Originally posted by: ThePresence
This is cool stuff.
My great-uncle died not too long ago. He was a religious Jew. His daughter is not religious so she has no use for all his old books. She is selling his house now and called me and my brother, and asked us if we want to go through his books and take what we want. So I got a few boxes of old stuff. I'm going through it and I find this little thin volume wrapped in plastic. It's completely handwritten, with a handwritten date of 1719 on top of the first page. The writing is neat, but not the type of hebrew that I'm used to reading (it's an old style of lettering) and the pages are splotched and brown so it's really difficult to read. Either way, I think it's pretty cool. It certainly looks legit.
EDIT:
Pics here
EDIT2: Okay, from what I've been able to translate, it seems to be the story of
Avrohom ben Avrohom (Abraham ben Abraham). There is some scholarly debate if that story ever even took place. And the date on top is probably the date of the events of the story, not the date it was written. Oh well. It's still pretty damn old and might actually be able to change some scholars opinions that the story did take place, so it can be an important document.
Mega Update:
I wrote about this book on a blog. I was contacted by a professor from Yale who is about to publish a major essay on the topic of the book (Abraham ben Abraham). He emailed me with his phone number. I called him and we will be meeting sometime next week. He told me that it's very similiar to another one from 1862, but there are small and obvious differences. He wants an hour with the book to mark down the differences between this one and the other known texts. This could be interesting!
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