What does it look like?

It is a single volume codex (book) of 250 pages, around 30 cm x 20 cm in size. It is written on paper of Italian origin. In the past, it has been affected by damp and some repairs have been made to the paper. It is bound in Moroccan leather and the scribe has used what is known as a Byzantine-style of bookhand.

Who, what and where?

This text, which is written in Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic, dates from the second century BCE, a time when the persecution of Jewish populations gave rise to the fear that the details of the oral traditions, dating from the first five centuries BCE, might be lost. The leader of the Jews, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, ordered that the law be written down and memorised; mishnah means ‘repetition’.  This copy of the original text was written much laterm in the 15^th century.

The Mishnah is divided into six orders (Sedarim), which deal with different aspects of daily life, and over the next six centuries, along with further commentaries, came to form the Talmud. The major part of the text of the Mishnah is written in Hebrew and reflects the debates which took place in the first and second centuries CE among a group of Rabbinic thinkers known as the Tannaim. It teaches by drawing on examples of specific judgements, along with details of debates between notable Rabbis, and discusses problems from all areas of human life. The two main commentaries on the Mishnah are the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud, both of which became primary sources of Jewish law in their own right.

Why is it significant to the study of religion?

The text of the Mishnah describes the first written account of the early Jewish oral tradition and the earliest significant work of Rabbinic Judaism. It is also known as the ‘Oral Torah’. The Mishnah is usually studied through recitation.

This is one of only three complete manuscripts of the Mishnah, and considered to be ‘an outstanding witness of the western type of Mishnaic Hebrew’. Of the manuscript, Schiller-Szinessy, the librarian in charge of Cambridge University Library’s Hebrew manuscripts, in the late 1800s wrote, “Although this copy can lay claim neither to a very great age, nor to absolute correctness, we cannot hesitate to pronounce it to be a manuscript beyond all price.”

Many commentaries were written on the Mishnah, including one by the distinguished scholar Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, more commonly known as Maimonides, in 1168. He was a medieval Jewish philosopher who became one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages, and a well-known rabbi and philosopher. He wrote the first full commentary on the entire Mishnah. It was popular both in its Arabic original and its medieval Hebrew translation. It included an introduction to the nature of the oral law and an essay, which concluded with his famous ‘thirteen principles of the Torah’.