CAJS Rare Ms. 434, purchased at Kestenbaum and Company Auction, was originally from the library of Hebrew College, near Boston.

The manuscript is provisionally called a “Collection of Judeo-Turkish Piyyutim”, a title which only partly reveals the content of this manuscript. Among the 112 pages, about half consist of Turkish language poems written down in Hebrew script by two different scribes and not sequentially bound; the rest of the material, as documented in the catalog, includes Hebrew and Arabic texts in Hebrew scripts from 19th-20th centuries Morocco and Yemen. Each of the seven sections of this unique manuscript, and the fact that they are all bound together, offer  interesting sources for investigating popular religious practices as well as the study of the materiality of manuscripts of Jews in modern Islamic contexts. Focusing on the dominant part of the manuscript composed in Judeo-Turkish also provides a rare opportunity to rethink the relationship between Turkish language and Jewish culture in the Ottoman empire.