SEDER AZHAROT (LITURGICAL POETRY FOR SHEMINI ATSERET) ACCORDING TO THE COCHINI RITE, RABBI ELIJAH HA-ADENI, AMSTERDAM: URI BEN AARON HA-LEVI, 1688

A rare copy of the first Hebrew title published on behalf of the Jews of Cochin.

Jews have been living in Cochin, southwest India, since at least the fourteenth century. In their settlement at Mattanchery (later known as Jew Town), they flourished under the tolerant rule of the Hindu rajahs, but following the arrival of the Portuguese led by Vasco da Gama in 1498, they began to suffer bitter persecutions. With the advent of Dutch rule in 1663, Jewish fortunes took a turn for the better, and on November 21, 1686, the local population welcomed a delegation sent by the Sephardic community of Amsterdam, headed by Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva. In Cochin, De Paiva learned the history of the community, which he then transcribed and published in Portuguese upon his return to Amsterdam as Notisias dos Judeos de Cochim (1687; issued in Yiddish translation shortly thereafter). He also arranged for Torah scrolls and other holy books to be sent to Cochin’s Jews to replace those that had been destroyed by the Portuguese during the sack of Jew Town in 1662.

The present lot comprises a collection of liturgical poetry composed by Rabbi Elijah ha-Adeni (d. 1631), a transplant from Aden (Yemen) who settled in Cochin. The poetry belongs to the genre known as azharot (lit., warnings), which list, in verse form, all 613 commandments of the Torah. These azharot, preceded by introductory material and reshuyyot (preludes), were meant to be recited on Shemini Atseret, the day before Simhat Torah, which celebrates the completion of the annual Torah reading cycle. According to the title page, Rabbi Levi Belilia sent the text to be published in Amsterdam and was assisted in this by De Paiva. The pamphlet was printed in two editions, one of ten leaves and the other of fourteen, each featuring a woodcut depiction of a schooner, representing the maritime journey between India and Holland.

Literature

Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva, Notisias dos Judeos de Cochim, ed. Moses Bensabat Amzalak (Lisbon: Museu Comercial, 1923).

Lajb Fuks and Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew Typography in the Northern Netherlands[,] 1585-1815: Historical Evaluation and Descriptive Bibliography, vol. 2 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1987), 241, 286 (no. 375).

Marvin J. Heller, The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus, vol. 2 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 1132-1133.

Hilde Oosterbroek, “Arranging Reality: The Editing Mechanisms of the World’s First Yiddish Newspaper, the Kurant (Amsterdam, 1686-1687)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Amsterdam, 2014), 80.

Vinograd, Amsterdam 547

Avraham Yaari, Ha-defus ha-ivri be-artsot ha-mizrah, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1940), 90-91.

Thoufeek Zakriya, “Eliyah ben Moses Adeni, A 17th century Hebrew poet from Cochin,” Jews of Malabar (November 18, 2015), available at: http://jewsofmalabar.blogspot.com/2015/11/eliyah-ben-moses-adeni-hebrew-poet-from.html.

Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Berlin: Louis Gerschel Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1875), 192 (no. 114).