Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kiddushin, [Constantinople, ca. 1510]

The only known near-complete copy of an early Sephardic Talmudic tractate.

“And one has to wonder: why was the Talmud, or at least some of its treatises, not printed in Eastern cities like Constantinople or Salonika? After all, in 1509 Rav Alfas’ work with all of its commentaries, as well as Maimonides’ work with all of its commentaries, were printed in Constantinople, and by 1520 many, many large books, like all of the midrashim, Sifra, Mekhilta, Rabbeinu Jeroham, Menorat ha-ma’or, Tosefot ha-rosh, Kolbo, Semak, etc., etc., had appeared […] Why did they not print even one leaf of the Talmud? […] I wanted to suggest that perhaps tractates were printed there, but because the use and study of Talmudic volumes are constant, the books wore out and disappeared from the world […] But it seems more likely that they in fact printed nothing of the Talmud because they could not sell its tractates in Italy, only in Turkey, and there were not enough customers for them there […]”

So wrote Raphael Nathan Note Rabbinovicz in 1877 in his foundational Ma’amar al hadpasat ha-talmud, and for about two decades thereafter the accepted wisdom among Hebrew bibliographers was (more or less) that no Talmudic treatises had been published in Constantinople before the second half of the sixteenth century. In 1897, however, the Orientalist Daniel Chwolson challenged this assumption when he recorded the existence in his personal Judaica collection of about a dozen leaves from Tractate Yoma that appeared to have been printed in Constantinople ca. 1510-1515. Since then, scholars have discovered remnants of several other treatises that they have attributed to the press(es) of the Ottoman capital in the early decades of the sixteenth century, assigning them to two separate editions.

The first, printed in large folio format (about 33-36 cm tall), has been dated ca. 1509 on the strength of its physical resemblance, in both typography and layout, to Rabbi Isaac Alfasi’s Hibbur ha-gadol me-ha-halakhot ha-nehugot, published in Constantinople that year. Its treatises are represented today by fragments from Eiruvin, Pesahim, Rosh ha-shanah, and Yoma, most of which are first editions; in the case of Yoma, its text derives from manuscript traditions independent of those that served as the basis for the Guadalajara ca. 1480 imprint. 

By contrast, the date of the second, whose tractates—portions of Berakhot, Beitsah, and Kiddushin are extant—were printed in small folio format (about 28 cm tall) and apparently therefore referred to in some early sources as “the small gemarot,” has been the subject of much scholarly controversy. Some have argued for moving it into the incunable period, ca. 1495, shortly after an edition of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher’s Arba‘ah turim is supposed to have appeared in Constantinople, while others have delayed its publication to as late as ca. 1525, after Daniel Bomberg’s first edition of the entire Babylonian Talmud had been issued in Venice. 

Much of the debate has focused on specific typographic features of these treatises, which have been compared to those of dated works published in Constantinople. However, the most recent research has demonstrated that the text of this small folio edition was largely based on that of the tractates issued by the Soncino family in Soncino and the hamlet of Barco (in today’s Bibbiano, Italy) in 1484 and ca. 1498, respectively. This suggests that “the small gemarot” were printed in Constantinople sometime in the early sixteenth century, perhaps a short while before or after the larger volumes mentioned above.

The present lot comprises a near-complete copy, probably missing only three or five leaves, of the small-format edition of Kiddushin published in Constantinople ca. 1510. (The date is supported by one of the book’s watermarks, which is similar to Briquet 2456 [Rome, 1508/1510] and Briquet 2515 [Pisa, 1515].) Like the other tractates that saw the light of print in this period, it contains the text of the Talmud, accompanied by the commentaries of Rashi and Tosafot on the inner and outer margins, respectively. Up to this point, Sephardic publishers had not included the latter commentary in their Talmuds because it was not commonly studied in local Spanish and Portuguese yeshivot. Following the expulsions of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, however, the Sephardic exiles who established their printing press(es) in Constantinople had to compete with the Soncinos working across the Mediterranean in Italy in providing for the scholarly needs of a different set of customers, necessitating the inclusion of the Tosafot in their new Talmud editions.

Only four institutions are known to hold individual folios (two or three each) from the Constantinople Kiddushin: the National Library of Israel, The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Bodleian Library, and the Cambridge University Library. Moreover, among all the extant early-sixteenth-century Constantinople Talmuds—whether printed in large or small folio format—the present volume is by far the most substantial representative. As one of the first tractates printed by Sephardic exiles in their new Ottoman surroundings, it bears witness to the perseverance of the Jewish spirit, as well as its commitment to the fundamental texts and traditions of Judaism, even in the face of adversity.

Provenance

1. Unidentified Yemenite immigrant to Israel (Traube)

2. Meir Benayahu (Traube and others)

Physical Description

123 folios (10 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.; 275 x 200 mm) (collation: i⁴ [i_1-2 lacking], ii-xv⁶, xvi⁴, xvii-xix⁶, xx⁸, xxi⁵ [probably lacking 1 or 3 leaves at the end]) on paper; modern foliation in pencil in Arabic numerals in upper-outer corner of rectos; bifolia signed in printed Hebrew characters in lower-outer corner of rectos (with some bifolia left unsigned); running headers (sometimes lacking); (enlarged) letters used for justification and layout purposes; some tapering text; Tetragrammaton often represented by he but sometimes by two or three yodin; modern marginal notation of Venice edition foliation added in pencil starting on f. 20v; periodic strikethroughs, corrections, marginalia, and pen trials. Lacking probably three or five folios (see collation); scattered staining, dampstaining, and thumbing; corners rounded; short tears frequently in outer edges, sometimes repaired; many printing errors (see Traube), including the loss on f. 99r of about a Venice edition folio’s worth of text (64b-65b), apparently due to homeoteleuton; lower-outer quadrant of f. 1 and lower-outer corner of f. 62 lacking, resulting in loss of text; one small wormhole in text on ff. 1-8; repairs affecting some text on ff. 2, 43; unrepaired tears on, e.g., ff. 3, 16, 44, 47-48, 65, 73, 82, 87; outer and lower margins of f. 48 removed; minor holes in text on ff. 80, 110. Nineteenth-century blind-tooled leather, somewhat scuffed at edges, with slight worming on upper board; two worn leather clasps on fore-edge, the upper one lacking half; contemporary paper pastedowns (no flyleaves) with lithographed text from an Arabic grammar explained in Turkish.

Literature

Meir Benayahu, Ha-yahasim she-bein yehudei yavan li-yehudei italyah mi-geirush sefarad ad tom ha-republikah ha-venetsi’anit (Tel Aviv: Ha-Makhon le-Heker ha-Tefutsot, 1980), 115 n. 45.

Daniel Chwolson, Reshimat sifrei yisra’el ha-nimtsa’im be-otsar ha-sefarim asher le-ha-profesor daniyyel chwolson (Vilna: Romm, 1897), 123-124 (no. 1832).

Daniel Chwolson, Reshit ma‘aseh ha-defus be-yisra’el, trans. Moses Eleazar Eisenstadt (Warsaw: Ha-Tsefirah, 1897), 27-28 n. 1.

Haim Z. Dimitrovsky, Seridei bavli: mavo bibliyyogerafi histori (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1979), 96-111, 118-119.

Yisrael Dubitsky, “First International Census of Earliest Printed Editions of [tractates of] the Babylonian Talmud: Prints from Incunables through Bomberg: Revised Edition,” Lieberman Institute, available at: https://www.lieberman-institute.com/resources/Dubitsky.html.

Shamma Friedman, “Massekhtot she-nidpesu ve-lo nirshemu ve-ka-elleh she-nirshemu ve-lo nidpesu,” Alei sefer 18 (1996): 5-41, at pp. 11-14, 25-27, 30-40.

Marvin J. Heller, Printing the Talmud: A History of the Earliest Printed Editions of the Talmud (Brooklyn: Im Hasefer, 1992), 305-308.

Marvin J. Heller, “Earliest Printings of the Talmud,” in Sharon Liberman Mintz and Gabriel M. Goldstein (eds.), Printing the Talmud: From Bomberg to Schottenstein (New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 2005), 61-78, at p. 68.

Benjamin Hirschman (ed.), Massekhet kiddushin im shinnuyyei nusseha’ot mi-tokh kitvei-ha-yad shel ha-talmud u-defusim rishonim..., vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Mekhon ha-Talmud ha-Yisre’eli ha-Shalem, 2012), 36-39.

Shimon Iakerson, Catalogue of Hebrew Incunabula from the Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, vol. 1 (New York; Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2004), xlv n. 151.

Dovid Kamenetsky, “Talmud bavli, defus kushta,” Yeshurun 27 (2012): 845-854.

Meron Bialik Lerner, “Ma‘asiyyot ketu‘ot: shihzur shel sippur katua bi-serid ha-genizah shel midrash aseret ha-dibberot ve-nusseho ha-kadum ba-bavli,” in Joshua Levinson, Jacob Elbaum, and Galit Hasan-Rokem (eds.), Higgayon le-yonah: hebbetim hadashim be-heker sifrut ha-midrash, ha-aggadah ve-ha-piyyut: kovets mehkarim li-kevodo shel profesor yonah fraenkel bi-melot lo shiv‘im ve-hamesh shanim (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006), 377-402, at p. 401 n. 116.

Israel Mehlman, “Ha-defus ha-ivri be-kushta me-et avraham ya‘ari (he‘arot ve-tosafot),” Kiryat sefer 43,4 (September 1968): 577-581, at p. 579 (no. 1), available at: https://benyehuda.org/read/14630.

Raphael Nathan Note Rabbinovicz, Ma’amar al hadpasat ha-talmud (Munich, 1877), 6-7 n. 2.

Isaac Mayer Traube, “Mehkarim be-massekhet kiddushin le-or ha-girsa’ot be-kitvei yad ve-rishonim” (Ph.D. diss., Yeshiva University, 1975), 2 (English), 10-23 (Hebrew).

Isaac Yudlov and G.J. Ormann, Sefer ginzei yisraʼel: sefarim, hoverot, va-alonim me-osef dr. yisraʼel mehlman, asher be-beit ha-sefarim ha-leʼummi ve-ha-universitaʼi (Jerusalem: JNUL, 1984), 41 (no. 141), 42 (no. 143).

Isaac Yudlov, “Tosafot hadashim le-massekhet yoma: defus kushta,” Tsefunot 1,3 (1989): 8-14.

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