 |
| A leaf from Seridei Bavli. |
INTRODUCTION:
I have
always been fascinated by the often incidental discovery of old important texts
that are constantly being made in modern times. These include writings like
those of Abulafia, for example, which Gershom Scholem happened to identify in Archives
of the Bavarian State Library when he was writing his dissertation in 1919.
There were also recent discoveries of the Meiri texts, as well as unpublished Rashi
commentaries and other works and even the recovery of some of the more recent
censored writing of Rav Kook.
In this
article, we shall explore the accidental discovery of parts of the 500-year-old
Spanish Talmud which was thought to have been lost forever.[1]
HAIM
ZALMAN DIMITROVSKY:
During the
1970s, after much detective work and scholarship, Professor Haim Zalman
Dimitrovsky (1920-2011) discovered 550 pages of lost volumes of the Spanish
Talmud.
Dimitrovsky
was a profound scholar, having produced the highly significant two-volume
magisterial work on R. Shlomo ibn Aderet, published by Mosad haRav Kook
in Jerusalem entitled Teshuvot haRashba. His analysis of a
responsum and glosses concerning the legality of the renewal of semikhah (ordination)
by the rabbis of Safed enabled him to more accurately reconstruct the facts of that
controversy.[2] [See
The
Sanhedrin/Smicha Story.]
Dimitrovsky
had studied at the Talmud Torah Eitz Chaim in Jerusalem and then at Merkaz
haRav (established by Rav Kook) and then at the Talmud Department of the
Hebrew University where he later returned as a professor. He was also a member
of the Hagana during the War of Independence.
BACKGROUND:
The very
first printing of the Talmud took place in Spain at around 1482, but because of
the vicissitudes of the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, very few copies of these
early printings remain. According to Adri Offenberg, much historical evidence
was destroyed and our knowledge of that period is therefore limited.[3]
However, we
do know that the oldest Spanish printed book, Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah,
was produced in 1476, just six years before the printing of the Spanish Talmud.
It originated from the press of Shlomo Alkabetz at Guadalajara in old Castile
in central Spain. He was the grandfather of Shlomo Alkabetz (c. 1505- 1584) the
well-known Kabbalist from Safed, who composed Lecha Dodi.
Between
1472 and 1482, at least fifteen Hebrew Books were printed in Guadalajara. The
British Library has a collection of five Guadalajara editions.
The paper
for these projects was imported from Palermo in southern Italy which was, at
that time Spanish control.
THE
STORY:
The story
goes all the way back to the beginnings of the first printing of the Talmud in
1482. The project was interrupted ten years later when the practising Jews were
expelled from Spain in 1492. Many Jews sought refuge in neighbouring Portugal
and the printing was continued there in the southern city of Faro – until they
were expelled from Portugal in 1497.
It was at
that point, after 1497, that the Spanish edition of the Talmud was lost.
THE
SEARCH:
For 500
years people spoke in rumours about this Talmud as it was said to have been a
different version of our editions of the Talmud. An oral tradition existed purporting that it differed quite substantially from our editions.
300
years later, from around the nineteenth century, bibliographers were beginning to
find and identify old fragments and leaves thought to belong to this lost
Talmud but there were no groundbreaking discoveries.
THE
DISCOVERY:
Then, during the 1970s Haim Zalman Dimitrovsky stumbled upon some Talmudic fragments of old
texts in a collection held in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of
America and he soon realized that these differed from the standard Talmudic
texts he was familiar with.
His
interest was piqued and he searched through other repositories of old
manuscripts. His hunt took him to explore textual fragments from the Cairo Geniza
which were housed at the Vatican, Cambridge and Bodleian Libraries. He also got
access to private collections in Israel.
He now knew
what to look for because the Spanish Talmud had a unique printing style and layout.
Dimitrovsky was even able to identify which leaves were printed first in Spain
and later in Portugal.
There were
a certain number of lines on a page and he knew the standard width of the
margins. The forming of the final letters was different and the representation
of G-d’s name was also specific and unique to this style. G-ds name
is represented by three and not two letters “yod,” and the letters, “gimel” are
elongated.
On one occasion,
while examining an unrelated book from the sixteenth century, he noticed a tear
in the cover of the book. Through it, he could see that the binding was
stiffened by about 12 pages which were glued together and then covered in
cloth. On further investigation, he identified the stiffening pages to be, not
worthless scraps of old paper, but priceless texts of the elusive Spanish
Talmud.
THE
HYPOTHESIS:
Dimitrovsky
believed that when the printers were exiled from Portugal, they took the yet
unbound pages of their Spanish Talmud with them with the intension and hope of
carrying on and completing their project which was already fifteen years in the
making. After attempting to re-establish their printing business in various
places of exile, it seems that eventually, they despaired of ever completing the
task they had begun and used the precious paper as binding material for other
printing projects. It is most likely that many of the pages were, by then,
already missing and they didn’t want to print an incomplete Talmud.
THE STRATEGY:
Acting on
this assumption, Dimitrovsky decided to ask his colleagues around the world to
carefully examine the bindings of Hebrew books printed during the early part of
the sixteenth century. This would have been the period immediately following
the Expulsions.
A veritable
collection of texts from the lost Spanish Talmud began to amass. One
interesting find was discovered hidden in the cover of a book of Church Music published in
Prague in 1604, now housed in Fales Library at New York University.[4]
These texts
have become known as the Guadalajara Talmud fragments, and Dimitrovsky believed
that, based on his analysis of the various text fonts used in Guadalajara, Ketuvot
was the last of the Guadalajara tractates to be published.
A MOST
AUTHENTIC TRADITION:
Joshua
Bloch and Alexander Marx are of the fascinating opinion that the variances in
the Spanish or Guadalajara Talmud, may not actually have been variances. This
is because they believe the Spanish version to have been derived directly from
old manuscripts which came to Spain from the Gaonic academies in Babylonia.[5]
[See The
‘Four Captives’.]
This would
place the Spanish edition in a very authentic position in the line of Talmudic
transmission:
“Indeed after a careful comparison of the
present leaves, one notes a different order of the text, as well as extra lines,
words and letters, even elimination of text in certain cases and other variants
(including orthography) – amounting to a text significantly unlike that of the
Bomberg edition and the much vaunted ‘Vilna Shas’.
Some of these variants are significant enough to
change the meaning of the Gemara…
[S]ince this Guadalajara edition was printed
prior to the Inquisition, it is free from censorship. Thus whereas the standard
editions employ the circumlocution ‘aku’m’ for gentile, here the original
reading ‘goy’ is retained.”
[See Daniel
Bomberg – The Story of the Tzuras haDaf.]
This
astounding discovery and the scholarship surrounding it, shows once again just
how rich and broad Torah literature is. These types of modern findings of our lost
texts add to the richness of the vast and expanding tapestry of our ancient tradition.
FURTHER
READING:
The Censored Writings of Rav Kook
A
Recently Discovered Document Showing Rav Kook’s Position on the Authorship of
the Zohar.
[1] See The Jewish Week – American
Examiner, March 23 1980. p. 8.
[2]
Encyloppedia.com. Entry on Dimitrovsky, Chaim Zalman, by Shamma Friedman.
[3] Adri K. Offenberg, Some Remarks on
the Date and Original Price of a Rare Iberian Hebrew Incunable. Zutot 2001,
114-117.
[4]
The Talmud Blog, A Tantalizing Tale of Temura Fragments – Guest Post by Noah
Bickart. October 29 2014.
[5] See also H.Z. Dimitrovsky, Sridei
Bavli (1979) Vol. I: Introduction, pp.41-43; and Vol II: 296a, 296d.
No comments:
Post a Comment