Midrash HaGadol

The existence of the Midrash HaGadol was first brought to the attention of Jewish scholarship by Jacob Saphir, who in his Even Sapir (1866) reports seeing a manuscript of the work in the possession of the Chief Rabbi of Yemen. His remarks about the "discovery" are reproduced in , where he describes a work on the entire Torah containing "twice as much as our Midrash Rabbah". While this collection was new to European Jewry, it was probably well known to the Yemenite Jews. The first manuscript was brought from Yemen to Jerusalem and then to Berlin in 1878 by Mr Saphir, and this midrash subsequently became the subject of much scholarly attention. There are currently approximately two hundred manuscripts of this work residing in various public and private Hebraica collections, according to the catalog of the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts. The Midrash HaGadol on Genesis was first published by Solomon Schechter in 1902. A large portion of Midrash HaGadol on Exodus was then published by David Zvi Hoffmann in 1913. Midrash HaGadol on Book of Numbers was published by S. Fisch in 1940 in a more accessible style than the previous efforts, which were principally arranged for a scholarly audience. More recent editions listed by are those on Genesis and Exodus by M. Margulies (1967), on Leviticus by E.N. Rabinowitz (1932) and Adin Steinsaltz (1975), on Numbers by E.N. Rabinowitz (1973), and on Deuteronomy by S. Fisch (1972). The Mossad Harav Kook in Jerusalem has also published a five-volume edition. == Authorship ==

According to , the work dates to the late 14th century. A discussion of its authorship is provided in , wherein he reviews the evidence in favor of the three then-prevailing opinions regarding authorship of the Midrash HaGadol, variously that it is the work of Maimonides' son, Rabbi Abraham Maimonides, which opinion follows that of Yiḥyah Salaḥ (an opinion disputed in later generations), or else compiled by David bar Amram al-Adani. After discounting Maimonides as a possible author, and reviewing some compelling factors in favor of the other two possible authors, offers the conciliatory hypothesis that the work was composed in Judeo-Arabic by Abraham Maimonides and translated into Hebrew by David al-Adani. While Fisch offers possible explanations for how the work, if indeed authored by Abraham Maimonides in Egypt, came first to be "lost" and then to be rediscovered in Yemen, find the attribution to Abraham Maimonides "only extremely weakly attested," and report that modern scholars almost uniformly attribute the work in its entirety to David bar Amram al-Adani. S. Fisch concedes this as well in his Encyclopaedia Judaica article on the topic. == Sources ==