Auction 1 - Rare Hebrew Books, Manuscripts & Rabbinic Letters
Lot 25:
Description
Masechet Keritot, with Rashi and Tosafot. Venice: Daniel Bomberg, 1522. First edition.
The first printing of Masechet Keritot, issued as part of Daniel Bomberg’s celebrated first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud. Unlike a number of tractates that had already passed through the presses of Soncino and other early printers, Keritot had apparently never before been printed. Until this volume appeared in Elul 1522, the tractate remained dependent upon manuscript copies. Bomberg’s editors themselves acknowledged the particular difficulty presented by the less commonly studied tractates, where reliable exemplars could be difficult to obtain. The present volume thus captures quite literally the moment Masechet Keritot passed from manuscript transmission into print.
And what exactly passed into print was not always straightforward. The commentary printed here, as ever since, under the familiar heading פירוש רש״י, has long raised questions of attribution, with its authorship disputed in the scholarly literature. The manuscript history is equally elusive. A manuscript of the commentary known to earlier scholars was lost in the Turin library fire of 1904, while another incomplete witness survives today. Precisely which exemplar stood before Bomberg’s editors in 1522 has not, so far as we can determine, been established. It is one of the small mysteries hiding behind an otherwise immediately familiar page of Gemara.
The text established in this first printing has itself remained of interest. Modern critical study of Keritot has cautiously treated the 1522 Bomberg edition as a witness to the tractate’s textual history, comparing its readings and errors with surviving manuscripts and placing it within the complex transmission of the prevalent Ashkenazic textual tradition. This is particularly fitting for a tractate whose early printers had already complained of the scarcity and imperfect state of the manuscript copies available to them.
Bomberg’s first Talmud, printed between 1520 and 1523, would become the great typographical model for subsequent editions of the Shas, fixing in print much of the page architecture and foliation that remain familiar today. When the present Keritot left the press in 1522, that achievement was still underway: the first complete printed Babylonian Talmud was, quite literally, still being made.
Complete, 28 folios. Clean, printed on thick paper, characteristic of the handsome production of the early Bomberg press. Some staining to the lower corners of several leaves. Handsomely rebound in full brown leather, boards with blind-tooled concentric borders; raised bands and gilt Hebrew title and ornaments to spine.
References: Rabinowitz, Ma’amar al Hadpasat ha-Talmud (1952) p. 41; Rosenthal, Masekhet Keritot (2003) 85; Shvat, Shinuyei Nuscha’ot be-Masekhet Keritot (1990).
Provenance: The distinguished library of Mr. Marvin Shick, a prominent scholar, communal figure, and discerning collector whose library reflected a lifetime of dedication to classical Jewish learning and heritage.
Opening Price: $15,000
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