The Cloisters Hebrew Bible is a Hebrew Bible codex made in the Kingdom of Castile from the early to mid-14th century, with an approximate date prior to 1366. [1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired this manuscript from the collection of Jacqui Safra from Sotheby's Judaica auction on December 20, 2017. [2]
Hebrew Bibles were produced in Castile during the 1230s, during the reign of Ferdinand III. [3] The era of manuscript making came to an end due to the Black Plague and the Massacre of 1391, followed by the Alhambra Decree and the expulsion of the Jewish communities in Portugal. [4]
After the expulsion of Jews, the manuscript remained in Thessaloniki for centuries, followed by Alexandria before coming into the hands of Jacqui Safra. [5] The manuscript was placed on auction by Safra through Sotheby's Judaica Auction on December 20, 2017, with an estimate of $3.5-5 million but it was purchased by the MET pre-auction for an undisclosed amount. [6]
It is now part of the Cloisters collection, under accession number 2018.59. [7]
The manuscript consist of 476 folios. [8] The first part of the manuscript is heavily gilded 70 folios are decorated with micrography, and the six of the micrographic pages are decorated with horseshoe and double-horseshoes frames. The manuscript is noted to be heavily influenced by Mudéjar and Gothic Design, which was prominent within the Iberian peninsula. The combination of Judaic, Islamic, and Christian art styles has come to be known as convivencia . [9]
It is one of only three surviving illuminated Hebrew Bibles from fourteenth-century Castile. [10]
The earliest known date on the codex is dated to 1366, with the owner's signature: David ha-Kohen Coutinh[o].
Other owners of the book include:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. In 2022 it welcomed 3,208,832 visitors, ranking it the third most visited U.S museum, and eighth on the list of most-visited art museums in the world. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m2) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.
The Morgan Bible, also called the Morgan Picture Bible, Crusader Bible, Shah Abbas Bible or Maciejowski Bible, is a unique medieval illuminated manuscript. It is a picture book Bible consisting of 46 surviving folios. The book consists of miniature paintings of events from the Hebrew Bible, set in the scenery and costumes of thirteenth-century France, and depicted from a Christian perspective. It is not a complete Bible, as it consists largely of illustrations of stories of kings, especially King David. The illustrations are now surrounded by text in three scripts and five languages: Latin, Persian, Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Hebrew. The level of detail in the images and the remarkable state of preservation of the work make it particularly valuable to scholars.
Lily Safra was a Brazilian-Monegasque billionaire and socialite who amassed considerable wealth through her four marriages. She had a significant art collection and owned the historic Villa Leopolda on the French Riviera. Her net worth was estimated at $1.3 billion. She became strongly engaged with philanthropy when she married the banker Edmond Safra, and this continued through their Foundation after his death in 1999.
The Alba Bible is a 1430 illuminated manuscript containing a translation of the Old Testament made directly from Hebrew into mediaeval Castilian. The translation was carried out under the direction of Moses Arragel, rabbi of the Jewish community of Maqueda in the Spanish province of Toledo, at the behest of Grand Master Luis González de Guzmán of the Order of Calatrava.
Hebrew Printing in America, 1735-1926, A History and Annotated Bibliography (ISBN 1-59975-685-4) is a history and bibliography of Hebrew books printed in America between 1735 and 1926 by Ari Kinsberg. It records 1208 items, annotated with bibliographical information, historical context, scholarly references, approbations, and location of copies in libraries worldwide. The bibliography is chronologically arranged within broad subject or format with 13 indexes, including Hebrew and English titles and authors, imprint places and years, publishers, printers, approbations, subscribers, typesetters, music arrangers, and artists; as well as reproductions of most title pages and selected interior pages, and appendices containing reproductions of relevant manuscripts and portraits of early American rabbis.
The Winchester Bible is a Romanesque illuminated manuscript produced in Winchester between 1150 and 1175 for Winchester Cathedral. With folios measuring 583 x 396 mm., it is the largest surviving 12th-century English Bible. The Bible belongs to a group of large-sized Bibles that were made for religious houses all over England and the continent during the 12th century. The Winchester Bible is important to understanding the history of medieval art, because it was left only partially completed, giving insight into the creation and production of these kinds of Bibles. It can still be seen in the Winchester Cathedral Library, which has been its home for more than eight hundred years. Before it was returned to Winchester Cathedral, the Bible had many owners and suffered because of it. Pages have been removed and torn out; one of those pages is known as the Morgan Leaf and is now owned by the Morgan Library in New York.
The British Library is a research library in London that is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the two largest libraries in the world, along with the Library of Congress. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
The Valmadonna Trust Library was a collection of 13,000 printed books and manuscripts printed in Hebrew or in Hebrew script. It was sold by the Trustees in January 2017 to the National Library of Israel (NLI). It is named after Valmadonna, a small town near Alessandria in north-west Italy with longstanding connections to the Lunzer family. The collection encompasses works from throughout the world, particularly Italy, "the cradle of Hebrew printing", and covers over a millennium; many items in the collection are rare or unique, and many date back to the earliest Hebrew printings. Before it was acquired by the NLI, Arthur Kiron, curator of Judaica collections at the University of Pennsylvania, said, "I don't know any other collection quite like it in private hands. It even rivals some of the great institutional collections in the world."
Jewish ceremonial art, also known as Judaica, refers to an array of objects used by Jews for ritual purposes. Because enhancing a mitzvah by performing it with an especially beautiful object is considered a praiseworthy way of honoring God's commandments, Judaism has a long tradition of commissioning ritual objects from craftsmen and artists.
The Washington Haggadah is a Hebrew-language illuminated manuscript haggadah created by Joel ben Simeon in 1478. He was a specialist illuminator of haggadot, who seems to have worked in both Italy and Germany, and whose style shows influences from the contemporary art of both countries.
Marc Michael Epstein is Professor of Religion and Visual Culture on the Mackie M. Paschall (1899) & Norman Davis Chair at Vassar College.
Lignereux is a French company, founded in 1787, which produces objets d'art. Established in Paris and London, Lignereux plays a major role in decorative arts. Lignereux makes objects which are intended for art collectors. In 2015 Lignereux began to produce new objects, decorated by contemporary artists and craftspeople.
David Solomon Sassoon, was a bibliophile and grandson of 19th century Baghdadi Jewish community leader David Sassoon.
Irvin Ungar is an American former pulpit rabbi and antiquarian bookseller, considered the foremost expert on the artist Arthur Szyk. Ungar is credited as “the man behind the Szyk renaissance” who pulled Szyk “out of obscurity” through scholarship, exhibitions, and publications spanning nearly three decades.
The Golden Haggadah is an illuminated Hebrew manuscript originating around c. 1320–1330 in Catalonia. It is an example of an Illustrated Haggadah, a religious text for Jewish Passover. It contains many lavish illustrations in the High Gothic style with Italianate influence, and is perhaps one of the most distinguished illustrated manuscripts created in Spain. The Golden Haggadah is now in the British Library and can be fully viewed as part of their Digitized Manuscript Collection MS 27210.
Damascus Crown, Keter Damascus, is a complete Hebrew Bible manuscript containing 24 canonical books written in the 13th century CE, and brought by stealth to Israel from Damascus, Syria in 1993. Today, it is housed at the Hebrew University and National Library of Israel, in Jerusalem, under a public trust. The manuscript is not to be confused with the Damascus Pentateuch.
The Rylands Haggadah is an illuminated Sephardi Passover Haggadah written and illuminated in Catalonia, Spain in the mid-14th century. It is generally regarded as one of the finest preserved and most ornate Haggadot in the world, and as an example of the "cross-fertilisation between Jewish and non-Jewish artists within the medium of manuscript illumination."
Codex S1 is a Masoretic codex comprising all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, dated to the 10th century CE. It is considered as old as the Aleppo Codex and a century older than the Leningrad Codex, the earliest known complete Hebrew Bible manuscript. Alternatively, it might be dated to the late 9th century. The Aleppo Codex was missing 40% of its leaves when it resurfaced in Israel in 1958, while in Codex S1 only twelve leaves are completely missing and hundreds more are partially lost. The scribe of S1 was unusually sloppy, frequently forgetting punctuation, diacritical marks, and vowels; he also errs in his consonantal spelling on dozens of occasions.
The Kennicott Bible, also known as the First Kennicott Bible, is an illuminated manuscript created in the city of A Coruña in 1476. Written by the calligrapher Moses ibn Zabarah and illuminated by Joseph ibn Hayyim, this manuscript is considered by some, such as the historian Carlos Barros Guimeráns, the most important religious manuscript of medieval Galicia. It is also regarded as one of the most exquisite illuminated manuscripts in Hebrew language in an article published by the Library of the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the most lavishly illuminated Sephardic manuscript of the 15th century by Katrin Kogman-Appel.