Sefer Mitzvot Gadol (Great Book of the Commandments), Moses ben Jacob of Coucy, Venice: Daniel Bomberg, 1522

250 leaves, (11 1/2 x 8 1/4 in.; 293 x 210 mm) Complete; later foliation in pencil; divisional title f.91r; decorated initial word panels on ff.7v, 96r; occasional hebrew marginalia; ownership inscription on title page; owner's stamp on title page eradicated; censored by Laurentius Franguellus, 1579 and Luigi da Bologna, 1599, with censors' signatures on f.250v.  A few leaves lightly stained; a very clean copy; worming repaired. Early vellum on paper boards, spine in compartments on raised bands.

Baruch Avraham ben Vardimas Fayyuni and his brother Judah, 1568--Inscription on title page.

E. E. Urbach, Baalei ha-Tosafot, vol. 1, pp. 384-95; Isaiah Sonne, 'Excursions into History and Bibliography', Alexander Marx Jubilee Volume, ed. Saul Lieberman, New York 1950, Hebrew section, pp. 209-235; A.M. Habermann, The Printer Daniel Bomberg (Safed, 1978); Vinograd, Venice 66.

The author of this work, Rabbi Moses ben Jacob of Coucy is among the most distinguished of the Tosafists, the great legal scholars produced by French medieval Jewry during the 12-14th centuries. Rabbi Moses, who participated in the Paris Talmud debate of 1240, also traveled widely in France and Spain, exhorting the masses to renew their commitment to living according to Jewish law. His most lasting literary achievement however is the extensive and important work Sefer Mitzvot Gadol, also know by its acronym, SeMaG, based in large part on the work of Maimonides. Moses of Coucy, in applying a corrective to the lack of sources in the Mishneh Torah, fills his own work with copious citations from the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds and the various aggadic midrashim, as well as from the works of French and German rishonim. Another practical distinction between the Mishneh Torah and the SeMaG is the varied arrangement of the precepts, separating those applicable in our time from those which are not. 

Sometime in the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Daniel Bomberg, a devout Christian and scion of a successful merchant family, left his native Antwerp and settled in Venice. Within a few years he had obtained permission from both the Venetian Senate and the Pope to become the first publisher of Hebrey books in Venice. Over the course of the next forty years, Bomberg's press produced an amazing corpus of some 240 beautifully printed books including the Sefer Mitzvot Gadol of Rabbi Moses of Coucy. Much of his success must be attributed to his disregard of expense when it came to using only the highest quality papers and inks.