Lot 36
  • 36

Sefer Torah (Pentateuch), in Hebrew, manuscript scroll on vellum [Ashkenazi scribe in Italy, fourteenth century]

Estimate
200,000 - 300,000 GBP
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Description

  • Vellum
81 membranes, approximately 590mm. and nearly 43 metres long, text complete in 240 columns of 48 lines laid out according to the vavei ha‘amudim format (every column begins with the letter vav; and in fact this is the earliest known complete scroll surviving in this format) of a fine Ashkenazi square script in black ink, some small areas with text replaced on patches (affecting only a few characters in a few lines in each case), some letters later overwritten in darker ink (most membranes with this in at least one small area), overall in outstanding condition on clean vellum of the finest quality

Provenance

The Hebrew Pentateuch is the oldest version of the first five books of the Old Testament, and moreover, the present manuscript is one of the earliest Ashkenazi scrolls to survive, containing a textual tradition unique to that community. No such scroll has ever been offered in public sale before

provenance

(1) Most probably written for a large and wealthy Ashkenazi community in northern Italy in the fourteenth century. The manuscript is clearly Ashkenazi, following that tradition in respect to its arrangement of the Song of the Sea (with lines 29-30 written as prose) and its palaeography (the bottom of the right line of Gimmel tends to the right and the base is thick and is written horizontally; the roof of Het is written straight across, without any rise; the base of Peh is thick and long and the inner stroke barely goes inside the letter; all features found in contemporary Ashkenazi codices). However, the 6 letters which begin certain specific columns are written according to the Italian tradition, and it seems likely that the scribe wrote there.

(2) Discovered among the ancestral belongings of a London synagogue (closed several decades ago); sold on behalf of their charitable trust.

Catalogue Note

text

The Torah (or Pentateuch) is commonly acknowledged to be the oldest section of the Hebrew Old Testament, containing the five books of Moses: Genesis (בראשית, Bereshit: "In the beginning ..."), Exodus (שמות, Shemot: "Names"), Leviticus (ויקרא, Vayyiqra: "And he called ..."), Numbers (במדבר, Bamidbar: "In the desert ..."), and Deuteronomy (דברים, Devarim: "Words", or "Discourses"), describing the creation of the Universe and its early history, and paying particular attention to the special covenant between God and the people of Israel. It forms the bedrock of biblical history, theology, and is a legal and ritual guide for both Jews and Christians alike.

Each Torah scroll is remarkable as a witness to the care and attention of Jewish scribes to facsimile and transmit in their purest form the scrolls copied by Moses, and the present one is of great individual importance as among the handful of early witnesses to survive. The faithful transmission of core texts in a form as close as possible to the original copy is, perhaps, one of the central tenets of all modern faiths, and in the Torah Scroll we have the single greatest expression of this wish in any text produced in human history. The text itself contains 304,805 letters and must be duplicated perfectly by a professional scribe, word-by-word from a correct exemplar. Furthermore, specifications are given for the amount of space to be left between individual letters and words, and the scribe must not alter the design of the sections or paragraph configurations. The scribe's pen cannot be from unclean animals or even base metals. It must be written on gevil (ie. parchment from kosher animals which is prepared for writing only on one side, and washed with salt, flour and m'afatsim, a residue of wasp enzyme and tree bark); this is the material which Moses reportedly used for the scroll which he placed inside the Holy Ark, and is the material which the majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls are written on. Of course, there is a strict ban on any illumination or decoration, and in the absence of that we are left with the austere beauty and grandeur of raw textual art.

Such strict laws on their production have also ensured that few early examples survive, as those with any damage to their text are almost always placed with great ceremony in a Genizah (a 'hiding-' or 'storage-place') in the synagogue and left to decay naturally. Thus, the oldest substantial manuscripts of the Old Testament in Hebrew are late ninth and tenth century in date, and we have few witnesses to important early stages in the history of the text. The Aleppo Codex (tenth century) is, perhaps rightly, regarded as the most accurate early witness to the Masoretic tradition of the text (the sections of that book relevant for this scroll were destroyed during the riots in Aleppo in 1947, but have been reconstructed by the groundbreaking work of Professor Jordan Penkower). In the late eleventh century, that codex was most probably consulted by the physician, philosopher and grand Biblical scholar, Moses Maimonides (born Cordoba, Spain, in 1135/38; d.1204, probably in Tiberias) and used to produce the textus receptus. What is most interesting about the present scroll is that it preserves a text in one of the rarest variants, that of the Ashkenazi tradition. Penkower has established that it has a highly accurate text, but one quite apart from Maimonides’ text in its sectional divisions. Where comparative manuscripts are available, it is clear that these agree with Ashkenazi sources, and these variants must be part of a distinct Ashkenazi tradition, quite apart from the revisions of Maimonides (see Penkower, ‘A Sheet of Parchment from a 10th or 11th Century Torah Scroll: Determining its Type among Four Traditions’, Textus, 21, 2002, pp.235-264, and ‘A Bukharan Pentateuch Manuscript from the End of the Fifteenth Century’, Israel, 2011, pp.155-178). There are further features, such as the writing of the vertical line to the left of the last word in every sentence, the final nun in the margin of the scroll at the beginning of every weekly portion, and two short vertical lines to the left of the end of a line that concludes with the Tetragrammaton (all later erased, but quite discernible here), which are found in no Eastern, Sefardi, or Yemenite witnesses, and only appear in a handful of medieval scrolls and codices of Ashkenazi or Italian origin.

This is one of a tiny number of witnesses to this Ashkenazi tradition to survive. Penkower has traced only 14 medieval Ashkenazi Torah scrolls (11 in public libraries in Germany, including Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibl., MSS.487 and 488; one in the Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, heb.2; another in the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, which also has a fragment of another scroll; and one in private ownership), almost all contemporary with the present scroll, with perhaps only the fragment in the National Library of Israel certainly of the thirteenth century and predating this here. While early Sephardi scrolls have appeared on the market in recent years (see the late twelfth-century Spanish scroll sold in our rooms, 4 December 2007, lot 38, for £276,500 hammer; and the late thirteenth-century Spanish scroll sold in our New York rooms, 24 November 2009, lot 142, for $398,500), no complete Ashkenazi medieval scroll has ever been offered in public sale before.

Sotheby's gratefully acknowledges the information used here from a report on this manuscript, prepared by Prof. Jordan Penkower. Copies of this and the C-14 certificate dated November 2014 available on request.