What other brilliant or scathing pranks by manuscript copyists are forever lost?
Venice, April 20 – The painstaking work of a disgruntled disciple tasked with reproducing an additional page of ancient lore was lost to history today when a publishing house reformatted his content in a way that removed the insults he had embedded in the initial letters of each line on the parchment.
An anonymous copyist toiled for most of an afternoon to plan the layout of a page from the Babylonian Talmud’s Tractate Sotah during the thirteenth century in one of the flourishing Jewish communities of Alsace: his calibrated the letter sizes and word spacing on the vellum with his quill and ink to arrange them to spell out “Asher Ben David Is A Git With Foul Odor” in the Aramaic and Hebrew text, referring to the man who assigned him the work. However, the printing house workers, unaware of the import of the subversive formatting, condensed several manuscript sheets’ worth of text into a single side of a page and instituted new line breaks to fit it such that the acrostic insult disappeared, effectively forever.
None of the three men working on the printing press – not the copy arranger, nor the man who reviewed his work before pressing, nor the one who scanned the printed page one more time to catch any possible errors before pressing more copies – picked up on the barb, which analysts believe the unknown, youthful manuscript copyist showed to a maximum of one other person before the page got rolled up and stowed with other copies. Most of the other pages in the collection wound up confiscated by French government officials a year later and burned publicly with 24 wagonloads of other priceless Talmud manuscripts.
Scholars acknowledged it will remain forever a mystery which and how many acrostic insults those precious manuscripts contained. “Aside from the loss of all that lore – the printing press didn’t reach Europe for another two centuries,” explained Professor of Jewish History Joshua Karlip of Yeshiva University. “We have no idea what irreplaceable works disappeared in that conflagration. Also, what other brilliant or scathing pranks by manuscript copyists are forever lost. Did other disciples feel the same way about Asher Ben David? Who was he? Did his mother really wear chain-mail boots?”
“What other gems still exist in the manuscripts we still have at our fingertips?” he continued. “There’s a master’s degree, perhaps a doctorate, waiting for whoever deciphers such barbs.”
“It could be the new Bible Codes.”