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14* José Martínez Delgado
I have no doubt that more fragments from the Kitāb al-Taysīr will
continue to appear in the libraries holding fragments from the Cairo Geniza.
I can only hope that my edition and the present article help to bring some
order to Solomon Schechter’s impressive work and the incredibly important
Firkovich collection.14
Analysis of Kitāb al-Taysīr
The contents of Kitāb al-Taysīr, which are based on Andalusi Jewish
school trends, present an enormous and meticulous collage of the most
important medieval Hebrew dictionaries. This does not mean that Šelomo
ben Mobārak was simply a compiler or transmitter. Far from it—his work
and lexicographical contribution are obvious in both the macro- and micro-
structures of his dictionary. On the macro level, he catalogues the lemmas
following a semantic approach—never a morphological one—dropping
from the corpus those roots that he considers superfluous or ambiguous. In
this way, he merges the morphological theories developed by the Andalusi
Hebrew School with the early Karaite tradition.
This dictionary may be considered a linguistic type, since its concern
is signs, never things; in fact, following the Andalusi tradition, the Kitāb
al-Taysīr does not study personal names or their possible etymologies,15
casting aside the work developed by al-Fāsī in this field. It tries to explain,
in theory, the meanings of biblical words, or at least to offer a hint that helps
to interpret certain words or forms. The definitions are strictly organized
14 My edition of the KT is based exclusively on all of the identified copies
in the Firkovich collection. This selection criterion is rooted in both the
importance and the size of the fragments and in the difficulty in gaining
access to them today. The edition is diplomatic and reproduces the Firk. I
77 copy. It also contains an ample critical apparatus, which includes all the
known variants.
15 The first author to omit personal names from his dictionary was Menaḥem
ben Saruq, who claims that “some consonants join together in personal
names, but there is nothing to learn from them because they are names,
not voices”; see Ángel Sáenz-Badillos, Maḥberet Mĕnaḥem (Granada:
Universidad de Granada, 1986), p. 15*:21–22 (hereinafter MM).