Evidence That the Hebrew “King Arthur” Manuscript Is a Non-authorial Copy

Abstract The Book of the Destruction of King Arthur’s Round Table is a Jewish rendering of Arthurian material dated 1278–79. It survives incompletely in a single manuscript, Rome, Vatican Library, codex Urbinate Ebraico 48, ff. 75r–77r. Past studies have identified The Book of the Destruction as a northern Italian text (via an analysis of the name variants appearing in it) and as a mostly literal translation into Hebrew of thoughtfully chosen passages from the Old French prose Merlin and Mort Artu . Much of that research assumes the single extant manuscript to be the autograph copy. Leviant’s edition (1969), which omits some codicological and paleographical details, is the basis of many of these studies. These details indicate that the manuscript is a non-authorial copy and, therefore, not a reliable indicator of the Hebrew romance’s ultimate provenance.