JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

of a million of them. The Portuguese tradition was revived in
Salonika 23 years later in an edition of Psalms, Proverbs, Job,
and Daniel with Don Judah Gedaliah as patron and Joseph
b. Mako Golphon as printer. The first Bible to be printed in
Spain was the 1514–17 Complutensian Polyglot printed at Alcalde
Henares (Lat. Complutum) under the patronage of Cardinal
Ximenes de Cisneros, founder of the university there,
regent of Castile, and archbishop of Toledo. The project was
completed in 1517, but it was nearly three years before Pope
Leo X authorized the work and a further two years before publication,
by which time Cardinal Ximenes had been dead for
five years. Accents were deliberately rejected; other signs were
introduced to mark the colons and the penultimate accented
syllables. The vowel-points are far from reliable.
By the year 1511 the Soncinos, now at Pesaro, were able to
make a new start and in stages they completed a fourth edition
of the complete Bible. Gershom had used the interval to
perfect his technique and this edition is the best produced by
Ashkenazi Jews in Italy. Around this time Daniel *Bomberg,
a Christian merchant of Amsterdam, arrived in Venice and
established his printing office there. In 1516–17 he published
the first Great Rabbinic Bible, edited by Felix Pratensis, who
was born a Jew but was baptized in 1506. The work is in four
volumes, with Targums and commentaries. For the first time
the kerei is given, but in the variants in the margin (see *Masorah).
The last volume contains additional material, notably
Maimonides’ “Thirteen Articles” and the treatise on accents
entitled Dikdukei ha-Te’amim said to be by *Ben Asher and
here printed for the first time. Here also for the first time in
Hebrew Samuel and Kings were each divided into two books
in imitation of the Vulgate. The strangest thing about this edition
is the statement made to the pope when his imprimatur
was sought; it claimed that the many previously printed Bibles
“contain as many errors as words” and that “no one had attempted
it before.” Daniel Bomberg and Felix Pratensis duly
received the pope’s blessing, though it proved more of a hindrance
than an asset. Even before this four-volume Bible was
published, Bomberg realized that he had made two bad mistakes:
employing an apostate Jew as his editor, and requesting
the pope’s imprimatur. He therefore remade the columns as
soon as the folios of the large Bible had been run off and issued
a quarto edition at the same time, this time without any
mention of either editor or pope. A second edition was called
for within four years, when the whole was reset; on this occasion
the two sons of Baruch Adelkind were mentioned as
printers, and great emphasis was laid on the fact that they were
Jews, thoroughly Orthodox and already engaged in printing
the whole of the Talmud. However, something had to be done
about the Great Rabbinic Bible, and, as though divinely guided
and certainly opportunely, Jacob b. Ḥayyim ibn Adonijah arrived
in Venice after his family had been driven out of Spain
and again out of Tunis. After seven penurious years of wandering
Jacob b. Ḥayyim found work with Bomberg in Venice.
The chief fruit of the partnership was the second Great Rab-
bible
binic Bible of 1524–25, the text of which became the standard
masoretic text and continued as such for 400 years. Jacob b.
Ḥayyim was very conscious of the importance of the masorah
as the guarantee of the correct text, and he went to great
pains and undertook several journeys to secure as many codices
with a masorah as possible. Thus, for the first time, there
was a printed Hebrew Bible with a marginal masorah. As the
editor discovered that “the masorah did not harmonize with
the majority of the codices,” he had to exercise his discretion.
The edition was in four volumes, with Targums, and with commentaries
by Rashi, Ibn Ezra, David and Moses Kimḥi, and
Levi b. Gershom. A third Bomberg quarto edition appeared
in 1525–28, the text being a combination of that of Felix Pratensis
and that of Jacob b. Ḥayyim.
Daniel Bomberg’s tribulations were not over, for soon
after 1525 Jacob b. Ḥayyim became a Christian. In 1527 Elijah
*Levita, a refugee originally from Neustadt near Nuremberg,
came to Venice and found employment with Bomberg.
No more is heard of Jacob b. Ḥayyim, Elijah Levita being
henceforth chief adviser to the Bomberg firm. In subsequent
reprints of the 1524–25 Bible, there is no mention of the editor.
Bibles printed after 1525 all follow substantially the text of
Jacob b. Ḥayyim ibn Adonijah until *Buxtorf’s small-format
Bible of 1611 and his four-volume rabbinic Bible of 1618–19,
printed at Basle, in which the text was influenced by Sephardi
traditions, and not dominated by the Ashkenazi ones as were
all previous editions printed under Jewish auspices. The text
was edited by Jablonski in 1699, but the most important edition
based on the Buxtorf text is that of J.H. Michaelis in 1720.
It is a critical edition, quoting 19 printed editions and five Erfurt
manuscripts, especially the very important Erfurt 3 with
its masorah, and containing also Okhlah ve-Okhlah, an 11thcentury
masoretic work of great importance then printed for
the first time. The critical notes and the variants provided by
Michaelis indicate a masoretic tradition different from that of
the 1524–25 Bible of Jacob b. Ḥayyim. They form a pattern, already
discernible in Jablonski’s 1699 edition, but more clearly
in *Lonzano’s Or Torah and *Norzi’s Minḥat Shai. Norzi depended
mostly on the de’Rossi codex 782, which had a strange,
disturbed history, though *de’Rossi (vol. 1, p. 128) recognized
it as “the most perfect examplar of the masoretic text.” This
tradition must have come to Spain at a comparatively early
date, and it is firmly established in Sephardi tradition. It is
responsible for at least some of the differences between the
Complutensian Polyglot and the standard text based on Ashkenazi
codices. Michaelis’ critical edition is an early and neglected
precursor of the modern editions of the Hebrew Bible,
those by P. Kahle and N.H. Snaith.
The story of modern times begins with Seligmann *Baer,
who published the Hebrew Bible in single volumes with notes,
except for Exodus to Deuteronomy (for which see the Roedelheim
Pentateuch, a popular edition without notes). The dates
of these volumes are 1869–1895. Baer believed that the masorah
is supreme, that firm rules can be established, and that
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 587