The Covenanters of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect George Foot Moore Harvard University Harvard Theological Review Vol. 4, No. 3 July, 1911 CONTENTS The Covenanters Of Damascus; A Hitherto Unknown Jewish Sect Footnotes THE COVENANTERS OF DAMASCUS; A HITHERTO UNKNOWN JEWISH SECT Among the Hebrew manuscripts recovered in 1896 from the Genizah of an old synagogue at Fostat, near Cairo, and now in the Cambridge University Library, England, were found eight leaves of a Hebrew manuscript which proved to be fragments of a book containing the teaching of a peculiar Jewish sect; a single leaf of a second manuscript, in part parallel to the first, in part supplementing it, was also discovered. These texts Professor Schechter has now published, with a translation and commentary, in the first volume of his _Documents of Jewish Sectaries_.(1) The longer and older of the manuscripts (A) is, in the opinion of the editor, probably of the tenth century; the other (B), of the eleventh or twelfth. What remains of the book may be divided into two parts. Pages 1-8 of A, and the single leaf of B, contain exhortations and warnings addressed to members of the sect, for which a ground and motive are often sought in the history of the Jewish people or of the sect itself, together with severe strictures upon such as have lapsed from the sound teaching, and polemics against the doctrine and practice of other bodies of Jews. The second part, pages 9-16, sets forth the constitution and government of the community, and its distinctive interpretation and application of the law,—what may be called sectarian _halakah_. Neither part is complete; the manuscript is mutilated and defective at the end, there is apparently a gap between the first and second parts, and it may be questioned whether the original beginning of the work is preserved. The lack of methodical arrangement in the contents leads Dr. Schechter to surmise that what we have in our hands is only a compilation of extracts from a larger work, put together with little regard for completeness or order. An orderly disposition, according to our notions of order, is not, however, so constant a characteristic of Jewish literature as to make this inference very convincing.