Lot 14

Fragment of Bible, in Hebrew and glossed in Latin, manuscript on vellum, with amulet-scroll necklace

Estimate

3,000 - 5,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

a cutting, 210mm. by 155mm., from a monumental Hebrew Bible, remains of two columns, with 15 lines on recto and verso of dark brown ink in Ashkenazi square book-script with nikkud, glossed by a small cursive fifteenth-century hand in Latin supplying the title "2^{o R[egno] 6^{am" and a number of words throughout the text, and subsequently re-used as a sixteenth-century bookbinding, hence somewhat defective and with stains, small holes, scribbles and a line-drawn spray of acanthus leaves, but vellum in good and strong condition, Ashkenaz (almost certainly Germany), thirteenth century; with a cylindrical Yemeni women's amulet and case in silver, decorated with bands and with pierced metal circles mounted with green stones, suspended from the body of the case, containing a vellum scroll with amuletic inscriptions and diagrams, and opening via a small 'key' which sits on top of the case, Yemen, eighteenth or early nineteenth century}}

Catalogue Note

The text of the thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible is that of the opening of 2 Kings 6:1-4, and on the verso, after a break of only a few lines, 2 Kings 6:7-10, concerning King David's gathering of the 30,000 chosen men of Israel to go and fetch the Ark of the Covenant from the house of Abinadab in Gabaa. What is remarkable about the present fragment is that it has been glossed in the fifteenth century by a scribe (most probably Christian) who could evidently read Hebrew, setting him among the handful of Christians who mastered that language before the modern period. He correctly marks Congregavit ('he gathered') in tiny script above the incipit: åÇéÌÉñÆó, and continues to add words throughout the entire text including electos ('chosen ones') and 30 and m[ili]a ('thirty thousand') in the second and third lines. When he reaches the description of the Ark of the Covenant he pays particular attention to the cherubin (line 10) who support the Lord of Hosts over the Ark, and its location in gabaa (line 14).

There were Jewish communities scattered throughout Germany in the late Middle Ages, with the largest in Regensburg (around 500 inhabitants) and Nuremburg (around 200 inhabitants), and these were a focus for persecution in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The arrival of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century brought a reaction from Christian communities who blamed the Jews for the pestilence, and the fifteenth century saw the expulsion of the communities from a large number of German cities, as well as forced baptisms and violent attacks. In particular, Jewish religious literature was held in contempt, and thus it is surprising that the present fragment indicates that an individual Christian scribe had enough interest in the Old Testament in its earliest linguistic form to obtain a manuscript in Hebrew from his Jewish neighbours, and to commit the time and effort to study the language in order to gain direct access to the text. Perhaps the glossator is to be identified as the controversial German humanistic scholar Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), or a member of his circle. Reuchlin was the first German to include Hebrew among the humanities. Much of his studies were focused on the Bible, and his personal interests were in the grammatical and exegetical tradition of the medieval rabbis, notably David Kimhi, publishing De Rudimentis Hebraicis in 1506 after Kimhi, and going on to print the Penitential Psalms in Hebrew in 1512 and De Arte Cabbalistica in 1517. The sixteenth century saw an increase in persecution and many regions of Germany expelled their entire population of Jews, after which the parent manuscript from which the present leaf comes was probably set aside and cut up for re-use as binding material.