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Sefer Torah (Pentateuch), in Hebrew, manuscript scroll on vellum
Description
Provenance
The Hebrew Pentateuch is the oldest version of the first five books of the Old Testament, and moreover, the present manuscript is the earliest complete recorded Sefardic Torah scroll, predating all other known examples by more than a century
provenance
1. Written for a Jewish community in Spain (perhaps Toledo) in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and presumably carried from there into exile.
2. Private collection, America, and believed to have come from a synagogue in Philadelphia, PA., founded by Dutch immigrants, and which closed in the mid-twentieth century.
Condition
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
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 a legal and ritual guide for both Jews and Christians alike. Modern scholarly dating begins with the work of Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918), the German biblical scholar, who proposed that the text is composed of four separate and identifiable stages, that of the Jahwist stage, written c. 850 BC, the redaction of the southern kingdom of Judah; the Elohist stage, written c. 750 BC, the redaction of the northern kingdom of Israel; the Deuteronomist stage, written c. 621 BC; and the so-called 'Priestly source' which was written during or after the exile of the Jews (around 539 BC). The current canon appears to have been fixed in the Persian period (before c. 520 BC to 331 BC), after the Jew's return from exile in Babylon, but before the schism with the Samaritans, and tradition ascribes the organisation of the work to the scribe Ezra.
The care and attention given by Jewish scribes to the transmission of the text of these books in as close a format as they were during the period of the New Testament is remarkable, and most probably unparalleled for any other ancient or medieval text. While Jewish communities began to produce codices or books from the eighth century AD, and continued to produce them throughout the medieval period, the most formal version of these texts continued to exist in one of the most ancient formats of writing, the scroll. Moreover, Talmudic law includes a number of very precise specifications about the methods of production of a Torah scroll. 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 found in the Qumram cave complex are written on. The scribe's pen cannot be from unclean animals or even base metals. The text itself contains 304,805 letters, and must be duplicated perfectly by a professional scribe, word-by-word from a correct exemplar (ie. without even one word being copied from memory), as any mistakes could render the work unfit for ritual use. 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. Of course, there is a strict ban on any illumination or decoration. Such Hebrew manuscripts have perhaps not commanded the same following as others, such as Hagadot, which are often accompanied by lavish illumination and delicate micrographic designs, but in Torah scrolls we have the austerity and grandeur of raw textual art, combined with the effort of many hundreds of generations of scribes toiling to keep the text as close to the form in which the ancient world knew it.
Moreover, the survival of any medieval Torah scroll is also remarkable; just as a Torah scroll is unfit for use if a single letter is omitted, any wear or damage to the document renders it useless. Torah scrolls, like other Jewish religious writings, once retired from use, cannot be destroyed, but are placed with great ceremony in a Genizah (a 'hiding-' or 'storage-place') in the synagogue and left to decay naturally. This tendency of Jewish communities to prefer newer copies of the text, as more free of damage or potential corruption, ensures that few such scrolls of any age survive in more than a handful of decayed fragments. Thus, the oldest substantial manuscripts of the Old Testament in Hebrew are late-ninth and tenth century in date: the lost Aleppo Codex written c. 930 AD perhaps by Aaron ben Asher (see below for further comment); the Cairo Codex of the Former and Latter Prophets written by Moses ben Asher in Tiberias (a town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee) in the tenth century; a substantial fragment in book-form written in the mid-ninth century and now British Library, Or. 4445; the complete St.Petersburg Old Testament, written and dated 1008 AD; as well as a handful of mid-ninth century manuscripts and fragments also in St. Petersburg.
The present manuscript is only two or three centuries younger. A combination of paleographical, textual and codicological aspects of the present scroll indicate that it was produced in Spain in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. The script, executed with a reed pen, shows striking similarities to the two extant dated Spanish manuscripts of the late twelfth century and the handful of similar manuscripts from the early thirteenth century; and as in those examples, the left leg of the letter Alef tends to slant to the right, and its bottom faces the left; with Gimmel the bottom of the right line is thin and tends to the left, the base is thick and is written horizontally; with Bet and Nun the base tends to be wide; with Peh the 'inside' is thick and formed by a to-and-fro stroke; with Tzadik the body is thick and drawn with a curved form, the two heads sitting on top of that, the right head (attached to a thin arm) turning to the right; with Heh and Qof the leg almost touches the roof; with Shin the square base tilts slightly down to the left, and the middle head turns to the right on a slant (for further discussion of these features see M. Beit-Arié & E. Engel, Specimens of Mediaeval Hebrew Scripts, Vol. II: Sefardic Script, 2002). The text itself is an early accurate Sefardic tradition rooted in the Codex Aleppo Massoretic practise of Tiberia about 930 AD (see below), and the writing on the surface of the vellum has been coated with brown varnish, as in other Spanish scrolls.
Additionally, the present manuscript is the earliest complete Sefardic Torah scroll, predating all others by at least a century. In general, Hebrew scrolls from early medieval Spain are incredibly rare: until the discovery of the present manuscript the earliest known Sefardic Torah scroll was that written by R. Nissim Gerondi in the fourteenth century (probably pre-1336), now in the holdings of the JNUL. There is also a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century scroll from Rhodes (also in the holdings of JNUL); that from the second half of the fourteenth century which was sold at Christie's New York, 10 December 1999, lot 171; two Sefardic Torah scrolls from the fourteenth century, one from the fifteenth, and a fragmentary one from the sixteenth, are listed by G. Margoliouth, Catalogue of the Hebrew... Manuscripts in the British Museum, Vol. i, 1899, nos. 1-3 & 5; two Sefardic scrolls, one from the fifteenth century and one from the fifteenth to sixteenth century in the de Rossi collection in the Palatina Library in Parma (see B. Richler, Hebrew Manuscripts in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, Catalogue, 2001; dating by M. Beit-Arié). In total, of the nine early recorded Sefardic Torah scrolls, four are from the fourteenth century, three from fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, and two from the fifteenth century. No other complete Sefardic Torah scroll dates to even the thirteenth century, let alone the late twelfth century.
Significantly, the present manuscript would also appear to be a direct descendant of an important and well-known lost codex. Due to human fallibility, dissent, and the occasional period of ancient Jewish history when the transmission of the text was less rigid than in medieval times, a number of very minor differences have entered the text as it is used by the various Jewish communities. That represented here is an early and accurate Sefardic tradition, rooted in the celebrated and now-lost Aleppo Codex. This famed codex was the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible according to the Tiberian massoretic practise, written c. 930 AD, perhaps by Aaron ben Asher. At the end of the twelfth century, in the period during which the present manuscript was probably written, the Aleppo Codex was used in Cairo by the rabbi and scholar Maimonides (1135-1204) when he wrote his Hilkhot Sefer Torah, a treatise on the exact rules for writing Torah scrolls, and by the fifteenth century it had reached Aleppo. It remained there until the mid-twentieth century, in the zealous care of the local community who refused to allow it to be copied or photographed, even for the scholar Paul Kahle in the 1920s when he was revising his monumental Biblia Hebraica; and so the third edition of this work, in 1937, was subsequently forced to use the St.Petersburg Codex as its basis instead. In December 1947 Muslim anti-Jewish riots desecrated and burned the synagogue, and the Codex was apparently damaged, so that only 295 of the original 487 leaves survived, its losses including almost all the Torah. It disappeared and a remnant re-emerged in 1958, and this is now in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A detailed comparison, by Dr. J. S. Penkower, of sections of Exodus and Leviticus of the present manuscript with the extant records of the contents of the Aleppo Codex reveals that the present manuscript is an extremely accurate copy, containing fewer variants than a large number of early witnesses to that tradition: Jewish Theological Seminary MS. 44a (dated 1241); Sassoon MS. 82 (1312); Trinity College MS. F 12 32 (1474); Sassoon MS. 16 (1383); JNUL MS. 4º 790 (1260); Sassoon MS. 368 (1366-1383); British Library MS. Or. 2201 (1300); British Library MS. Or. 2626 (1482); all in book form, and given here in descending order of accuracy. Moreover, the corrections in the present manuscript in seventy-three places agree perfectly with the Aleppo Codex (definitely with this codex in sixty-five places, and most probably in another eight), suggesting a close relationship between the two. This is unlikely to have been a direct relationship - the Aleppo Codex was in Cairo at the time the present manuscript was written in Spain - but it is unlikely that more than one or two lost exemplars stand between them. Penkower also notes a link between the present manuscript and another important and now-lost manuscript: the Hilleli Codex. Its name derives from the tradition which associated it with Rabbi Hillel ben Moses ben Hillel, who lived c. 600 AD (see B. Pick, 'Lost Hebrew Manuscripts', in Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, 2.2, 1882, pp. 122-7). R. David Qimhi, in his Mikhlol (edited 1842, p. 71a) tells us that he saw the codex when he lived in Toledo in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, that is at the time when the present manuscript was copied somewhere in Spain, and a later Jewish commentator, Zacutto, in his Sefer Yuhasin (edited H. Filipowski, 1857, p. 220b) records that the Hilleli Codex was removed from the kingdom of Leon in 1197 during a period of persecution of the Jewish community there, and that he saw the volume of Prophets in the sixteenth century in Bugia, Africa, whence it was brought by refugees from Portugal. Zacutto also notes that "it was exceedingly correct; and all other codices were revised after it", and this information is confirmed by the inscription within JTS MS. 44a (copied in Toledo in 1241), that it was corrected according to the Hilleli Codex. Penkower's comparison of records of the contents of this now-lost manuscript with the present one reveals that 66% of the corrections in the present manuscript agree with the reading of the Hilleli codex, and on a number of occasions where the present scroll was changed from a reading that previously agreed with the Aleppo codex, the new reading now agrees with the Hilleli. Thus, the present manuscript would appear to be a 'grandson' or close descendent of the lost Aleppo Codex, and a direct descendent of the lost Hilleli Codex representing an extremely important stage of the textual tradition, and is clearly deserving of much future study.
The manuscript is also of interest as a testament to the history of the Sefardic communities in Spain in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the zenith and final years of the ascendance of the medieval Spanish Jewish community. With the capture of Islamic Spain by the traditional and fundamentalist Almohads the 'golden age' of Jewish life under the Spanish Muslims came to an end in the twelfth century, and with forced conversions many Jews (and Christians) were driven northwards into Christian Spain, notably into the lands of King Alfonso VI (1040-1109), the conqueror of Toledo, who was extremely tolerant of Jewish settlers, offering wealthy Jews equal privileges to Christian citizens and even the Christian nobility. After a youthful period of intolerance, his son Alfonso VII (1105-57), emperor of Leon, Toledo and Santiago, followed in his father's footsteps, making Judeh ben Joseph ibn Ezra his chamberlain; and this act alone may have enabled many Jewish refugees from Islamic Spain to settle in communities in Flascala, Fromista, Carrion and Palencia, and establish congregations there. Jews continued to hold influential positions and play crucial roles in Christian Spanish society into the reign of Alfonso VIII of Castile (1166-1214). By 1300 there were about 120 Jewish communities in Christian Spain, with approximately half a million inhabitants, living in separate communities or Juderias, with their own administration and judicial systems. However, this tolerant society began to crumble in 1195 and after the defeat of Alfonso VIII of Castile by the Almohades at the battle of Alarcos, the archbishop of Toledo invited in Crusaders to stem the Islamic incursions, but on their arrival these newcomers began a blood-thirsty 'holy war' against the Jewish communities. This contact also drew the attention of the clergy, in particular that of the Dominican friars, and numerous conversion-campaigns were launched in the following years. The growing hostility subsequently spiralled into the expulsion of the Jews at the end of the fifteenth century. The present manuscript was clearly a valued object, treasured long after it had ceased to be of practical use, and was most probably commissioned for a congregation of wealthy Jews who had fled Almohad persecution and settled in (and indeed helped to build) the tolerant and vibrant culture of Christian Spain, perhaps in the Juderia of Toledo. In time they were forced to flee from here as well, perhaps carrying with them the present manuscript as a relic of their former community.
Sotheby's gratefully acknowledges the information used here from scholarly and learned reports on this manuscript, prepared for its current owner by Professor M. Beìt-Arié and Dr. Jordan Penkower.