by Fabrizio Quaglia

This is the final post in a series of posts by Fabrizio Quaglia on his ongoing work collecting Footprints and other data from the collection of David Kaufmann, now at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. As Quaglia notes, the collection is multilayered, revealing libraries within libraries.

Abraham Berliner (1833-1915)

A copy of the very important work Sefer ha-Kuzari, Venice 1594 (Kaufmann B 351) – composed by the Spanish philosopher and poet Yehudah ha-Levi (1075-1141) – was owned by Abraham Berliner (1833-1915) immediately prior to Kaufmann. Berliner was selected in 1873 as professor of Jewish history and literature at the newly founded rabbinic seminary of Berlin, where he was also the first librarian. Berliner directed the important “Magazin für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur” (renamed later as “Magazin für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums”) in 1874-1893, and was author of many historical works resulting from his research in the archives and libraries of Europe and particularly of Italy. According to his cursive Ashkenazic Hebrew note in a worn violet ink, he sold his copy of Sefer ha-Kuzari in March-April 1879, likely to the young David Kaufmann, who would have signed with initials only. Kaufmann’s ownership notes are also written in violet ink, but his calligraphy is usually different, but the spelling of Berliner’s name with Yiddish vocalization seems a bit unusual.  [figure 1] This demonstrates a relationship between the two scholars: in 1884 Berliner reestablished the literary society Mekitse Nirdamim (originally created in 1861) in order to publish medieval Hebrew manuscripts with Kaufmann, and letters from Kaufmann to Berliner in the years 1884-1899 have been edited by the Austrian rabbi Ferdinand Rosenthal (1839-1921), Kaufmann’s brother-in-law (he married his sister Amalie, 1856 or 1857-1911) and one of his first biographers.

Incidentally, at the top of the title page of Sefer ha-Kuzari there is the cursive Hebrew signature of a Mosheh Shalom who bought it in 1652. In the Italian Jewry the surname Shalom became Salom. A Salom family, perhaps of Spanish origin, moved to Padua in the sixteenth century, where they held important positions within the Jewish community, and later in Venice as well. A branch of Saloms, however, remained in Padua, where in the seventeenth century they were silk merchants. A Mosheh Salom, son of Yitsḥak, called Moretto, married Mazaltov Aldaheb in Venice on 22 March 1624 , but the modest ketubbah, at the National Library of Israel, ms. Heb. 2° 901.139, seems to show a different signature of the groom as compared to the one on Kaufmann B 351.

Mordekhai Adelmann (1847-1922)

On 17 December 1895, Kaufmann  was at his parents’ house to celebrate the engagement party of his brother Ignác (Ignaz; 1859-1923) in his native Kojetín in Moravia. While there, he received the 1489 Lisbon Abudarham (Kaufmann B 1, missing) – a compilation of laws, customs, and commentary on the prayer book by the Spanish rabbi David Abudarham (fl. 1340) – brought to him from Jerusalem by his friend Mordekhai Adelmann (1847-1922), also known as Moritz Adelmann and Moritz Edelmann, born in Lithuania to an Orthodox Jewish family. Adelmann took an early interest in the Haśkalah movement, a fact which in the 1870s led him to Vienna in search of a broader education. He devoted much of his time to writing and editing articles for the Jewish press. In seeking of material, he scoured the European libraries looking for little-known Hebrew manuscripts to study and expound. At the same time, he founded the Lema’an Tsiyon Society of Frankfurt, a nationalist organization intended to support Jewish charitable institutions in Palestine. Later he lived for a few years in Paris. While he was studying manuscripts of the Vatican Library in 1878, M. Adelmann was commissioned by the Vatican to find ancient material in Iraq and Persia. This was a difficult challenge: he was once robbed while traveling on a boat on the Tigris near Basra. Finally, Adelmann settled in Jerusalem in 1881, working as a teacher in the German-Jewish Orphanage School and as a storekeeper, while he continued working tirelessly for the Lema’an Tsiyon Society to maintain and extend the Jewish settlement in Palestine, establishing hospitals and giving assistance to poor immigrants. M. Adelmann also helped to found, in 1892, a public library in Jerusalem called the Abarbanel Library, the first iteration of the Jewish National and University Library (now The National Library of Israel), when he was secretary and then president of the old Jerusalem Lodge. For decades Adelmann supplied D. Kaufmann with manuscripts he acquired in and out of Palestine from yeshivot (for instance in Hebron) as well as from private Jerusalemites, including material discovered in the Jerusalem genizot, and precious Yemenite manuscripts that he had bought from Jews immigrating from Yemen, like a collection of 18th-19th-century Seliḥot (ms. Kaufmann A 407), and a 17th-century Maḥzor of the North-African rite (ms. Kaufmann A 410). Some Yemenite mss. came from the collection of Moses Wilhelm Shapira of Jerusalem (1830-1884), a not always reliable antiquities dealer. Adelmann procured for Kaufmann several other books as well. In fact, his signature also shows up on the first part of Conciliator, Frankfurt 1632 (Kaufmann C 1069; first edition), a Spanish work reconciling discordant Bible passages that was meant for Christian scholars and clergymen as well as for a Sephardi audience of converso origin, written by the Amsterdam-resident rabbi Menasseh b. Yisraʼel (1604-1657).

At the top of p. 184 of the above-mentioned Kaufmann B 1, one can see a partially deleted 17th-century Italian note “Liuorno al s.[igno]r Solomon Racah”. Solomon Racah was a Jewish merchant of North-African origin, son of Massol/Massod/Massot Raccà/Racha/Racach. In 1707, Salomone moved to Genoa from Livorno with his brother Abramo and a servant (the name of a third brother, Jacob, is also known). Salomon and Abram managed a company importing a great variety of goods (e.g. Neapolitan silk pieces as well as saffron and bales of spun cotton from the Levant). Around 1710 he became one of the massari of the Jewish community of Genoa. Together with his brother Abram, he obtained an annual exemption from wearing the Jewish sign thanks to the utility of their activity for the Genoese economy following. Salomon lived in Genoa Until at least 1718 (in that year he was exempted again from wearing the badge). Salomon and Abram helped pay ransoms of Genoese captives in Egypt and the Barbary Coast.

Here is an example of the network of relationships that could intervene through middlemen in the commercial network and, in this case, ransom a prisoner. A document of 21 February 1712 noted that a certain Giovanni Battista Mazini, slave of a Turkish captain called “Yusuf Rais” son of a French renegade, was freed paying 387 “pezzi da otto” (Spanish silver coins), 305 of which were brought to Algiers by a Jew called Daniel Coen. Having certified the poverty of the redeemed, the Magistrato del Riscatto degli schiavi of Genoa paid the money advanced by D. Coen to Abram and Salomon Racah, appointed as attorneys of the firm David and Salamon Coen of Livorno. The Racah brothers operated their business, sometimes as agents and attorneys of other firms, also in Livorno, Naples, Venice, Tunisia, Alexandria, Cairo, and Belgium. In the 1720s and 1730s, Salomon Racah was the agent in Venice of the Livornese company managed by two Iberian Jews, Ergas and Silvera, for the selling in Venice of diamonds extracted from the famous Golconda mines in India. This was a kind of trade in which large sums of money could easily generate controversies on payments like those involving S. Racah and Jews living in Livorno and London. From the 1730s until his death on 15 October 1754, the wealthy philanthropist “Salomon Racach” lived in Venice, where he maintained a rabbinical academy and where he financially supported the kabbalist circle headed by Mosheh Ḥayyim Luzzatto (1707-1746) in Padua. After the death of his first wife, this Salomon married again in the Spring of 1738. It cannot, however, be certain that “Salomon Racach” is the Jew from Livorno who settled in Genoa many decades before. Since among the goods imported by Abram Racah in the years 1728-1735 there were some books, his brother Solomon could have received the Lisbon Abudarham as a result of this commerce.

This incunable was censored in 1619 by the converted Camillo Jaghel (1554-d. before 1624). This is a further demonstration of the extreme mobility of the Hebrew books and their owners: Lisbon, Italy (Emilia Romagna or Marche), Jerusalem, Kojetín and Budapest.

An unsafe path

Many book owners remain nothing more than a name written on a page, sometimes not even fully deciphered. A certain Italian Jew, Ya‘akov Gershon, on Purim 1668 owned the (incomplete) Kaufmann B 448, with the didactic poem Musar ha-sekhel be-melitsa, a work attributed to the Iraqi Hai b. Sherira Ga’on (939-1038), and the ethical marriage poem Kaʻarat kesef by the thirteenth-century French liturgical poet Yosef b. Ḥanan b. Natan Ezobi, printed in Venice in 1578. The probable surname or place of origin of Ya‘akov Gershon, even if it was indicated in his signature after his name, is not fully understandable because f. 2 is torn. Nor could the identity of the Italian Jew Yesha‘yah (Isaiah) be ascertained. He owned the influential Kevod Elohim Ferrara 1555 (Kaufmann B 342; only edition), a philosophical work about the differences between Judaism and Aristotelianism by the Spanish rabbi Yosef Ibn Shem Ṭov (ca. 1400 – ca. 1460). On the contrary, Leb Kalits signed in full Sefer Or Ḥadash printed in Amsterdam in 1671 (Kaufmann B 44; only edition) – a compilation of laws on blessings by the Polish kabbalist, Talmudist, and grammarian Ḥayyim Binyamin Ze’ev Boḵner (1609-1684) – but his identity is quite shrouded in mists.  From his handwriting one can deduce that he was a 19th-century Ashkenazi Jew. Likewise unknown is the man who inscribed the 17th-century Sephardic signature “Avraham son of honorable teacher Rabbi Yamak” (Yamaḵ ימך could also be read as Yamaq ימק) on the title page of the short elegiac Naḥalat Yaʻakov melitsot, Amsterdam 1652 (Kaufmann B 415; only edition) that the Polish Yaʻakov b. Naftali (fl. mid-17th cent.) wrote about the Chmielnicki pogroms of 1648-1649. On the upper left side of the title page of the above-mentioned Shelomoh bar Eli‘ezer ha-Levi’s `Avodat ha-Levi (the Kaufmann B 61 copy) is a cut off cursive Hebrew signature written in Sephardic script, perhaps 16th century, of a son of the honorable teacher Rabbi David Basa or Baqa, whose the first name is no longer decipherable. We can mention another copy of Sefer ha-zikhronot by S. Aboab (Kaufmann B 236) signed in a 17th-century Italian cursive Hebrew “Aḥim bnei Yosef Yiśra’el Rava z.l.” (“Brothers, sons of Yosef Yiśra’el Rava of blessed memory”). The family Rava (also Ravà) was in Tuscany around the end of the 13th-century, afterwards settled in Bologna, Padua, Verona, and Reggio Emilia where the Ravas in the 19th century managed an important trading house. The Ravas were also jurists, critics, historians, publicists, etc. However, since there is no indication of place, date, or a patronymic (regarding Yosef Yiśra’el) in this inscription, it is not possible to ascertain who the brothers who inherited Kaufmann B 236 were. The handwritten Lekeṭ Pe’ah, composed by a certain rabbi Eli‘ezer and copied in the 1560s, collecting homiletics and short Torah thoughts (allusions, acronyms and numerical values), seemingly bears at the bottom of first leaf the same inscription that is in Kaufmann B 236.

Other cases are more fortunate. It is, for example, very probable that the penciled inscription appearing on Seder Seliḥot, Sulzbach 1737 (Kaufmann B 610; only edition) referred to a known person, rabbi Moses Mannheimer, because he carried out his activity in that city. [figure 2] He was born in Worms on 4 October 1810 and died there on 21 July 1882. Son of David Mannheimer and Eva Durlach, he married Zipora Cahn. M. Mannheimer was an adherent of Wissenschaft des Judentums and a Reformist. He published religious textbooks and books on the history of Jews of his city, Judaism, synagogue music and persecutions of Jews in Medieval Germany, particularly in Worms. These are: in Frankfurt am Main, Die Juden in Worms. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden in den Rheingegenden (1842; a copy is in the Kaufmann Collection, shelf number D.384); in Darmstadt, Lehrbuch der israelitischen Religion (1866), Die Kunst und das deutsche Lied im israelitischen Cultus. Dem hiesigen Gesangsverein ⹂Harmonie” (Synagogenchor) am Gründungstage (10. August) seines 10jährigen Bestehens (1869), Die Judenverfolgungen in Speyer, Worms und Mainz im Jahre 1096 während des ersten Kreuzzuges. Aus einem in der Grossherzoglichen Hofbibliothek zu Darmstadt befindlichen alten hebräischen Manuscripte übertragen und mit historisch-kritischen Anmerkungen (1877; the following year Mannheimer published in Berlin the Hebrew text by Eli‘ezer b. Natan of Mainz, active 12th century), Das gebetbuch und der religionsunterricht (1881); in Magdeburg Der Mosaismus und das Aegypterthum in religiöser und politisch-socialer beziehung 1878 (the second edition was released in Darmstadt in 1891).

What it has been featured in this wandering tour through places and people are nothing more than postcards of a bigger route. You will find the complete records of 250 books with more bio-bibliographic details on their provenance in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Library OPAC, opac.mtak.hu/.