Biblia Arabica: Critical edition and comprehensive digital inventory of Arabic Old Testament manuscripts and their paratexts
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Team Members
Peter Tarras
I studied Philosophy, Islamic Studies, and Near and Middle Eastern Studies in Kiel, Munich, and Sheffield. Whilst undertaking my doctoral research in the history of Arabic philosophy, I’ve always maintained a profound interest in pre-modern manuscript cultures, primarily in Arabic and especially of Christian and Jewish communities of the Islamic world. I approach them from the perspectives of material philology, book history, and provenance history. I have published on different aspects of textual transmissions with a focus on scribal culture, materiality, and textual practices as well as the emergence of manuscript collections. More recently, I became interested in the question of how the production of manuscripts and literary works relates to institutional settings. This is something I’m studying with respect to the production of early Christian Arabic monastic literature as well as within the ERC project MAJLIS, looking at Judaeo-Arabic works and their revisions authored by the members of the Qaraite dār al-ʻilm in 10th- and 11th-century CE Jerusalem. In January 2026, I was appointed project coordinator and senior researcher for the new Biblia Arabica Academies project. Previously, I have worked for the Arabic and Latin Corpus as well as the Arabic and Latin Glossary (Julius-Maximilians-Universität, Würzburg).
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At the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, I have taught courses on different aspects of Middle Eastern Judaism, including Jewish philosophy in Hebrew and Arabic, Jewish manuscript culture, as well as Aramaic (including Syriac) language courses. I’m running an ongoing online reading group on the Arabic Bible.
In 2023, I launched the blog and resource site Membra Dispersa Sinaitica which is dedicated to the dislocated manuscripts of St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, Egypt. With this project, I’m also committed to communicating research to wider audiences, something that I also do as the editor of the JAC Newsletter and the blogs hosted by the Munich Research Centre for Jewish-Arabic Cultures.
Peter.Tarras@lmu.de https://medisi.hypotheses.org/about https://hcommons.org/members/tarraspeter/ https://bsky.app/profile/petertarras.bsky.social — Areas of Interestmanuscript studies, book history, provenance history, material philology, Arabic Bible, Eastern monastic literature, philosophy in Arabic (Jewish, Christian, Muslim), research communication
— Historical Periods of Interest8th through 14th centuries; occasionally late 19th and early 20th centuries
— Positions2026
Senior Researcher and Project Coordinator, Academies project “Biblia Arabica”
2023 – 2026Research Associate, ERC project “MAJLIS”
2019 – 2023
Research Associate, DFG project “Arabic and Latin Glossary”, Institute for Philosophy, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
— Education2018 – 2019
Research Associate, DFG project “Korpus der arabisch-lateinischen Übersetzungen des 10.–14. Jahrhunderts”, Institute for Philosophy, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
2016 – 2024
PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich
2014 – 2016
MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich
2012 – 2013
BA in Philosophy, University of Sheffield, UK
2012 – 2014
BA in Philosophy and Oriental and Ancient Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich
— Awards and distinctions2010 – 2012
BA in Philosophy, Islamic Studies, University of Kiel
2020
Gorgias Book Grant
2016 – 2018
Doctoral scholarship, Munich School of Ancient Philosophy
2013 – 2016
Student scholarship, Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes
Lea Gzella
After initially studying Arabic, I was so intrigued by its language system that I switched to Semitic studies soon afterwards. Throughout my studies, I have thus occupied myself with the broad range of fields that the study of Semitic languages has to offer. As such, Hebrew (Bible and Qumran), Aramaic (Bible, Qumran, and Mandaic), and Judeo-Arabic, as well as work with manuscripts, have emerged as particular areas of interest of mine.
To combine some of these adjacent but distinct fields of scholarship, I decided to write my doctoral dissertation on Ibn Ǧanāḥ’s Kitāb al-uṣūl. This dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, written in Judeo-Arabic in the 11th century, is a seminal work of Hebrew lexicography whose influence is by no means limited to the Middle Ages but extends well into modern times. After his predecessor Ḥayyūǧ had postulated the theory of triliteral roots, which is still prevalent in today’s scholarship, Ibn Ǧanāḥ was able to develop it systematically in his Kitāb al-uṣūl. Moreover, he does not merely offer translations and brief explanations of Hebrew words occurring in the Bible. Frequently, he also engages in elaborate, both theologically and philosophically informed discussions on the meaning of the biblical text as well. Thus, beyond the more technical aspects of lexicographical and grammatical subtleties, the Kitāb al-uṣūl also makes for an intriguing read owing to Ibn Ǧanāḥ’s intellectual originality and versatility.
Jessica Thalmann
I am working as a student assistant at the Institute of the Near and Middle East at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
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Foto: LMU / Matthias Remmling
Ronny Vollandt
Ronny Vollandt is Professor of Judaic Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität Munich and currently the first chairperson of the German Association of Jewish Studies. His teaching focuses on rabbinic Judaism and on the intellectual history of Jews in the Islamicate world. He researches Arabic versions of the Bible, Judaeo-Arabic literature, and Jewish cultural heritage, and above all manuscripts, in the Near East. He is the author of Arabic Versions of the Pentateuch: A Comparative Study of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Sources (Brill, 2015, awarded the Boehlig prize in 2017), and co-directed the research project “Biblia Arabica”. Together with Dr Miriam Goldstein (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), he recently received a DFG grant Award for Research Cooperation and High Excellence in Science for the edition, identification, and cataloguing of manuscripts related to Bible exegesis and translation in the Firkovich collections. He is keen on passing on his passion for studying medieval Jewish manuscripts, their codicology, repositories, and acquisition histories to his students (https://www.manuscripthunters.gwi.uni-muenchen.de/).
Maximilian de Molière
In 2021, I completed my dissertation on the library of the 15th-century Christian Hebraist Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter. The goal of this project was to contribute to the history of the Jewish book in the hands of Christian Hebraists. This investigation involved describing and cataloguing the codicological and paleographical features of Widmanstetter’s entire library (195 volumes of manuscripts and printed books) and feeding this information into a TEI-XML database to serve as the basis for analysis. Using this large dataset, I was able to reconstruct the chronology of his acquisitions, the booksellers from whom he sourced new printed books, and how Widmanstetter maintained his library over three decades of his life. Moreover, I was interested in the notes he left in the margins of his books. These marginalia throw new light on why he assessed the relevance of kabbalistic texts to Christianity differently than contemporary Christian kabbalists like Guillaume Postel or Egidio da Viterbo.
