Benjamin Richler, “The Lost Manuscripts of the Library for Jewish Studies in Warsaw,” Studia Rosenthaliana, vol. 38-39 (2006): 360-383 (original) (raw)
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The Hebrew Collection of the Berlin State Library
European Judaism, 2008
The responsibility of this department includes to this day the acquisition and cataloguing of printed materials as well as manuscripts. The collection of printed rabbinical books, which was at the end of the nineteenth century one of the most important in Germany, must be considered as lost since the Second World War. 2 This collection was influenced and mainly catalogued by the famous researcher and bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907), who compiled a very useful subject-catalogue of the printed collection. This precious catalogue survived the war and is still used as an instrument to rebuild the collection, as an important bibliographic tool for rabbinica, too. Unlike the printed collection, the Hebrew manuscripts survived the war. The librarian in charge at the time, Max Weisweiler, decided to send all manuscripts west for safekeeping, rather than east to Silesia. Most of the manuscripts survived in the Abbey of Banz and the Abbey of Beuron, and were moved after the war to Tübingen University Library, where they formed the 'Tübinger Depot der Preussischen Staatsbibliothek'. After the war a new Oriental department was founded-first in Marburg-and then in West-Berlin, where in 1968 the new building of the Berlin State Library was opened. A small group of manuscripts remained in Berlin during the war for several reasons, for example the so-called Hebrew 'Erfurt Bible' could not be moved because of its size and weight. After the war this important manuscript was part of the Oriental manuscript holdings of the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in East-Berlin. 3
Description: The Old Jewish Library of Mainz was saved during World War II. The books were hidden in a coal cellar and survived in rather good condition. The collection of almost 5,500 volumes, among them rare Hebraica and manuscripts, is one of the very few libraries saved from the persecutions in Germany. In 1946, the books were brought to the newly founded university of Mainz. Most interesting is the reconstruction of the ownership of some of the books. Some of the books came from the private libraries of Rabbis and preachers of the Mainz community; most famous are Marcus Lehmann (1831-1890) and Siegmund Salfeld (1843-1926).The presentation will give an overview of the most precious volumes and the libraries history.
Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism 14, 1999
Undoubtedly one of the most fascinating areas of Judaic research, Jewish manuscripts, has experienced a remarkable renaissance. What the field has largely lacked, however, is professional publications to bring together researchers who, albeit in different specialist areas (history, philosophy, Kabbalah, bibliography, art history, comparative manuscript studies, paleography and codicology), all deal variously with Hebrew manuscripts. This desideratum of Judaic scholarship appears all the more reasonable when we look at the situation of the classical philologies which have a long tradition of specialist publications devoted exclusively to the study of Latin and Greek manuscripts. The authors of the collected eight articles show the perspectives and the possibilities of such a discourse based on Jewish manuscripts within Judaic Studies; moreover numerous tie-ins with disciplines relating to general Medieval and early modern history and culture can be developed.
2017
Textual studies have always depended on the discovery of new manuscripts. Oriental scholarship in Germany and Denmark in the late 18 th and early 19 th century, on which this article focuses, not only actively promoted the search for new sources, but also developed new tools to describe, date and localise manuscripts in order to put them at the disposal of textual scholars. One particularly intriguing figure in this context is Jacob Georg Christian Adler (1756-1834), who studied -and actually physically examined -an unprecedented range of Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic manuscripts as a young scholar, which he consulted during his travels to the main libraries of Europe. While on this peregrinatio academica, he documented his observations in a number of notebooks, none of which have hitherto attracted attention or even been discussed. These notebooks show a scholar at work and record his thoughts on the manuscripts he consulted, particularly on the repository of texts they contained and on their physical appearance. He drew upon this preliminary work later in a number of books that he published. Adler perceived both aspects as being intrinsically connected and, indeed, inseparable, much in contrast to later research, which degraded the study of the material embodiment of texts to a mere Hilfswissenschaft (ancillary discipline).
THE COLLECTION OF HEBREW PRINTED BOOKS IN THE ANTONIANA LIBRARY OF PADUA i A handwritten inventory exists of the Hebrew books in the Anto mana Library of Padua. This inventory, dated 22 May 1783, which is to be found in the Library itself, contains, despite its I,I1any errors, a complete list , with a few exceptions of the collection in its present form (1). The collection contains the Mishna, Talmud and the Codes of Jacob hen Asher, Moses of Couey, Maimonides and Joseph Karo. There are also numerous volumes of Responsa, many of which were written by Rabbis of Padua. From th� middle of the fifteenth century onwards, Jews, fleeing from the persecutions in Germany and France, found a re fuge in Italy. Padua, in particular, became a centre for these exiles. In the sixteenth century, the Rabbis of Padua such as Judah Minz and Meir Katzenbellen9gen were among the mosts outstanding of their time and indeed of all time. In fact the impact of their learning is felt today whe rever the study of the Talmud still flourishes. Under th ('i ir leadership, Jewish learning in Padua received an additional impetus. Yeshivahs (academies of Rabbinical learning) were founded and indeed the extra ordinary depth of Talmudic learning of the Yeshivahs of Padua has even led to their being compared to Volozhin, the famous Lithuanian Yeshivah of the nineteenth century. Thus it is not suprising to find a large number of works dealing with Jewish Law in this collection. The literary interests of another sector of the community, that of the Italian Jews, is also represented by the various works on Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. It is to be' remembered that the Jew, Elie del Meqigo, the translator of Aristotle, was himself from Padua and had taught Pico della Mirandola in that city. (1) The fhventory was compiled by P.M. Bonaventura Perissutti, the Director of the Library. In it, the refers to two books (numbers 51 and 77) which the Library no longer possesses.
In 1901 Professor Aron Freimann, then librarian at the University library in Frankfurt on the Main, gave a lecture at a conference of German philologists in Straßburg on hebrew incunabula primary and as well about incunabula from Portugal which belonged at that time to the collection of the library. Freimann gave an account of the printing on the Iberian Peninsula, starting with the Juan de Lucenas printing company, probably in 16th century specialized in printing prayer books, and ending with the printing companies in North Africa and Turkey. Freimann presumed, that the Hebrew printers took their woodblocks with them as their most valued possession, promulgating thereby the typography of Iberian Peninsula, which differed markedly from the italian style, south and eastward. Among the about 50 titles with sephardic woodblocks listed by Aron Freimann are Talmud editions as well as a great number of titles by famous authors such as Moses ben Maimon, Jakob ben Ascher, Moses ben Nachman. The incunabula described by Prof. Freimann came from different scholarly libraries and donations, so from the libraries Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild, Abraham Berliner or Abraham Merzbacher. In my lecture I will give an overview of the history, condition, layout and characteristics of this titles, which were printed in Faro, Guadaljara, Ixar (Hijar), Leiria, Lisbon and Zamora and later in North Africa and Turkey and explain their accessibility.