WHEN British Jews were asked to bring one treasure representing their faith to a Diamond Jubilee ceremony for Queen Elizabeth, four years ago, they chose a Hebrew Bible from 1189. Long admired as a rare manuscript, its true significance was discovered more recently when scholars pondered clues—distinctively English bookmaking techniques, an Anglo-Norman term for “seagull” in a list of non-kosher birds jotted in a margin—and concluded that this is the only known book to survive from the tiny, embattled Jewish community of medieval England. That history lends poignancy to neat pen-and-ink drawings hidden on a final page, showing two dogs hunting a lion: a coded lament over the persecution of Jews. In the year after that Bible was neatly dated by a scribe, England saw a wave of anti-Semitic riots, ending in the massacre of every Jew in the city of York.
Today that remarkable book lives in a business park near Oklahoma City airport, after its sale at auction last year for $3.6m. It is one of more than 40,000 biblical texts and artefacts, including fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and sections from the Gutenberg Bible, collected since 2009 by the Green...Continue reading
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