An Esther Scroll Presented by the Ben Ish Hai to David Solomon Sassoon, [Baghdad, 1893]

An elegant, bespoke bar mitzvah gift.

The family of Solomon David Sassoon maintained a close relationship with Rabbi Joseph Hayyim, better known as the author of Sefer ben ish hai, for many years. The great sage of Baghdad and leader of Iraqi Jewry regularly made time in his busy schedule to correspond with Solomon David, Flora, Rachel, David Solomon, and Mozelle Sassoon. He even requested that Solomon David send photographs of Rachel and David Solomon so that he could add them to the other pictures he kept of members of the Sassoon family. 

In honor of David Solomon’s birth in 1880, R. Joseph Hayyim gifted the newborn a diamond ring and asked his father to make sure to request a set of tefillin (phylacteries) from him once the boy became a bar mitzvah. Indeed, around the time that auspicious day—6 Tevet 5654 (December 17, 1893)—arrived, David Solomon received from his father a pair of tefillin that had been written under R. Joseph Hayyim’s supervision, as well as a golden Star of David sent by the distinguished rabbi to celebrate the occasion.

The present lot is yet another item given by the Ben ish hai to David Solomon in advance of his thirteenth birthday. In his personal diary, Divrei david, Sassoon records that, in the fall of 1893, while he was in Mahabaleshwar, a town south of Bombay where the Sassoons maintained a home originally owned by David Solomon’s grandfather and to which they went each year to escape the heat, a gift arrived: “a personalized Esther scroll, in which each column ends with one letter from my name: David [ben] Sliman David Sassoon.” Given that the next major Jewish holiday after his bar mitzvah was Purim, this was a particularly appropriate present. It was only the second piece in Sassoon’s nascent Jewish and Samaritan manuscript collection, which would grow to number 1,274 items by the time he passed away in 1942.

Physical Description

Scroll (2 5/8 x approx. 100 3/8 in.; 67 x approx. 2552 mm) on parchment; text written in Baghdadi square script in black ink; arranged in 33 columns with 13 lines to a column on 11 membranes stitched together. Small hole in parchment before first text column; small loss of parchment in edge above first text column; minor staining in membranes 5, 8, 11. Tapered outer edge of membrane 1; mounted on a slightly soiled turned wooden roller inscribed on the shaft with the name of the owner (David Sliman David Sassoon) and the year of acquisition (5654). Housed in a cardboard cylinder with a removable top.

Literature

Abraham Ben-Yaacob, Perakim be-toledot yehudei bavel: korot anaf ehad mi-mishpahat sassoon ha-bagdadit, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Olam ha-Sefer ha-Torani, 1989), 1:142, 2:419-457.

Yaakov Moshe Hillel, Ben ish hai: toledotav, korot yamav u-morashto le-dorot shel rabbeinu ha-gadol … yosef hayyim (Jerusalem: Shalom LaAm Center, 2011), 103, 121-122, 331.

David Solomon Sassoon, Ohel Dawid: Descriptive Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan Manuscripts in the Sassoon Library, London, vol. 1 ([Oxford]: Oxford University Press; London: Humphrey Milford, 1932), 558 (no. 2).

David Solomon Sassoon, Divrei david, in Ben-Yaacob, Perakim be-toledot yehudei bavel, 2:651.

David Solomon and Nathan Solomon Sassoon (eds.), Nahalat avot: asufat genazim mi-beit mishpahat sassoon (Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, Yad Samuel Franco, 2007), 362-370.