‘MS A’ is the best-preserved early exemplar of the Mishna without Talmud or commentaries known to us.13 No less than thirty-six folios, spanning over thirty-one shelfmarks, have been discovered in the Geniza collections, today in Cambridge, Oxford, St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, New York and Toronto. These fragments stem from various tractates belonging to the orders Nashim, Neziqin, Qodashim and Toharot ...Thus there is a lot more to that MS A than the final leaf. But that leaf has been found and it does include a (damaged but reconstructable) dated colophon. You have to read to the end to learn that the colophon dates the manuscript to the mid-ninth century.
This essay discusses MS A in technical detail and in the context of the other earliest manuscripts of the Mishnah from the Cairo Geniza and elsewhere.
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