(Continued from last week)
The Bibliophile
Rabbi Maimon was probably the greatest lover and collector of Sefarim of our time.
The love of books was implanted in him by his father, Reb Avraham Elimelech, who was a Torah scribe.
“When he reached the age of eight, his father was no longer the only customer of books in the family as a new ‘buyer’ had joined him,” Geulah Bat Yehudah writes in the biography of her father Rabbi Y. L. Maimon.
His grandmother had given the boy ten kopeks to buy some sweets. Young Leibele used the money to acquire a small book from an itinerant bookseller who had come to Marculesti. This small book formed the basis of what eventually developed into a world famous Jewish library, boasting 40,000 volumes, including manuscripts.
When Rabbi Maimon settled in 1913 in the land of Israel, he took his book treasures along with him. In 1915 he was deported from Palestine by the Turkish authorities and he spent the years of World War I in the U.S. spreading the ideas and ideals of Mizrachi He was filled with longing for Zion, but also worried about the fate of his library which he had left behind, and which then already comprised about 10,000 volumes.
On his return to Palestine in 1919, he was overjoyed to find his library in its entirety. His father and his brother Zecharya, who had also settled in the country, had succeeded in hiding the books in a large and deep cellar shortly before the Jews were expelled from Tel Aviv by the Turkish authorities.
Rabbi Maimon continued to search for and collect Sefarim although his time was fully occupied with communal work and writing.
During his frequent travels abroad on behalf of Mizrachi or the Zionist Organization, he found time to visit Jewish libraries and private collections to search for books.
Some time after the end of World War II he visited London. At a lecture he gave at the Mahazikei Hadath Synagogue at the East End, he met an old friend, my late teacher Rabbi Nachman Shlomo Greenspan. The two men had not seen each other for quite a few years. I was present at their meeting and I remember well the first question Rabbi Maimon asked Rabbi Greenspan: “Did you acquire any interesting books since we last saw each other?”
“For his exhausting work on his missions abroad, which was occasionally even degrading albeit essential, Rabbi Maimon compensated himself during the brief leisure hours between meetings and appearances by dropping in to this or that bookstore,” Geulah Bat Yehudah writes in her book. “He would snoop among the shelves and boxes hoping that he would be fortunate and ensnare in his fishnet that which his soul loved: a scarce book, a rare edition, a magnificent publication, a booklet on Maimonides which he did not yet possess, and similar items.”
“Rabbi Maimon whose eyesight had never been good, and who most of the time, needed guides even to a hotel to which he was accustomed, never lost his way when going to a bookstore he had once visited. He would walk to the store directly and confidently, as if by the sense of smell.”
Geulah bat Yehudah describes several interesting “finds” of Rabbi Maimon. We will mention one of them here:
Rabbi Yaakov Emden had removed a page from his work, Birat Migdal Oz because he felt that a note there about the reason for the commandment of circumcision was not correct. The page was torn out from all the copies of the first edition (Altona, 1748) and was never reprinted.
Rabbi Maimon assumed that Rabbi Yaakov Emden might have distributed some copies of his book before he decided to remove the page which contained the questionable note. Thus it was quite possible that a complete copy of Birat Migdal Oz could still be found. So Rabbi Maimon started to search. He discovered what he was looking for in a well known London bookstore of which he was an old customer. Rabib Maimon and the owner of the store who was a non-Jew couldn’t agree on the price of the book. but the bookseller was willing to sell Rabbi Maimon the page he desired. Rabbi Maimon acquired it. Some time later, the owner of the shop sent the mutilated copy, for which he could find no customer, as a gift to Rabbi Maimon.
***
Since the death of Rabbi Maimon, his private library has become part of the library of Yad HaRav Maimon, the spiritual center at the entrance to Jerusalem, which consists of the Mossad Harav Kook publishing house, the Religious Zionist Archives, the Institute for Hasidism and other research institutions. The library of Yad Harav Maimon, which comprises more that 100,000 volumes, including manuscripts is open to the public. It is primarily used by rabbis, scholars and students.
(To be continued)
The Jewish Press, Friday, March 12, 1999