385 PRINTED BOOKS OF THE FIFTEENTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES, BOUND WITH MEDIEVAL HEBREW MANUSCRIPTS IN THE ESTENSE LIBRARY IN MODENA

Mauro Perani with the cooperation of Emmanuela Mongardi and Ezra Chwat*

The curious custom of recycling medieval Hebrew and non-Hebrew manuscript parchment folios during the second half of the sixteenth century until the end of the seventeenth, and in some cases up to the eighteenth century, is well known to scholars working in the field of the history of book production or in that of medieval Hebrew manuscripts. In the “European Genizah,” so called only by analogy with a true Genizah, and especially in archives and libraries all over Italy, during the past twenty-four years of research, I have seen several printed books whose binding boards were reinforced by using some bifolios of Hebrew manuscripts during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Most frequently, such recycling of parchment manuscripts occured when they were used to bind registers or protocols of notaries, or of any other institution which had to put them into an archive after writing and compiling them. A very important case was that of twenty fragments (seven bifolios containing fourteen pages and nine horizontally cut to make eighteen incomplete pages), detached from a Sephardic manuscript copied in Spain during the thirteenth century, which were reused to bind seven large folio volumes that contained the juridical works of Bartolo

* I began this research during the 1980s. It has been completed with the help of Emmanuela Mongardi who prepared on this subject her M.A. thesis, discussed at the Faculty of Preservation of Cultural Heritage of Bologna University, Ravenna campus, on March 13, 2008. To Emmanuela is due the inventory and elaboration of the data. Ezra Chwat from the Institute of Hebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National and University Library of Jerusalem carried out the larger part of the identification of the content of these fragments. For the research on all the maculaturae written in other languages, see M. Perani, “Codicum Hebraicorum fragmenta. I manoscritti ebraici riusati nelle legature in Ita- lia,” in “Fragmenta ne pereant”: Recupero e studio dei frammenti di manoscritti medievali e rinas- cimentali riutilizzati in legature, ed. Mauro Perani and Cesarino Ruini (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2002). 218 mauro perani da Sassoferrato, published in 1555 in Lyon (France) and kept in the Library of the Diocesan Seminary in Savona. These fragments con- tain an early copy of Talmud Yerushalmi, more precisely, portions of the tractates Berakot, Bava Qama, Bava Metzia, Sanhedrin, Makkot, Shevuot, Avodah Zarah, and Horayot. This finding was important because there is only one extant complete codex of Talmud Yerushalmi, in Leiden (ms. Scaliger 3), which was copied in Italy in 1289 by the scribe Yechiel ben Yequtiel ben Benyamin ha-Rofeh, and which served as the basis for the editio princeps published in Venice by the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg in 1523. The text of the Savona fragments is quite different from that of the Leiden codex, and similar to that of some fragments from the Cairo Genizah, copied in the tenth century in the Orient, and to that of the El Escorial Manuscript IG3 (Royal Library of Saint Laurence manuscript of Talmud Bavli), in which the scribe who cop- ied it in the fifteenth century also added (only for the three tractates Bavot) the text of Yerushalmi in the upper margins. The fragments from Savona, which preserve passages from the tractates Bavot, attest that the recensio of the Cairo Genizah fragments was still alive in Spain in the thirteenth and in the fifteenth centuries.1 This example also demonstrates how just a few pages of a manu- script can be of great importance for shedding new light on the his- tory of the copying tradition of a work. Unfortunately, a common practice adopted by binders when reusing parchment manuscripts to bind printed books was to erase and completely obliterate the text appearing on the outer sides of the recycled folios. This was done to avoid an unpleasant impact on a reader who might balk at see- ing a Hebrew, Latin, or vernacular text written on the cover of a book. This common practice has deprived us of 50% of the texts written on manuscript parchment and reused in binding. As I have just pointed out, this was normal for the binding of printed books, while, in contrast, when binding registers or deeds of any kind, the binders generally left the text on the outer sides of the wrappers also. The largest collection in the world of handwritten parchments, both Hebrew and non-Hebrew, is held in the Modena area, where about

1 For these fragments of Talmud Yerushalmi, see M. Perani and G. Stemberger, “The Yerushalmi Fragments Discovered in the Diocesan Library of Savona,” Henoch 23 (2001): 267–303. For the catalogue of the Talmudic fragments found up to the present in the Italian Genizah, see Mauro Perani and Enrica Sagradini, Talmudic and Midrashic Fragments from the “Italian Genizah”: Reunification of the Manuscripts and Catalogue, AISG Quaderni di Materia giudaica 1 (Florence: Giuntina, 2004).