Kol Zimrah (Poem in Honor of the Wedding of Elijah and Mirele Norden), Isaac ben Elijah Hezekiah Cohen Belinfante, Amsterdam: Proops, 1773

An extremely rare occasional poem, printed on silk.

Eighteenth-century Amsterdam witnessed a type of golden age of Hebrew literary activity. Numerous rabbis and scholars affiliated with the Sephardic community’s beit midrash, Ets Haim, produced halakhic, historical, ethical, homiletical, belletristic, and especially poetic works of great renown and lasting importance. Poems were composed for a wide variety of occasions, including when individuals were honored in the synagogue, when doctors finished their medical training, when famous rabbis passed away, and when two families were joined together in matrimony. Marriage parties often featured the public recitation of these epithalamia (wedding poems), and beautifully produced copies of the texts were sometimes distributed to the guests.

The present lot is a pastoral epithalamium penned by Isaac ben Elijah Hezekiah Cohen Belinfante (ca. 1725-1780) for the nuptials of Elijah ben Leib Norden and Mirele bat Aaron Norden. The author, scion of a prominent line of Portuguese exiles, was a prolific editor, translator, publisher, book collector, bibliographer, sermonizer, historian, liturgist, and poet. His close friend Rabbi David Meldola wrote about him that he was “expert in grammar like Radak [Rabbi David Kimhi] and in ars poetica like [Rabbi Abraham] Ibn Ezra.” Indeed, in the introduction to Kol zimrah Belinfante mentions having been hired previously by the bridegroom’s father, Leib Norden, to compose poetry on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding—a reference to the work Ha-kolot yigdalun (1767) celebrating the marriage of Aryeh Leib ben Maharam Maarsen and Esther bat Leib Norden. Many other poems of his, in various genres, survive in print and in manuscript, as both standalone publications and as part of anthologies and larger works.

Hebrew occasional poems printed on silk are of great rarity. Only five other copies of the present title are known to exist, all in public institutions: the National Library of Israel (formerly Valmadonna, formerly Schocken, formerly Talmud Torah Ets Haim, Amsterdam), Library of the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, and Ets Haim-Livraria Montezinos (two copies). (All but the Ets Haim copies are printed on silk.) The present exemplar was procured by Salomon Jakob Florsheim (1893-1979), a banker and philanthropist who lived in Amsterdam before World War II. Like its owner, who began acquiring Judaica before the war, it survived the ravages of the Holocaust, testifying to the resilience of the spirit in the face of oppression.

Provenance

Salomon Jakob Florsheim (bookplate on pastedown of upper board)

Physical Description

5 folios (7 1/8 x 4 5/8 in.; 180 x 117 mm) printed on silk, with red-stained edges; final blank removed, leaving stub. Slight scattered staining. (Original?) red silk over board, worn at corners and along edges; silk pastedowns; torn paper ticket from an Amsterdam bookshop in lower-left corner of pastedown of upper-board. Housed in a modern blue folding case.

Literature

Jonathan N. Cohen, Hebraica and Judaica printed before 1900: Catalogue of the Jaap Meijer Collection (Amsterdam: The Library of the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, 1999), 44 (no. 70).

Hyman Gerson Enelow, “Isaac Belinfante: An Eighteenth Century Bibliophile,” in Studies in Jewish Bibliography and Related Subjects, in Memory of Abraham Solomon Freidus (1867-1923) (New York: The Alexander Kohut Memorial Foundation, 1929), 5-30.

Bernhard Friedberg, Beit eked sefarim, vol. 3, p. 893 (no. 326).

Zvi Malachi, “‘Pi ha-medabber’—yitshak ha-kohen belinfante: li-demuto shel meshorer, darshan u-motsi le-or be-amsterdam ba-me’ah ha-18,” in Be-no‘am siah: perakim mi-toledot sifrutenu (Lod: Mekhon Habermann le-Mehkerei Sifrut, 1983), 291-333, at p. 306.

David Sclar (ed.), Treasures of the Valmadonna Trust Library: A Catalogue of 15th-Century Books and Five Centuries of Deluxe Hebrew Printing (London and New York: Valmadonna Trust Library, 2011), 148 (no. 2).

Vinograd, Amsterdam 2029

Raphael Weiser and Yosef Kaplan (eds.), Me-otserot sifriyyat ets-hayyim / montezinos, trans. Michael Plotkin (Jerusalem: JNUL, 1980), 30 (no. 38).

https://www.nli.org.il/he/books/NNL_ALEPH001845823/NLI

https://www.geni.com/people/Salo-Fl%C3%B6rsheim/6000000056436468057