ABRABANEL, ISAAC DON. Pirush HaTorah [commentary to the Pentateuch]

(KARAITICA)

Bragadin for Giovanni di Gara

Venice

1579

FIRST EDITION. Interleaved with manuscript notations by Karaite scribe Joseph ben Moses Chazan and his disciple, the noted, if controversial, Karaite scholar Abraham ben Samuel Firkovich (Even Reshef; 1786-1874)

Vinograd, Venice 641; Mehlman 626; Steinschneider 5302(1), Salo Baron Jubilee Volume III (1974), pp. 23, 30-31 (facsimile of variant)

On the first page, the scribe, Joseph ben Moses Chazan, writes that he inherited from his ancestors many handsome tomes which unfortunately had fallen into disrepair, including this volume of Abrabanel’s Commentary to the Torah. Several years were to pass before Chazan discovered a copy of the work in the study house of Dubno, enabling him to erplicate the leaves missing from his own copy. This page is datelined “3 Kislev, 5576 [1816], village of Pien.” As for Chazan’s disciple, Abraham Firkovich, his name “lives in infamy” due to his many forgeries. Conversely, the Firkovich collections in the St. Petersburg Library, which contain invaluable Genizah documents and rabbinic manuscripts that Firkovich collected during his 1830 expedition to Eretz Israel, remain among the most important repositories of Judaica in the world. See JE, Vol. V, pp. 393-4; EJ, Vol. VI, cols. 1305-6