Al-Ḥarizi was in love with the Hebrew language and the child of that love was the Taḥkemoni. For my own part, I have been in love with the Taḥkemoni for several decades now, and to-date this has inspired me first to produce my initial work on the subject (Rand, Evolution), followed by the present book. And as in my experience of real life so also in allegory, far from exhausting the love affair, the appearance of children on the scene seems to have only made it stronger.
The Taḥkemoni appeals to me because it foregrounds the human encounter, which is how I tend to conceive of my own existenceâa series of encounters: some fruitful, some barren, some happy and some sad. And as I grow older (I am now nearing the end of my 49th year), I become more and more viscerallyârather than purely intellectuallyâaware that all of them will one day come to an end. In this sense, reading the Taḥkemoni for me is always a little bit of an opportunity to indulge in thoughts about what I consider important in my own lifeâthose encounters that are fruitful and joyful for meâand also to prepare for the time when these will come to an end, first because some of the people whom I love to meet will no longer be around, and then because I will have to go as well. That and the fact that for me the book occasionally succeeds in achieving the kind of allure that results from just the right mixture of the light and the serious, the vulgar and the elegant, the mean-spirited and the spiritually generousâingredients that ultimately can never be separated out and in which I see a compelling representation of life itself. So writing and thinking about the Taḥkemoni is one of my greatest pleasures, intellectual and perhaps even spiritual.
In preparing this book, I have been able to call on the expertise and assistance of a number of colleagues, two of whom are also very dearly held mentors. Pride of place among these goes to Kedem Golden, who has been a constant source of invaluable information throughout the life of the project. It was he who pointed out to me that ms. St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Firkovitch IIA 85.14 fol. 1â4 belongs to the same copy as IIA 87.1 fol. 9, thereby greatly expanding the text of what is now maḥberet X of the Maḥberot Eitan ha-Ezraḥi. It was he also, who, when I asked him whether in his work on the Firkovitch manuscripts he had encountered any further material that may belong to this collection sent me his transcription of ms. St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Firkovitch IIA 85.15, which I was able to identify as a copy of what is now maḥberet Y. These are but two of the most outstanding examples of his contribution to the edition, which is so significant that I have come to think of him as a sort of agathos daimon of the Maḥberot Eitan ha-Ezraḥi. In other parts of the book, Kedem has also pointed me in the direction of primary and secondary sources that have turned out to be of key importance for the development of my thesis. And to complete the inventory of my debts to him, he has meticulously read the entire book and, by pointing out numerous faults, has given me the opportunity of correcting them. It is a pleasure to acknowledge my gratitude to him, on behalf of myself and the anonymous author of the Maḥberot Eitan ha-Ezraḥi, whose work I have been able to restore to the degree that I have only thanks to his help. Others have read parts of the book and provided valuable insights and corrections: Shulamit Elizur (whose almost impossibly close reading of the Hebrew Section was performed under great pressure from the commitment imposed by our joint project, the forthcoming edition of the Yom Kippur piyyutim of ElÊ¿azar be-rabbi Qillir, whose proofs we are correcting as I write these lines), Matti Huss, Raymond Scheindlin and Jonathan Vardi. To all I am indebted and proud that my engagement over the years with Medieval Hebrew literature has made it possible for me to enter into conversation with scholars of such caliber, to consider them colleagues and be so considered by them. Finally, my list of thanks would not be complete without mentioning Ben Outhwaite, my colleague at Cambridge and on the editorial board of the Cambridge Genizah Studies Series. His generous flexibility in what essentially amounts to making my work welcome in the Series and therefore encouraging me to rely on it as a safe haven for my research and writing have made it possible for me to pursue the latter as dictated by my own intellectual impulses and leanings and without concerning myself with the need to direct it into channels that might be considered desirable in the contemporary academic climate. For me, at any rate, this is a great gift.