TY - CHAP
T1 - The Book of Twitches of Shem, Son of Noah, and Other Manuals of Palmomancy from the Cairo Genizah and al-Qusayr
AU - Bohak, Gideon
N1 - Funding Information: 1 The research for the present paper was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant ?o. 986/14). I am grateful to Edna Engel for the paleographic analysis of the fragments in Hebrew script, to Aviam ?en-?aim for his assistance in deciphering the Arabic and Judeo-Arabic texts, and to Simon Hopkins for many helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. All remaining errors are, of course, my own. Publisher Copyright: © Gideon Bohak, 2023.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Twitch divination (palmomancy) entails observing the involuntary twitches of a person’s body to predict his or her future. It is a practice attested already in the Assyro-Babylonian world and it circulated widely in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages. It is well attested in the Cairo Genizah, which shows its great popularity among the Jews of medieval Cairo. The present paper provides an edition and translation of the extant Genizah fragments of Kitāb al-Ikhtilāj, “The Book of Twitches,” attributed to Shem, son of Noah. This is followed by a detailed survey of all the palmomantic fragments from the Cairo Genizah in Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew. Finally, I offer a reedition of a palmomantic fragment from al-Qusayr, which has previously been misidentified as an amulet. Together, all these fragments attest to the vitality of the palmomantic tradition in medieval Egypt.
AB - Twitch divination (palmomancy) entails observing the involuntary twitches of a person’s body to predict his or her future. It is a practice attested already in the Assyro-Babylonian world and it circulated widely in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages. It is well attested in the Cairo Genizah, which shows its great popularity among the Jews of medieval Cairo. The present paper provides an edition and translation of the extant Genizah fragments of Kitāb al-Ikhtilāj, “The Book of Twitches,” attributed to Shem, son of Noah. This is followed by a detailed survey of all the palmomantic fragments from the Cairo Genizah in Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew. Finally, I offer a reedition of a palmomantic fragment from al-Qusayr, which has previously been misidentified as an amulet. Together, all these fragments attest to the vitality of the palmomantic tradition in medieval Egypt.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85159363900
U2 - 10.1163/9789004527874_007
DO - 10.1163/9789004527874_007
M3 - Chapter
SN - 9789004527867
T3 - Islamic History and Civilization
SP - 139
EP - 161
BT - From Samarqand to Toledo
A2 - Kaplony, Andreas
A2 - Malczycki, Matt
PB - Brill Academic Publishers
CY - Leiden ; Boston
ER -