(NACHMANIDES / RaMBa”N). Chidushei Bava Bathra [novellae to Talmud Tractate]. * Appended: Dina de-Garmei

MOSES BEN NACHMAN

Daniel Bomberg

Venice

1523

FIRST EDITION. A fine, wide-margined copy. Divisional title of Dina de-Garmei. On title and final blank two elegant Sephardic monograms, as yet unidentified. At bottom final page several censors’ inscriptions: “Dominico Irosolimi[ta]no”; “Aless[and]ro Scipione 1596”; “Laurentius Franguellus”; “Visto per me Gio[vanni] Dominico Carretto 1618.” (See Wm. Poppers, The Censorship of Hebrew Books, pl.III, nos. 1, 7, 8; pl.iv, no.5)

Vinograd, Venice 74; Habermann, Bomberg 80; not in Adams

Dina Degarmi, is an exposition of laws pertaining to personal injuries and property damage. This small, work was highly praised and generated many super-commentaries In the poem which serves as the preface to Dina de-Garmei (f.110), Nachmanides praises his predecessors, the “Sages of France” (i.e. The Tosaphists). R. Solomon Luria (Yam shel Shelomo, Tractate Bava Kama, Introduction) would cite this poem as proof of the great esteem in which Nachmanides, a Spaniard, held the rabbis of France. Maimonides, on the other hand, had a certain disdain for the French rabbis, writing of them disparagingly. See C.B. Chavel, Kithvei Ramban, vol. I (1968), p.417; EJ, Vol. XII, col. 780; Vol. VII, cols. 430-431. Israel Ta-Shema has established that with the exception of Nachmanides’ commentary to Bava Kama and the appended “Dina de-Garmei,” printed in Venice in 1523, there did not appear in print any other work of Nachmanides’ Talmudic interpretations for the next two centuries. The ramifications of this are enormous, for it means that Aschkenazic decisors such as R. Shabthai Cohen, author “Siphthei Cohen” (Sha”Ch) were bereft of the major portion of Nachmanides’ scholarship. See I.M. Ta-Shema, Kiryath Sepher, Vol. L (1975), p.327; and Haym Soloveitchik, “Printing and the History of Halakha - A Case Study” in: Bar-Ilan Annual, Vol. XXX-XXXI (2006), p.319