By Natalija Gligorevic

This is the second of two blog posts from Natalija Gligorevic who worked with Footprints in spring 2025 as part of the First Experiences in Research program for first-year undergraduate students in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. 

As a part of my undergraduate research with Footprints, I analyzed an auction catalog (Judaica Books, Manuscripts, Works of Art and Pictures) from Christie’s Auction House in Amsterdam. The auction took place on December 19, 1990, and I noted the auctioned books that were published prior to 1800. While reading through the catalog, I noticed repeated inscriptions of a man named Solomon Dubno, four in total: three of them belonged to books by Naftali Herz Wessely and one by Nathan Hanover. The three Wessely books noted in the catalog that Dubno owned were Mikhtav sheni, Mikhtav shelishi, and Mikhtav revii, all bound together and published in Berlin in 1782 (no. 438 in catalog). The Hanover book that Dubno owned was Sefer yeven metsulah (no. 407 in catalog), published in 1727 in Brzeg Dolny, Poland.  

Zuzanna Krezmien’s 2019 dissertation, Shaping the Jewish Enlightenment: Solomon Dubno (1738-1813), an Eastern European Maskil helped me fill in the gaps of who Solomon Dubno was and the extent of his massive library. Originally born in Dubno, Poland, he relocated to Amsterdam and then to Berlin. During these relocations, his collection would grow as well as his influence on the Hasklalah (Jewish Enlightenment thought that spread through Europe) and on his fellow maskilim. Coming from a low-income background, it is assumed that Dubno either sold books or lent/rented out most of his books to support himself (Krzemien 64). Based on a booklist published by Dubno in 1771 and an auction catalogue that was published the year after his death, 1814, it is estimated that Dubno’s collection ranged around 2076 books and 106 manuscripts (Krzemien 63-64). 

The collection was overall very diverse, as it “encompasses disciplines such as liturgy (hagadot, maḥzorim, seliḥot, sidurim, teḥinot etc.), the Bible and its commentaries, halakhah (Talmud tractates with commentaries, novellae, responsa and collectanea), midrashic compilations, ethics, poetry, Kabbalah, grammar, philosophy, as well as belles-lettres, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and geography” (Krzemien 71). With a well-versed disciplinary range, along with his travels across Europe, Dubno became an influential figure. His mark can be seen across diverse works of Judaica, which explains the reappearance of his signatures on the books in the Christie’s Auction catalog. 

Although Dubno’s booklist unfortunately does not give indication of specific dates in which he received many of his books, it is assumed that many were given as gifts (Krzemien 87). Dubno’s copy of the 1727 edition of Nathan Hannover’s 17th-century chronicle of the Khmelnytsky massacres may have been a gift but Dubno may also have bought it at a Frankfurt book fair. According to Krzemien, book fairs were an incredibly popular way to circulate Judaica in the 18th century, particularly in Frankfurt where a large book convention was held twice a year (Krzemien 81). On the other hand, Naftali Hertz Wessely and Dubno moved in the same circles of the Berlin Haskalah centered around Moses Mendelssohn and it seems likely that these were gifts from the author to his colleague. 

I am inviting others to take on Dubno’s originally published book list and posthumous auction catalogue as a future Footprints project–combining this historical evidence with information about extant books with his signature. 

Source:

Krzemień, Zuzanna. “Shaping the Jewish Enlightenment: Solomon Dubno (1738–1813), an Eastern European Maskil.” PhD Thesis, University College London, 2019.  (later published by Academic Studies Press, 2023).   

 

Guest post by Dr. Noam Sienna, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Toronto.

Examining inscriptions in Sephardi script for the Footprints workshop at the Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, held in June 2025, revealed two volumes of Sefer ha-levush (Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Friedberg F0013 v.3-4) with a provenance connecting them to an important Moroccan Jewish family. The books, comprising the volumes Even ha-‘ezer and Hoshen mishpat of Mordekhai Jaffe’s halakhic compendium Sefer ha-levush, were printed in Venice in 1619 by Giovanni Cajon (whose name appears on the Hebrew portion of the title page), working at the press of Pietro and Lorenzo Bragadini.

The first handwritten inscription is an unfortunately-trimmed note recording that the books were acquired “as my portion … from the inheritance of R. Yosef … [for the sum of] 40 uqiyyot, 3 thamans [an eighth of an uqiyya], and four flus [a twelfth of a thaman].” Unfortunately the names of both the giver and the receiver have been cut away by an overzealous binder. But another note lower down on the page gives another owner’s name, Pinhas Toledano, and in the other volume, he recorded a lengthier inscription, with the same purchase sum, so it is likely that he was also the purchaser in the original inscription:

“A purchase of mine, to fulfill my desire, in the year May You REBUILD [5457 AM= 1697 CE] the walls of Jerusalem, for the sum of 40 uqiyyot, 3 thamans, and four flus, in the coinage of the sultan Mulay Isma‘il. I, the meek, Pinhas Toledano, son of Daniel of blessed memory.”

Finally, another inscription on the first volume confirms that the books stayed at least one more generation in the family:
“This [book] was my inheritance from my father of blessed memory — I, the meek servant of God, Meir Toledano.”

So who were these Toledanos? Toledano is one of the most significant names of the Sephardi diaspora — originating, as might be suspected, in the Spanish city of Toledo — and there are many branches of Toledanos spread across North Africa and the Ottoman Balkans. But luckily, these ones can be identified with precision, thanks to the reference to uqiyyot and Sultan Mulay Isma‘il which pinpoint the location of these footprints as having been written in 17th-century Morocco.

And indeed, among the Moroccan Toledanos, the bibliographer Yosef Bennaim records the following genealogy (in Malkhe rabanan, 1931):

1. Daniel b. Yosef Toledano II [ca. 1600-1688]: he was the friend and advisor of Ya‘aqov Sasportas [NES: and his father-in-law, since Sasportas was married to his daughter Rahel Toledano], and he came to his aid in the fight against the Sabbatean heresy. He was also one of the advisors to the king Mulay Isma‘il in Meknes.

2. [His son,] Pinhas b. Daniel Toledano. One of the sages of Meknes, who lived in the 17th century, and died in the year 1701. I saw a legal document in which [his cousin] Habib Toledano appointed Daniel Bahlul as guardian over the children of this Pinhas, and thus his sons, named Meir and Daniel, were still minors at this time; this document was dated Adar I 5461 [Feb-Mar 1701].

Bennaim also notes that Daniel’s grandfather (also named Daniel, ca. 1570-1640 CE) and his son Yosef “were among the [descendants of] exiles from Castile who settled in Fes, where Daniel was the head of a yeshiva… and [Yosef and his family] moved to live in Meknes in 1665 CE.”

This was a pivotal moment in Moroccan history. The 1660s saw the disintegration of the Sa‘adi dynasty after decades of chaos, and the rise of the ‘Alawis (who still rule Morocco today), beginning with Sultan Mulay Rashid (r. 1664–1672), followed by his half-brother Mulay Isma‘il (r. 1672–1727). The connection of the Toledano family to the court of Sultan Mulay Isma‘il is well-documented in European and Moroccan sources, showing that Daniel b. Yosef Toledano began as an advisor to Mulay Isma‘il in the 1660s, while he was a viceroy in Meknes. Following Mulay Isma‘il’s coronation in 1672, Daniel Toledano and several of his sons served not only as the sultan’s ministers, but also as negotiators (along with other Moroccan Jews, including members of the Maymaran and Benattar families) between the Moroccan government and the European nations of Spain, England, and the Netherlands (Hirschberg 1974).

For over a century, Moroccan sultans had relied on Jewish merchants to serve as translators, diplomats, and intermediaries with Christian Europe; these agents were known as tujjar al-sultan, “the merchants of the sultan,” and their work became especially important over the course of the seventeenth century (Schroeter 2002). The
first commercial treaty between a North African and a Christian European nation had been signed (between Morocco and the Netherlands) in 1608 through an embassy led by the Moroccan Jewish diplomat Samuel Pallache (ca. 1550-1616), and soon the Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian governments had all engaged numerous Jewish merchants as mediators and representatives to Christian nations (Garcia-Arenal &
Wiegers 2007). These agents are sometimes equated with the figure of the “Court Jew” in Europe, who fulfilled similar functions, but they had very different relationships to diplomatic power. As Erica Heinsen-Roach writes, comparing Dutch and North African attitudes to their Jewish colleagues (2019):

[Could] Jewish mediators be considered public ministers? … [One Dutch consul] spoke for all and expressed it most clearly: “Jews cannot send delegates because they no longer have a state.” As second-class citizens they could not represent European governments either. France, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire never appointed Jewish diplomats. They relied on so-called court Jews, men who rarely resided at court but who supplied rulers with loans and arms and acted as unofficial mediators between states—that is, they functioned outside official diplomatic channels. In contrast, Muslim rulers in the Mediterranean appointed Jewish merchants as agents for the same reason that European states relied on them in their capacity as court Jews.

Heinsen-Roach also observes that ransoming captives was an essential task of diplomatic agents on both sides (and one of the main sources of friction between European consuls and Maghribi representatives). In fact, we have quite a few accounts of the activity of members of Pinhas Toledano’s family from the time he was acquiring and inscribing his copies of the Levush! Between 1683-1685, two of Pinhas’ brothers, Yosef and Hayyim Toledano, along with their brother-in-law Ya‘aqov Sasportas, negotiated an important peace treaty between the Netherlands and Morocco (Hirschberg 1974). Yosef Toledano’s role in this treaty was celebrated in a commemorative poem by one of the foremost Sephardi Jewish poets of Amsterdam, Daniel Miguel Levi de Barrios.

Daniel Toledano’s children continued in the service of Mulay Isma‘il for several more decades. Hayyim Toledano is documented in the Mercure Gallant as visiting Amsterdam on another diplomatic mission in 1691 (Attal 1983), while in the summer of 1698, the Gazette de Paris reported that an unnamed son of Daniel Toledano was again in the Hague on behalf of Mulay Isma‘il with two important goals, namely, negotiating for weapons and ransoming captives:

The Hague, 12 June 1698
An Envoy of the King of Morocco, named Toledano — the son of the previous Envoy of this Prince — has recently arrived in this country. He made notice of his arrival to the States General, and then presented to them a  Memorandum, by which he demanded on behalf of his Master that they provide him with cannons, guns, lead, and ammunition, conforming to the last Treaty which he had made with them, and [notified them] that he would pay the cost of all those of [the Sultan’s] subjects who were enslaved in the States.

Perhaps the most fascinating source comes from two decades later: another Toledano (or perhaps the same one?) was sent by Mulay Isma‘il to Spain in 1717, but refused entry by a representative of the Spanish Inquisition, at which point the Sultan penned a  polite but firm letter to Philip V, King of Spain (as translated by Matar, 2009):

From the Sublime Commander in God Almighty, Isma‘il… to Philip the Fifth, the tyrant of Castile:

Know that before this hour, and a few days ago, we sent to the city of Cadiz a Jew of the Jews who serve us and perform for us some of our worldly duties. His name is Simon [sic] Toledano, and he was accompanied by six servants, also Jews. [We desired] that the aforementioned Jew should be permitted to travel for a specific number of days to finish the blessed duties we had assigned him. We thought that matter easy, uncomplicated, and unproblematic. But then it appeared to us from what [the governor] did that he could not grant that permission, and that if he could, he would have. The reason was that diwan [office] of yours, called the Inquisition…

As for the claim of the Inquisition that the company of the Jews will corrupt the belief of the common people — if that had been true, we would not have permitted them among us. For when a man chooses a religion for himself, nothing can corrupt it… Do you not know that in our blessed kingdom we have Christians and friars in churches and places where they perform their infidelity, as is their custom, in front of idols and crucifixes and everything else needed inside their churches—all of which is decried in our religion? But we have permitted them to worship because of the good will that your ancestors had shown. Therefore, we expect you to reciprocate and permit that dhimmi [i.e. Toledano] to enter the city of Cadiz, and stay there for two or three months until he completes the errands we have assigned him. Written on the 20th of Muharram, the beginning of the year 1129 [AH = 12 January 1717 CE].

Which Toledanos are these? According to Toledano family histories, Daniel b. Yosef Toledano had nine children, of which at least three are documented as Moroccan diplomatic agents in the years between 1680-1720: Moses (Moshe), Haym (Hayyim), and Joseph (Yosef). Nabil Matar wrote that Daniel Toledano was accompanied by his son Moses in 1698, and again in 1717, and considers the naming of the 1717 representative as “Simon” as a “scribal error.” Meanwhile, Fatima Rhorchi identifies the representative of 1717 as Joseph Toledano, who was also documented as being in the Hague in 1699.

In any case, the Toledano brother who owned our books, Pinhas, clearly died in 1701 (so he could not have been sent on the 1717 mission to Spain), and he himself is not recorded in any source as a merchant or agent of the sultan. But it is fascinating to note that his acquisition of these books is happening around the same time that his father and brothers were in Europe on repeated diplomatic missions. Was it through them that these books made their way from Italy to Morocco? In any case, Pinhas’ explicit mention in his inscription of “the coinage of the sultan Mulay Isma‘il” is a reminder of his family’s close ties to the sultan, and a rare illustration of the overlapping spheres of secular political influence and rabbinic Jewish authority in early modern Morocco —something also personified by Pinhas’ father Daniel, who, as Emily Gottreich points out, “saw to the consolidation of Moroccan Judaism by asserting his own authority [in opposing the Sabbatean movement], and linking it to Alawi authority [in his role as the sultan’s advisor]” (Gottreich 2013).

(As an aside: in this respect, it is astonishing to see that Daniel Bahlul was appointed as the legal guardian over Pinhas’ children, since Pinhas’ father was a vociferous anti-Sabbatean, while Daniel Bahlul was one of the most prominent of Moroccan Sabbateans in the 1660s and 1670s: Moyal 1984. But it seems that by 1701, the tensions had calmed enough for the Bahluls and Toledanos to integrate their families. As Gottreich writes, Moroccan rabbis were able “to control and ultimately assimilate the [Sabbatean] movement into normative Judaism without ever actually destroying it.”)

And how did his books — at least these two of them — get to Toronto? After Pinhas’ death (perhaps prematurely?) in 1701, they were inherited by his son Meir, whose script appears much cruder and tentatively written than his father’s elegant inscription; was he still a child at the time? Further details of Meir’s life are unknown. A Daniel b. Pinhas Toledano is mentioned in a legal document from Fes, dated 1709; this is probably the same as Meir’s brother of the same name, so perhaps they both moved from Meknes back to Fes. All we can say is that by a century or so later, the books had migrated from Morocco to Algeria, where they were acquired by the scholar Sa‘adya ‘Amur (ca. 1800-1888), the head of the rabbinic court of Algiers, who signed his name next to Toledano’s. Finally, in the second half of the 20th century, they were acquired by the noted Jewish book collector Albert Dov Friedberg, who donated them to the Fisher Library in 1996. Here, they will remain, not only as books on the shelf but as windows into the world of a Jewish family of “merchants of the sultan” in early modern Morocco.

Works Cited

• Attal, Robert. “Un ambassadeur juif du Maroc dans la synagogue d’Amsterdam en 1691.” Revue des études juives 142:3-4 (1983).
• Bennaim, Yosef. Malkhe rabanan. Jerusalem, 1931.
• Garcia-Arenal, Mercedes, and Gerald Wiegers. A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
• Gottreich, Emily Benichou. “Of Messiahs and Sultans: Shabbatai Zevi and Early Modernity in Morocco.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 12.2 (2013).
• Heinsen-Roach, Erica. Consuls and Captives : Dutch-North African Diplomacy in the Early Modern Mediterranean. University of Rochester Press, 2019.
• Hirschberg, Haim Zeev. A History of the Jews in North Africa. Leiden: Brill, 1974.
• Matar, Nabil. Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
• Moyal, Elie. Ha-tenu‘a ha-shabtait be-maroqo: toldoteha u-meqoroteha. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1984.
• Rhorchi, Fatima. “Court Jews and their Role as Dhimmis and Influential Agents of Moroccan Sultans.” In Significant Others: Aspects of Deviance and Difference in Premodern Court Cultures (eds. Zita Rohr and Jonathan Spangler), Routledge, 2021.
• Schroeter, Daniel. The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World. Stanford University Press, 2002.
• Toledano, Yaakov Tal. Ilan ha-yuhasin shel daniel toledano. Jerusalem, 1999.

In early June, Footprints brought together a group of scholars and graduate students at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for the latest installment of our ongoing series of paleography workshops and Footprints work. This year’s workshop was sponsored by the Fisher Library as part of their annual Fisher Summer Seminar Series, an ongoing series of hands-on workshops using their collections. For two days, the group received instruction on Ashkenazic and Sephardi/Mizrahi scripts and time to work in small groups on deciphering handwritten inscriptions in printed books in the Fisher’s collection.

This paleography workshop series reflects the commitment on the part of the Footprints co-project directors to training a cohort of scholars in the diverse paleographic traditions used by Jewish communities around the world. Professor Edward Fram of Ben Gurion University of the Negev and Dr. Noam Sienna, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, returned to the project to share their rare expertise. As exemplars of outstanding pedagogy, Professor Fram and Dr. Sienna equipped every participant with the tools to decipher even the most challenging scripts. Chaya Juni, a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, embraced what she described as “the human elements that made her think about her own handwriting,” and noted how much she had learned in such a short time. Albert Yang, a graduate student at the same university, reflected on one of Footprints’ most valuable aspects: its reliance on scholarly collaboration. The participants also heard from Jessica Lockhart and Stephanie J. Lahey of the Old Books New Science Lab at the University of Toronto, who spoke about multispectral imaging and its impacts for provenance research.

Participants left the workshop eager to use their new skills on local collections in Montreal, Cleveland, New York, Washington DC, and Jerusalem. Feedback focused on the importance of collaboration to this work, as well as excitement about the uncovering of previously hidden histories. Footprints has already published a post citing some of the findings by one group following their training, and more will be posted in the coming weeks. 

The Footprints co-directors, Marjorie Lehman (Jewish Theological Seminary), Michelle Margolis (Columbia University), Adam Shear (University of Pittsburgh), and Joshua Teplitsky (University of Pennsylvania) are indebted to Nadav Sharon, the Jewish Studies Librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for his outstanding work in organizing this workshop, along with David Fernandez, head of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Fisher Library. We are thankful for the support of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto, the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, the Hidden Stories Project of the University of Toronto, the University of Toronto Hillel, and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

We are likewise grateful to the great book collectors of the 20th century, Nancy and Albert D. Friedberg and Sarah and Rabbi Abraham Aron Price, who amassed incredible collections of Hebrew books and made them available for public use at the Fisher Rare Book Library.

Footprints co-directors thank all of our participants–Nathan Diena, Elaine Gold, Rachel Greenblatt, Jacquelyn Clements, Chaya Juni, David Lavenda, Louis (Chaim) Meiselman, Natalie Oeltgen, Jane Rothstein, Hannah Srour-Zackon, Patrick J. Stevens, David A. Wacks,  Dalia Wolfson, Albert Yang, and Erez Zobary–for their passionate commitment to the Footprints project and for inputting their data into the database.

by Jacquelyn Clements, Edward Fram, and Adam Shear  (participants in the workshop jointly sponsored by the Fisher Library and Footprints in Toronto in June 2025.) 

In 2024, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto acquired at auction two books published in Venice in the 1540s on different presses but bound together. One was Sefer Yosifon, the tenth-century Byzantine chronicle of Jewish history ascribed to Joseph ben Gurion, which was printed in 1544 on the press of Johann dei Farri under the guidance of Cornelius Adelkind. The second volume, Rabbi Israel Isserlein’s Be’urim `al perush Rashi, was published at the Guistiniani press the following year. Beyond the language and place of publication, the works are only connected in that these copies were bound together sometime in the early modern period..

This was not the first printing of Sefer Yosifon, which during the medieval and early modern period was generally thought to be based on, if not an adaptation of, the work of Josephus Flavius. The book appeared in Mantua in 1476 and again in Constantinople around 1510. Since the work dealt with the Second Temple period, it interested both Jews and Christians. Sebastian Münster published the Hebrew text, an explanatory introduction in Latin, and a Latin translation with notes under the title Iospehvs Hebraicvs in Basel in 1541. The title emphasizes contemporary perceptions of the book’s authorship.

The 1544 Hebrew printing of Sefer Yosifon exists in many other collections beyond Toronto. What makes the Toronto copy special are the footprints–the ownership markings and the marginalia.

 

Christian Reader(s) Read Yosifon

On the end sheet attached to the front cover is a note from a Jewish owner.

יונתן ב”ר שלמה הלוי קניתי זה הספר מגלח פו[פ]ן הויזן …וחצק

I, Yonatan (Jonathan) son of Mr. Solomon ha-Levi, bought this book from a galaḥ [priest or monk], (of?) the priests of Hausen… and [?].

Yonatan refers to a purchase from a previous owner (“galaḥ”) but alas does not provide more information about him. The plural “priests of Hausen” (poppen hoizen) could simply be a reference to the place of origin or residence of the priestly seller of the book. Yonatan did not provide any further information about the priest (or priests), however, the transfer of the book from Christian to Jewish hands was more than simply a matter of ownership. Previous Christian owners carefully studied this copy of Yosifon. (We surmise multiple Christian readers, perhaps in an institutional setting, due to different hands.) They added copious notes as they worked their way through the text with several Hebrew, Latin, and Greek texts in front of them (or in mind). The simplicity of some notations, such as those completing the ultimate letter of Hebrew words marked with an abbreviation mark (‘), should not lull contemporary readers into thinking that Hebrew was an almost insurmountable challenge for Christian readers. The Christian readers who annotated this text were meticulous, and even minutiae were noted. The Hebrew citations were written in clear square letters. The lack of any Hebrew semi-cursive letters almost certainly suggests Christian users (and most likely not converts from Judaism). Our Christian readers often connected their marginalia to the text using crosses. The annotators also used Latin abbreviations throughout to highlight and explicate key Hebrew phrases and to compare them with other editions of the text.

The transfer of ownership of this book, noted on the endpaper, brought Christian scholarship right into Jewish homes. While it is uncertain whether later Jewish owners appreciated or used this Christian learning, anyone who opened this volume had to be struck by the interest Christians took in this Hebrew book and the time and energy they devoted to glossing it.

The marginalia are worthy of scrutiny and further study. At least one Christian reader was not pleased with what he saw before him. The pagination of the first two folios has been crossed out. The Hebrew letter gimel, noting folio three, has been struck out and replaced with a square letter alef, re-paginating the book. Each Hebrew chapter number heading (e.g., pereq shelishi) has been replaced with the Latin Cap. followed by an Arabic numeral for the chapter number (e.g., Cap. 5). Readers struggled with the numbering, and at least one reader revised the Latin chapter division that had already been inserted. What was once Cap. 6 later became Cap. 10. New headings were also introduced, with Cap. 4 dividing what in the Hebrew text is chapter 3. The Hebrew running headers intended to remind readers of their place in the book were stricken to reflect these changes.

Christian readers tried to align this copy of the 1544 Hebrew text of Yosifon with Münster’s 1541 Hebrew text and translation. This posed an immediate problem because the 1544 Hebrew text includes material not found in Münster’s Hebrew text. The 1544 edition begins with Adam and his progeny (fol. 1a). Münster’s edition began with Darius the Mede and Cyrus the Great (Münster’s Hebrew text is not paginated). Münster mostly followed the first Hebrew edition printed in Mantua in 1476, but omitted the first three chapters (for a brief description of the different editions of the text, see The Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. Joseph ben Gurion). Lining up the early sections of the two versions was difficult. Things seem to have become clearer for the reader at the beginning of the Purim story that appears in chapter four of the 1544 Yosifon (fol. 15a). There a Christian reader crossed out Chapter 4 in the Hebrew (pereq revi`i) and wrote Liber secundi, Lib. 2. Cap. i., corresponding to Münster’s Book Two, Chapter 1, beginning on page 17 of his Latin translation. Differences in the texts continued to plague the redivision of the Venice edition, but the pattern was set.

The Venice text was read closely with Münster’s Hebrew, for there are numerous marginal notations to “Müns.” Some are relatively simple. For example, on fol. 11b, the reader noted: “Pro hoc Münster legit: וַיִיקַץ,” where the word ויקם appeared in the 1544 Hebrew text. Missing texts were pointed out (Defúnt haec), based on Münster. Generally, readers annotated the Venice copy in the margins, sometimes at great length. In one case (fol. 88), the notations were so lengthy that there was a need to continue them on a separate sheet bound into the volume after Isserlein’s work (pag. i). However, the page appears to have been cropped, indicating that the reader worked on this before it was inserted into the volume. The addition of this page and 65 blank additional folios, some of which have a single-headed eagle watermark, suggests that the Christian owner(s) who ordered the binding were in German lands and expected that readers would continue to comment on and/or gloss these works.

Christian readers of the Fisher Library copy of Yosifon went beyond Sebastian Münster’s text and translation. There are marginal references to biblical texts and a cross-reference to the Book of John 9.7 (fol. 130a) to help readers understand the phrase, “the waters of Shiloah.” “R. Salo.” (fol. 2a), presumably the important eleventh-century Jewish exegete Rashi, also appears. Indeed, the Hebrew רש”י is found in notes on fols. 2b, 13a, and 29a, the latter two making specific reference to Rashi’s comments on verses in Daniel. Jewish readers not in conversation with Christian scholars might have been surprised, if not shocked, to find that Christians not only knew of the important eleventh-century Jewish exegete but read him carefully. This interest in Rashi may help explain how Isserlein’s book on Rashi’s biblical commentary came to be bound with Yosifon. There are references to other works such as Isaac Vossii’s de [vera] ætate mundi, which was printed in 1659 (on fol. 18a), perhaps in a different hand than most notes in the volume. There is also a reference to Johannes Buxtorf’s De Synagoga Judaica (fol. 104b), perhaps in yet a different hand.

Münster was not the only translation consulted. David Kyberus’s Historia belli Judaici, a Latin translation of Josephus’s work, is also referenced (fol. 73a). (Kyberus’ Latin translation included the chapters from the Hebrew that were omitted by Münster.)  There is also a cross-reference to a “ver. Germ. pag. 332” (fol. 141b), presumably a German translation from the Latin version of Josephus. Such translations appeared in print already in the first half of the sixteenth century. Specific passages from the Greek and Latin versions of Josephus are referenced in a marginal note on folio 104b. The annotation includes a Greek word and a reference to a section of Lucian’s De morte Peregrini.

Christian annotation of the Toronto Yosifon peters out after about 20 folios, although the marking of chapters according to Münster’s volume continued. However, in the third book (fol. 30b), someone returned to an intensive reading of the text and continued to do so until folio 92. The combined work of these Christian scholars provides an example of how Christian Hebraists read and compared texts, while the “footprints” in this copy show how a Hebrew text moved into the Christian world and then returned to the Jewish community laden with different frames of reference.

 

When and Where?

Unfortunately, the first four folios of the Fisher Library’s copy of Sefer Yosifon, as well as the last four folios of Isserlein’s supercommentary on Rashi, are missing and have been carefully photo-reproduced from other copies by a recent owner of the volume. Thus, any ownership marks on the title page of Yosifon are lost to us. But the binding and some of the annotations offer us some suggestions.

A page at the front of the bound volume includes notes by one of the Christian readers on the authorship of Yosifon and, not surprisingly, a discussion of the so-called “Testimoniam Flavium,” a statement about Jesus attributed to Josephus and used by Christian polemicists in the Middle Ages as evidence of first-century Jewish recognition of Christ. One of the texts cited is a work by Johannes Andreas Bose (Bosius) (1626-1674) as “Exercitat. in periocham Fl. Josephis de Jesu Christo. Cap. 2, s[ection] 46.”  Our annotator gives no date for this work, which was first published in Jena in 1673. Another note on this page refers to Stephanus (or Étienne) le Moyne (1624-1689)’s Varia Sacra, volume 1, with the place (Leiden) and date of publication (1685) given. These references suggest that the work was still in Christian hands in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

It is not clear when the two books were bound together. The binding is in a typical sixteenth- or seventeenth-century German design with names, images, and floral decorations embossed on the front and back leather covers. Clearly visible are names and images of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Martin Luther, as well as Lucretia (about to thrust a dagger into her heart), Justice, and Philology.

 

The image of Luther, along with the predominance of Protestant theological works quoted in the annotations, makes it almost certain that the book was not just in Christian hands but in Lutheran (or possibly Reformed) hands. Our Jewish purchaser, Yonatan ha-Levi, uses a term “galaḥ” which derives from the shaved heads of monks, but it seems almost certain that the Christian cleric who sold him the book was not a monk.

As for geography, there are several places called “Hausen” in German lands, but our best guess is that it the Hausen that was on the outskirts of Frankfurt am Main as a later owner of the book, Elias Sussels, signed his name in both Hebrew and German and identified himself as living in Frankfurt. The Frankfurt book fair included not only the sale of newly printed books but a lively trade in used books and would have been a natural place for a Lutheran priest to sell a Hebrew book to a Jew. Why our Lutheran owner no longer needed or wanted the book is not clear.

When did this transaction take place and when did the book pass from the hands of Yonatan bar Shlomo Halevi to Elias Sussel?  Unfortunately, here too we can only make educated guesses. The earliest Yonatan could have bought the book was 1685 (the date of the work by Le Moyne cited in the notes of one of the Christian readers). Elias Sussel does not tell us he purchased the book from Yonatan but from someone named Joseph for certain number of batzen.. With at least one owner between Yonatan and Elias and with Elias’s interest in copying his name in Latin letters, we might place Elias in the late eighteenth century or early nineteenth century. However, we have not been able to find information about him in sources about Frankfurt Jews, such as Shlomo Ettlinger’s Ele toldot, a genealogical record of Frankfurt Jewry from the sixteenth until the first decades of the nineteenth century. We would be grateful for any information about Elias or the others who owned the book and will be pleased to update the footprints in the database accordingly.

Just as it seems that multiple Christian readers were interested in reading and annotating the book, it seems to have also interested multiple Jewish readers. An inscription below this tells us that Yoel ben Moses Hazan bought the book from Elias and then resold it to him later.

What about the second book bound with the Yosifon, Israel Isserlein’s Beurim `al perush Rashi? Isserlein was a prominent mid-fifteenth century Ashkenazic rabbi known both for his halakhic works and this supercommentary on Rashi, a sub-genre which engendered great interest through the sixteenth century. This Venice, 1545 printing was the second edition of the work, the first being that produced by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1519. The book was subsequently reprinted in Riva del Garda in 1562 and, again, as part of an edition of Rashi’s commentary in Venice (Zanetti) in 1566. While Christian readers were often interested in Rashi and other medieval rabbinic biblical commentators as a “telephone line” to the original Old Testament (in Beryl Smalley’s memorable phrasing), it does not seem that either the Christian readers of Yosifon or the later Jewish owners of the volume ultimately had much interest in Isserlein. The work is devoid of marginalia. The title page of the Fisher copy contains 3 inscriptions in Hebrew, none giving us much information about ownership or the relationship to the other book in the volume. One merely copies word for word the subtitle of the book and the authorship information. The second would be most promising as it appears to be the name of an owner but is rubbed out. The third note mentions the purchase and a price but no name:

קניתי זה הספר בעד [ה] ב”ץ

“I purchased this book for 5? batzen.”

One hint of a Christian hand lies in the hand-written Arabic numerals for the date of publication underneath the Hebrew year on the title page, “1544.”  This (Christian?) date-noter shows a relatively sophisticated understanding of the Hebrew year as the Hebrew date on the title page is 305 “according to the lesser reckoning,” a year that began in fall 1544 and continued through the end of summer 1545. The title page does not tell us when the printing took place during that year, and there is no printer’s colophon, which often gives a more precise date for the completion of the printing. So there is no way to really know whether the work was produced in late 1544 or early 1545. Perhaps our reader was also trying to find a connection through a common year of printing for the two books he found bound together?

There is much we don’t know about the history of this particular book (or more precisely this bound volume with copies of two imprints) and there is much more research that might be done here—on the owners of the books, for example, or a more in-depth analysis of the marginalia and annotations of the Christian readers. But attention to provenance and book use allows us to add this Fisher Library book to the relatively short list of book copies owned by Christians and then acquired by Jewish owners. Historians of the book have noted the many ways in which Jewish books and manuscripts have entered Christian collections in both early modern Europe and in the formation of major modern library collections from the nineteenth century on. Much remains to be discovered about movement in a different direction, from Christian hands to Jewish hands.

 

Post-Script (August 11)

The joy and power of sharing knowledge through this blog:

A reader of this blogpost suggested on social media that a more obvious reading of “Poppen hoizen” as the place of purchase from a Christian “galah” would be the town of Poppenhausen in the Fulda region of Hesse, about 120 kilometers northeast of Frankfurt am Main.

(There is also a Poppenhausen in Bavaria, in the district of Schweinfurt.)

Poppenhausen in Fulda had a small Jewish population in the early modern period, as Michael Mott describes in his article, “Zu Geschichte der Juden in Poppenhausen/Wasserkuppe,” Fuldaer Geschichtsblätter: Zeitschrift des Fuldaer Geschichtsvereins 97 (2021): 157-178.  A photograph of a gravestone from 1848 that Mott includes in his article (Figure 5, p.170) gives us what was likely the usual rendering of the town name in Hebrew characters in the mid-nineteenth century:

פאפענהיזען

This is indeed close to the spelling on the inscription in the Fisher Library book:

פופן הויזן

Thus, it may well be that Jonathan, son of Solomon Halevi, bought the book from a galah (priest or monk) of Poppenhausen and that Halevi brought the book to Frankfurt or that it ended up in Frankfurt later on when it came into possession of the Sussel family.   Moreover, Fulda was a Catholic region, and the Benedictine Fulda abbey (some 20 km from Poppenhausen) could have been the home of the “galah” who sold the book.

However, two issues cause us hesitation in accepting the identification of the place as Poppenhausen, Hesse (let alone Poppenhausen, Bavaria).  The first of these is the Catholic identity of Hesse, Fulda, and Poppenhausen.  The binding with images of Martin Luther and the large number of Protestant works cited by the Christian readers of the texts suggest a Lutheran setting, like Hausen.  There is, of course, the possibility, that when these two works were bound, they were in Protestant hands and then moved to Catholic ownership later. Just as books could move between Jews and Christians, so too could they move between Christian owners of different confessions.

Second, the space and the final nun at the end of “popen” in the Fisher library book led us to conclude that we were looking at two words, thus leading us to explore the colloquial term “poppen.”  We now enter some sensitive territory:  for speakers of modern German, this term is most associated with a slang verb for sexual intercourse; the noun also suggests the plural of “puppets.”  Why did we read it as “priests,” a carry-on from the previous word galah?  Although not very common, the word “pope,” derived from the Latin “popa,” does appear in various German literary contexts as “priest”, as attested by the Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch  (s.v. Pope.)  And פאפ can be found for priest in some Yiddish dictionaries (see Harvaky, English-Yiddish Dictionary, New York, circa 1891, for example).

Indeed, more research is needed, because we may well have made a different mistake in identifying this as a reference to a specific town or village. Could “popen hausen” simply be an early modern Ashkenazic expression for “house of priests,” i.e. a monastery?

For now, we are sticking with Hausen near Frankfurt as a tentative identification. But we can’t be certain: we are left with much unknown in tracing the footprints of this book.  Poppenhausen or Hausen or some other place   A Catholic or a Protestant setting for Christian reading of the book?  Who were the Jewish owners and what led a priest or monk to sell the book?