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10* Gideon Bohak and Matthew Morgenstern

elsewhere), good black and white images of some of these fragments have
survived in several different collections.3

A Babylonian Jewish Aramaic Magical Booklet

Among these now-lost fragments is a set of seven parchment folios of
small size and irregular shape containing magical spells and recipes in
Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, photographs of which may now be found in
the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin under the shelf mark Or. Sim. 6.4 The
writing surface, handwriting, style, and contents make it clear that all seven
folios were written by the same scribe, whose hand was identified by Judith
Olszowy-Schlanger as dating to the eleventh century and displaying some
possibly Babylonian features. All seven folios probably came from a single
booklet, which must have contained more such folios. The order of the
preserved folios cannot be determined for certain, but we tried to arrange
them in what seems to be the most plausible sequence.5 The longest

3 For the circumstances under which they were taken, see Bandt and Rattmann, pp.
9–10, 12, 16, and 18.

4 We are extremely grateful to Amir Ashur and especially to Ronny Vollandt, who is
now cataloguing the Damascus fragments in Berlin, for bringing these texts to our
attention. We are also grateful to Christoph Rauch for the photographs and for the
permission to publish them here, to Cordula Bandt for sharing with us other
photographs of the Damascus Genizah fragments, and to Judith Olszowy-Schlanger
for her palaeographical advice. Dr. James Nathan Ford read the manuscript and
proposed many helpful readings and interpretations, as well as granting us permission
to cite from magic bowls that that he is preparing for publication (cited as JNF).
Professor Shaul Shaked aided us with the Persian material and similarly granted us
permission to cite from his work on the Martin Schøyen collection (cited as MS).

5 Unfortunately, the Arabic numerals on the margins of the folios bear no clear relation
to the folios’ original order. For the circumstances under which these numerals were
added to the original folios see Bandt and Rattmann, p. 13 and Plates 7 and 8. The
same is true of the small etiquettes with sequential numberings which were placed
next to each folio while the pictures were taken, which also bear no relation to the
original order of the folios.