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SUMMARIES

The Hebrew Section

Documents from Afghanistan
in the National Library of Israel

Ofir Haim

Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem

Several years ago, a large corpus of documents was discovered in northern
Afghanistan. This corpus, which was a Jewish family archive from the city
of Bāmiyān and dated to the 5th/11th century, includes various texts, most
of which written in Early Judeo-Persian and Early New Persian. The
National Library of Israel has recently purchased twenty-nine documents
from this corpus. Despite its small number of documents, the National
Library’s collection is quite diverse, since it consists of texts different
languages from several genres, such as private and business letters, legal
documents and poetry. This diversity in language and genre may be of
great importance for many fields of study, particularly that of Jewish
history in the early Islamic world. Based on a tentative reading and
translation of documents from the National Library’s collection, this article
presents the preliminary conclusions concerning two different topics: the
Jewish family, whose members are often mentioned in these documents,
and the development of Islamic legal writing in the Iranian-speaking world.
Moreover, a short discussion is given regarding the most frequently

GQinezdeiem
10 (2014)