Sefer ha-Aguddah, Alexander Suslin ha-Kohen of Frankfurt, Cracow: Isaac Prostitz: 1571

254 leaves (12 ¼ x 8 in.; 310 x 200 mm). FOLIATION: 1-4, 1-250. Architectural title with owners’ inscriptions; numerous decorative woodcut initial word panels. Lightly stained and spotted, mostly marginally; red speckled edges. Later half vellum over gilt stamped tan cloth; spine gilt stamped, titles.

Vinograd, Cracow 32.

FIRST EDITION

Sefer ha-Aguddah is a halakhic digest organized by talmudic tractates, though only those found in the Mishnaic orders: Zera’im, Kodashim, and Tohorot. The halakhot from these tractates are frequently omitted from other codes, because their content deals primarily with issues germane only in the Land of Israel, or in the era before the destruction of the Temple. The title page of this first edition utilizes the decorative frame topped by a vignette of the Akedah, reused by Prostitz in Cracow over several decades.

Alexander Suslin ha-Kohen of Frankfort was one of the leading talmudists of Germany in the first half of the fourteenth century; he was a student of Isaac of Dueren, author of Sha'arei Dura (see lot 57), and served as rabbi in Cologne, Worms, and Frankfort. Towards the end of his life he settled in Erfurt, his birthplace, where, in the massacres following the Black Death, he suffered a martyr’s death on March 21, 1349, one of more than a hundred Jews who perished that day.