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 |  Subject: The Mystery Of The Cairo Codex  Wed May 04, 2016 7:04 am | |
| The Mystery Of The Cairo Codex
May 3, 2016 by SkyWatch Editor
 A few years ago, my friend J. Zel Lurie, a Delray Beach resident and founding editor of Hadassah magazine, decided he wanted to do something special to mark his 100th birthday. He decided to publish the illuminated pages of an ancient manuscript he had photographed in 1978 in Cairo at the synagogue of a Jewish sect known as the Karaites. The manuscript was the legendary Cairo Codex, originally known as the Codex of the Prophets, which had been in possession of the Karaites-a group that rebelled against Jewish rabbinical authority in the years following the Roman sacking of Jerusalem and the Second Temple-for nearly 1,000 years. Lurie, then in his 60s, was transfixed by the Codex, with its 554 gazelle-hide parchment pages inscribed with three columns of gracefully handwritten Hebrew. He was especially taken with its 13 illuminated pages, decorated with meticulous micrography-delicate lines of tiny Hebrew letters that formed complex geometric patterns, interlaced with color and gold leaf. Though not a sentimental man, Lurie was moved by their beauty. (READ MORE) |
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