TA‘AM LE-MUSAF TIKKANTA SHABBAT (COMMENTARY ON THE SABBATH MUSAF PRAYER ACCORDING TO THE ROMANIOTE RITE), RABBI JOSEPH BEN ABRAHAM HA-KOHEN OF CORFU, VENICE: DANIEL ZANETTI, 1604

In the Middle Ages, Jews living in certain parts of the Byzantine Empire developed a distinctive prayer rite and customs termed “Romaniote.” While the practices of waves of immigrants from other parts of the Jewish world, particularly Spain and Portugal, began to displace Romaniote culture in the sixteenth century, pockets of these communities persisted in places like Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans.

Rabbi Joseph ben Abraham ha-Kohen of Corfu, a Greek island controlled at the time by the Republic of Venice, composed two works on parts of the Romaniote liturgy. The first, Mosha‘ot E-l, is a commentary on the hosha‘not poems recited on Sukkot, and the second, Ta‘am le-musaf tikkanta shabbat, is a commentary on the middle blessing of the Musaf prayer recited on the Sabbath. Both books were apparently originally sent to Constantinople, where the author’s son Elijah lived, and printed in Kuruçeşme at the press of Doña Reyna Nasi (see lot 237) in about 1598 before being reissued in Venice in 1604. The author writes in the introduction to the present edition that he completed the commentary in Safed but had to leave the Holy Land for Venice because the Kuruçeşme edition did not come out to his liking (indeed, it seems no copy of this printing has survived).

Literature

Marvin J. Heller, The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus, vol. 1 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 136-137.

Vinograd, Venice 972

Isaac Yudlov and G.J. Ormann, Sefer ginzei yisra’el: sefarim, hoverot, va-alonim me-osef dr. yisra’el mehlman, asher be-beit ha-sefarim ha-le’ummi ve-ha-universita’i (Jerusalem: JNUL, 1984), 103 (no. 608).