Former Owners of Manuscripts from the Günzburg Family Collection: Identification Attempt

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of owners’ stamps and inscriptions on manuscripts from the Günzburg family collection stored in the Russian State Library (RSL). The author did not set out to provide exhaustive information about the previous owners, part of whom still remains unidentified. The purpose of the article is to highlight the blocks of manuscripts that were previously part of other private libraries and later were acquired by the Günzburgs, as well as to focus on the most famous former owners of books. Information about them can be discovered in the owner’s inscriptions or, less often, stamps, which are usually found on the fly-leaf or the first folio of the manuscript. Sometimes, however, you can find out who owned a particular book by studying the catalogues of private libraries that were sold out after the death of their owners. This method let to discover among the previous owners of the Günzburg manuscripts such names as Nathan Nahman Koronel, scholar and book publisher, and Fischl Hirsch, bibliophile and bookseller. Based on information from the owners’ inscriptions, we learned that a number of manuscripts from the Günzburg collection were owned by such scholars as Seligmann Baer, Elyakim Carmoly and Shlomo Dubno. Some manuscripts of the collection bear inscriptions of Parisian bookseller Menahem Lifshits with the date and information to whom this particular manuscript belonged earlier. Almost all of them originated from various private libraries on the territory of modern Italy and pertained to more or less known now Italian rabbis or bibliophiles. It is worth noting that the surnames of Italian Jewish families, such as Segre, Finzi, Foa and Travis, are more often found in the owners’ inscriptions on the manuscripts from the Günzburg library than Jewish names from other regions. Among the famous owners of Italian origin is Abraham Yosef Shlomo Graziano, who was Rabbi, scholar and poet and was known for his rather wide view of the Jewish religious laws — Halakha. Separately, it should be noted a few female names and their ownership inscriptions found among the owners of the manuscripts. The article presents the original spelling of some of the names of the owners of manuscripts.