New Staff Appointment: Marc Michaels Lead Paleographer and Specialist for Scribal Arts and Hebrew Manuscripts
The MIKRA Research Laboratory is pleased to announce the appointment of Marc Michaels as our new Lead Paleographer and Specialist for Scribal Arts and Hebrew Manuscripts. Marc adds a specialization in Hebrew scribal arts in addition to Hebrew paleography that will provide added depth to our expanding manuscript research projects. Marc joins our team in advance of several new and important digitization projects. Bringing decades of experience as a practicing sofer (scribe), scholar, and lecturer in the Hebrew scribal arts, he is ideally suited for manuscript analysis in the modern digital era.
More about Marc
Marc is perhaps best known by his Hebrew name and website, Mordechai Pinchas Sofer, an educational platform that since 1995 has featured aspects of the work and life of a scribe committed to biblical manuscripts. Marc has published numerous works related to textual analysis and the scribal arts, including the pivotal work, Sefer Tagin Fragments from the Cairo Genizah: A Critical Edition, Commentary and Reconstruction (Brill, 2021). As noted by the publisher, in this project, Marc Michaels,
“transcribes and recreates fragments of arguably the earliest found manuscript of the manual for sofrim (scribes) concerning the decorative tagin (tittles) and 'strange' letter forms that adorn certain words in the Torah. Comparing these found fragments against other core and secondary sources of Sefer Tagin (including several pages of a new secondary source), Michaels establishes the most likely readings to assist the reconstruction of the fragments and shed light on the original intention of the author of Sefer Tagin.”
Highlights from Marc’s other notable activities
Current PhD student with senior scholar status at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (FAMES), university of Cambridge (Fitzwilliam College), 2022
Fellowship recipient from Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, for research in scribal studies and Hebrew manuscripts in 2021
Creation of the first new tiqqun (copyists’ guide) in several thousand years for the Megillat ha-Shoah (Holocaust Scroll) converting the text into a manuscript and using techniques from Sefer Tagin and other sources
His featuring in three BBC television programs
Accomplishments as an excellent graphic designer/marketing expert, numerous non-academic works in his areas of specialization, and featured national and international lecturer.
To access Marc’s publications, academic contributions, and extended CV see: https://independent.academia.edu/MordechaiPinchas. To learn more about this fascinating and accomplished scholar, be sure to visit his website: https://www.sofer.co.uk .
Marc has hit the ground running at MIKRA and has already completed stage 1 of a challenging commissioned paleographical analysis of a centuries old Yemenite Torah scroll. We’ll be making more announcements about this project in the future.
Check back soon to keep up with Marc’s work at MIKRA!