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Jan 3, 2023Liked by Dr. Tamar Ron Marvin

Fascinating. Would the Rif have been copied and transmitted as a single codex, or would it have been assembled with other, perhaps related, texts?

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It's a great question. Looking at the manuscripts used by Dr. Ezra Chwat in his critical edition, it seems that Halachot ha-Rif were sometimes (often?) transmitted as a unit (several manuscripts have specifically Berachot, Seder Moed, Chullin, and Halachot Ketanot together - so Nezikin and Nashim seem to have had their own codices). It may be that smaller units were also created, though the fragmentary nature of the many Geniza copies of Rif make it hard to say. Although it was indeed very common for codices to be assembled with multiple texts inside, the length and usage of the Rif may have made that less common.

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