Map of the Land of Israel in Accordance with the Gaon of Vilna, Elijah ben Shelomo Zalman, [Vilna and] Warsaw: Peretz Feinroit [ca. 1828]

1 sheet (13 x 16 1/2 in.; 330 x 420 mm). Hand-colored; vertical and horizontal central creases with very small tear at junction; minor marginal tears.

Laor 886; Vinograd, Otzar Sifrei ha-Gra, pp.9 (#25, n.25), illust. p.293; Rehav (Buni) Rubin, Portraying the Land, Yad itzhak ben Zvi (2014), pp. 147-151 (Hebrew).

This extremely rare map, depicting the division of the Land of Israel among the twelve tribes is directly based upon the teachings of Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (1720-97), better known as the Vilna Gaon, one of the most influential Jewish thinkers since the Middle Ages. In addition to being the leading authority on the Torah and the Talmud of his day, he was recognized as an accomplished mathematician and astronomer and wrote prolifically, producing commentaries on numerous Jewish texts and subjects, as well as mathematical and scientific works. Although he never visited the Holy Land, more than 500 of his disciples moved to Palestine at his urging; this immigration is considered the beginning of the modern Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel.

The present map was created especially for inclusion in a multi-volume Hebrew Bible edition with the Vilna Gaon’s commentary, which was printed in 1838; it is based on the 1820 intaglio engraving by Dov Baer ben Yosef Juspa of Vilna. Rehav (Buni) Rubin, however, in his recent groundbreaking study of Hebrew maps of the Land of Israel, categorically asserts the artistic superiority of the present lithograph edition over the copperplate version of eight years earlier. The scarcity of this map is attested to by Yeshayahu Vinograd, who in his definitive bibliography of the Gaon, says that he was unable to locate even a single copy of the 1838 bible with the map still present, and the single loose copy held in the Eran Laor Hebrew map collection at the National Library of Israel, is defective.