Auction 1 - Rare Hebrew Books, Manuscripts & Rabbinic Letters
Lot 13:
Description
The celebrated Torah commentary of R. Levi ben Gershom (Ralbag; 1288–1344), the great Provençal exegete, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. Ralbag proceeds through the Biblical text with characteristic independence, concluding its sections with the תועלות, the philosophical, ethical and practical lessons to be drawn from the narrative, a feature which became one of the signatures of his commentary.
The work had an unusually turbulent beginning in print. Its first edition, produced by Abraham Conat in Mantua around 1474–1476, encountered the fierce opposition of R. Judah Messer Leon, himself one of the leading rabbinic and philosophical figures of Renaissance Italy. Messer Leon considered certain of Ralbag’s theological positions heretical and sought to prevent the commentary from circulating. R. Benjamin Montalcino of Florence came to Ralbag’s defense, and the controversy spread among the Italian rabbinate. Conat nevertheless proceeded with the edition. Some seventy years later, Ralbag’s commentary returned to an Italian press on a considerably different scale, issued in the present substantial folio by Daniel Bomberg, whose name had by then become virtually synonymous with the great Hebrew books of Renaissance Venice. The Messer Leon controversy and Montalcino’s intervention are documented in modern scholarship.
The printers permitted themselves a fitting play on words on the title page, adapting the Biblical הואיל משה באר את התורה הזאת לאמר to read הואיל רבי לוי באר את התורה הזאת לאמר, with R. Levi now undertaking to expound the Torah. The volume was produced for Bomberg by Cornelio Adelkind, one of the accomplished craftsmen of the Bomberg press, who identifies himself in the colophon as צעיר המחוקקים קורנילייו אדיל קינד לבית הלוי.
An imposing Venetian edition of a commentary which, from its earliest appearance in print, had occupied an uneasy but enduring place at the intersection of traditional Biblical exegesis and medieval Jewish philosophy.
The colophon on fol. 248a includes a poem in honor of the author and of the printer Cornelio Adelkind. This copy is signed on the title-page by יעקב לוי בר ישראל, dated 1847; the name יעקב לוי appears again in the margin of fol. 167a. Numerous pencil marginal annotations appear throughout. Modern leather binding. Attractive copy, free of holes or restoration
References: Rabinowitz, The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow (1983); Simonsohn, History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua (1977) pp. 626–627.
Provenance: The collection of Abraham Lieberman, Flatbush, Brooklyn NY
Opening Price: $1000
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