The discovery of rare early fragments or manuscripts previously unknown to us is always a cause for celebration in the world of scholars and collectors, all the more so when we are able to identify the handwriting and its author. This past week, I was lucky to be able to sell a fabulous find, a fragment extracted from a binding of an old Hebrew book, which turned out to be one of the most exciting such finds in recent memory.
Old manuscripts as well as printed books used various materials for bindings, many of which were not fully stable on their own, thus the use of pastedowns to reinforce the bindings. A pastedown is the sheet glued into the front and/or back cover of a book; it helps to hide the elements that hold the book together. If one uses a strong material like parchment, the pastedown can also provide further stability to the binding. Historically, due to the high cost of paper, the pastedown as well as the free-ends were often recycled from old manuscripts of pages from old books that fell in to disuse. If done carefully, these pastedowns can be extracted and separated from their bindings and their original text identified.
The fragment I sold was from the commentary of the Ralbag, Levi ben Gershon’s (1288-1344) commentary on the book of Iyov, with handwritten annotations and additions in the Ralbag’s own handwriting! Only one other autograph handwriting of the Ralbag is known, a page at the end of a copy of his Sefer Shorashim, a book on Hebrew language roots, which currently resides in Warsaw, Poland, in an institution. In that manuscript, the final page was written by the Ralbag himself, within which he lists the books in his library and the books he authored. A comparison between the two manuscript pages was done by experts and it was confirmed that it is indeed the handwriting of the Ralbag (also known as Gersonides), one of the more famous Rishonim and believed by many to be the maternal grandson of the Ramban. He was a medieval French Jewish philosopher, Talmudist, mathematician, physician and astronomer/astrologer.
