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A Babylonian Jewish Aramaic Magical
Booklet from the Damascus Genizah

Gideon Bohak and Matthew Morgenstern

The Damascus Genizah

Although discovered at about the same time, the Damascus Genizah is far
less widely known among Jewish studies scholars than its more famous
sister, the one from Cairo.1 There are two reasons for this ignorance. First,
the vast proportion (more than ninety-nine percent) of the Damascus
Genizah consists of Muslim Arabic texts, which are of little interest to most
students of Jewish studies, and the remaining 0.5% consists mostly of
Christian fragments, only some of which, notably those containing sections
of the Septuagint, are of relevance for students of Judaism. Barely a
handful of the texts are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Judaeo-Arabic and
are of Jewish origin.2 Second, the Christian and Jewish texts that made
their way into this Muslim Genizah and were preserved there until the early
twentieth century were shipped to Berlin in 1902 and shipped back to the
Ottoman court in Istanbul in 1909, and have never been seen again. Only
recently has it been discovered that while the fragments themselves are still
missing (and may be found one day in Damascus, in Istanbul, or

1 For the Damascus Genizah, see the excellent study by C. Bandt and A. Rattmann,
“Die Damaskusreise Bruno Violets 1900/1901 zur Erforschung der Qubbet el-
Chazne,” Codices Manuscripti 76/77 (2011): 1–20.

2 For the Christian fragments, see Bandt and Rattmann, esp. pp. 18–20; for the Jewish
ones, see ibid., p. 20. See also A. Ashur, “A Ketubbah in the Palestinian Style with the
Permission of Matzliah Gaon, from the Damascus Genizah,” Pe’amim 135 (2013):
163–70 (Heb.).

GQinezdeiem
10 (2014)