(BIBLE).

AUCTION 26 |
Monday, November 22nd,
2004 at 1:00
Exceptional Printed Books, Sixty-Five Hebrew Incunabula: The Elkan Nathan Adler-Wineman Family Collection
Lot 33
(BIBLE).
Naples : Joseph ben Jacob Aschkenazi Gunzenhauser 1487
Est: $15,000 - $20,000
PRICE REALIZED $28,000
First edition of commentaries on the Five Megilloth along with the text (see Cohen, Hebrew Incunabula...Yeshiva University no. 40, p.109).
According to J. Bloch (p. 124, n. 32), “Very few copies of the Naples Hagiographa were known in the 18th-century. In fact, when in 1735 Dr. Theo. Pellet presented a copy of the book to the Library of Eton College, he described it as unique..."
This edition does not follow the standard order presently used “in all generally familiar editions of the Hebrew Bible.” See J. Bloch, Hebrew Printing and Bibliography: Studies by Joshua Bloch (1976) pp.111-38 esp. p.126
“The reverence for the Divine Name which induced the Soncino editors...to print the Tetragrammaton ... substituting a “Daleth” for a “He” is also followed by the Naples editors...(p. 812). See Christian D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (1897) pp. 811-14