Commentators:R. Yosef Kara's Commentaries on Esther/1

R. Yosef Kara's Commentaries on Esther

Introduction

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Introduction

R. Yosef Kara, a student/colleague of Rashi, was one of the intellectual giants of Biblical exegesis in Northern France in the 11th-12th centuries,¹ and his scholarly efforts spanned also the fields of liturgy and Midrash. He authored commentaries on most of the books of Tanakh, and perhaps on all of them. In recent years, portions of several of his commentaries have been rediscovered and recovered,² and this has led to a greater appreciation of the centrality of the role he played in the development of the plain sense (peshat) Biblical exegesis in Northern France.

Multiple Commentaries on Esther

On a few books of Tanakh, multiple commentaries of R. Yosef Kara have survived.  Megillat Esther is one of these books, and we possess textual witnesses for three different commentaries of R. Yosef Kara on Esther.

• The commentary of R. Yosef Kara which survived in whole or in part in the most manuscripts is labeled "1st Commentary" in ALHATORAH.ORG's Mikraot Gedolot. A full text of this commentary is found in MS Prague F6,³ and the beginning of the commentary (Esther 1:1-9 only) is found in MS Erlangen 1263. Virtually all of the numerous citations of R. Yosef found in MS Hamburg 32 match this commentary nearly verbatim, thus providing strong support for the identification of R. Yosef Kara as its author.⁴
• An additional commentary of R. Yosef Kara is found in MS St. Petersburg Evr. I.21, and it is labeled "2nd Commentary" in ALHATORAH.ORG's Mikraot Gedolot.⁵ The identification of R. Yosef Kara as its author rests upon the extensive content parallels to the first commentary and stylistic similarities to other commentaries of R. Yosef Kara.
• Two non-overlapping portions of an additional commentary of R. Yosef Kara, each presented as part of a "3rd Commentary" in ALHATORAH.ORG's Mikraot Gedolot, can be found in MS Corpus Christi College 6 and MS Neuengronau 150-151 (from Esther 8:5 – 10:3).⁶  The Corpus Christi College manuscript contains Rashi's commentary on most of Nakh.  However its commentary on Esther 1:1 – 7:4 is not from Rashi, and it is being published here for the first time and being identified as that of R. Yosef Kara based on the extensive parallels in most of its material to the other commentaries of R. Yosef Kara and because the remaining non-parallel material shares some of the hallmarks of R. Yosef Kara's exegesis.

It should be emphasized that it is unclear that the two parts of the "3rd Commentary" derive from the same commentary (they are presented as one in the Mikraot Gedolot simply for technical reasons), and it is possible that, in sum total, we have texts or portions of texts deriving from four separate commentaries of R. Yosef Kara.

Acknowledgments and Manuscript List

It is a great pleasure to thank Yael Okun and Yisrael Dubitsky of the Department of Manuscripts at the National Library of Israel for bringing the significance of MS CCC 6 to our attention, and we also gratefully acknowledge the assistance provided by Joanne Snelling, Librarian of Corpus Christi College.

The following is a list of manuscripts containing material from R. Yosef Kara's commentaries on Esther (with links to their records):

• Erlangen 1263 – Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg
• Hamburg Hebr. 32 – Staats und Universitaetsbibliothek Hamburg
• Neuengronau 150-151 – with permission of Landeskirchliches Archiv Kassel
• Oxford CCC MS 6 – By permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford
• Paris 334 – Bibliothèque nationale de France
• Parma 2868 – Biblioteca Palatina
• Prague NK XVIII F 6 – Prague National Library
• St. Petersburg Evr. I 21 – National Library of Russia

¹ For more on his life and work, see R. Yosef Kara's Torah Commentary and the literature cited in the notes there.

² For more, see R. Yosef Kara's Torah Commentary and R. Yosef Kara's Commentary on Neviim Rishonim.

³ The text of the Prague manuscript was first published by A. Hübsch, in Die fünf Megilloth nebst dem syrischen Thargum genannt Peschito (Prague,1866).

⁴ The single citations of R. Yosef Kara in each of MS Paris 334 and MS Parma 2868 appear to be paraphrases and it is difficult to ascertain from which of the three commentaries they are drawn.

⁵ The text of the St. Petersburg manuscript was first published in Mikraot Gedolot HaKeter, edited by Prof. Menachem Cohen.

⁶ The text of the Neuengronau 150-151 was first published by E. Hollender and A. Lehnardt, "Ein unbekannter hebräischer Esther-Kommentar aus einem Einbandfragment", Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge 33 (2006): 35-67.  [Both the transcription and restorations there should be used with caution.]