Important Judaica

Important Judaica

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 18. AN EXCEEDINGLY RARE PRINTED MIZRAH, [MANTUA: 17TH CENTURY].

AN EXCEEDINGLY RARE PRINTED MIZRAH, [MANTUA: 17TH CENTURY]

Auction Closed

June 5, 04:47 PM GMT

Estimate

18,000 - 24,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

AN EXCEEDINGLY RARE PRINTED MIZRAH, [MANTUA: 17TH CENTURY]


Ink on paper (8 3/4 x 13 1/2 in.; 223 x 345 mm); elaborate floral border designs typical of the period; hollow spaces of letters in central panel filled with dense foliate imagery, as well as depictions of cities surrounded by water; hand-colored in red. Edges worn, though usually restored; two minor tears at foot; some ink rubbed; several small holes scattered throughout; fold lines; light dampstaining. Matted.

The earliest extant printed mizrah plaque.


With the passage of time, the biblical practice of praying toward the Temple in Jerusalem (see I Kings 8:44, 48; II Chron. 6), later codified in the Mishnah (Berakhot 4:5) and Talmud (Berakhot 30a), gave rise to the production of decorative broadsides meant to indicate which of a building’s walls faced the proper liturgical direction. Because the Diaspora Jewish communities in which these artworks developed had settled to the west of the Land of Israel, such ornaments became popularly known as mizrah (lit., east) plaques. The present lot, featuring the word mizrah in large, flowery letters surrounded by ornate, foliate borders and hand-colored in red, is the earliest printed mizrah plaque extant.


Support for the document’s dating is drawn from the border design, which was used by publishers in Mantua already as early as the seventeenth century, and possibly before that, as can be seen in several broadsides held in the collections of the National Library of Israel (the Valmadonna Broadsides) and The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. An additional feature tantalizingly suggesting an early provenance for this mizrah is the depiction of cities surrounded by water in the hollow spaces of the letters zayin and het, recalling similar imagery used in a unicum Hebrew map of the exodus from Egypt and entry into Canaan printed in Mantua in the 1560s (now preserved in the map collection of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich). It may be that the designers of the present mizrah drew their inspiration in part from this or similar woodcuts featuring such an unusual fusion of the maritime and the urban.


Prior to the discovery of this plaque, the oldest printed mizrah was believed to be an exemplar produced in the second half of the eighteenth century (now held in the collection of the Jewish Museum of Prague). The survival of the present document – extraordinary, given its ephemeral nature – pushes the advent of the printed mizrah back a century and to Italy, the cradle of the early modern Hebrew book trade.


Literature

Rehav Rubin, “A Sixteenth-Century Hebrew Map from Mantua,” Imago Mundi 62,1 (2010): 30-45.


Mantua Map in the Map Collection of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich (http://beta.nli.org.il/en/maps/NNL_MAPS_JER003875673/NLI_MAPS_JER?_ga=2.60121197.1760697764.1554269065-745098054.1543117240#$FL32714821)


Mizrah Plaques in the Collection of the Jewish Museum of Prague #178.795 (http://collections.jewishmuseum.cz/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/221565) and #178.796 (http://collections.jewishmuseum.cz/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/221566)