By Ann Brener

 

From its modest beginnings under President James Madison in 1800, the Library of Congress has grown to include over 167,000,000 items, among them rare manuscripts in many different languages. The Hebraic Section, which forms part of the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division, houses some 230 manuscripts, mostly in Hebrew but with a fair sampling written in Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic or Judeo-Persian, all of which use Hebrew letters.

Like the Hebraic Section itself, founded in 1912 through the generosity of philanthropist Jacob Schiff, many of the manuscripts came to the Library via the collections of Ephraim Deinard, savvy bookdealer and tireless world traveler. It is a highly diverse collection, dating from the 11th to early 20th centuries and drawn from Jewish communities across the globe. It is also a very eclectic collection, particularly rich in kabalistic material from Italy and Safed yet with not a few offerings in topics ranging from music and poetry to medicine, magic, and synagogue rites.

One of the very first (and certainly most famous) manuscripts to enter the collection was nothing less than the beautifully illuminated haggadah known today as the Washington Haggadah, written and illustrated by Joel ben Simeon in 1478 in Italy or Germany.

LC Hebr Ms 181. Opening page of the Washington Haggadah. Written and illuminated by Joel ben Simeon in Italy or Germany, 1478. Manuscript on vellum, Ashkenazic square script, 22.5 x 15. 5 cm. 38 fols. Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress.

 

According to the existing correspondence, this masterpiece of Hebrew illumination came to the Library either in 1916 or 1920, with little fanfare and quite a lot of quibbling over the price: an exorbitant $500 (ah, those were the days!). Today, after meticulous work by the Library’s Conservation Division, the Washington Haggadah has been restored to almost pristine beauty and is fully accessible on the Library’s website.

Among other manuscript treasures in the Hebraic Section let us also mention a Sefer Evronot, or treatise for calculating the Hebrew calendar.

LC Hebr Ms 230, fol. 7v (left); fol. 11v (right). Anonymous. Sefer Evronot (Book of Intercalations). Illustrated manuscript on paper .[Eastern Europe, 1593-1604]. Ashkenazic semi-cursive script. Tooled leather binding. 20.2 x 15.8cm. 44 fols. Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress.

 

Dating from ca. 1593-1604, this is one of only a half dozen examples of the genre to come down to us from the 16th century. The book includes numerous illustrations, charts, and calendars in a colorful palette of greens, browns, and reds, together with some charmingly drawn sketches of animal heads.

One spectacular treasure of more recent acquisition is a Hebrew/Persian Book of Psalms handwritten on vellum and only recently created in Iran. The interlinear Persian translation, written in the Nasta‘liq calligraphic style, was created in order to celebrate the historic presence of Jewish religious communities in Iran. Beautifully illuminated in rich shades of red and blue and sumptuously gilded in 24-karat gold.

LC Hebr. Ms 229. Details from the Hebrew / Persian Book of Psalms [תהלה לדוד /کتاب مزامير حضرت داويد]. Tehran, Iran, 2004. 285 fols. Calligraphy in Nasta‘liq by Abdol-Hamid Masoumi of Tehran; illuminations in 24-karat gold by Mehdi Bahman. Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress.

The manuscript was publicly displayed for the first time in 2014 in the exhibit Thousand Years of the Persian Book curated by Hirad Dinavari, Iranian World Specialist in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division.

Illuminated treasures aside, there is nothing quite like even the plainest old manuscript to give one a sense of everyday life in the distant past. Manuscript 149 is a good case in point.

LC Hebr. Ms 149 (fol. 1r). Anonymous. [The Reluctant Bride: A Quarrel between the Mother and the Maiden]. Italian with Hebrew rhyme-words. Italy, early 19th century. Italian cursive script. 18 x 12.5 cm. 36 fols. Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress.

Here we have a collection of wedding poems, the first poem (fols. 1r – 16r) being a rhymed dialogue clearly composed as the none-too-decorous entertainment for the guests at a Jewish wedding, and as we read it the wedding festivities come almost magically alive.

The swiftly moving dialogue takes place between the bride and her mother, with an occasional stanza or two for the somewhat bewildered bridegroom. Written in Italian and punctuated by Hebrew rhyme-words, the dialogue revolves around the exaggerated “reluctance” of the innocent young bride to enter the marriage state. In one notable stanza (no. 50), for example, the mother scolds her daughter for being so troublesome about going to the mikveh prior to the wedding ceremony As the daughter moans and groans about drowning in the ritual bath and other unlikely disasters, the mother breaks sharply in:

My daughter, stop all that moaning

And just dunk your head in –

Truly all this fuss and fury

Makes you seem like a simpleton.

– translation by Carol Anderson, Ph.D. candidate, the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.

Other manuscripts of interest include a diwan of poems, some unpublished, by Solomon ben Meshullam Dapiera, a Hebrew poet from late fourteenth-century Spain (Ms 154); a responsum concerning the kiddushin of two sisters apparently in Lebanon (Ms 31); and a pinkas (records book) of a synagogue in Mantua from the years 1739-1749 (Ms 29).

Those interested in Jewish folk culture will find rich materials (e.g., Mss 21, 35, 57, 182), as will those researching the modes of Jewish music in the Ottoman Empire (Mss 24; 144; 149). Particularly intriguing, perhaps, is a large autograph fragment by Moses b. Abraham Provençal (Ms 147), a chapter from Hayyim Vital’s unpublished redaction of Shemoneh She’arim (Ms 43), and an unpublished novel in Hebrew written just after the First Zionist Congress in 1896 (Ms 77).

Now almost one hundred years since the first Hebraic manuscripts entered the Library of Congress, the Hebraic Manuscript Collection is culminating in a digital website to make the manuscripts fully accessible online. But spanning these two bookends, so to speak, was a century of research as scholars worked to identify manuscripts and add new information to the bibliographical notes.

Particularly important in this respect was the work of two former heads of the Library’s Hebraic Section: Lawrence C. Marwick (1909-1981) and Myron M. Weinstein (1927-1998), whose copious notes provided a foundation for the catalogue compiled by Benjamin Richler in the summer of 2006. Richler’s masterly work, with the addition of some half-a-dozen manuscripts acquired over the past few years, is now being made ready for the digital age. To date over one hundred manuscripts have been added to the online corpus of Hebraic manuscripts at the Library of Congress – and the work continues.

The work of acquisition also continues, and indeed the Hebraic Section has recently acquired a manuscript of the utmost importance, namely an ancient Torah scroll sheet from the Book of Exodus written on vellum in the Middle East some time during the tenth or eleventh century.

Torah Scroll Sheet dated ca. 1000 C.E., containing Exodus 10:10-16:15. Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress.

Containing verses 10:10–16:15, the fragment begins with the Ten Plagues of Egypt and ends with the passage over the Red Sea. The “Song of the Sea,” in which the Children of Israel celebrate the transition from slavery to freedom has been written in the beautiful “half-brick over brick, brick over half-brick” layout prescribed by ancient Jewish law—a layout not found in the considerably more ancient Dead Sea Scrolls. Displayed in the Library’s Great Hall just after acquisition, the scroll sheet is currently undergoing extensive treatment in the Library’s Conservation Division.

 

Ann Brener is the Hebraic Area Specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress.