Sacred Splendor: Judaica from the Arthur and Gitel Marx Collection

SMALL TORAH SCROLL WITH SILVER GARNITURE, [EASTERN EUROPE: 19TH CENTURY]

Auction Closed

November 20, 08:47 PM GMT

Estimate

50,000 - 70,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

SMALL TORAH SCROLL WITH SILVER GARNITURE, [EASTERN EUROPE: 19TH CENTURY]

Scroll of 45 membranes (approx. 7 in. x 54.4 ft.; approx. 177 mm x 16.6 m) made of parchment; written in Velish script in black ink on 264 columns with forty-two lines per column. Mounted on early-nineteenth-century wooden rollers with silver handles. Fitted with a parcel-gilt silver Torah Shield, formed as a tasseled drapery mantle, applied with The Tablets of the Law above a compartment containing four reversible silver-gilt portion plaques, all topped by an openwork parcel-gilt silver crown hung with bells and with bud finial, the silver unmarked, circa 1880-90, with a later pointer; one late-nineteenth-century German silver fitted Torah shield with ermine background, engraved Tablets of the Law, and engraved initials J.L.; one later silver Torah pointer with bellflowers; one embroidered nineteenth-century crimson velvet Torah mantle initialed J.L. within a Star of David surmounted by a crown, with gold braid trimmings; and one modern crimson silk Torah binder.

The present scroll was executed by a master scribe with a clear, bold hand and exceptional aesthetic sensibility. He laid out the text with considerations of symmetry and proportion in mind, even as he attempted to achieve two seemingly contradictory goals: starting each column (with specific, customarily-mandated exceptions) with the conjunctive letter vav, a feature known as vavei ha-ammudim (lit., the hooks of the columns; see Ex. 38:10), and ending each column with the last word of a verse. (Many Yemenites and some Sephardim similarly try to end each column in this way.) While the finished product did not perfectly follow these two guiding principles (see Num. 1; Deut. 1:1, 32:22), the effort itself is both remarkable and visually striking.

According to accompanying documentation, this Torah belonged to Emmo (Emanuel) Lipmann (1839-1897), a Breslau-based businessman who bequeathed it to his son Otto (1880-1933), an important educational and occupational psychologist in Weimar Germany who dedicated much of his energy to the operation of the Institut für angewandte Psychologie und psychologische Sammelforschung in Berlin.