Sacred Splendor: Judaica from the Arthur and Gitel Marx Collection
Sacred Splendor: Judaica from the Arthur and Gitel Marx Collection
SEFER HE-ARUKH (TALMUDIC DICTIONARY), RABBI NATHAN BEN JEHIEL, PESARO: GERSHOM SONCINO, 1517
Auction Closed
November 20, 08:47 PM GMT
Estimate
7,000 - 10,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
SEFER HE-ARUKH (TALMUDIC DICTIONARY), RABBI NATHAN BEN JEHIEL, PESARO: GERSHOM SONCINO, 1517
196 folios (12 1/4 x 7 7/8 in.; 310 x 202 mm) on paper. Woodcut floral border on title page enclosing poetic prayer and bibliographic information; intermittent marginalia; diagram filled in in pen on f. 27v; some manuscript pencil foliation corrections; numerous pen trials on final flyleaf. Scattered soiling and dampstaining; corners rounded; repairs to edges of ff. 1-7, including part of the border design on the title page; slight worming at various points, especially toward end, mostly affecting individual letters. Modern elaborately blind-tooled morocco; spine in eight compartments with raised bands; title, place, and date lettered in gilt in Hebrew and English on spine; modern paper flyleaves and pastedowns.
The second edition of the first Talmudic dictionary to achieve wide circulation.
Rabbi Nathan ben Jehiel (1035-ca. 1110), cohead (together with his two brothers) of the yeshiva in Rome, was a widely-respected Italian halakhic authority and an accomplished linguist. In the present work, completed in 1101, he explicates, in alphabetical order, the many difficult terms in the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, as well as in targumic and midrashic literature, often providing the pertinent etymology from Latin, Greek, Arabic, or Persian; in about six hundred cases, he glosses the term with its Judeo-Italian equivalent. R. Nathan’s detailed explanations contain material of historical and bibliographical value, including descriptions of rare Jewish customs and citations of otherwise-unknown passages from important works.
The title page of this book declares that it was printed “in the land of Italy.” Scholars have posited that this imprecise localization, which appears in several of Gershom’s imprints, may indicate that the peripatetic Soncino began this printing project “on the road” somewhere between Ortona and Rimini. The colophon, however, is more specific, stating that the work was completed in Pesaro.
Provenance
Zevi ben (?) (f. [1r])
Moses Samuel Shmelka Segel (ff. [1r], 2r)
Israel Isaac ben Hayyim Menahem Man (f. [1r])
Moses ben Nathaniel Kalman of Krakow, 1770 (f. [1r])
Phinehas ha-Levi Ish Horowitz (?) (ff. [1r], 2r, [196v])
Max Saul, Berlin (ff. 2r, 59r)
Literature
A.M. Habermann, Ha-madpisim benei soncino: toledoteihem u-reshimat ha-sefarim ha-ivrim she-nidpesu al yedeihem (Vienna: David Fraenkel, 1933), 56 (no. 63).
Marvin J. Heller, The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus, vol. 1 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), 104-105.
Chaim and Betzalel Stefansky, Sifrei yesod: sifrei ha-yesod shel ha-sifriyyah ha-yehudit ha-toranit (n.p.: Chaim and Betzalel Stefansky, 2019), 153 (no. 525).
Vinograd, Pesaro 44