Category Archives: Acquisitions

Launch of The Weisz Western Sephardi Collection

Thanks to the generosity of the Joir and Kato Weisz Foundation, which acquired the collection from the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation of London and donated it to the Centre, the Leopold Muller Memorial Library has been privileged to receive the Weisz Western Sephardi Collection.

The collection was assembled mainly by the late Dr Richard Barnett, the Honorary Archivist of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation. It comprises over 500 items, including books, manuscripts, sermons, rabbinic responsa and commentaries, as well as letters by Sephardi Jews, some of them rabbis or members of the Congregation or of the mother congregation in Amsterdam; there are also works by Christian Hebraists which witness to the continued exchange of opinions and knowledge between the members of Jewish communities and their host nations. There are many examples of printed ephemera, including notably prayers for special occasions and calendars, and also printed and other material for the internal use of the communities, such as community and philanthropic societies’ byelaws, ordinances and lists of members. Notable is the only known copy of the first edition of the Prayer Book for Sephardi usage printed in England, in 1721.

There is a rich trove of works in Spanish and Portuguese, including both translations from the Hebrew and original works, all aimed at making it possible for newly arrived Crypto-Jews, also known as marranos, to acquire a functioning knowledge of Judaism. The works encompass Bible, prayer books, apologetic treatises and practical manuals of kashrut and purity; in short, manuals for people who had all but forgotten everything about Judaism but who knew that their families had once been Jewish.

Most of the printed material comes from Amsterdam and some is from London. There are also works printed in Alexandria, Algiers, Altona-Hamburg, Barbados, Basel, Bordeaux, Corfu, Curaçao, Florence, Gibraltar, The Hague, Livorno, Madrid, Naples, Oporto, Paris, Nice, Utrecht, Verona and Venice – a true atlas of the Sephardi Diaspora.

 

The Centre is grateful to the Weisz Foundation for the donation, to Mr Edgar Samuel for initiating the transfer of the collection and to Dr Jeremy Schonfield for facilitating the process.

WEISZ WESTERN SEPHARDI COLLECTION LECTURE

Tuesday 15th November 2016, 6pm
at the Clarendon Institute

Professor David Abulafia
(Cambridge)
The first Sephardim in the Atlantic Islands

Refreshments will follow

New Acquisition: Haggadah shel Pesah [happy Passover!]

Tonight is the first night of the Jewish festival of Pesah (Passover), celebrated every year from the 15th to the 22nd day of Nissan. This year, the holiday starts on the 22nd of April and ends next Saturday, April the 30th. Passover commemorates the biblical exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. To learn more, click here.

The text of the Passover seder, a special family meal, is written in a book called the Haggadah. Our Library holds numerous copies of Haggadot according to different local customs. Among our recent acquisitions, is a copy of a sephardi Haggadah printed in London in 1813. This particular version is an augmented edition of Alexander’s London Haggadah of 1806, and is the first Haggadah with Spanish translation printed in London (source). The book was presented to the Leopold Muller Memorial Library on long-term loan by the Lewis Family Interests.

The Haggadah contains several engravings, among them a couple of folded maps, one of those being a ‘Plan explanatory of the Passage of the Red-Sea by the Israelites’, depicted below. All in all, feast for the eyes. Enjoy!

Hagadah shel Pesah ke-minhag sefaradim = Orden de la Agada de Pesah, en Hebraico y Espanol, según uzan los Judios, Espanoles, y Portuguezes, traducido del Hebraico y Caldeo. Por Senior Jacob Meldula, de Amsterdam. London : Printed by L. Alexander, Whitechapel-Road, A.M. 5573 [1813]

Sefer Tehilim = Psalterium Hebraicum (Basel: Johann Froben, 1523) (shelfmark PB449)

One of the smallest books in our newly acquired Weisz Sephardi Collection is a Book of Psalms in Hebrew. Together with its binding, it is 11cm by 8cm in size. This tiny volume was published by Johann Froben in Basel in 1523.

Psalterium Hebraicum (Basle: Johann Froben, 1523)

Psalterium Hebraicum (Basel: Johann Froben, 1523)

Portrait of Johann Froben by Hans Holbein the Younger, Hampton Court

Portrait of Johann Froben by Hans Holbein the Younger, Hampton Court

 

The colophon at the end of the volume says:
BASILEAE IN AEDIBVS IOANNIS FROBENII, MENSE MARTIO. AN. M.D.XXIII.
“Basel, in the house of Johann Froben, March, 1523”

Colophon, Psalterium Hebraicum (Basle: Johann Froben, 1523)

Colophon, Psalterium Hebraicum (Basel: Johann Froben, 1523)

Johann Froben (ca. 1460 Hammelburg – 1527 Basel), one of the most prominent printers of sixteenth-century Basel. He established a printing house in Basel together with the already successful printer, Johannes Auerbach (1443-1513). Froben collaborated with leading scholars of the age, such as Erasmus and Konrad Pellikan. Many of his publications were illustrated by woodcuts designed by two renowned artists, Hans Holbein the Younger and Urs Graf. The woodcut decorating the title page of this Hebrew book of Psalters, contains in its centre Froben’s printer’s device: the staff of Mercury surrounded by two crowned snakes and a dove. The device was designed by Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein also painted two portraits of Froben, one of which is on display in Hampton Court.

 

Title page, Psalterium Hebraicum (Basle: Johann Froben, 1523)

Title page, Psalterium Hebraicum (Basel: Johann Froben, 1523)

Johann Froben's printer's device

Title page, Psalterium Hebraicum (Basel: Johann Froben, 1523)

Printer’s waste, Psalterium Hebraicum (Basel: Johann Froben, 1523)

A closer look reveals that even the binding of the volume can offer something to the curious-minded: it has Latin manuscript waste in its binding — a widespread way of recycling discarded parchment or paper leaves.

Printer's waste, Psalterium Hebraicum (Basel: Johann Froben, 1523)

New Acquisition: ‘Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia’ by Simon Rabinovitch

pid_23788Abstract (source): In its full-color poster for elections to the All-Russian Jewish Congress in 1917, the Jewish People’s Party depicted a variety of Jews in seeking to enlist the support of the broadest possible segment of Russia’s Jewish population. It forsook neither traditional religious and economic life like the Jewish socialist parties, nor life in Europe like the Zionists. It embraced Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian as fulfilling different roles in Jewish life. It sought the democratization of Jewish communal self-government and the creation of new Russian Jewish national-cultural and governmental institutions. Most importantly, the self-named “folkists” believed that Jewish national aspirations could be fulfilled through Jewish autonomy in Russia and Eastern Europe more broadly. Ideologically and organizationally, this party’s leadership would profoundly influence the course of Russian Jewish politics.

Jewish Rights, National Rights provides a completely new interpretation of the origins of Jewish nationalism in Russia. It argues that Jewish nationalism, and Jewish politics generally, developed in a changing legal environment where the idea that nations had rights was beginning to take hold, and centered on the demand for Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe. Drawing on numerous archives and libraries in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Israel, Simon Rabinovitch carefully reconstructs the political movement for Jewish autonomy, its personalities, institutions, and cultural projects. He explains how Jewish autonomy was realized following the February Revolution of 1917, and for the first time assesses voting patterns in November 1917 to determine the extent of public support for Jewish nationalism at the height of the Russian revolutionary period. (Stanford University Press, 2014)

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New Acquisition: ‘The Swedish Jews and the Victims of Nazi Terror, 1933-1945’ by Pontus Rudberg

 

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Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Historica Upsaliensia 253, Editores: Margaret Hunt, Jan Lindegren & Maria Agren.

Abstract: “We will be judged in our own time and in the future by measuring the aid that we, inhabitants of a free and fortunate country, gave to our brethren in this time of greatest disaster.” This declaration, made shortly after the Pogroms of November 1938 by the representatives of the Jewish communities in Sweden, was truer than anyone could have anticipated at the time. It is this sensitive and much debated issue – Jewish responses to the persecutions and mass murders of Jews during the Nazi era – with which this book deals. What actions did Swedish Jews take to aid the Jews in Europe during the years 1933-45 and what determined and constrained their policies and actions?

This book focuses especially on the aid efforts of the Jewish Community of Stockholm, showing the range of activities in which the Community engaged, and the challenges and opportunities presented by official refugee policy in Sweden and by international organizations for refugee aid and foreign relief to Jews. Wheareas previous research has tended to see the Swedish Jewish response to Nazi terror as passive and overly cautious, this book modifies this picture. It concludes that in fact Swedish Jews acted incessantly and on many fronts to aid their brethren, and they did so throughout the entire period 1933 to 1945. Moreover, the form and limited scope of that aid are ultimately attributable more to rigid governmental refugee policies, inadequate financial resources, and international pressures than to a lack of effort or will on the part of Swedish Jews.