Several weeks ago, Asufa, the Petach Tikva based auction firm headed by Moshe Guz, held one of its periodical public Judaica sales at the Orthodox Union’s World Center in Jerusalem.
It was a most interesting sale. Eight hundred thousand items- rare books, manuscripts, documents and letters were offered. The Hebrew books included prayer books, prayer sheets for special occasions, Passover Haggadot and works in all fields of Jewish learning such as Bible and Talmud, Rabbinics and Kabbala, Hasidism and Drush and more. Among the other items on sale were calendars and periodicals, proclamations, regulations of communities and societies, books for children, poetry, books, travel books, memorial books, communal publications and pictures of rabbis and synagogues.
A number of the items offered are not listed in any bibliographies and seem to have been completely unknown to students of the Jewish book.
Prominent rabbis whose letters were on sale at the auction include Rabbi Isaiah Pick, Rabbi Eliyahu Guttmacher, Rabbi Zvi Yehezkel Michelson, Rabbi Yisrael Friedmann (the Admor of Czortkov) Rabbi Akiva Sofer, Rabbi Yitzhak Zeev Soloveitchik, Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel, Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, and Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler.
The prize piece of the sale was a copy of the 1551 Venice edition of Maimonides’ Moreh Nevukhim with handwritten notes on the Moreh and its commentaries as well as corrections of the text by Rabbi Moshe Isserles of Cracow, known as the Rema.
The writer of the notes reveals his identity in various places… “.. And so it appears to me, Moses ben Isserles, (folio 44A) ” so it appears to me, Moses ben Israel, shelit, known as Moses Isserles of Cracow (folio 48a): “… so it appears to me, M.I. [Moses Isserles] (folio 97b): “And I Moses Isserles of Cracow, say….” (Folio 160b). Other notes begin with: Moses says…” (e.g. folios 35a, 100a).
Asufa has published detailed descriptions of this Moreh Nevukhim and the handwritten notes and corrections in Hebrew and in English (the English description in the sales catalog was written by Rabbi David Kamenetsky).
From these descriptions we learn that a small part of the Rema’s notes were printed in 1861 in the Lemberg miscellany Otzar Hockhma. They were published by R. Joshua Heschel Sirkin of Ponevez, who wrote that he had copied them “from the actual handwriting of our teacher. the Head of the Exile, the Rema, Z”l, found in the margins of the Moreh Nevukhim printed in Venice in 1551.” The book from which Sirkin copied the notes was owned by his friend R. Chaim Burstein, in Vilna.
Even if we assume that the Moreh Nevukhim offered for sale in Jerusalem is the same from which J.J. Sirkin copied the Rema’s notes, how can we be sure that the handwriting was, indeed, that of the Rema? Perhaps an acquaintance or a disciple of Rabbi Moshe Isserles copied them from the latter’s Moreh into his own copy of the book?
Asufa asked Benjamin Richler, the director of the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew mansucripts in the Jewish National and Hebrew University Library in Jerusalem, to examine the Rema’s notes.
These are Benjamin Richler’s conclusions:
“I saw a copy of Moses B. Maimon’s Moreh Nevukhim (Venice 1551) with many notes or glosses by R. Moses Isserles…. The glosses are written in a semi-cursive Ashkenazic script of the 16th century. The writing seems to be identical to the only known autograph of the Rema – a one line note stating ownership of a printed book (Responsa Rivash, Constantinople 1547) and preserved in the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem. The forms of the letters are identical or very similar in both sources and the signs used as abbreviation marks – a small semi circle facing down – are also identical. It may be argued that the writing need not be the Rema’s but may be a copy made by a student or another contemporary which was subsequently entered into the margin of another copy of the Moreh. However, the color of the ink is not uniform and it seems that the glosses were not added all at the same time, but were entered at various intervals, as an author of glosses would be wont to write them.
“In summation, it seems to me beyond doubt that the glosses in this copy of the Moreh are indeed the autograph of the Rema, R. Moses b. Israel of Cracow.”
The Moreh Nevukim with the Rema’s glosses and corrections sold for $164,000.
The Jewish Press, Friday, January 31, 2003 p. 87