Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol, Iggeret Orhot Olam, on world geography including the New World, in Hebrew, manuscript on paper [northern Italy, 1524-1528]

36 leaves, 197mm. by 143mm., complete, collation: i-iii^{10, iv6 (following right to left), 30 lines in brown ink in the Italian semi-cursive hand of the scribe} Joseph Finzi (see below), larger initials in same, last 2 leaves in slightly later hand (containing the Melitzah sehok ha-ishkaki, an important treatise on chess by Bonsenoir ibn Yahya: cf. V.A. Keats, Chess in Jewish History, 1995, pp.74-9 for a discussion and translation of the text into English) extensive marginalia for first 12 leaves, else wide and near-clean margins, some small stains and edges of paper woolly in places, some professionally restored, overall very good condition, modern light brown tooled morocco over pasteboards, enclosing a copy of a report on the manuscript by Dr Edna Engel

An important witness to the contribution of Jewish scholarship to the Italian Renaissance in the courts of Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-92) and Ercole I d'Este (1431-1505), with a simple sketch drawing of America in the hand of the author

provenance

(1) Written by the scribe Joseph ben Abraham Finzi Delinyago, who was active in northern Italy during the first third of the sixteenth century, and who worked within Farissol's immediate circle, most probably as a member of the workshop Farissol assembled to copy and disseminate his writings (see E. Engel, 'Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol: Sephardi Tradition of Book Making in Northern Italy of the Renaissance Period', Jewish Art 18, 1992, pp.158-63).

(2) By the late sixteenth century the book had travelled east, perhaps even leaving mainland Italy: an inscription in Italian on its first flyleaf naming "Gui Senicarro" of Dalmatia (now mostly modern Croatia), dated 1587; further contemporary scribbles on the last endleaf name "Domino Jacomo" and "Gramaldi". The addition of the names "Zamaria razzaro" and "Zaliman" show that the volume remained in Jewish ownership.

text

Abraham Farissol (fl. 1469-1528) is of singular importance for demonstrating the subtle but significant part the Jews played in the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy. He was born in Avignon, and at the age of 17 moved with his father to northern Italy, variously settling in Mantua, Ferrara and Florence. He was attendant on the great Florentine duke and supreme patron of the arts, Lorenzo de' Medici, and appears to have remained on close friendly terms with the duke. In 1487, he is recorded in the court of Ercole I d'Este, duke of Ferrara, taking part in a staged debate with a Dominican theologian and a Franciscan friar on the respective merits of Christianity and Judaism. Fifteen years later he became the private tutor to the French humanist, François Tissard (1460-1508), who set out to master Hebrew as well as Greek, and who would return to Paris to teach classics and publish the first French grammars of those languages. In addition, Farissol was an important scholar and scribe within his own community, accepting commissions for manuscripts up until his seventy-sixth year, and it has been suggested that his hand was one of those used as the basis for the Conat typeface used to produce the first Hebrew printing of Ferrara.

The present work represents his lifelong interest in geography, and is an attempt to record the location of all the dispersed Jewish peoples in the world. It includes the first mention of the New World in Hebrew (as part of a discussion of whether the newly-discovered American Indians were in fact one of the lost tribes of Israel or followers of King Solomon), and accounts of the coastline of Africa, India and the Far East. The mapping of the world beyond the frontiers of Europe held a fascination bordering on obsession for both the Florentine and Ferrarese courts. In 1466, the German mapmaker Donnus Nicolaus presented a manuscript of Ptolemy's Geographia of his own design and construction to Borso d'Este, the predecessor and half-brother to Ercole I, with a dedication lauding its recipient as "the only one of all the rulers of Italy" to collect around him scholars in the cartographic arts and be qualified to spot errors in the volume. Ercole himself commissioned a treatise on the theoretical possibility of a New World well in advance of Columbus' voyage, and employed spies to keep him informed about Columbus' discoveries following his return. In 1502, a copy of a secret world map detailing Portuguese discoveries, which was kept in in the palace in Lisbon, was smuggled to Ercole along with  reports of the voyages of Gaspar Conte-Real, made in private to King Manuel I and overheard by a Ferrarese spy. Florence was equally interested in such material, and Farissol records in this text that he first heard of the possibility of life in the southern hemisphere (denied by earlier scholars) in discussions in the Medici court in 1487. Farissol spoke and read both Italian and Latin, and the research for this text must have been made in the great ducal libraries of Florence and Ferrara. It is clear that he used portolans, knew of maps with Ptolemaic and non-Ptolemaic divisions of the world, and mentions in passing a Latin copy of the works of Josephus. In addition, he drew on accounts of Columbus' discoveries (most probably those smuggled to Ercole d'Este), as well as Cadamosto's account of West Africa, de Sintra's account of his voyage to the same, and the letters of Girolamo Sernigi describing de Gama's voyage around Africa to the Far East. Farissol's text was translated into Latin by the Christian Hebraist, Thomas Hyde (1636-1703), and was published in 1691.

Of the five extant manuscripts of the text,  this is the only copy in private hands. Four of them date to the lifetime of the author: (i) the present manuscript; (ii) Florence, Laurenziana MS.47; (iii) Oxford, Bodleian MS.2053; and (iv) Budapest, Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Kaufmann MS.A333 (given in 1906); the fifth is an Italian sixteenth-century copy: Parma, Biblioteca Palatina MS.2392. None has been offered in public sale before, and there is no manuscript of the text in the United States.

the sketch drawing of America

The section on the New World is accompanied by a sketch drawing of America (fol.32v) with six stars and sixteen symbols which resemble a letter 's'. In the Oxford manuscript and the printed editions of the text there is no explanation of this diagram or its symbols, but here there is an added line in a hand identified by Edna Engel and Menahem Schmelzer as Farissol's autograph (cf. the reproductions in Engel, 'Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol', figs.16 and 21) explaining that they are stars and 'lines' visible in the sky over the New World. The sketch is also in the same light brown ink and is most probably also in his hand.