[Hebrew:  Masaot R. Binyamin y’’g dafim k’tivah ashkenazit k’domah yoter:]

This Ms. is the groundwork of the text I have adopted.

2.  R, or the Roman Ms., in the Casanatense library at Rome, and numbered No. 216 in the Catalogue Sacerdote.  This Ms. occupies the first twenty-seven leaves of Codex 3097, which contains fifteen other treatises, among them a text of Eldad Hadani, all written by the same scribe, Isaac of Pisa, in 5189 A.M., which corresponds with 1429-1430 (see Colophon at the end of the Hebrew text, page [Hebrew:  ayn-nun]).  Under my direction Dr. Gruenhut, of Jerusalem, proceeded to Rome, and made a copy.  Subsequently I obtained a collation of it made by the late Dr. Neubauer; both have been used in preparing the notes to the text.  Later on, after the Hebrew text had already been printed, I visited Rome, and on examining the Ms. I found that a few variants had been overlooked.  I had facsimiles made of several pages, which will be found with the Hebrew text.

3.  E, a Ms. now in the possession of Herr Epstein of Vienna, who acquired it from Halberstamm’s collection.  The only reliable clue as to the date of this Ms. is the license of the censor:  “visto per me fra Luigi da Bologna Juglio 1599.”  Herr Epstein considers it to have been written at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century.  The Ms. is on paper and in “Italian” handwriting.  It contains seventy-four quarto pages of from 19-20 lines each.  Speaking generally it is analogous to the edition of Ferrara, 1556, which was used by Ashor as the groundwork of his text (Asher, p. 3), but the spelling of persons and places in E often differs from that in the text of Asher.

4.  O, in the Oppenheim collection of the Bodleian Library (Ms. Opp. add. 8 deg. 36; ff. 58-63; Neubauer 2425), is a fragment.  Its first three leaves are continuous, beginning at p. 61 of Asher’s edition and ending at p. 73.  After this there is a lacuna of four leaves, and the fragment, which recommences at p. 98 of Asher’s edition, is then continuous to the end of the book.  The volume in which it is bound contains various other treatises written by the same scribe, and includes a fragment on Maimonides, whose death is mentioned as occurring in 1202, and also part of a controversy of Nachmanides which took place in 1263.

The Ms. is in Spanish Rabbinic characters, and would appear to have been written in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.  For the collation of this and the following fragment I am indebted to the kindness of my friend Mr. A. Cowley, of Oxford.  Photographs of pages of both MSS. will be found with the Hebrew text.

5.  B, also in the Oppenheim collection of the Bodleian Library (Ms. Opp. add. 8 deg., 58; fol. 57; Neubauer 2580).  This fragment begins at p. 50 of Asher’s edition.  The date of this fragment is probably much later than that of O, and may well be as late as the eighteenth century.  It appears to be written in an oriental hand.