Synopse zum Talmud Yerushalmi: Ordnung Zera im, vol. I. 1-2: Berakhot und Pe a; vol. I. 6-11: Terumot, Ma aserot, Ma aser Sheni Halla, Orla und Bikturin.

• Author: Sarason, Richard S.

The Talmud Yerushalmi (also called the "Jerusalem" or "Palestinian" Talmud, or the "Talmud of the Land of Israel"), edited in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. in the areas around Tiberias and Caesaria, is the briefer and somewhat older contemporary of the better-known Babylonian Talmud. Students of this Talmud have long been plagued by a paucity of research tools to deal with a text that is notoriously elliptical and corrupt. The only reasonably complete manuscript of the work, Codex Leiden-Scaliger 3, which was finished in 1289 and forms the basis for the first printed edition (Venice, 1523), is heavily glossed and full of errors. (The tractates and chapters that do not appear in this manuscript are either lost or presumed never to have existed.) A slightly older manuscript, Vatican Ebreo 133, which covers Tractate Sotah and Seder Zera im excluding Tractate Bikkurim and most of Orlah, is more corrupt than MS Leiden but contains a fair number of better readings from a different text tradition. The Yerushalmi-text is also included in two manuscripts of a sixteenth-century commentary on Seder Zera im and Tractate Sheqalim by Solomon Sirillo (MS Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, Heb. 1389, with its continuation in MS Moscow, Gunzberg Collection, Nr. 1135; and MS London, British Library Or. 2822-24). While many of the variants in the Sirillo manuscripts represent the commentator's own corrections and reconstructions of the text, some of them clearly derive from an independent manuscript tradition and are better readings than those in either MSS Leiden or Vatican. Similarly, two early printings of portions of the Talmud Yerushalmi - ed. Constantinople, 1662 (covering the halakhic portions of Tractates Berakhot, Pe ah, Orlah, Hallah, and Bikkurim, with the commentary of Joshua Benveniste), and ed. Amsterdam, 1710 (Seder Zera im and Tractate Sheqalim, with the commentary of Elijah b. Judah Loew of Foulda) - while based on the editio princeps, contain corrections derived from independent manuscript readings.

Faced then with the problem of presenting the primary textual evidence for the study of Talmud Yerushalmi in a manageable form, editors Peter Schafer and Hans-Jurgen Becker have chosen that of a synopsis rather than a standard critical edition. This decision, explained at length in the introduction to the first volume (pp. vii-ix), is well justified. The number of variants between the Leiden and Vatican manuscripts alone is too large to be...