Providencia de Dios con Ysrael (God’s Providence toward Israel), Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira, [Amsterdam, 18th century]

An elegantly executed copy of an influential work of theology and polemics.

Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira (ca. 1596-1660) settled around the age of twenty in Amsterdam, where he was eventually appointed a hakham and head of the local unified Sephardic community’s rabbinic court. He is perhaps best known as the teacher of Baruch Spinoza, whom he would later, in 1656, excommunicate on account of the latter’s heretical ideas. Morteira was the author of Giv‘at sha’ul, a selection of his sermons, as well as a number of responsa and apologetic essays.

Among the latter was his magnum opus, Tratado da Verdade da Lei de Moisés (Treatise on the Truth of the Law of Moses), a Portuguese work expounding on the nature of God’s Providence, defending the divine origin of the Hebrew Bible, and rejecting key aspects of Christian dogma. Tratado played an important role in Morteira’s campaign to rejudaize the reverted conversos of Amsterdam and also exerted a direct influence on Spinoza’s thought. A note written in an eighteenth-century hand on one of the front flyleaves of the autograph manuscript (Amsterdam, Ets Haim Bibliotheek, Ms. 48 A 09) explains that the book was eventually sent to Rabbi Moses Raphael d’Aguilar (ca. 1611-1679), who revised it and translated it into Spanish. It then circulated in manuscript for decades among Amsterdam’s Sephardic Jews in a number of different Spanish recensions, often under the title Providencia de Dios con Ysrael (or some variation thereon). Over thirty of these manuscripts are now housed in both public and private collections, and yet, all these centuries later, Providencia has yet to be printed (in Spanish) or translated into English in full. (An edition of the 429-folio Portuguese original appeared for the first time in 1988.)

The present lot is a copy of the second volume of Morteira’s Providencia, comprising chapters 48-71 (ff. 1r-248v), plus a table of contents (ff. 249r-252v). These passages contain critiques of the New Testament’s accounts of the events surrounding Jesus’ death; the theology behind the Eucharist, Trinity, and Incarnation; Christian interpretation of Hebrew Scripture; the New Testament’s lack of legislation regarding political, economic, and other matters; Calvinist teaching regarding observance of the Torah’s precepts; etc. The manuscript was acquired by David Solomon Sassoon on April 20, 1927, from an owner in Aden (presumably Elias Abraham Saadia Solomon Halfon).

Sotheby’s is grateful to Gregory B. Kaplan for providing information that aided in the cataloguing of this manuscript.

Physical Description

252 folios (9 7/8 x 7 3/8 in.; 250 x 190 mm) (collation: 3+ i¹², ii-iv¹⁰, v¹², vi-xxiv¹⁰, xxv¹⁴) on paper (first three and last seven folios blank); original foliation in pen in Arabic numerals in upper-outer corners of rectos (with mistakes, corrected on ff. 59-62, 247-248); written in elegant italic Latin script in brown ink; single-column text of eighteen lines per page; justification of lines via dilation or contraction of final letters, abbreviation, and hyphenation; horizontal catchwords in lower margins of versos; periodic marginal citations of biblical verses; table of contents of vol. 2 on ff. 249r-252v; episodic corrections (e.g., f. 150v) and an insertion (f. 125v) in primary hand. Slightly enlarged and somewhat flourished chapter titles and incipits; small decorative flourishes usually placed at close of chapters. Slight scattered staining (see outer edge of f. 17r); some foxing; ink episodically biting; short tears extending from gutters of ff. 32, 155, 179, 204, in lower edge of f. 89, and in outer edge of f. 97; slight worming in outer edges of ff. 115-150. Original marbled paper over cardboard, torn and worn; rebound in modern brown buckram, slightly worn; paper ticket with (faulty) title affixed to top of spine; shelf mark lettered in gilt at base of spine; modern paper flyleaves and pastedowns.

Literature

Lajb Fuks and Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew and Judaica Manuscripts in Amsterdam Public Collections, 2 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975), 1:128 (no. 276a), 129 (no. 278), 130-131 (nos. 280-281), 2:6-7 (no. 15), 84-86 (no. 176=pp. 229-230 [no. 423]), 91-92 (no. 187), 93-94 (no. 189), 95-96 (no. 193), 102-103 (no. 203), 103-104 (no. 205), 106 (no. 208), 115 (no. 224), 

Gregory B. Kaplan, The Origins of Democratic Zionism (New York: Routledge, 2019), 124-140.

Gregory B. Kaplan, “Converso Refugee Travel in the Treatises of Saul Levi Mortera (c. 1590-1660),” eHumanista 51 (2022): 551-561, available at: https://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/sitefiles/ehumanista/volume51/ehum51.kaplan.pdf.

Saul Levi Mortera, Tratado da Verdade da Lei de Moisés, ed. Herman P. Salomon (Coimbra: University of Coimbra, 1988). Translation of pp. 3-7 by Marvin Meital available at: https://www.posenlibrary.com/entry/tratado-de-la-verdad-de-la-ley-de-moseh-y-providencia-de-dios-con-su-pueblo-treatise-truth-law-moses.

Herman P. Salomon, “Saul Levi Mortera’s magnum opus,” in Treasures of Jewish Booklore (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20040823164205/http://cf.uba.uva.nl/nl/publicaties/treasures/text/t17.html.

David Solomon Sassoon, Ohel Dawid: Descriptive Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan Manuscripts in the Sassoon Library, London, vol. 2 ([Oxford]: Oxford University Press; London: Humphrey Milford, 1932), 1087 (no. 963).

Partial translation of Providencia by Gregory B. Kaplan available at: https://heskaamuna.org/morteiraheskatext.pdf.