Yitz Landes Wins the J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award

19 May 2025

We are pleased to announce the winner of this year’s J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award: Isaac (Yitz) Landes wins the prize for his outstanding thesis on ‘The Transmission of the Mishnah and the Spread of Rabbinic Judaism, 200 CE–1200 CE’.

In his dissertation, which he completed at Princeton University, Landes looks at the history of the transmission, reception, and study of the Mishnah, the central text of the Rabbinic corpus, from its inception in third-century Galilee until the publication of Maimonides’ commentary to the Mishnah in 12th-century Egypt. It deals with evidence for the Mishnah’s creation and initial dissemination in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia, the earliest manuscript evidence for the Mishna, attitudes towards the Mishnah and its creation in the works of Medieval Jewish writers, and the impacts of the rise of Christianity and Islam on Jewish concepts of the Rabbinic canon and on the spread of Rabbinic texts and practices.

Landes’ nuanced method for studying the intermedial transmission of the Mishnah shows how textual and paratextual elements of manuscript copies can be used to glean crucial evidence for the oral transmission of written texts. His dissertation also highlights the manner in which artefactualisation can shift communities’ perceptions of a work, drawing attention also to the importance of technological shifts and the manner in which they interface with issues of communal politics and identity. Overall, his work is a blueprint for all scholars who seek to use written artefacts in order to shed light on the history of education, the transmission of knowledge, and the spread of religious ideologies and practices.

The J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award honours the best doctoral thesis defended in each year that contributes to any aspect of the study of manuscripts and other written artefacts. The award includes a prize money of 5,000 Euro and a fellowship for a research stay at CSMC. 

Johan Peter Gumbert (1936–2016) was Professor and Professor Emeritus of Western Palaeography and Codicology at Leiden University from 1979 to 2001, and an expert on Latin and Dutch manuscripts. As a frequent guest at the University of Hamburg, he was associated with the CSMC from its very beginning as well as with the COMSt-Network (Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies).

Previous winners of the award are Jeremiah Coogan (2021), Hui Sun (2021), Mallory E. Matsumoto (2022), Madalina Toca (2022), Elif Sezer (2023), and Daria Kohler (2023).