SEFER HA-MITSVOT (BOOK OF THE COMMANDMENTS), RABBI MOSES MAIMONIDES, [CONSTANTINOPLE, CA. 1510-1525]

The rare first edition of Maimonides’ seminal work enumerating the 613 commandments, made even rarer by the misimposition of the pages in its first quire.

The Babylonian Talmud teaches (Makkot 23b) that the Torah contains 613 commandments, 365 prohibitions corresponding to the number of days in a solar year and 248 positive mandates equal to the number of limbs in a human body. However, the Talmud does not specify which of the Bible’s many directives should be counted toward the total of 613. In the Middle Ages, rabbinic scholars began drawing up lists of which commandments they felt should be included. The most famous of these, Rabbi Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), composed the Sefer ha-mitsvot in Judeo-Arabic as a type of introduction to his magnum opus, Mishneh torah, a comprehensive study of all of Jewish law. The present lot is a copy of the first edition of this work, as translated into Hebrew by Moses ben Samuel ibn Tibbon (fl. 1244-1283), which was printed without a title page sometime between 1510 and 1525 in Constantinople. Rabbi Chaim Heller (1880-1960), in his edition of Sefer ha-mitsvot, notes that this printing preserved many correct readings of the work that were subsequently altered (consciously or unconsciously) and, at times, adulterated by later editors and publishers.

The present copy of this edition is exceedingly rare in that the inner two sheets of its first quire have been misprinted, such that the texts on the rectos and versos of ff. 3-6 do not follow sequentially. That this quire survived in its present, misimposed state suggests that it was a proof copy used by the printers to correct subsequent printings of these leaves. Most, and perhaps all, other exemplars of the book extant have these pages in their proper order, making this lot exceptional and, perhaps, unique.