Sacred Splendor: Judaica from the Arthur and Gitel Marx Collection

Sacred Splendor: Judaica from the Arthur and Gitel Marx Collection

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 1. PSALMS WITH THE COMMENTARY OF RABBI DAVID KIMHI, EDITED BY RABBI JACOB LANDAU, NAPLES: JOSEPH BEN JACOB ASHKENAZI [GUNZENHAUSER], 1487.

PSALMS WITH THE COMMENTARY OF RABBI DAVID KIMHI, EDITED BY RABBI JACOB LANDAU, NAPLES: JOSEPH BEN JACOB ASHKENAZI [GUNZENHAUSER], 1487

Auction Closed

November 20, 08:47 PM GMT

Estimate

30,000 - 40,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

PSALMS WITH THE COMMENTARY OF RABBI DAVID KIMHI, EDITED BY RABBI JACOB LANDAU, NAPLES: JOSEPH BEN JACOB ASHKENAZI [GUNZENHAUSER], 1487


106 of 117 folios (9 5/8 x 7 1/4 in.; 244 x 184 mm) (collation: i6, ii-xiv8, xv7 [lacking final blank]) on paper; modern foliation (off by two) in pencil in Arabic numerals in lower margins; early psalm numeration in pen in Hebrew characters; scattered marginalia and/or corrections in pen. Lacking ff. 1-8, 26-27, 40 (ff. 3-8, 26-27, 40 replaced in facsimile); leaves remargined for conformity. Modern vellum; title, place, and date lettered on spine; modern paper flyleaves and pastedowns.

The first Hebrew book printed in Naples, and the second edition of Kimhi’s commentary on the book of Psalms.


Rabbi David Kimhi (ca. 1160-ca. 1235), a Provencal grammarian and biblical exegete, wrote a series of influential peshat (plain sense)-oriented commentaries on Chronicles, Genesis, all the prophetic books, and Psalms that stressed philological analysis of the text on the model of Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra. His exposition of Psalms, in particular, achieved great popularity and would be the first of the group to be published, in 1477 (perhaps in Bologna). The present lot is a copy of the second edition, printed ten years later based on a different manuscript or manuscripts. It was edited by Rabbi Jacob Landau, author of Sefer agur (see lot 16), and issued by Joseph Gunzenhauser (d. 1490), an immigrant from the German town of Gunzenhausen who established the first Hebrew press in Naples, a center of the contemporary book trade. The next edition of Kimhi’s Psalms commentary would appear in the Venice Rabbinic Bible (1517), followed by the Salonika imprint of 1522 (see lot 239).


Literature

Adri K. Offenberg with C. Moed-Van Walraven, Hebrew Incunabula in Public Collections: A First International Census (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf Publishers, 1990), 47-48 (no. 35).


Frederick R. Goff, Incunabula in American Libraries: A Third Census of Fifteenth-Century Books Recorded in North American Collections (Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1973), 318 (Heb-29).


Shimon Iakerson, Katalog ha-inkunabulim ha-ivriyyim me-osef sifriyyat beit ha-midrash le-rabbanim be-america, vol. 1 (New York and Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2004), 211-215 (no. 44).


Ezra Zion Melamed, “Peirush radak li-tehillim,” Areshet 2 (1960): 35-95, at pp. 35-65.


Vinograd, Naples 4


Isaac Yudlov and G.J. Ormann, Sefer ginzei yisra’el: sefarim, hoverot, va-alonim me-osef dr. yisra’el mehlman, asher be-beit ha-sefarim ha-le’ummi ve-ha-universita’i (Jerusalem: JNUL, 1984), 20 (no. 23).