I had a bit of good fortune today. I was able to reunite an orphaned transcription with the manuscript from which it was originally derived!

When there is no stable reference provided in a published transcription to the manuscript or artifact from which it was made, it may reasonably be called orphaned. Such was the case for “Amulet No. 42” — a transcription of which was made over a hundred years ago by the scholar Richard Gottheil (1862-1936) and published by James Alan Montgomery (1866-1949) in Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur, The [University of Pennsylvania] Museum Publications of the Babylonian Section. Vol. 3 (Philadelphia, 1913).

Lucky for me, the manuscript was acquired by the Columbia University Hebrew Manuscripts collection at some point in the past, catalogued, digitized, and the scan uploaded to the Internet Archive. The collection runs a bot which regularly tweets images of the items in its catalogue with links to their entries at the Internet Archive.

Long after I had given up of ever locating the original amulet manuscript, I just happened to see this amulet tweeted today. Last year, I had made a full digital transcription of the amulet based upon the text published (with errors) by Montgomery. Even stranger, it was only this last Thursday that I reviewed this amulet text with my ḥavrutah in Jewish magic. (I have a very irrational feeling that numinous powers were at work in reuniting transcription and source, so that all the errors could be identified and corrected.)

If you’d like to read the entire text with a translation, you can do so here.

This post was originally published on my Facebook page on 24 April 2021, here. There in the comments, Columbia University librarian Michelle Moargolis provided the shelf number of the manuscript, MS General 194. Michelle was kind enough to write about my discovery, here.

In April of 2021, Aharon Varady identified an amulet for a woman in labor (specifically, Mirḳada d.m Ṿiadah bat Donah), as the same one that had been described by Richard James Horatio Gottheil (Professor of Rabbinical Literature and Semitic Languages at Columbia from 1890 until his death in 1936) as “Amulet No. 42” in James Montgomery’s Aramaic Incantation Texts from Nippur (1913). As Varady tells the tale, Montgomery wasn’t sure whether the text came from of an amulet bowl or something else, and even Gottheil himself couldn’t remember where he saw it. Gottheil’s collection was donated to Columbia in 1936, but this manuscript was added to a box – without identifying information. It was re-discovered and cataloged by Yoram Bitton in 2011 as part of a project to process the uncataloged Hebrew manuscripts, but it wasn’t until it was digitized and made widely available online that it could be identified as Gottheil’s Amulet No. 42!

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Locating James Alan Montgomery and Richard Gotheil’s lost Amulet No. 42” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.