Liss, Hanna
Senior Fellow: October 2022–February 2023
Research Project: Philology as a Confessional Tool: The Sacred Texts
The focus of this project will be the study of the Masoretic Bible and the biblical Masorah in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although it was never at the centre of formal Jewish education, the study of the Hebrew Bible has always been a part of it. In the Middle Ages, not only Hebrew language and grammar, but also the medieval biblical metatext—the Masorah—were studied and introduced into medieval and early modern Jewish commentaries. In contrast, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Protestant historical-critical research on the Hebrew Bible was mainly grounded in contemporary studies of late antiquity. The Hebrew Bible was regarded as an integral part of ancient Near Eastern literature, while the Masorah, as a medieval metatext, became a neglected field of scholarly research. Abraham Geiger was one of the first scholars after Wolf Heidenheim to take up this issue in his article “Zur Geschichte der Maßorah” (1864/5). His initial research on the Masorah led to a variety of publications and editions regarding the Masoretic material, for example by Adolf Neubauer (“Pèle-mèle literaire. Die Massorah אכלה ואכלה,” 1862) and Salman (Salomo) Frensdorff (Das Buch Ochlah W’ochlah, 1864; Die Massora Magna nach den ältesten Drucken mit Zuziehung alter Handschriften, 1876). However, Jewish Bible research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not really follow the path of its great spiritus rector, which led to the fact that most of the Masoretic material, especially that belonging to Ashkenazi manuscript traditions, remains unedited to this day and intensive research on it has only recently begun. This project investigates the significance of the confessional barriers for Masoretic research and explores the developments that Israeli Masorah research in particular has made since the middle of the twentieth century.
Hanna Liss is the chair of the Department of Bible and Jewish Exegesis at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany.