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Because the works were user-produced and informal, they were usually written on less expensive material, often on the backs of other, disused texts.Ī section from a typical Genizah rotulus, containing responsa (T-S G2.20) The form was especially popular for copying texts for personal use, such as study copies of the Talmud or of responsa, or for liturgical poetry and hafṭarot.

Together with Gideon Bohak, Olszowy-Schlanger has found about three-hundred fragments of rotuli in the Genizah, many of them dating to as late as the eleventh century. The rotulus used to be thought of as an early and transitional book-form between the megilla (the medium preferred by Jews in antiquity) and the codex (which Jews adopted following the Islamic conquests Christians had started using it several centuries earlier). Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, who is currently studying rotuli from the Genizah, calls it ‘the third form of the Hebrew book’, after the megilla (the horizontal scroll, in which the text runs parallel to the long side) and the codex (the bound book as we know it). The resulting manuscript proved of great interest in several different ways.Ī rotulus is a vertical scroll with the text written parallel to the short side.

Recently, Roni Shweka pieced together six fragments of an eleventh-century rotulus of the She’iltot located in four different Genizah collections. Reconstructing a book from fragments preserved in the Genizah is like trying to complete a puzzle where most of the pieces are missing. Shemarya, T-S F13.1 and moreīy Roni Shweka, Marina Rustow and Judith Olszowy-Schlanger The She’iltot, recycling manuscripts and Efrayim b.