The Casale Pilgrim: A Sixteenth century Illustrated Guide to the Holy Places, Reproduced in Facsimile, with Introduction, Translation, and Notes by Cecil Roth.

(ISRAEL, LAND OF)

Curwen Press

London

1929

SIR LEON SIMON’S COPY with his signature (twice) on opening endpapers. One of 580 numbered copies printed on Van Gelder paper. Color pictorial plates.

“In the last decade of the sixteenth century, a pilgrim returned from Palestine to his native city of Casale Monferrato in North Italy. He had been privileged to visit the Holy Land and to see with his own eyes all of its wonders…Basing himself on the text of the anonymous Ascription of the Patriarchs of half a century before [i.e., Yichus Avoth of 1537], though not following it by any means slavishly, he produced the slender illuminated volume which is here reproduced - a spiritual Baedeker to the Holy Land, fully illustrated in colour.” (Introduction, pp. 17-18). Sir Leon Simon (1881-1965) was a Zionist leader and Chairman of the Hebrew University’s Executive Council who is most well known for helping draft the Balfour Declaration. Sir Leon and Cecil Roth were contemporaries and well-acquainted.