The editors of this volume wish to honour and celebrate their friend and colleague Prof. Mauro Perani for his outstanding and uncountable achievements in the discipline of Jewish Studies. It would have been impossible to take into account in a single volume all the areas of Jewish Studies to which Mauro has contributed in a significant and lasting way, in particular the history of the Jews in Italy, Jewish medieval exegesis and Jewish thought at large. To keep the planned tribute within the limits of a single volume, and thus to grant the feasibility of this, the decision was taken to focus on contributions related to Manuscript Studies in all its sub-branches: palaeography, codicology, voluminology, fragmentology and text history, disciplines to which Mauro has devoted most of his research. The volume was planned to appear on the occasion of Mauro’s 70th birthday, but was unfortunately delayed, hindered by several inconveniences, not the least of them being the pandemic crisis of the past few years.
Had we included all the texts offered to honour Mauro, from Europe, the United States of America and Israel, we would have ended up with a multi-volume Festschrift that would still fall short of our wish to cover the complete thematic diversity of Mauro’s oeuvre. Fortunately, we are aware of other initiatives and publications that should address the topics we have not been able to include in this volume. The influx of proposals we witnessed is yet another sign of the vast network of friendships and of the recognition Mauro enjoys, not only on account of his indefatigable scholarly activity but also for his human qualities, which can be summarized, we think, in one word: generosity. Mauro has never refused to offer his time, his vast learning, his active support, in favour of colleagues and young scholars. A fraction of the fruits of his relentless commitment as a teacher, a generous colleague and a true friend is gathered here, with the hope that it will contribute to sketch a portrait of his activities. This portrait is a partial one, not only due to the choices we have made, but also because, since his retirement, Mauro is actively involved in new projects, as we wish he will be for a long time to come.
Born in 1949, in the Mantuan village of Castelgoffredo, Mauro pursued his studies at the University of Bologna, obtaining a first degree in Philosophy in 1975 and a second one in Oriental History, in 1982. He taught Religion in secondary school until his appointment as Researcher in 1996, at the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna (Ravenna Campus). In 2000, he was made Full Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the same university, where he remained until his retirement in 2019. In 2013, he received a PhD honoris causa from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to honour Mauro’s successful career and at the same time his amazing identification of the world’s oldest complete Torah scroll (held at the Bologna University Library), which opened a new unprecedented season of research on Hebrew scrolls.
Mauro’s investigations of manuscripts started some forty years ago. After his philosophical work on the concept of time in the Hebrew Bible and on Moshe ben Naḥman’s exegetical oeuvre and his Italian translation of the Midraš Temurah, Mauro dedicated his exceptional industriousness to the so-called Italian genizah, that is, to the thousands of fragments of Hebrew manuscripts re-used in book- and register-bindings that are preserved in Italian libraries, archives and private collections, mostly, but not exclusively, in central and northern Italy. Not only did he not spare time and efforts to search, inventory, catalogue and study the fragments and the texts they contained, he was also able to inspire and involve a growing number of young scholars at the very beginning of their academic path, teaching them how to search in archives or libraries, what to look for in a manuscript, a fragment, in a single column and line of text, in the shape of a letter, how to describe the growing corpus properly and how to assess its value and make its importance known to the scholarly readership and to the general public.
Some of the editors and most of the contributors to this volume are Mauro’s pupils, others are colleagues, all of them are his friends. None could say that they did not learn from him, from his works and from his example. We do not know of many other scholars that deserve as much as Mauro the famous variation on Cato’s definition of the perfect orator, proposed by the classical scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz and repeated by Friedrich Leo. Mauro is recognized as an authority and a teacher precisely because he is always very much eager to learn: he is truly a vir bonus discendi peritus. That life and choices brought him to specialize in fragments of Hebrew manuscripts is not the result of imponderable chance: it is the best characterization of his method of approaching the objects of academic knowledge. Mauro’s starting point has always been the fragment as remnant and intimation of a totality, the whole book, which is both at the beginning and at the end of the cosmic process in monotheistic religious traditions. Beynataym (meanwhile), for Mauro the brokenness of what history has delivered to us, the incompleteness of our knowledge, has always been an incentive for understanding and compassion, a moral duty to gently repair the damage and to cure the wounds. Many of us owe him a great debt of gratitude and this volume, while displaying the richness of Mauro’s research approach and results, is also a token of thankfulness.
The editors wish to thank the authors for their contribution, the publisher for their invaluable support, Dr Evelien Chayes for her precious help in editorial and linguistic matters, and, most of all, Enrica Sagradini, without whom our desire to honour Mauro Perani would have never come to fruition.
Emma Abate, Saverio Campanini, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, and Giuseppe Veltri