Pirush Chamesh Megiloth [commentary to the Five Scrolls, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Daniel, Ezra & Nehemiah and Chronicles]

YACHYA, JOSEPH BEN DAVID IBN.

The Company of Jewish Silk Weavers

Bologna

1538

FIRST EDITION. Initial word of each chapter within decorative woodcut frame. Wide-margined copy. On final page, signature of censor, “Revisus p[er] me Laurentiu[m] Ffranguellu[m], 1575.” See Wm. Popper, The Censorship of Hebrew Books, plate IV, no. 5

Vinograd, Bologna 11; Adams J-337

Best known for his commentary to the Pentateuch, “Torah Or,” Joseph ben David ibn Yachya (1494-1534), scion of a distinguished Spanish-Portuguese family, took sharp exception to Maimonides’ rationalist philosophy and universalism, aligning himself with Judah Halevi’s doctrine of the chosenness of the Jewish People as expounded in the Kuzari. Thus, it is little wonder then that church censors found his works so pernicious. Joseph’s son, Gedaliah ibn Yachya, author “Shalsheleth ha-Kabbalah,” a classic of Jewish historiography, relates that after his father’s passing, Church censors burnt the deceased’s yet unpublished manuscripts. Israel Zinberg has suggested that the key to understanding the author’s exclusivist worldview lies in his family history of near martyrdom. His namesake, his grandfather Joseph ben David, was forced to flee Portugal for Spain and later for Italy because of his steadfast refusal to succumb to conversion to the dominant religion of Christianity. Neither did Italy prove much more tolerant of the Ibn Yachya family’s “Judaizing” tendencies. See I. Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, Vol. IV (1974), pp. 56-59; EJ, Vol. VIII, cols. 1207, 1210. The seventh of only nine books printed by the Jewish Silk Weaver’s Guild. See Amram, The Makers of Hebrew Books in Italy (1963), pp.232-35