[Mesorah] kodashim

[David E Cohen]

I thank R' Seth Mandel for taking the time to post and greatly enhancing my
understanding of the issue.

It seems that the question boils down to, as R' David Bannett put it,
"whether a [Sefaradi or Israeli pseudo-Sefaradi] bal-koireh should read
according to the 800-year old tradition or according to the new discoveries
from the over 1000-year old accurate manuscripts."

My initial tendency would be to side with the former option (i.e.
"kadashim").  After all, Ashkenazi pronunciation underwent a much more
dramatic shift following the adoption of the Tiberian symbols, yet nobody
would suggest that a balkorei who is aiming to read according to the
Ashkenazi tradition should revert to pronouncing things the way that
Ashkenazim (or pre-Ashkenazim?) did over 1,000 years ago, when they were
using the Palestinian vocalization.  It seems self-evident that it means
reading the way that Ashkenazim have read for the past few hundred years.

One could argue, though, that whereas the early Ashkenazim must have
realized that they were changing their pronunciation in order to bring it in
line with the Tiberian symbols, the Sefaradim were attempting to keep their
ancestral pronunciation and just find a way to map the Tiberian symbols to
it.  Thus, if they ended up deviating from their ancestral pronunciation in
a few places, one could say that this was not intentional, and if they would
have had access to the manuscripts with Palestinian vocalization, they would
have realized that it was a "mistake" to implement the theories of the
Kimchis across the board, and never would have done so -- something that
cannot be said about the Ashkenazim.  Thus, an argument could be made, I
suppose, for "correcting the mistake" and reverting to "kodashim."

--D.C.