Epistola contra Judaeorum errores

Name: Epistola contra Judaeorum errores
Author: Samuel Marochitanus

by Samuel Marochitanus

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48 pages 1499

About This Book

Small 4to. ff. 28, including the initial blank. 19th-century calf backed- and cornered marbled boards, red morocco cover label (‘sine loco et anno’). With contemporary scarlet initials, underlinings, and intra-textual emphasis professionally supplied; printed without catchwords, pagination or signatures, on a superior paper-stock. From the famous library of Dr Georg Kloss of Frankfurt, with his bookplate, but apparently not in his 1835 sale at Sotheby’s – which contains no fewer than four other incunabular editions (lots 3260-3263). Bound with pseudo-Pontius Pilate’s Epistola ad Tiberium [‘Incipit Epistola quam misit Rabi Samuel Israhelita oriundus de Civitate Regis Morochorum ad Rabi Ysaac’.]. Second (?), and earliest procurable edition of one of the most ubiquitous and enduring of all medieval forgeries. The ‘letter of renunciation’ attributed to one Rabbi Samuel ibn Nasr ibn Abbas of Fez (?1001-1100), a converted Jew, berating his former co-religionists for continuing to await their Messiah, in obedience to Mosaic Law, when He had in fact materialized a millennium thence as Jesus Christ, and citing Old Testament texts in support of the advent of subsequent Christianity. Supposedly written in Arabic in 1072 and addressed to a Rabbi Isaac of Subiulmeta in Morocco, but then suppressed by conspiring Jews for more than 250 years, it was ‘translated’ into Latin in 1339 by Alphonsus Boni Hominis (or Alonso Buenhombre), a Dominican missionary who d. 1353, and who, in the absence of any known Arabic or pre- Latin text, is now generally assumed to have been the true author/forger. It proved hugely popular in the High Renaissance, and even in ensuing centuries. Ficino’s pupil Sebastiano Salvini translated it from Buenhombre’s ‘barbarous’ Latin into Tuscan by November 1479, a version first published in Salvini’s undated vernacular works (F. R. Goff, Incunabula in American Libraries: A Third Census. Millwood (N.Y.), 1973, S 117) and also revised his source into a more elegant humanist prose, in 1482, as P. O. Kristeller argues in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters. Rome, 1993, p. 189. But if so, it is not Salvini’s revision, but the original mid-14th-century text that survives in at least seventeen of the twenty-four incunabular editions, alongside translations into Italian, German, and Spanish. Thereafter WorldCat lists more than three hundred reprints, including Polish, Dutch, and French in the 16th century, and an exhaustive count would take notice of later appearances or adaptations in Portuguese, modern Greek, Slovak, Romanian, and English (Thomas Calvert’s The Blessed Jew of Morocco, or a Blackamoor made White. York, 1648), and a significant revival as antisemitic fodder in Russian in the late 18th and the 19th century. The first printed edition of ‘Rabbi Samuel’ likely emerged from the press of Leonardus Achates de Basilia (Leonhard Agtstein) in Sant’Orso, a small town in the northern Veneto, Province of Vicenza, undated, but undoubtedly 1474: Agtstein was active in Padua in1472-1473, printed just three books in Sant’Orso in 1474, including the Rabbi Samuel, and had moved to nearby Vicenza by November 1474, where he remained until 1497. To his editio princeps of Samuel he appended the first printing of another notable Christian forgery, the short imaginary letter of Pontius Pilate to the Roman emperor Tiberius (an apparent error for Claudius: see J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford, 1993, p. 205), describing Jesus admiringly, and recounting his own attempts to save him from the wrath of the Jewish elders. Nine copies of Agtstein’s printing are recorded by ISTC in Italy, Austria, England, and Poland, four of them imperfect, and one (at Krakow) undescribed. The same assembly was reprinted at the second (and last early) press in Sant’ Orso, that of Johannes de Reno (Johannes Renensis), a printer who seems to have followed closely in the footsteps of Agtstein, starting out in Padua as well (1473), transferring to Sant’Orso in 1475 (a unique [Sant’Orso, 1473] imprint, see Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke. Leipzig [etc.], M33258, cannot be his as catalogued) with nine known publications attributed to him there in that year, and then also moving on to Vicenza before 1 September 1476, where he worked until at least 1482. His edition of Samuel is presumably based directly on Agtstein’s, but is not a paginary reprint; nonetheless, it clearly indicates that the text was saleable enough, from a small north Italian press, to justify two printings there within one year or so of each other. And within the first two years of its initial appearance in print, three further editions of Rabbi Samuel are dated, specifically, ‘1475’, i.e. (1) Mantua, Johannes Schalus, with the ‘Scrutinum scripturarum’ of Paulus de Sancta Maria, (2) Augsburg, Jodocus Pflanzmann, in German, and (3) Bologna, Ugo Rugerius (17 June). None of these three includes the Pilate Epistle, which reappeared only in the two Rome editions of 1480. Inexplicably, ISTC orders these 1474-75 editions with the Mantuan printing deemed second, between the two of Sant’Orso, and the Augsburg and Bologna edition as fourth and fifth, but because only the Sant’Orso editions contain the supplementary Pilate forgery, it is more like that they appeared first. In the entire corpus of 24 15th-century editions, only eight include the second forgery (among them the 1480 Rome, Silber edition, see Bib# 4102698/Fr# 174 in this collection), and sixteen do not. See W.A. Copinger, Supplement to Hain’s Repertorium bibliographicum, I. London, 1895, 14263+, British Museum, Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Museum, vol.VII,, 1028, Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke. Leipzig [etc.], 39841, Goff S 104. <a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_7596538" rel="ugc nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a>