(Author of Kol Mussar, 1679-1727). Autograph Hebrew Manuscript Signed: “Shirah Chadasha Shibchu Yisra’elim.”

MODON, SAMSON COHEN.

circa

(Mantua)

1700

Neat Italian semi-cursive script. Heading in square script. One page. Fourteen lines.

A poetic sonnet concerning a Jew who embraced Christianity. Cecil Roth gives high marks to the poetic achievement of Modon, “renewer of the Hebrew sonnet, who won golden opinions when he was sent on a congratulatory mission to the Emperor Charles VI.” His Kol Mussar (Mantua, 1725) contains fifty similar types of sonnets (poems of fourteen lines). See C. Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy (1946), p. 400; D. Bregman & A. Brener. The Emergence of the Hebrew Sonnet, in: Prooftexts. Vol. 11, no. 3 (1991), pp. 231-39.