Auction 1 - Rare Hebrew Books, Manuscripts & Rabbinic Letters
Lot 30:
Description
Long before Rabbi Moshe Provenzali’s responsa were gathered into printed volumes, they existed as individual letters, carried between the Jewish communities of Renaissance Italy, read by their recipients, copied by later scribes, and only gradually transformed into the literary corpus known today. The present leaf belongs to that earlier world. It preserves not merely the text of a responsum, but the original exchange from which it emerged.
Rabbi Moshe Provenzali (c. 1503–1576), Chief Rabbi of Mantua, stood among the foremost halakhic authorities of Renaissance Italy. Admired for the breadth of his learning as much as for the acuity of his legal decisions, he occupied a singular place within the vibrant intellectual culture of sixteenth-century Mantua, corresponding with leading rabbinic figures across Italy while addressing questions that ranged from communal governance to the most delicate matters of Jewish family law.
The letter was written by Rabbi Yosef ben Mattathias Treves of Savigliano, a member of the distinguished Treves rabbinic family whose generations of scholars served communities throughout northern Italy and beyond. As has been demonstrated, Treves himself participated in the celebrated Tamari–Venturozzo divorce controversy of the 1560s, siding with Provenzali in one of Renaissance Italy’s defining halakhic disputes concerning the laws of divorce. It is therefore particularly fitting that the present inquiry concerns another difficult question in the same field: the validity of a conditional get whose effectiveness depended upon the husband’s physical ability to consummate the stipulated condition.
The manuscript’s greatest significance, however, lies not only in its subject but in its textual history. The responsum was eventually published in Teshuvot Rabbi Moshe Provenzali (Jerusalem, 1989), where it was edited from later manuscript copies (Preface, pg. 9). The published edition begins with an already truncated version of the question. The present autograph preserves the question in full, restoring a portion of the original document otherwise lost in the manuscript tradition. It thus offers a rare glimpse into the process by which living correspondence evolved into the textual record preserved by later copyists and, centuries afterward, by modern editors.
Single folio, autograph manuscript in a contemporary Italian Hebrew cursive. Published in Teshuvot Rabbi Moshe Provenzali, I, no. 102, though the present manuscript the complete introductory salutation
Reference: Brüll, Das Geschlecht der Treves, Jahrbücher für jüdische Geschichte und Litteratur, I (1874), pp. 111–112; David, “Provençal, Moses ben Abraham,” EJ.
Condition: very good condition
Opening price: $8,000
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