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The Hebrew Language collection at the British Library is a vast repository of material. It has about 75,000 printed books and 3,000 manuscript volumes as well as a vast number of newspapers and journals. It is one of the world’s great collections encompassing 1,000 years of writings in all the languages, such as Yiddish and Ladino, that use Hebrew script.
It is now embarked on a three-year digitisation project, funded by the Polonsky foundation, which will make 1,250 manuscripts available online free. And now JC readers can access it exclusively (see below).
The British Library is also a storehouse of treasures — Hebrew books and manuscripts of exquisite beauty and great historic stature and even items that (not really a Jewish concept but perhaps apposite here) come close to being religious relics. What else can one say of a manuscript page bearing a rabbinic response from Maimonides written in his own hand and with his autograph at the bottom?
Dating from the 12 century, it is the most important of the library’s 7,000 fragments from the genizah at the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo, discovered in the 19th century and recognised as a repository of 1,000 years of that community’s history and religious experience.
The three-volume, 15th-century Lisbon Bible, bought by the British Museum in 1882, is one of the most outstanding pieces in the British Library’s collection. Completed 14 years before the Jews’ expulsion from Portugal in 1496, it is a consummate masterpiece of calligraphy and illumination, each page consisting of two columns of text surrounded with a frame of Hebrew words in gold and, framing that, ornate, colourful, crowded but beautifully composed borders depicting flora and fauna.
Such work was often done by Christian artists under the direction and supervision of the Jewish scribes who wrote the text and oversaw its completion. To be in their presence and close-up is a rare and awe-inspiring privilege, especially when in the company of Ilana Tahan, the distinguished lead curator of the library’s Hebrew collection, who will be offering some lucky JC readers this opportunity next month.
Another treasure is a late 15th-century Portuguese edition of Maimonides’s magnum opus, his account of the whole of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah . The opening page bears in large gold letters the words Ani Moshe bar Maimon (I am Moses son of Maimon) with a golden crown above it and beautiful, delicate gold-spotted and intricate penwork and floral borders surrounding the text announces volumes of extreme beauty and exquisite craftsmanship that do honour to one of the greatest of all rabbinical texts.
It also did honour to a rich patron. This Mishneh Torah, very expensive to produce, was copied by an important scribe for a wealthy man who was an adviser to the King of Portugal. Two-and-a-half centuries later, it had found its way into the collection of the Harleys, Earls of Oxford and Mortimer.
Educated high-born 18th-century Englishmen would often know Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. They also had great libraries. In 1753, Edward Harley’s widow and daughter sold the whole library to the nation for £10,000 and it became an important part of the collection of the British Museum, which was founded that year.
Also among the treasures are some of the most important printed Hebrew books — the Amsterdam Haggadah of 1712, with wonderful etchings and a large map putting the twelve tribes in their places in the Holy Land (Naphtali and Menasheh and one end, Shimon and Yehudah at the other). And the great Talmud by Daniel Bomberg, an Antwerp-born Christian who was one of the first printers of Hebrew. He moved to Venice around 1516, the year the ghetto was instituted there. The ghetto gave rise, among other things, to a great hunger for religious books, one that Jews could not supply because they were forbidden from printing or publishing. Hence Bomberg. Ilana Tahan will also show her JC guests Gershon Soncino, considered the greatest of all Jewish printers. From a family originating in Bavaria, he set up his first press in Soncino in Lombardy in 1484 then, in the face of political persecution or commercial competition moved from town to Italian town (though never to Venice).
For those, like your correspondent, who thought Soncino was just the name of a British publisher who, a generation ago, seemed to chumashim as Heinz is to baked beans, the journey to knowledge has only just begun.
