Theirs or Ours? A Defense of the Vatican Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts
MILLER, PHILIP E.
A late-15th-century text of the Mishneh Torah, written by Moses Maimonides. This Italian manuscript is opened to SeferAhava, The Book of Love," which discusses the attainment of the love of God...
...That morning, a full-page advertisement by the "Committee for the Recovery of Jewish Manuscripts" appeared in The Miami Herald demanding that the Vatican return the manuscripts to the Jews, from whom they had allegedly been plundered...
...A second exhibition of Jewish manuscripts at the New York Public Library called "The Hebrew Book from Antiquity to Our Time—A Sign and a Witness," is comprised of 185 books from Europe, Israel and the United States, which have never been shown as a collection before (see p. 36, "The Jewish Doctor 600 Years Ago...
...The sum total of Hebrew manuscripts is nine...
...These books may have been acquired through the 1329 mandate of Pope John XXII, ordering that talmudic books be taken from Jews and studied by Christian theologians, says Boyle...
...The exhibition, which had been in the making for years, came about because Rabbi Philip Hiat, assistant to the president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations for special projects, had an idea of creating an exhibition that would further understanding between Catholics and Jews...
...Without waiting for an answer, some decided that the books had to be booty confiscated from Jewish owners who were doubtlessly martyred for their faith, broken on the rack or burned at the stake...
...After the New York exhibit closes on January 14, 1989, the manuscripts will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art...
...The exhibition was not to be a mere artistic or scholarly display, but something that would educate the members of the two faith communities...
...At present, the Vatican Library possesses 801 Hebrew manuscripts, out of a total of some 75,000 volumes...
...If the return of the art collection, considerably more valuable than the Vatican's Hebrew manuscripts, were demanded by Iran or Saudi Arabia, would the Israel Museum be expected to give it back...
...How, then, did the Vatican acquire the Palatine Collection...
...By 1527, 227 Hebrew texts, not identified by title, were included in a library inventory note...
...In both cases, the claim is groundless...
...Hiat was aided in this endeavor by Roman Catholic clergy for whom the educational agenda was clear: Father Joseph D. Fenton, director of broadcast media for the U.S...
...I put a great deal of time and effort into trying to track this story down...
...What was not known in Berliner's day, however, was that the university did not keep the property, but sold it...
...I suspect they were either ransomed back to the Jews, or sold to someone else...
...The Hebrew manuscripts in the Palatine Collection can be traced to several sources...
...This collection of 8,000 manuscripts, printed books, and maps includes nearly 700 Jewish manuscripts, which, the ad claimed, had been confiscated in 1391, at the time of the expulsion of the Jewish community from Heidelberg...
...Voss got these Hebrew volumes from the library of his father, Gerhard Voss, an outstanding Dutch Christian Hebraist of the 17th century (and incidentally, a friend of Rembrandt and Manasseh ben Israel...
...Indeed, the famous library was a special prize of war that the Vatican wanted intact because Heidelberg had been a major center of Protestant scholarship and publishing...
...And during the Renaissance, humanists valued Hebrew as one of the tongues of classical antiquity...
...Consequently, I now believe it was made up by the anonymous author of this advertisement...
...At first I thought it might be one of those bubbe meisehs that abound in Jewish history, but to my surprise, I could not find the Prague story anywhere...
...Others believe that the knights represented the soldiers of the Church fighting for their lady, or Mary...
...Some art historians believe the non-Jewish illuminator interpreted the "Book of Love" to mean courtly love, so the artist drew a picture of chivalrous knights...
...That Berliner attributed the Palatine Collection to the despoiled community of Heidelberg is not surprising, for it was known in his day that Heidelberg's Jewish communal real estate—the synagogue, the mikveh and the cemetery—was seized by the local government at the time of the expulsion and given to the university...
...In the words of New York Times reviewer Deborah Gimelson, the manuscripts are "replete with beautiful images and vivacious colors . . . The show not only offers a development of thought within Judaism, but presents as well a millennium of cultural and intellectual exchange between Christians and Jews...
...For while this was not an era of Jewish-Christian "dialogue" as we know it, there were moments of contact between the two groups, however limited, resulting in intellectual cross-fertilization that changed both Christians and Jews...
...They can be seen there from January 28 until April22,1989, andafterward at the Harvard Semitic Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from April 19 until July 8, 1989, before returning to the Vatican...
...A half-century after Berliner's work, Umberto D. Cassuto, a chief rabbi of Florence and head of the rabbinical assembly there, researched the matter and brought the disparate facts together...
...However, the Jewish community of Heidelberg in 1391 numbered only twelve famines...
...The last acquisition of Hebrew manuscripts was made in 1923...
...Since then, "A Visual Testimony" has been shown at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, Hebrew Union College's Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Tennessee...
...The advertisement was one of many attacks on the Vatican exhibit made by Jews who have asked: From where and how did Hebrew manuscripts come into the hands of the Roman Catholic Church...
...Jews were excluded from the artists' guilds in Europe beginning in the 13th century...
...The Vatican Library treats its Hebrew manuscripts with the same professional concern, respect, and even love as the rest of its 75,000 pieces...
...As for the manuscripts of Queen Christina, there is absolutely no evidence that they had been confiscated from the Jewish community of Prague...
...Moreover, the Vatican's entire manuscript collection has been available to scholars on microfilm since the early 1950s, thus obviating the need to travel to Rome...
...Her library was in fact built by her tutor, Isaac Voss, a Dutch cleric, who was a Hebraist as well as a classicist...
...When the library was founded in the fifteenth century by Pope Nicholas V, he wanted it to include materials in the three tongues sacred to the Christian tradition: Latin, Greek and Hebrew...
...Nowhere in its attempt to set the "historical record" straight did this advertisement cite any scholarly literature to substantiate its claims...
...The treasures of many peoples are in the hands of others...
...A Visual Testimony: Judaicafrom the Vatican Library," has been touring the United States for a year...
...The illumination, however, shows knights with their lances held ready for jousting...
...Cassuto found archival documentation demonstrating that Fugger legitimately purchased his manuscripts from Jewish and non-Jewish sources...
...The exhibition's debut coincided with the 1987 visit of Pope John Paul II, who was present at the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami when it opened on September 16, 1987...
...Indeed, many of the Hebrew manuscripts in the Vatican Library were gifts from Italian noble families, including some whose sons took the cloth...
...Similarly, it probably galls many Arabs and Iranians that the Israel Museum has one of the finest collections of Islamic art in the world...
...The Vatican Library came into being in the 15th century, but papal archives existed before then, according to Father Leonard Boyle, library prefect...
...A cry went up demanding their return...
...Because of his unusual character and contributions to scholarship, Voss was included in the British Dictionary of National Biography, where the facts of his life and his relationship with Queen Christina are given in detail...
...The Catholic Prince Maximilian of Bavaria seized it when his forces conquered Protestant Heidelberg in 1634...
...This Italian manuscript is opened to SeferAhava, The Book of Love," which discusses the attainment of the love of God through prayer and study...
...While Christian achievements in Hebrew were comparatively meager compared to those in Latin and Greek, knowledge of Hebrew was, nevertheless, a sign of culture...
...Queen Christina, the ad alleged, received them from her father, who had confiscated them from the Jewish community of Prague in retaliation for their having participated in the defense of the city during the Thirty Years' War...
...It is highly unlikely that a Jewish community of this size would possess an enormously valuable collection of nearly 700 manuscripts...
...The Vatican exhibit of Hebrew manuscripts, "A Visual Testimony: Judaica from the Vatican Library," has been under attack from Jewish sources I since the day Pope John Paul II opened the exhibit in Miami...
...From that time until the beginning of this century, the Vatican Library has had a Hebrew specialist...
...however, illuminations were rarely done by Jews prior to that, according to art historian Joseph Gutmann...
...According to Vatican sources, Fugger sold his books to the Palatine Library because of insolvency...
...To people who jumped to this conclusion, the Vatican had no right to possess any Hebrew manuscripts...
...The fact is that these manuscripts have been used by such giants of Jewish scholarship as Leopold Zunz, Abraham Berliner, Azriel Hildesheimer, Wilhelm Bacher, Umberto Cassuto, Gershom Scholem, Ephraim Urbach, Louis Finkelstein and others, who have published major studies based on the Vatican's materials...
...Unfortunately, that the Reform organization of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations had a hand in this enterprise was, for some Jews, another strike against the exhibition...
...Catholic Conference, Archbishop John Foley of the Vatican's Office of Information, and Father Leonard E. Boyle, prefect of the Vatican Library...
...A Defense of the Vatican Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts PHILIP E. MILLER An exhibition of priceless Jewish manuscripts belonging to the Vatican opened at the New York Public Library on October 15, 1988...
...Until this ad appeared, I had never heard it said that Queen Christina's Hebrew manuscripts had been confiscated from the Jews of Prague...
...It obviously galls many Jews that important Hebrew manuscripts are in the Vatican Library...
...In 1877, the rabbinic scholar, historian and librarian Abraham Berliner (1833-1915) conjectured that the Hebrew manuscripts in the Palatine Collection had been confiscated from the Jewish community at the time of its expulsion from Heidelberg in 1391...
...It is likely that the community's books were not kept by the university...
...The present Vatican Library was begun around 1448, by Pope Nicholas V, who envisioned a library that would be open to the public...
...The second was the collection of Hebrew manuscripts that belonged to Queen Christina of Sweden, who reigned from 1644 to 1654...
...The 56 manuscripts on display span a thousand years—from the 8th century to the 18th century...
...While Christians drew the illuminations, Jews almost exclusively did the calligraphy, and the scribal tradition was kept within Jewish families...
...The Miami Herald ad singled out two major collections...
...Moreover, the collection included Sephardic, Provengal, Greek, Babylonian and Italian Hebrew manuscripts...
...Despite historical animosity between the Church and Jews, the Hebrew language has always been valued by the Catholic establishment because it is a language in which divine revelation occurred...
...Another version, according to the Encyclopedia Brilannica (1950 edition), is that Fugger bequeathed his collection of manuscripts to the library...
...The first was the Palatine Collection from the University of Heidelberg in Germany...
...The Miami broadside demanded the manuscripts' return to Jewish hands so that they "should again be used for Jewish scholarship . . . for which they were intended...
...Indeed, Isaac Voss charged Christina exorbitant sums for his bibliographic "finds...
...The Latin and Greek manuscripts in her collection number 2,400...
...Cassuto, a leading Bible scholar, wrote a monograph on the Palatine Collection in which he concluded that it had been the private collection of Ulrich Fugger (15261584), a noted 16th-century Christian German banker who sold his collection in order to raise capital...
...Microfilms of the Vatican's Hebrew manuscripts may be found in many libraries, including Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, and the Institute for Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem...
...The rich blue color behind the word aftava and on the knights is made from crushed lapis, with gold flecks woven into a design of vines and flowers on top...
...How did these Hebrew manuscripts come into the hands of the Roman Catholic Church...
...Fugger was not as interested in banking as he was in scholarship and book collecting...
...For example, while these manuscripts are significant and beautiful they are also displayed so as to demonstrate (1) the breadth and depth of knowledge available to Jews in the pre-modern period, (2) the material culture of these Jews, and (3) how Jewish and Christian thinkers influenced one another...
...Twenty years later, Fabio Ranucci, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, became the library's first Hebrew specialist...
...The most important criterion is whether these treasures are treated in an appropriate and respectful manner...
...The total effect of the manuscripts is dazzling and enlightening...
...Even if one or two wealthy families had a collection, it is doubtful that it would have had such a range of provenances...
...They had little value for the Christians who could not read them...
...Theirs or Ours...
...They are in eminently safe hands...
...Hebrew books were listed in the papal archive ^inventory as early as 1369...
Vol. 13 • November 1988 • No. 8
