ELIAS ADENI. Seder Azharoth [piyutim for Shemini Atzereth].

(INDIAN JUDAICA)

Uri b. Aaron Halevi

Amsterdam

1688

According to the rite of Cochin. Vignette of schooner on last page

Vinograd, Amsterdam 547 (not in the JNUL); Davidson, Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry, Vol. I p. xxvi (with erroneous date of publication)

The first publication of the Jews of Cochin. The manuscript was brought back to Amsterdam by Moses Pereira de Paiva, head of the delegation sent by the Sephardi Community of Amsterdam, to visit the Jews resident along India’s Malabar Coast. Contact between the Cochin Jews and their European co-religionists were sparse until the Dutch captured Cochin from the Portuguese in 1663. They in turn granted the Jews full cultural and religious autonomy Contains prayers unique to the Cochin Jews published here for the first time and never reprinted. Only one other copy recorded, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, but it lacks a title-page. Therefore neither Steinschneider (Cat. Bodl. no. 4938.2) nor Fuks (Amsterdam no. 375) recorded a complete description. Unknown entirely to Yaari (viz. Hebrew Printing in the East (1940) p. 91 note 3)