(Ed.) Imrei No’am [Kabbalistic and grammatical super-commentary to Rashi and ibn Ezra on the Pentateuch]

Delasquez, Jacob

Eliezer ben Gershom Soncino

Constantinople

1540

FIRST EDITION. On final page, censor’s signature: “Dominico Yerushalmi” in Hebrew characters, and below in Latin characters, “Dominico Irosolimitano, 1612.” (See Wm. Popper, The Censorship of Hebrew Books, pl. III, no. 1). Strikingly modernist crushed morocco binding: in center cartouche front and back, two red obelisks, upright and inverted, surrounded by gold galaxy, against stark black background

Vinograd, Const.166; Ya’ari, Const. 129; not in Adams

Imrei No’am is a collection of comments on the Pentateuch by the medieval French school of Tosaphists. Just as there are several collections of Tosaphoth to the Talmud, so too there are various collections of the Tosaphoth to the Pentateuch: Da’ath Zekeinim, Minchath Yehudah, and Pa’ane’ach Raza, to name but a few. See Ch.J.D. Azulai, Shem ha-Gedolim, II, A-113, D-34. The censor responsible for striking words the Church found to be offensive in this work was the apostate Dominico Irosolimitano, one of very few Church censors wont to sign his name in Hebrew. While Latin inscriptions by the Dominican censors are common, Hebrew signatures are scarce. There exists some confusion between the Church censor and another apostate by that same name, born in Galilee, court physician in Constantinople, and after his conversion to Catholicism, instructor of Hebrew in the College of Neophytes in Rome. See Wm. Poppers, The Censorship of Hebrew Books (1969), p. 61