SEDER PIDYON HA-BEN (ORDER OF THE REDEMPTION OF THE FIRSTBORN), SCRIBE: SAMUEL BEN ABRAHAM COHEN SOFER, [AMSTERDAM]: 1806

An elegant pocket-size pidyon ha-ben liturgy and registry.

Jewish law requires that the firstborn son of a Jewish woman of non-priestly or Levitical lineage be redeemed (Num. 18:15-16). On the thirty-first day of his life, he is brought by his parents to a kohen, who is given the equivalent of 5 biblical sela‘im (here, either 3 rijksdaalders or 7 guilders, 10 stuivers) in exchange for the child. The present manuscript, commissioned by a kohen, includes the text of the blessings recited by the father of the child and the kohen, as well as that of the birkat ha-mazon (grace after meals) said after the festive meal that follows the pidyon ha-ben ceremony. The scribe, himself a kohen, is known to have produced at least two other manuscripts in the Netherlands toward the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Two interesting features of this work are the inclusion of a blessing (mekaddesh bekhorei yisra’el le-pidyonam) found in the responsa of the ge’onim and other sources but not generally recited in Ashkenazic communities (She’elot u-teshuvot ha-rosh 49:1), as well as the instruction that the kohen ask the mother (not the father) to verify that the child is her firstborn. A list of names appended at the rear of the volume gives the Hebrew and Gregorian dates, from 1831 to 1885, on which fifteen firstborns were redeemed.

Provenance

Ber ben Isaac Cohen Kampen (f. 1r)

Literature

Lajb Fuks and Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew and Judaic Manuscripts in Amsterdam Public Collections, vol. 1 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973), 160 (no. 355), 230-231 (no. 516).

Evi Michels, Jiddische Handschriften der Niederlande (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2013), 262-265 (no. 61).