Talmud / Mishna · 11th c. · Mediterranean · Fragment · Mishna · Foundational · Earliest Witness

קטעי משנה — סדרי זרעים, מועד ונשים

Early Mishnah Fragments — leaves from Sedarim Zera'im, Mo'ed, and Nashim (11th–12th c.)

11th–12th century · The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary

A collection of very early Mishnah fragments — leaves drawn from Sedarim Zera'im, Mo'ed, and Nashim — written by hand in the 11th and 12th centuries. Mishnah manuscripts from this period are exceptionally rare. Together with the Kaufman Codex of the Mishnah (also in this library), these fragments form a small group of pre-13th-century textual witnesses to the Six Orders. Their readings preserve nuances of vocalization, orthography, and word division that survive nowhere in the printed tradition. For the modern critical study of the Mishnah text, fragments like these — even when only a few leaves of any one tractate survive — are first-order evidence: they sit at or near the head of every stemma scholars have tried to draw. A downloadable PDF facsimile is also available.