Zevah Pesah (Haggadah and Commentary), Isaac Abrabanel: Constantinople, 1505

Isaac ben Judah Abrabanel (1437-1508) was a noted statesman, biblical exegete, and philosopher who was among the tens of thousands of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. He was forced to wander throughout the region before arriving in late 1495 at the age of 58, in Monopoli, in the kingdom of Naples. Here Abrabanel set aside his other writings and began to compose Zevah Pesah.  In this commentary on the Passover haggadah, Abrabanel used the paradigm of the redemption of the Jews from Egypt to address his concerns with the calamities that had befallen his own generation of Spanish exiles. The commentary is lengthy, deep and thorough, but eminently readable. In his introductory remarks, Abrabanel poses 100 questions which he proposes to answer at length in his commentary. While many of his replies address the text directly, in many cases he holds forth on a subject at great length, even in the absence of a direct textual connection. The commentary thus became an important discourse in its own right. It has proven to be of enduring popularity, and has often been reprinted.

Zevah Pesah was brought to press and published together with Nahalat Avot (a commentary on the Ethics of the Fathers) and Rosh Amana (on the principles of the Jewish faith), all three being sold as a single unit (see lots 32, 33). Printed by David and Samuel ibn Nahmias, the three works share a single printer's colophon reporting that they were completed on Thursday, 9 Kislev, in the year 5266 (6 November 1505). There being no formal title pages, each of these works begins with a poem set within an ornamental border, written by the author's son, Judah Abrabanel, one of the foremost philosophers of the Renaissance, and perhaps better known by his Italian name, Leone Ebreo, and author of Dialoghi di Amore. The border was originally designed by Spanish silversmith Alfonso Fernandez de Cordova and used by early Jewish printers in Spain and Portugal before making its way to Constantinople and to the press of ibn Nahmias.