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Detective work - whenever you say to Judith "from a geniza fragment," she says "which one? Give shelfmark."
I've been working with an article which was published by one E. N. Adler in 1897, about a 16-page geniza fragment he'd pulled out of his sack, back in the days when you got geniza fragments by going to Fustat with a sack and bribing the custodian. They didn't have shelfmarks for fragments in those days. Nonetheless, which fragment was it, says Judith.
Read up on this Adler (Elkan Nathan, Jewish book collecter, that's probably him) in Wikipedia. His book and manuscript collection got sold to JTS during his lifetime, when he was in financial difficulties. OK, he probably included his geniza fragments in that, because by then Schechter had filled Cambridge with geniza fragments and JTS would have wanted a share.
Go to the geniza project site, which aims to have digital records of everything which came out of the geniza. Geniza shelfmarks tend to be assigned by libraries based on which box stuff is in, and JTS definitely catalogues by box number all the time, I know that from having worked there. JTS has several entries for fragment collections. One of them is ENA. That'll be the stuff that came from Elkan Nathan Adler all right.
Looks like ENA contains more than 4000 fragments. Too many to comb through by hand.
The geniza project website people have entered catalogues into their database, where catalogues exist. Adler catalogued all his interesting stuff because he was a booky person. Chances are that catalogue has been put into the database.
Adler called the fragment a few different things. Try all of them in the catalogue field. All of them come up with lots of hits because geniza cataloguing is like that, they're mostly just described like "Masora" or "Correspondence" and where there's been more scholarship, more is written.
Of the hits, look only at the ones in JTS ENA collections.
Eventually the search for הלכות ספרים shows a 15-folio fragment in ENA. Aha. That's the right size of fragment on the right topic.
Check the text against what's in the article. Yup. This is the one.
A pleasing amount of "probably" decisions which ended up with the correct shelfmark and a high-quality scan of the fragment in question. JTS MS R2063, also listed as JTS ENA 222, if you were wondering. Viewable at fgp.org.
I've been working with an article which was published by one E. N. Adler in 1897, about a 16-page geniza fragment he'd pulled out of his sack, back in the days when you got geniza fragments by going to Fustat with a sack and bribing the custodian. They didn't have shelfmarks for fragments in those days. Nonetheless, which fragment was it, says Judith.
Read up on this Adler (Elkan Nathan, Jewish book collecter, that's probably him) in Wikipedia. His book and manuscript collection got sold to JTS during his lifetime, when he was in financial difficulties. OK, he probably included his geniza fragments in that, because by then Schechter had filled Cambridge with geniza fragments and JTS would have wanted a share.
Go to the geniza project site, which aims to have digital records of everything which came out of the geniza. Geniza shelfmarks tend to be assigned by libraries based on which box stuff is in, and JTS definitely catalogues by box number all the time, I know that from having worked there. JTS has several entries for fragment collections. One of them is ENA. That'll be the stuff that came from Elkan Nathan Adler all right.
Looks like ENA contains more than 4000 fragments. Too many to comb through by hand.
The geniza project website people have entered catalogues into their database, where catalogues exist. Adler catalogued all his interesting stuff because he was a booky person. Chances are that catalogue has been put into the database.
Adler called the fragment a few different things. Try all of them in the catalogue field. All of them come up with lots of hits because geniza cataloguing is like that, they're mostly just described like "Masora" or "Correspondence" and where there's been more scholarship, more is written.
Of the hits, look only at the ones in JTS ENA collections.
Eventually the search for הלכות ספרים shows a 15-folio fragment in ENA. Aha. That's the right size of fragment on the right topic.
Check the text against what's in the article. Yup. This is the one.
A pleasing amount of "probably" decisions which ended up with the correct shelfmark and a high-quality scan of the fragment in question. JTS MS R2063, also listed as JTS ENA 222, if you were wondering. Viewable at fgp.org.