P.10: Letter from an Anonymous Writer to Moses b. Judah

This letter was sent to Moses by one of his associates and deals with Moses’ request of the writer to copy for him a book of Kabbalah. It was first published by Hacker (2000, 592–93), who suggested that the writer is Meʾīr, son of David the scribe, who is mentioned in Moses’ letter (P.1/29). We assume that Rabbi David Shemesh, who is mentioned in this letter, can be identified as David ibn Shams, who wrote many of the letters to Moses in our corpus; and that David ibn Shams is the “David the scribe” mentioned by Moses in his letter. The identification of the writer with Meʾīr, son of David the scribe, is therefore impossible: the writer mentions David as his friend and not as his father. The letter as written at the end of a copy of the Kabbalistic work Shaʿar ha-Shoʾel ‘The Section/Gate of the Questioner’, R. ʿAzriel of Gerona’s commentary on the Ten Sefirot (JTS 2331, 207a–213b; 214a–215b). It was a very popular work in the Middle Ages (more than 150 manuscripts of it have survived). The manuscript also contains samples of letters (214a–215a), which are also mentioned in our letter (l. 15). The manuscript was held in Moses’ library and later by Samuel Ḥalafta, a Maghribian Jew who lived in Jerusalem in the early sixteenth century (his ownership signature appears in 207a). Below the letter, a censorship signature by the famous converted censor Dominico Irosolimitano, dated to 1598, can be found (217b), which indicates that the manuscript later arrived in Italy. Irosolimitano’s signature also appears on other copies of this work, such as MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale heb. 810 (a collection of Kabbalistic works in Italian-Ashkenazic script, including R. ʿAzriel’s work). The writer included an addition to the letter, with a request that Moses check whether he, or Nathan Sholal, had received any letters from the Maghreb. This could be evidence that the writer was of Maghribian origin, like Sholal. He wrote this addition on the previous page, in a free space left at the end of the book he had copied (217b), and added to it a special title (l. 1). However, both letters are unsigned, and it is therefore possible that they did not originally belong to the same letter.1