MAHZOR (FESTIVAL PRAYER BOOK) ACCORDING TO THE ASHKENAZIC RITE, SALONIKA: SOLOMON AND JOSEPH JABEZ, [CA. 1550]

An extremely rare copy of the only known Ashkenazic mahzor for the entire year printed in this cosmopolitan Ottoman city.

The Ashkenazic community of Salonika has its origins in the thirteenth century. Over the following two hundred years, its ranks would swell due to successive waves of migration from Hungary and Bavaria. In the mid-sixteenth century, the community’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Benjamin ben Meir ha-Levi Ashkenazi, whose ancestors had lived in Nuremberg, decided to publish a mahzor according to the rite of Italian Ashkenazim, including many of the piyyutim (liturgical poems), selihot (penitential prayers), kinot (dirges), and public biblical readings for special Sabbaths, fast days, Hanukkah, Purim, the three pilgrimage festivals, the Elul season, the Days of Awe, and lifecycle events (e.g., weddings and berit milah ceremonies). To these he appended the text of Megillat anteyokhos (a popular, traditional recounting of the Hanukkah story), a Passover Haggadah, and Pirkei avot (Ethics of the Fathers), as well as concise summaries of the laws relating to each holiday and a commentary on many of the piyyutim (the latter derived in part, perhaps indirectly, from the work of Rabbi Joseph Kara). He even composed three kinot of his own, mourning the destruction of Jerusalem; the death of two of his children in 1534; as well as a fire that broke out in 1545 and a plague that killed four more of his children in 1548.

Though apparently intended for local use, this folio-format mahzor was also marketed to Jewish communities in other Ottoman cities and in Italy, where it served as the basis for a quarto edition published in Sabbioneta and Cremona in 1556-1560. In fact, the present exemplar bears marginalia in an Italian hand as well as signs of extensive expurgation by a censor.