tractate Sotah that contains between 43 and 46 lines per column. It is a composite work combined into one volume, copied by six different copyists and written in old-style, square Ashkenazi Hebrew script. Sections of the original manuscript were partially destroyed, requiring its owners to replace the damaged or missing parts at different time periods. The original manuscript is preserved at the Vatican Library in Rome. A facsimile edition of the manuscript has been published under the name Jerusalem Talmud: Vatican Manuscript, but since it lacks 5 out of the total of 6 orders prescribed for the Mishnah and Talmud, the manuscript contains only about of the entire Jerusalem Talmud. In common Hebrew inscriptions, it is often called the 'Rome manuscript'.Importance
The manuscript, although copied in the late 13th or early 14th centuries, offers scholars only limited value, as it is generally believed to contain many copyist errors. For example, the manuscript containing Seder Zera'im, from which the scribe copied the Rome MS, was defective in that it had missing pages in several places and the scribe copied the pages that were in front of him consecutively, unaware of the deficiencies. Most errors, however, are the result of the copyists mistaking one Hebrew character for another Hebrew character, the most common being confusion of the graphemes and ; confusion of and ; and confusion of with . Occasionally, two separate letters were inadvertently joined together by the copyist to produce the letter.Nonetheless, some variant readings in the Vatican Hebrew MS 133 are still considered to be insightful, perhaps offering a more correct reading of the Jerusalem Talmud at the time of its compilation. Most critical editions of the Jerusalem Talmud include tables with variant readings, many of which are gleaned from Vat. ebr. 133. In 1909, Ginzberg published an account of the Rome MS's variant readings.
Scholars have pointed out that Vatican Hebrew MS 133 was one of three primary texts used by Jehiel ben Jekuthiel Anav, the copyist of the Leiden MS of the Jerusalem Talmud, but almost all modern editions of the Jerusalem Talmud will cite variant readings from the Vatican Ms., and wherever there are two or more concurring versions, that version overrides the Vilna printed edition where a variant reading appears, and such a reading will appear in the modern printed edition of the Jerusalem Talmud published by Friedman.
The marginal notes, textual emendations written in the glosses of the Leiden MS, are believed to have been copied from Vat. ebr. 133.
Selected variants
In Vat. ebr. 133, the spelling of place names has in each case a -suffix, instead of an -suffix. This spelling follows the traditional transcription of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. In terms of orthography, Vat. ebr. 133 displays a close similarity to the Cairo Geniza fragments of the Jerusalem Talmud. Names of rabbis are written in the old Palestinian style, such as instead of ; instead of ; instead of and instead of. On the other hand, the copyist of the Leiden MS has changed the original script's spelling in many places to conform with the Babylonian style. Vat. ebr. 133 is correct in calling hyacinths bulbosīn, which in the Leiden MS was corrupted to read as kulkosīn.| Page | Vat. ebr. 133 |
| Folio 102r | |
| Page | Old Yemenite fragment |
| Shevi'it 7:1 | |
| Page | Leiden MS |
| Shevi'it 7:1 |
The Talmud relates a story about the inhabitants of Sepphoris who enquired concerning grains of wheat and whether or not it was permissible for them on the Seventh Year to produce a clean, white flour by covering the grain with stratified layers of a green herb, in this case, with the green foliage of thorny plants in order to induce by heat and evaporation the slow destruction of the dark outer kernels containing the germ and the bran, leaving only the white inner-kernel. Both Vat. ebr. 133 and the old Yemenite fragment of the Jerusalem Talmud have written for the thorny plants used to do this, which the Leiden MS apparently corrupted to read .