Newly discovered early palimpsest fragments of the Talmud Yerushalmi from the Cairo Genizah

A previously unknown small collection of twelve fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts has recently come to light in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. These fragments originate from the Cairo Genizah. Two of them contain an early version of the Talmud Yerushalmi. BNF Hébr. 1489 (1) contains one folio from the tractate Mo'ed Qatan and BNF Hébr. 1489(9), one folio from the tractate Sotah Both manuscripts are palimpsests written on recycled non Jewish manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic. In both cases, the folios belong to codices whose other parts have been discovered among other Cairo Genizah collections, respectively in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Cambridge University Library. The palaeographical analysis of the fragments suggests that they are among the earliest known witnesses to the Talmud Yerushalmi text. The edition proposed in this paper shows some early reading variants.