Battle for Three Books

Abstract

The Library of the Leo Baeck College has been immeasurably enriched by the arrival of three rare and precious volumes. The books are of great importance to Jewish cultural and religious heritage and will provide scholars with rich research material. The oldest is an edition of the Kol Bo , a large compendium of halachic material, that was probably printed in Naples around 1490 and is, therefore, one of the very first Hebrew books to appear after the art of printing was invented. Kol Bo may be almost 500 years old but the quality of the paper and the beauty and clarity of the typeface are breathtaking, great testimony to the art of those anonymous early printers. The second of the three volumes is a small 18th century Haggadah , handwritten on vellum and profusely illustrated after the pattern of the Amsterdam Haggadah of 1695. The artist/scribe was Aaron ben Wolff Herlingen of Gewitsch and he wrote this Haggadah in Presburg now Bratislava in 1730, a few years before he was appointed as scribe to the Imperial Library of Vienna. Most of the illustrations are in black and white, very fine and richly detailed and some have been enlivened with watercolour. The works of this Jewish manuscript artist are today very much sought after. A somewhat larger Haggadah of the same date was offered at auction in London with an estimated price of £140-180,000. The most recent of the three works is also a manuscript, a notebook in the tiny, neat hand of the great 19th century Italian rabbi, Samuel David Luzzatto (ShaDaL). The book consists of a series of short monographs on groups of words appearing in the Hebrew Bible that are generally regarded as synonymous. ShaDaL, however, is at great pains to explore subtle differences in meaning between the words and thus to demonstrate that such words are not merely interchangeable synonyms each one carries a unique nuance and one word and one word only is appropriate to each particular context. ShaDaL wrote this notebook around 1824, when he was only 24 years old. Various of the monographs were published in scholarly Hebrew journals in 1826 and 1856. These three books have in themselves much to excite and inspire both scholar and layman. But the strange, almost incredible story of how they came to the Leo Baeck College also needs to be told. When the College was founded in 1956,