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JEWISH PRINTING IN HEBREW, IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL IN 1578. This is Rabbi Samuel Aripul's "Sar Shalom", printed in 1578 by Abraham & Eliezer Askkenazi at Safed (צְפַת Tsfat), the highest city in the Galilee, in what is today northern Israel. Jews were printing books in Israel nearly 5 centuries ago.

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Reposted by Incunabula

In 1553, the population of Safed consisted of 1121 Muslim households, and 716 Jewish households, which rose to 945 households in 1567. There were more than 30 synagogues and 7000 Jews in Safed in 1576 when Murad III issued an edict for the forced deportation of 1000 Jewish families to Cyprus.

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Peter Tarras @petertarras.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Jews have been a settled, permanent, continuous presence in the Holy Land for over three millennia, and have only ever left in numbers when exiled or forced out.

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Reposted by Incunabula

This is the beginning of the oldest Arabic version of Christ's Letter Sent from Heaven. This 10th century ms. (Munich BSB Cod. arab. 1067) is one of the oldest witnesses of this apocryphon in existence. Digital images are available online here: www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb0....

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Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

This collection has been formed quite regardless of expense - some of these tchotchkes cost literally fives of euros.

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The vowels in this manuscript seem to be written in at a later date, and use a distinctly Polish Yiddish pronunciation. Many words are voweled in a Yiddish distortion of the Hebrew word, such as the word Ashpeh - in modern Hebrew it would be pronounced Ashpah, etc. 7/

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There is debate as to when the pogroms associated with the Khmelnytsky Uprisings ended. The pogroms started in 1648, some historians put their end at 1654, but the pogrom described in this manuscript indicates otherwise. The general consensus today puts the end of these pogroms at 1657. 6/

"Fathers and children together were slaughtered next to each other. They slaughtered them and shed their blood, like the blood of rams and oxen.... The pillar of our world, Rabbi Judah, who had been a leader in the region for many years – they severed his head with an axe." 5/

"Rabbi Israel who was from the tribe of the Leviites, the enemies placed fire and sulphur on the heart, and his soul exited as he said the verse Shema Yisrael." "...Rabbi Mordechai, who wrote the Holy Sefer Torah on parchments, and from them the enemies made sandals". 4/

Written in the form of a lamentation, it describes the pogrom starting on the 2nd day of Pesach in 1655 throughout the cities of Poland. "Rabbi Yitzchak the head of the Beth Din, who was an expert in the Torah, they injured his head, ripped his beard & threw him from the windows into the trash." 3/

The manuscript is undated, but the text has the character of a first-hand account, clearly written by someone who witnessed the pogrom himself, and likely dates from before 1700, thus predating the book itself by more than a century. The Hebrew vowelization was apparently added at a later period. 2/

Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · 25/10/2024

A machzor (prayerbook), printed in Sulzbach in 1794, with a contemporary Hebrew manuscript account bound in of the Jews murdered in a Polish pogrom on the 2nd day of Pesach 1655, together with an additional later Yiddish translation written in pencil. 1/

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No, I meant Jews, adherents of Judaism. When this developed in identifiable form is disputed, many academic historians say from the 8th or 9th century BCE, the Jewish view is it's much earlier than that. Samaritanism was also, separately, present but primarily confined to Samaria in central Israel.

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This manuscript was formerly in the library of perhaps the greatest of all Jewish bibliophiles, David Solomon Sassoon. 6/

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The rite of Avignon liturgy was first printed between 1763 and 1767; this however, did not include a volume for the three Pilgrimage Festivals, and even when this eventually appeared in Aix in 1855, it did not reproduce all of the traditional Avignonese piyyutim found in this manuscript. 5/

This manuscript machzor is especially noteworthy for its traditional Avignonese piyyutim (some known only from this copy), as well as several unusual prayer formulas - including special prayers for the well-being of the Pope, something not often found in a Jewish prayerbook! 4/

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Because of their extreme isolation from the rest of the Jewish world (and even, within the Comtat Venaissin, from each other), all four communities developed their own unique customs and minhag (liturgical rite). Many of these were never printed, and survive only in manuscript form, as here. 3/

After their expulsion from France in the 14th-century, a handful of Jews remained in the independent Provençal Papal territory known as the Comtat Venaissin. Avignon was one of four Jewish communities tolerated by the Holy See: the other 3 were Carpentras, Cavaillon, & L'isle-sur-la-Sorgue. 2/

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The 7 days of Sukkot start tomorrow. Sukkot is one of the three Jewish festivals on which the ancient Israelites were commanded to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. This beautiful machzor (prayerbook) for Sukkot according to the rite of Avignon, was written by David Tsoref in 1721. 1/

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A few years later, we see the same woodcut of Jerusalem in this edition of Bat Ayin [Chassidic homilies to the Chumash and Festivals], written by Avraham Dov-Baer Auerbach of Ovrutch, published by the Press of Moshe & Yehudit in Jerusalem in 1847. This was the first Hasidic text printed in Israel.

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The 'Press of Moshe & Yehudit" refers to Moses Montefiore and his wife Judith, who donated the press and so re-established a publishing industry in Eretz Israel. This, printed by the same Press a year earlier in 1843, is the first Machzor (festival prayer-book) published in Jerusalem.

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Sefer Chibat Yerushalayim. [Book of the Love of Jerusalem]. Written by Rabbi Chaim Horowitz, and printed at the Press of Moshe & Yehudit in Jerusalem in 1844. The first edition of the first book about Jerusalem printed in the Holy City, illustrated with the Western Wall on the title page.

Although Ktav Ashuri [כְּתָב אַשּׁוּרִי - 'Assyrian' script] was the script commonly used at the time, the writing on the coins is in the far more ancient Paleo-Hebrew script - as a way of symbolically connecting to the time of the First Temple and to the monarchy of King David.

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Jews have been a settled, permanent, continuous presence in the Holy Land for over three millennia, and have only ever left in numbers when exiled or forced out.

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