Enfilade

This is a book that I should have noted years ago; David Stern’s review for Mosaic usefully introduces the collectors, many of whom lived in the 18th century. –CH

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press . . .

Rebecca Abrams and César Merchán-Hamann, eds., Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1851245024, $55.

Representing four centuries of collecting and a thousand years of Jewish history, this book brings together Hebrew manuscripts and rare books from the Bodleian Library and Oxford colleges. Highlights of the extraordinary collections include a fragment of Maimonides’ autograph draft of the Mishneh Torah, the earliest dated fragment of the Talmud, exquisitely illuminated manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, stunning festival prayer books, and one of the oldest surviving Jewish seals in England. Lavishly illustrated essays by experts in the field bring these outstanding works to life, exploring the personalities and diverse motivations of their original collectors. Saved for posterity by religious scholarship, intellectual rivalry, and political ambition, these extraordinary collections also detail the consumption and circulation of knowledge across the centuries, forming a social and cultural history of objects moved across borders from person to person. Together, they offer a fascinating journey through Jewish intellectual and social history.

Rebecca Abrams is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford and author of The Jewish Journey: 4000 Years in 22 Objects.
César Merchán-Hamann is the Victor Blank Hebraica and Judaica curator in the Bodleian Library and director of the Leopold Muller Memorial Library at the University of Oxford.

c o n t e n t s

Librarian’s Foreword — Richard Ovenden
Preface — Martin J. Gross

Introduction to the Bodleian Library and College Collections — César Merchán-Hamann
1  The Laud Collection — Giles Mandelbrote
2  The Pococke Collection — Benjamin Williams
3  The Huntington Collection — Simon Mills and César Merchán-Hamann
4  The Kennicott Collection — Theo Dunkelgrün
5  The Canonici Collection — Dorit Raines
6  The Oppenheim Collection — Joshua Teplitsky
7  The Michael Collection — Saverio Campanini
8  The Genizah Collection — Nadio Vidro
9  The College Library Collections — Rahel Fronda
From Collectors to Readers — Piet van Boxel

Notes
Further Reading
Contributors
Picture Credits
Index