Auction 1 - Rare Hebrew Books, Manuscripts & Rabbinic Letters
Lot 4:
Description
The halakhic legacy of Moroccan Jewry survived largely in manuscript. For centuries, the rulings of the great rabbinic courts of Fez, Meknes, and Marrakesh circulated as handwritten copies prepared and recopied by successive generations of judges and scholars rather than as printed books. These working compilations of piske din and responsa were continually expanded, excerpted, and reorganized, preserving the practical jurisprudence of Morocco’s foremost authorities long before only portions of this literature reached print.
The present manuscript is organized into distinct collections devoted to individual authorities. One section, headed “ketsat piskei dinim me-harav haMashbir,” assembles rulings of Rabbi Moshe Berdugo (c. 1679–1730) and Rabbi Yaakov ibn Tzur (1673-1752). R. Berdugo, the famed Mashbir, was Aav beit din of Meknes and one of Morocco’s greatest halakhic decisors. His rulings circulated widely in manuscript. R. ibn Tzur was the celebrated Ya’avetz of Fez, whose responsa likewise enjoyed extensive manuscript circulation before reaching print (Mishpat U’tzedakah BeYaakov, Alexandria 1894). Even after publication, manuscript compilations continued to preserve rulings omitted from printed editions, alternate textual traditions, and practical decisions copied directly from communal court records. Much of the material in this section of the manuscript corresponds to the corpus later published by Rabbi Avraham Coriat in his responsa Zechut Avot (Pisa, 1817, 48b). Significantly, Coriat introduces these rulings with the note that they were “collected from my grandfather’s [R. Yehudah Coriat] manuscript” (ליקוטי דינים מכ״י מז״ה זלה״ה), demonstrating that they derived from an earlier manuscript archive. The present volume thus preserves another witness to that same textual tradition, and likely represents an independent branch of its transmission.
A second section, entitled “ketsat hiddueshei dinim me-harav… Shlomo Amar,” contains the rulings of Rabbi Shlomo ben Avraham Amar (d. 1735), Av beit din of Marrakesh. The esteem in which Rabbi Shlomo Amar was held also as a kabbalist is reflected in a tradition preserved by the Chida. Following a kabbalistic dispute between Rabbi Amar and Rabbi Avraham Azulai of Marrakesh, one of the era’s leading scholars, Rabbi Azulai was informed in a dream that “מה שפירש מהר״ש – הענין אמת בחכמת הקבלה.” The rulings in this section closely parallel the material published in the modern edition Torat Marrakesh (2022), itself reconstructed from numerous dispersed manuscripts, primarily from the manuscript collection of R. Makhluf Ohayon. Their presence here illustrates how Rabbi Amar’s jurisprudence circulated for nearly three centuries, not in a printed responsa volume which was only first brought to much later (Divrei Moshe, Meknes 1947), but through privately copied manuscript anthologies consulted by successive generations of Moroccan rabbis.
The final folio contains a collection of segulot and practical keme’ot, copied from earlier sources, preserving an additional layer of traditional folk-medicinal and protective lore transmitted alongside the manuscript’s primary text.
Written throughout in a handsome Maghrebi rabbinic cursive hand, the characteristic script of North African Hebrew manuscripts, the volume is more than a collection of legal rulings. It is a rare witness to the very process by which Moroccan halakhah was transmitted, studied, and preserved, documenting a living manuscript tradition that sustained the jurisprudence of Morocco’s leading rabbinic courts until the modern era.
20 folios (40 pages). Some corners and margins are neatly repaired, minor wormholes.
Opening price: $1000
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