Emerson researches the provenance and historical significance of biblical material in Duke’s Hebrew manuscripts collection (with Noam Sienna and Jonathan Homrighausen).
Her project focuses particularly on MS 013. The manuscript is a parchment leaf from a 14–15th century Ashkenazi codex of 1 Samuel (or possibly a complete Bible). Using damage analysis and Cairo Geniza research, Emerson has demonstated that MS 013’s codex was much larger than this leaf is today. The individual page evidences water, insect, and stress damage to the codex itself, from which MS 013 either fell or was cut out for decorative uses in newer, smaller books.
Emerson combines manuscript history with rabbinic commentary research to investigate MS 013’s historical context in late medieval Ashkenaz. Her research suggests that the codex was of Ashkenazi-Sephardi hybrid origins.
MS 013 employs formatting techniques from Masoretic Bibles popular among Sephardi Jews at the time, but the content of the text within that formatting includes commentary material only an Ashkenazi audience would have been likely to use. That content consists of non-biblical material inserted directly into the flow of the biblical text itself. MS 013 marks such material by leaving it unvocalized and set off by small dashes. Only Ashkenazi, rabbinicly-inspired commentary on the inserted words render them meaningful in the biblical context where MS 013 witnesses them. These findings suggest that MS 013 used Masoretic-Sephardi formatting to circulate Ashkenazi commmentary content in the late medieval world.
MS 013’s hybrid techniques show that the idea of the biblical was changing at this time in Jewish history. Page formatting, classical interpretation, and scholarly commentary could act as crucibles not only for biblical thought itself but also for Jewish cultural factors like ethnicity. MS 013’s formatting decisions did not find enough purchase in the Jewish world to last into modern Bibles, Jewish or otherwise. But for a time, such decisions had purchase enough within an Ashkenazi Jewish community to warant the production of Bibles like MS 013’s.