News Brief

One of Maimonides’ major works on ancient Jewish ## which had been lost for more than seven centuries, has been discovered through ## researches of Professor Saul Lieberman of the Jewish Thoological Seminary of ##rica, and was issued yesterday in a Hebrew folio edition.

The manuscript on which the publication is based consists of four long ##gments from the original Hebrew text of Maimonides’ “The Laws of the Palestinian ##mud,” and is written in the holograph of the great philosopher, scientist and ##aic scholar.The new manuscript is the only previously unpublished work by Maimonides, ### great Jewish scholar, philosopher and physician who was born in 1135 and died ### 1204. According to Jewish scholars who were informed of Professor Lieberman’s ##covery before its publication, the manuscript is invaluable for its elucidation ### the fourth century Palestinian Talmud. As a scholarly achievement, the attribution of the manuscript to Maimonides is considered one of this generation’s foremost ##ents in the field of Jewish learning.The manuscript was found more than 50 years ago in the Cairo Genizah by ##ctor Solomon Schechter, who later became president of the Jewish Theological ##minary of America. It soon came into the possession of the Cambridge University library in England where it remains to this day. Until Professor Lieberman began ##s studies, however, its significance was not recognized and it was considered ## be the work of a contemporary scribe rather than of Maimonides himself.The first evidence which scholars had for believing that Maimonides had actually written such a work consisted in a reference to it by Maimonides himself ### his “Commentary on the Misnnah.” The reference was accompanied by a long ##tation from the lost work, and it was this quotation which Professor Lieberman ##ound verbatim in the Genizah manuscript.