Sacred Splendor: Judaica from the Arthur and Gitel Marx Collection

Sacred Splendor: Judaica from the Arthur and Gitel Marx Collection

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 16. SEFER AGUR (ASHKENAZIC HALAKHIC COMPENDIUM), RABBI JACOB LANDAU, [RIMINI]: [GERSHOM] SONCINO, [1525-1526].

SEFER AGUR (ASHKENAZIC HALAKHIC COMPENDIUM), RABBI JACOB LANDAU, [RIMINI]: [GERSHOM] SONCINO, [1525-1526]

Auction Closed

November 20, 08:47 PM GMT

Estimate

12,000 - 16,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

SEFER AGUR (ASHKENAZIC HALAKHIC COMPENDIUM), RABBI JACOB LANDAU, [RIMINI]: [GERSHOM] SONCINO, [1525-1526]


102 folios (8 1/4 x 6 1/8 in.; 209 x 154 mm) (collation: i-xxiv4, xxv6) on paper. Title within woodcut architectural frame; enlarged initial woodcut letters on f. [2r]; marginalia in pen, some of them lengthy. Slight scattered staining; some browning; occasional minor worming, usually repaired and usually not affecting text; f. [1] loose toward foot; library stamps removed from ff. [1r, 102v]; tear on f. [45] repaired. Modern elaborately blind-tooled calf; spine in five compartments with raised bands; title, place, and date lettered on spine; modern paper flyleaves and pastedowns.

Sefer agur is a concise halakhic compendium by Rabbi Jacob Landau, scion of a prominent German rabbinic family who resettled in Naples in 1487. There he worked for a time as a proofreader at the press of Joseph Gunzenhauser (see lot 1), whose son Azriel printed the first edition of Landau’s Sefer agur circa 1490. The work relies primarily on the Sefer arba‘ah turim of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher and follows the arrangement of that work. Prominent mention is made, however, of rulings by later Ashkenazic authorities, among them Rabbis Israel Isserlein, Jacob Weil, Joseph Colon, and the author’s father, Judah Landau. In the present edition, the text of Sefer agur proper is followed by a table of contents (ff. [87v-98r]), as well as Sefer hazon, a short composition on halakhic conundrums (ff. 99r-102r), absent in most surviving copies. The incunable edition of the work was the first book to contain haskamot (rabbinic approbations), and most of these have been reprinted in the present printing (f. [1v]). Rimini having only recently been brought back under the rule of the Papal States, it is no surprise that when Gershom Soncino elected to reprint the book in that city, his dating of the title page was rendered: “in the third year of our lord Pope Clement VII [Giulio de’ Medici],” i.e., 1526.


Literature

A.M. Habermann, Ha-madpisim benei soncino: toledoteihem u-reshimat ha-sefarim ha-ivrim she-nidpesu al yedeihem (Vienna: David Fraenkel, 1933), 63 (no. 77).


Marvin J. Heller, The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus, vol. 1 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), 180-181.


Chaim and Betzalel Stefansky, Sifrei yesod: sifrei ha-yesod shel ha-sifriyyah ha-yehudit ha-toranit (n.p.: Chaim and Betzalel Stefansky, 2019), 76 (no. 256).


Vinograd, Rimini 6