Torah (Pentateuch, with Masora Magna and Minora) in Hebrew, decorated manuscript on paper, in contemporary boxbinding

An outstanding example of a form of medieval book binding of the utmost rarity, containing an early manuscript of the Torah in excellent condition

provenance

(1) The main colophon on fol.132v records that the manuscript was copied in the Selucid year 1826 (1515 AD) by Aaron the son of Amram the son of Joseph, in the city of Sana. The codex was evidently a family possession, and contains records of their births; in particular the birth of a member of the family in the Seleucid year 1814 (c.1503 AD) with a record of his genealogy back to Judah (fol.133v, within a coloured frame).

(2) Apparently by descent through that family (note numerous later additions on fols.1v, 17v, 132v-3r, 215r) until 1896 AD when it was bought by the traveller and manuscript hunter A. E. Saffrin from a family of impoverished Yemenite Jews in Jerusalem whom he had over-wintered with.

(3) In Jaffa, he was persuaded to part with it by Agnes Lewis (1843-1926), the formidable early biblical scholar (see the preceding lot), while she and her twin sister, Margaret Gibson, were on their famous expedition to find and secure the Taylor-Schechter Genizah. As she explains in her letter of 13 April 1896, the present item was too bulky to travel with easily, and they feared it might attract unwanted attention (European travellers through Jaffa at that time were advised to carry only modern printed bibles and guide books; Saffrin himself had only just managed to get his possessions out of Jerusalem in a crowd during a storm), and so it was sent to Great Britain at the earliest opportunity with the belongings of a member of their party who was returning home to London via Egypt.

(4) Given almost immediately by Margaret Dunlop Gibson and Agnes Smith Lewis to Westminster College, Cambridge, 1899.

text

The text comprises Psalm 119 in ornamental micrographic script (fol.1r-2v); a grammatical text (fol.2r-15v); the Torah with Masora Magna and Minora above and below the main text (fol.17r-131r); and the Haftarot from the Prophets for each Sabbat and festival (fol.138r-213v). Correspondence from A. E. Saffrin to Agnes Lewis in 1896 records that it was believed to have been a manuscript retained in Sana as a standard to copy other manuscripts from.

binding

Medieval boxbinding was exclusively practised by the Jewish communities of Spain, Portugal and Yemen in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and only on their most luxurious and treasured volumes. Nothing similar can be found in the bindings of western Europe or those of the Islamic communities of the Near East or North Africa. Surviving examples of this type of medieval binding are exceedingly rare; in 1989, when L. Avrin published her seminal study of boxbindings ("The Sephardi Box Binding"  Library Archives and Information Studies, 1989, pp.27-42), so few were recorded that she postulated that all known examples might stem from the work of a single Spanish binder. In fact she records only four examples of such bindings on manuscripts (The Kennicott Bible: Oxford, Bodleian MS. Kennicott 1, written in La Coruña, Spain, in 1476; Jerusalem, Schocken Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, MS. 24350, an undated Pentateuch; New York, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Micr. 8241, an undated Hippocrates, Medical Aphorisms; and Cinncinati, Hebrew Union College, Klau Library MS. 2, a Pentateuch written in Lisbon in 1475). In addition she noted a late fifteenth-century printed book, the Hamisha Humshe Torah (1491), in a contemporary boxbinding in Philadelphia, Rosenbach Library. Very few others have come to light since that publication: a Pentateuch has emerged as MS. L62 of the Jewish Theological Seminary (fifteenth century, Yemen); and another is in the holdings of the National Library of South Africa, Capetown (Spain / Portugal, fourteenth or fifteenth century; catalogued in C. Steyn, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Grey Collection of the National Library of South Africa, 2002, ii. p. 121-4).

Within this small group the present item stands out as a particularly fine example of this type of binding. Those catalogued by Avrin were all smaller than the present one (the largest there measuring 314mm. by 225mm.), and only MS. L62 of the Jewish Theological Seminary is comparable in size to the present item. The tooling is in the same style as the finest of the other extant examples, a style commonly named mudéjar after the Spanish examples, but perhaps to be more correctly identified as Sephardic (P. Needham, Twelve Centuries of Book Binding, 1979, no.20, pp.78-81). The large central cablework panel on the present example compares well with the cablework tooling on the Schocken Pentateuch, but has an outer border of repeating rope-tools which associate it with the head-rim of the Rosenbach printed book and perhaps the rear board of the Kennicott Bible (see "Sephardi Box Binding", pls. 12, 23 & 2 for reproductions of these).

The present item is one of only two known boxbindings from the Jewish community in Yemen. While it seems likely that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the practice was as common there as in Spain or Portugal, the survival of only a handful of documented examples, and the fact that these may all date to the period 1475-1515, perhaps indicates the work of a single master-craftsman who began his career among the Jewish communities of Spain and Portugal, and who fled into exile with his family following the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, and ended his days in the Jewish community at Sana in Yemen.