Abstract
This article presents an unknown Spanish translation of the Qur’ān, extant at the Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos Library of the Portuguese Jewish Community of Amsterdam. The manuscript dates from the seventeenth century and was the work of a Spanish or Portuguese Jew living in Amsterdam or another community of the Sephardi diaspora. In the present contribution, a detailed material description of the manuscript and its contents, as well as of its Italian and Spanish sources, is offered. While the translator claimed that the work was translated “word for word from Arabic,” he actually used the Italian version of the Qur’ān by Giovanni Battista Castrodardo, published by Andrea Arrivabene in Venice in 1547. The short appendix on the life of Muḥammad, on the other hand was based on a Spanish polemical work addressed to the minority of the moriscos: the Confutacion del Al coran y secta mahometana by Lope de Obregon, published in Granada in 1555. This translation represents a unique case-study of the re-contextualization of the Qur’ān in early modern Europe and of the History of Reading across European and Mediterranean confessions.
Highlights
La vera vita di Macometto, tratta dall’historie di cristiani, ff
The manuscript has the signature EH 48 D 20 of Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos; on the end cover leaf a glued label indicates that it was donated to Ets Haim in 5645 [1885], by the late J[aco]b van J[aco]b Ferares, chief rabbi at The Hague
Ladino word-for-word translation was used frequently in the educational practice of rendering Hebrew texts in order to comment them. Another distinctive feature of the translation is the influence of Portuguese, which is a common trait of Iberian Jewish literature produced in the communities of the Western Sephardi diaspora such as Venice and Amsterdam
Summary
The manuscript has the signature EH 48 D 20 of Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos; on the end cover leaf a glued label indicates that it was donated to Ets Haim in 5645 [1885], by the late J[aco]b van J[aco]b Ferares, chief rabbi at The Hague. The physical evidence of the manuscript offers little support for a precise dating In their catalogue of the manuscripts held in Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos Library, Fuks and Fuks-Mansfeld suggested that it is a “late 17th century copy,” perhaps on the basis of their impression of the “current Iberian writing.”. This cursive writing – one and the same for the whole text – is not very distinctive. It has the watermark of Amsterdam, with two lions holding the crowned coat of arms of the city, and three vertically aligned crosses in the center This watermark was used in Dutch paper production from the second half of the seventeenth century. The translated “first part,” on the “Beginning of things created in this world and the beginning of the Reign of Muhammad and beginning of his company”;4 and the “second part,” the Qur,an itself, present distinctive linguistic features not present in the added appendix, the very shortened version of Lope de Obregon’s Confutación del Alcorán y secta Mahometana, published in Granada in 1555
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