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General
The manuscript contains thirteen folio pages, of which the first and the last are entirely blank. Folio 2r is a title page in German, folio 3r a title page in Hebrew. The German title page contains the notation: ‘This was presented to me, Joh[ann] Christoph Sticht, in 1753 by the Hamburg Jew Joseph Simon Levi Junior.’ Sticht, a Christian theologian, presumably passed the manuscript on to his pupil, the Orientalist Oluf Gerhard Tychsen (1734–1818), from whose library it made its way into the collection of the Rostock Universitätsbibliothek. From Sticht's notation, at all events, we learn the latest possible date for the manuscript's writing.
The Hebrew title page conveys the earliest possible date. It gives the title of the manuscript as Sefer hamispaḥat, ‘The Book of the Scab’, referring to the ‘scab’ designated in Leviticus 13: 7–8 as a symptom of leprosy. To this the scribe adds, as subtitle:
… the inveterate leprosy, sprung from the scoundrel Sabbatai Cowturd, may his name be erased from the world, in accordance with the views of his believers, blast and damn them; with annotations by the famed and illustrious scholar, Rabbi Moses Hagiz, to which I have given the title Beit hameri [‘The Rebellious House’]; also a version from the book Ma‘aseh tuviah [‘The Work of Tobias’], a deposition taken in the holy city of Jerusalem, and the festivals of [Sabbatai’s] worshippers.
The abbreviation ‘may the memory of the righteous and holy one serve as a blessing’, shows that Hagiz was dead at the time the scribe wrote. Hagiz died in 1751. It might possibly be imagined that the title page could have been written later than the body of the manuscript; yet in the manuscript itself, on folio 5r, the first of Hagiz's notes on Cuenque is introduced with an attribution to ‘the illustrious scholar Rabbi Moses Hagiz, [‘may the memory of the righteous serve as a blessing’]’.
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