The volume presented here is the product of academic cooperation between students of medieval Karaism and students of medieval Byzantium. It presents a partial Hebrew edition and English translation of Judah Hadassi’s majestic Eshkol ha-kofer (Cluster of Henna Blossoms), an incomparable summa of theology, law, exegesis, polemic, linguistics, and much more. Its author, a twelfth-century Byzantine Karaite, was conversant with both the Karaite heritage, as developed in the Land of Israel in the Golden Age of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and as mediated by his Byzantine Karaite predecessors; and the Greek philosophical/theological heritage, as mediated by his Byzantine Christian teachers and neighbors. Eshkol ha-kofer is informed by both traditions to which Hadassi was heir. In the realm of theology, the major topic of this volume, his thought is mainly a continuation of the Karaite version of Islamic Kalām, yet it also reflects strands in Greek philosophy that were unknown to his Karaite predecessors. Linguistically, too, Eshkol ha-kofer operates within two contexts. The text, with its idiosyncratic style of rhymed prose in alphabetic acrostics, shows Hadassi’s artistic mastery of the Hebrew language; its use of Greek terms, which appear as Judaeo-Greek in Hebrew script, most of which are found in the context of theology, rhetoric, science, or realia, indicates that Hadassi was able to access Greek philosophy in the original language.

This duality is unique in the history of medieval Jewish thought. Other medieval Jewish philosophers, Karaite and Rabbanite alike, were familiar with Greek philosophy only at second or third hand via Arabic or Hebrew translations. In order to appreciate Hadassi’s thought fully, then, it is important to analyze Hadassi’s philosophical and educational background as reflected in his use of Greek terminology. It is necessary to keep in mind that although Judah Hadassi was a Karaite, he was fully a Jewish thinker, intimately familiar with rabbinic traditions as well as his own Karaite heritage. Despite Hadassi’s use of contemporary Greek, his theology is still generally a continuation of classical Jewish Kalām as found in both Karaite and Rabbinic Geonic thought. Thus, attention has to be paid as well to the Karaite theological traditions that circulated in Byzantium when he wrote his work.

In addition to their importance for understanding Hadassi’s education and thought, his Judaeo-Greek transcriptions are also an important witness to a poorly documented phase of the Greek language. Since the Greek material represents a stage in the development of this language for which we have but few and quite problematic contemporary sources, this requires deciphering his Judaeo-Greek terms. This task is quite difficult because Hadassi’s Judaeo-Greek can be understood only against a background of more than a thousand years of linguistic development. Furthermore, the Judaeo-Greek orthography is open to diverse interpretations since there was no standard orthography for vernacular Greek at that time.

It is clear, then, that the explication of Eshkol ha-kofer requires an editorial team whose members are conversant with poetical Hebrew, Karaite law and lore, Rabbinic Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Byzantine Greek. We were able to put together such a team thanks to a generous grant provided by the German-Israel Fund (GIF Grant No: 1179–212.4/2011). Daniel J. Lasker and Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis were the principal investigators on this project. Lasker took overall responsibility for the entire project, writing most of the general introduction and providing the English translation of the text, as well as being involved in all other aspects of the production of the book. Niehoff-Panagiotidis was responsible for investigating Hadassi’s Byzantine education, as presented in the general introduction, and for analyzing the linguistic aspects of Hadassi’s Greek, transcribing the Judaeo-Greek words into Greek letters, and explaining their meanings. David Sklare, Lasker’s research assistant, produced the Hebrew edition along with an introduction describing the manuscripts and editorial conventions. Sandra Görgen and Saskia Dönitz, Niehoff-Panagiotidis’s research assistants, did much of the initial work of identifying and transcribing the Judaeo-Greek words. Despite this division of labor, all members of the research group contributed to each other’s work.

We are pleased to thank the German-Israel Fund (Tali Rosenbaum, director), which provided the financial means to pursue this project, as well as our academic homes, the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; and the Center for Byzantine Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin. The research authorities of the two home universities administered the grant and took care of all the bureaucratic tasks associated with it. Lasker also conducted part of the research as the Horace W. Goldsmith Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at Yale University. Meira Polliack and Michael G. Wechsler were kind enough to accept this book into the Karaite Texts and Studies series of Brill’s Études sur Judaisme Médiéval, and we would like to thank the Brill production staff for their hard work on this volume. The Binah Nemoy Memorial Fund administered by Yale University, under the direction of Steven D. Fraade, provided funding for editorial work that was done by Tali Hochstein, who gave invaluable assistance with the translation and the checking of sources. Adrian Pirtea checked the Greek references and transcriptions. The Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation; grant No. 1754/12) helped support the copy editing of this book which was done by Gene McGarry. We would like to thank those libraries whose manuscripts were used in the preparation of this edition: the University of Leiden Library, the Moscow Russian State Library, the Oxford-Bodleian Library, and the British Library. In addition, we acknowledge the assistance of the following friends and colleagues who contributed to this book by lending us their expertise: Haggai Ben-Shammai, Moshe Firrouz, Daniel Frank, Yuval Harari, Elisabeth Hollender, Adiel Kadari, Martin I. Lockshin, Aharon Maman, Dan Shapira, Sacha Stern, and Joachim Yeshaya. Identification of sources was aided by a new computerized tool for automatic identification of biblical references, provided by Dicta: The Israel Center for Text Analysis, directed by Prof. Moshe Koppel. The tool was developed by Avi and Shaltiel Shmidman.

In the present volume, we have limited ourselves to the first part of the book, up till Alphabet 100, since that is the section with the most theological content and the majority of the Judaeo-Greek glosses. We begin with a general introduction outlining the book and its contexts, as well as a summary of Hadassi’s theology. We then provide an edition of the Hebrew text based on the best manuscripts and an English translation of that text (which may not always render Hadassi’s difficult Hebrew with total accuracy). Finally, the Judaeo-Greek glosses from the entire work were deciphered and transcribed into Greek letters, preceded by a short history of Greek and an explanation of the importance of Eshkol ha-kofer for Byzantine Greek studies. It is to be hoped that a full edition of the Hebrew text will be offered in the future. In the meanwhile, we present this work as a case study of “theological encounters at a crossroads.”

Daniel J. Lasker

Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis

David Sklare

September, 2017