Dr. Ani Avetisyan | “Between Script and Community: Judaeo-Arabic Medical Manuscripts of the Matenadaran Collection (Republic of Armenia)”

Dr. Ani Avetisyan is a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

This talk explores the little-known corpus of Judaeo-Arabic medical manuscripts of the Matenadaran Collection (Republic of Armenia), with a focus on MS 1751 — an 18th-century compilation containing four distinct works, including a Judaeo-Arabic version of Ibn al-Akfānī’s Nihāyat al-qaṣd fī ṣināʿat al-faṣd (“The End of Search in the Art of Phlebotomy”). The manuscript offers a rich basis for examining orthographic, morphological, and syntactic features, alongside broader transmission patterns observed in Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic, and Garshuni variants. I will also briefly introduce MS 1752, the second medical manuscript in the collection, as part of an upcoming catalogue project of Arabic medical manuscripts at the Matenadaran. Beyond philological interest, the talk considers how these texts reflect the movement and adaptation of medical knowledge across languages, communities, and geographies.