Expulsion makes amateurs

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Hebrew books came from two channels: commissioned copies by professional scribes and copies owners made for their own use, and colophons usually say which. A commercial scribal market needs stable communities with clients, credit, and reputations, whereas an owner with a borrowed exemplar needs nothing but time. The conjecture is that persecution registers in the dated record as a channel switch: after mass violence and expulsion — Iberia after 1391 and 1492 above all — the owner-copied share of dated manuscripts from the affected population jumps sharply, because refugees still need books while the professional market that supplied them has collapsed. Catastrophe, on this view, does not merely reduce book production; it de-professionalizes it, as a discontinuity rather than a trend. If this holds, colophon self-descriptions become an index of institutional collapse independent of chronicles.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: in SfarData, the proportion of owner-copied manuscripts among dated Sephardic-script manuscripts rises by at least 10 percentage points in the two decades after 1391 relative to the two decades before, and again after 1492 among manuscripts copied by Iberian exiles; a change-point analysis locates breaks within five years of those dates. The verdict follows this discontinuity test.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

SfarData, whose colophon records distinguish commissioned from owner-produced copies and give script type, date, and locality.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated in a single blind Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is a relaunch after the prior W19 attempt was stopped mid-run.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Beit-Arié published the commissioned/owner-copied split (38% commissioned, 29% self-produced) as a hallmark of Hebrew book culture, but no change-point analysis of the owner-copied share across the 1391/1492 expulsion horizons was located.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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