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 62. THE FORM OF PRAYERS […] ACCORDING TO THE CUSTOM OF THE SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE JEWS, TRANSLATED BY DAVID LEVI, LONDON: W. JUSTINS, 1789-1793.

THE FORM OF PRAYERS […] ACCORDING TO THE CUSTOM OF THE SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE JEWS, TRANSLATED BY DAVID LEVI, LONDON: W. JUSTINS, 1789-1793

Auction Closed

November 20, 08:47 PM GMT

Estimate

12,000 - 16,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

THE FORM OF PRAYERS […] ACCORDING TO THE CUSTOM OF THE SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE JEWS, TRANSLATED BY DAVID LEVI, LONDON: W. JUSTINS, 1789-1793


6 volumes (8 3/8 x 5 1/8 in.; 212 x 128 mm): Vol. 1 (Daily Prayers): 263 folios, 33 pages (pagination and foliation: [1]-12 pages, [1], [1]-262 folios, 1-21 pages); Vol. 2 (Rosh Hashanah): 141 folios, 5 pages; Vol. 3 (Yom Kippur); 285 folios, 5 pages (pagination and foliation: [1-2], [1]-282, [1] folios, [i]-v pages); Vol. 4 (Sukkot): 198 folios, 4 pages; Vol. 5 (Passover and Shavuot): 208 folios, 8 pages (pagination and foliation: [1-2], [1]-18, 18-205 folios, [1]-[8] pages); Vol. 6 (Fast Days): 212 folios, 8 pages on paper. Small decorative elements scattered throughout; some underlining in pencil toward rear of Vol. 2 and notes in pencil on 3:88v and 6:186v-187r; handwritten slip from a previous owner included in Vol. 4; first few pages of Vol. 6 printed on blue-tinted paper. Very slight scattered staining and dogearing; some browning and foxing; minor nicks in upper edges of several pages; small hole affecting a few letters on 2:11 and 3:203; short tears in lower edge of 3:134 and outer edges of 3:205, 6:19; small marginal hole on 4:71; slight paper flaw in outer edge of 5:118. Modern gilt-tooled calf; spines in six compartments with raised bands; type of prayers, Vol. number, place, and date lettered in gilt on spines; loose green silk bookmarks in Vols. 1, 4, 6; modern marbled paper flyleaves and pastedowns.

A rare complete set of Levi’s enormously influential translation into English of the Sephardic liturgy for the entire year.


In 1712, the great Amsterdam printer Solomon Proops issued a four-volume series of prayer books according to the Sephardic rite covering the liturgy for weekdays, Sabbaths, festivals, High Holidays, and fast days. This four-volume model was followed, with some modifications, by another Amsterdam publisher, Samuel Rodrigues Mendes, in 1726. When the time came, in 1771-1776, to render the text of the Sephardic liturgy in English, the London-based printing pioneer Alexander Alexander (d. ca. 1807) adopted a six-volume format that was subsequently imitated by the translator of the present lot, David Levi (1740/1742-1801).


Levi, a British-born Orthodox Ashkenazic autodidact, made his living first as a cobbler and then as a hatter, but his true passion lay in scholarly pursuits. A man of remarkable industry, he published a Hebrew grammar and dictionary (1785-1787), well-regarded defenses of Judaism in the face of English conversionary efforts (1787, 1795), a new Pentateuch translation intended for synagogal use (1787), and translations of both the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic (1794-1796) liturgies, the former of which constitutes the present lot.


Regarded by the scholar of Anglo-Jewish liturgical translation history Simeon Singer as “a monument of honest labour and of a sustained and loyal, and, on the whole, a praiseworthy endeavour to enter into the spirit of the original,” Levi’s translations of the prayer book would go on to be reprinted and adapted in editions issued both in England and the United States well into the nineteenth century. Complete copies of the present series are scarce, especially in private hands.


Provenance

Mrs. S.D. Lindo


Literature

Cecil Roth, “Ha-defus ha-ivri be-london: nissayon bibli’ogerafi,” Kiryat sefer 14,1-3 (1937): 97-104, 379-387, at p. 104 (no. 60).


David B. Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ch. 6.


Simeon Singer, “Early Translations and Translators of the Jewish Liturgy in England,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 3 (1896-1898): 36-71, at pp. 58-71.


Vinograd, London 125, 127(?)