Discovery
The existence of the Midrash HaGadol was first brought to the attention of Jewish scholarship by Jacob Sapir, who in his Even Sapir (1866) reports seeing a manuscript of the work in the possession of the Chief Rabbi of Yemen (Fish 1957). His remarks about the "discovery" are reproduced in Fish (1940), where he describes a work on the entire Pentateuch containing "twice as much as our Midrash Rabbah". (It is worth noting that while this collection was new to European Jewry, it was probably well-known to the Jews of Yemen.) The first manuscript was brought from Yemen to Jerusalem and then to Berlin in 1878 by a certain Mr. Shapira, 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 Schecter in 1902. A large portion of Midrash Hagadol on Exodus was then published by David Zvi Hoffman 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 Strack & Stemberger (1991) are those on Genesis and Exodus by M. Margulies (1967), on Leviticus by E.N. Rabinowitz (1932) and A. Steinsalz (1975), on Numbers by E.N. Rabinowitz (1973), and on Deuteronomy by S. Fish (1972).
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