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Unknown Jewish Sect by George Foot Moore

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Title: The Covenanters of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect

Author: George Foot Moore

Release Date: April 12, 2010 [Ebook #31960]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COVENANTERS OF DAMASCUS; A HITHERTO UNKNOWN JEWISH SECT***

The Covenanters of Damascus;

A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect

George Foot Moore

Harvard University

Harvard Theological Review

Vol. 4, No. 3

July, 1911

CONTENTS

The Covenanters Of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect
Footnotes

THE COVENANTERS OF DAMASCUS; A HITHERTO UNKNOWN JEWISH SECT

Among the Hebrew manuscripts recovered in 1896 from the Genizah of an old
synagogue at Fostat, near Cairo, and now in the Cambridge University
Library, England, were found eight leaves of a Hebrew manuscript which
proved to be fragments of a book containing the teaching of a peculiar
Jewish sect; a single leaf of a second manuscript, in part parallel to the
first, in part supplementing it, was also discovered. These texts
Professor Schechter has now published, with a translation and commentary,
in the first volume of his _Documents of Jewish Sectaries_.(1) The longer
and older of the manuscripts (A) is, in the opinion of the editor,
probably of the tenth century; the other (B), of the eleventh or twelfth.

What remains of the book may be divided into two parts. Pages 1-8 of A,
and the single leaf of B, contain exhortations and warnings addressed to
members of the sect, for which a ground and motive are often sought in the
history of the Jewish people or of the sect itself, together with severe
strictures upon such as have lapsed from the sound teaching, and polemics
against the doctrine and practice of other bodies of Jews. The second
part, pages 9-16, sets forth the constitution and government of the
community, and its di