It’s not easy following the Torah reading from a 13th-century manuscript. The marginal drolleries—little decorated images—can be distracting, and the Masoretic notes and annotations persist in twisting themselves into interesting geometric (and other) forms. The Hebrew cursive for the Rashi commentary is impossible to parse, looking for all the world like a series of identical brushstrokes. And the text itself is compressed, quirky, hedged about with a thicket of vowels and cantillation marks intended to ease reading but in fact further cramping the already tightly-spaced text column. And how in the world is one to even see the tiny marks that indicate the ends of sections and readings? And yet following the Torah portion from a late-13th-century manuscript was precisely what I was doing one recent Saturday morning when a mystery appeared.
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