Job, Five Scrolls, Daniel, and Ezra-Nehemiah with Commentaries, [Naples: Joseph ben Jacob Ashkenazi Gunzenhauser, 1487]

Job, Five Scrolls, Daniel, and Ezra-Nehemiah with Commentaries, [Naples: Joseph ben Jacob Ashkenazi Gunzenhauser, 1487]

In about 1486, a German Jewish immigrant named Joseph Gunzenhauser (d. 1490) entered into a printing partnership in Naples, a center of the contemporary book trade. The following year, his press issued three works in rapid succession: Psalms with the commentary of Rabbi David Kimhi (Radak), Proverbs with the commentary of Rabbi Immanuel ben Solomon of Rome, and the present title, containing the rest of the books of the Ketuvim (Hagiographa) with one commentary each (some printed here for the first time): Job with that of Rabbi Levi ben Gerson (Ralbag or Gersonides), Lamentations with that of Rabbi Joseph Kara, and the Song of Songs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and I-II Chronicles with that of (or attributed to) Rashi. In doing so, Gunzenhauser brought to a close a process, set in motion in Bologna in 1482 and continued in Soncino in 1486, of printing each book of the Hebrew Bible with at least one commentary.

The illustrated initial word panel that opens the book of Job in the present volume was most likely the work of Gunzenhauser’s brother-in-law, Moses ben Isaac. It is identical with others that appear in works printed at the Gunzenhauser press, including the 1489 Hovot ha-levavot, which mentions Moses ben Isaac in a lengthy epigraph.

Gunzenhauser the businessman arranged each book to fit into a whole number of quires, thus facilitating their separation into distinct volumes, as has occurred here: Chronicles had apparently already been removed by the time the book was cataloged and signed by Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi (1742-1831), the great Italian Christian Hebraist scholar and bookseller whose collection of Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books today forms an integral part of the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma.

Provenance

[Giovanni Bernardo] De Rossi (front flyleaf)

Physical Description

110 folios (10 1/2 x 7 3/4 in.; 265 x 196 mm) (collation: i-vi8, i8, i10, i-iv8, v12) on paper (ff. 49r, 56v, 66v, 110v blank); modern foliation in pencil in upper-outer corner of rectos; first three signatures numbered 29, 30, 31 in pen; cantillation signs added in pen on ff. 5r-13r; marginalia, corrections, and strikethroughs added in a premodern Italian hand in pen on ff. 6v-7r, 8v-9v, 12v, 16r, 74v; modern marginal pencil notation of the start of Nehemiah on f. 100r. Enlarged initial word panels filled with scrollwork on ff. 2r, 49v. Slight scattered staining; some dampstaining; small holes in outer margins of ff. 1, 110; tape repairs in lower margins of ff. 1, 66, 91, in gutter at head of ff. 2-4, and in upper margins of ff. 43, 110; tears in lower margins of ff. 27, 79-80 and in outer edge of f. 93; minor worming in upper-outer edges of ff. 42-48, in gutter at head of ff. 74-110, and in gutter at foot of ff. 102-110. Nineteenth-century(?) pink leather over board, scratched and worn around edges; gilt-tooled spine, slightly wormed, headband exposed, and upper and lower joints starting; title, place, and date in gilt on annexed blue lettering piece; nineteenth-century paper flyleaves and pastedowns.

Literature

Aron Freimann and Moses Marx, Otsar li-melekhet ha-defus ha-ivri ha-rishonah ba-meʼah ha-hamesh esreh (Jerusalem: The Universitas-Booksellers, 1968), 130-131 (A59).

Frederick R. Goff, Incunabula in America Libraries: A Third Census of Fifteenth-Century Books Recorded in North American Collections (Milwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1989), 318 (Heb-26).

Shimon Iakerson, Catalogue of Hebrew Incunabula from the Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, vol. 1 (New York; Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2004), 181-185 (no. 46).

Adri K. Offenberg with C. Moed-Van Walraven, Hebrew Incunabula in Public Collections: A First International Census (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf Publishers, 1990), 60-61 (no. 46).

Vinograd, Naples 2

Isaac Yudlov and G. J. Ormann, Sefer ginzei yisraʼel: sefarim, hoverot, va-alonim me-osef dr. yisraʼel mehlman, asher be-beit ha-sefarim ha-leʼummi ve-ha-universitaʼi (Jerusalem: JNUL, 1984), 22 (no. 24).

Isaac Yudlov, “Te‘udah bi-devar mekhirat sifrei inkunabulah be-napoli ba-me’ah ha-hamesh-esreh,” Asufot 10 (1997): 71-109, esp. p. 80 (no. 3).