Abstract
Among the hundreds of thousands of fragments of mediaeval manuscripts found in the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue of al-Fusṭāṭ (Old Cairo), a noteworthy corpus of alchemical material preserves alchemical recipes and theoretical works that have the potential to shed light on the oft-debated question of the involvement of Jews in alchemy during the Middle Ages. After an assessment of the status quaestionis, this article offers an introduction to the corpus and to its codicological, palaeographic and linguistic features, and focusses on a discreet number of fragments that were composed by the same alchemist/copyist. The first Judaeo-Arabic edition, Arabic transcription and English translation of a selection of passages from these fragments is presented, together with discussion of their contents. While the first of the fragments is a collection of practical alchemical recipes, the second fragment preserves the Judaeo-Arabic version of a work by the famous alchemist Jābir ibn Ḥayyān that was previously considered lost.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to the Regula Forster and the anonymous peer-reviewers for their insightful comments, valuable corrections and bibliographic advice, and to Melonie Schmierer-Lee, who kindly polished my English. Images in this article are reproduced with the kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
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Research funding: This publication is part of the research project Alchemy in the Making: From Ancient Babylonia via Graeco-Roman Egypt into the Byzantine, Syriac, and Arabic Traditions, acronym AlchemEast. The AlchemEast project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 724914).
References
Manuscripts
Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, UK
Mosseri I.111
Or. 1080.14.6
T-S 20.20
T-S 20.85
T-S 24.69
T-S Ar. 35.104
T-S Ar. 44.194
T-S Ar. 48.65
T-S K1.8
T-S K1.38
T-S K14.17
T-S Misc. 8.24
T-S Misc. 8.35
T-S Misc. 8.51
T-S Misc. 10.9
T-S NS 90.64
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