Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sukkah, Constantinople: Solomon and Joseph, sons of Isaac Ya'avetz [1583-1585]

Estimate

5,000 - 7,000 USD

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Description

leather binding, paper

75 leaves (12 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.; 321 x 215 mm). COLLATION: 1-17^{4 [7]=75 leaves. Owners' notes on verso of title page. Title page remargined; a few leaves strengthened at gutter; soiled and stained. Manuscript diagrams on f. 8r. Trace worming and marginal losses expertly repaired. Modern brown blind tooled morocco.}

Literature

Vinograd, Constantinople 298; Yaari, Kushta 211; Hacker, pp. 491-2; Heller, Printing the Talmud, pp. 309-317; Marvin Heller, The Sixteenth-Century Hebrew Book, pp. 716-17.

Catalogue Note

Following the massive burning of tens of thousands of volumes of the Talmud in Italy in 1553, a new edition was sorely needed. The first post-Italian edition was printed in Basel ca. 1580. Because of its heavy-handed censorship, it was widely considered to be a corrupt edition and nearly universally rejected by Jewish readers. Only with the appearance of the Talmud volumes printed by the Ya'avetz brothers in the Ottoman Empire (Salonika and Constantinople), was the Catholic Church's ban of the Talmud finally circumvented. The extreme fidelity of these tractates to the destroyed Italian editions is evident in both their typographical layout, clearly directly modeled on the first Bomberg Talmud, as well as the inclusion of the references and other modifications introduced in the Giustiniani edition.