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Book Category: Jewish Studies

Pentateuch from Plantin’s Polyglot Bible

The Plantin Polyglot or Biblia regia constitutes the third large-scale polyglot bible edition in European history, after the famous Complutensian polyglot of 1514–7, and Johns Hopkins’ superb copy of the Genoa polyglot psalter of 1516. Many of the original 1,200 copies were lost in a shipwreck en route to Spain. A handful of copies of the Plantin Polyglot Bible are found today in European and American libraries.

Published in eight volumes between 1569 and 1572 in Antwerp by the leading printer of the northern Renaissance, Christopher Plantin (around 1520–89), this bold project was underwritten directly by King Philip II of Spain. Produced by an international team of linguists, biblical scholars, and more than 40 printers, the Plantin Polyglot is a breathtaking masterpiece both of philology and typography. It is, simply put, one of the most famous books ever printed.

The first volume of Johns Hopkins’ copy, which is used frequently for teaching and scholarship, is in need of conservation treatment. It contains the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Hebrew Bible—in the original Hebrew with parallel translations in Latin and Greek as well as an Aramaic commentary (targum) below the main texts.

Conservation Treatment

Remove from current binding, mend and guard all spine folds and other tears/losses in paper, re-sew, and re-bind using conservation-grade materials and structure.

Mickey Mouse Israeli comic series

Nineteen years after Walt Disney created one of the most famous cartoon characters of all time, Mickey Mouse arrived in Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). Mickey Ma’oz is considered the first Hebrew comic magazine. The animated bi-monthly series included comic strips featuring Mickey Mouse (Miki Ma’oz), Donald Duck (Danny Avazani), and Pinocchio, as well as local comic heroes like detective David Tidhar, Omer and Gomer, and others, combined with stories on Israeli children and their adventures.

The comics were rhymed and edited by the Israeli author and journalist Yehoshua Tan Pai (1914-88), who published Mickey Maoz—without seeking Disney’s permission—and other children’s books through a small publishing house he founded in Tel Aviv. The magazine included illustrations by Ze’ev Raban (1890-1970), one of the fathers of Israeli art.

Reaches of Heaven: A Story of the Baal Shem Tov

Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991), who grew up in a strictly Orthodox Hasidic household in Poland, presents a version of the legend surrounding the 18th century founder of Hasidism known as the Baal Shem Tov.

Singer was a Polish-born Jewish-American author of short stories, novels, essays, cultural criticism, memoirs, and stories for children. His career spanned nearly seven decades of literary production, at the center of which was the translation of his work from Yiddish into English, which he undertook with various collaborators and editors. Known for fiction that portrayed 19th-century Polish Jewry as well as supernatural tales that combined Jewish mysticism with demonology, Singer was a master storyteller whose sights were set squarely on the tension between human nature and the human spirit.

The illustrations are by the Polish American artist Ira Moskovitz (1912 -2001), who is known for his Southwest influenced art, Judaica, and printmaking. He often collaborated with Isaac Bashevis Singer, illustrating his acclaimed books and fanciful tales about Eastern European Jewish life at the turn of the century.

You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104

Barbara Wolff (b. 1949) is one of the rare contemporary artists using the techniques of medieval manuscript illumination. She paints on vellum—animal skin—and highlights her work with silver, gold, and platinum foils. Her work has been exhibited at The NY Illustrators Club, The Jewish Theological Seminary, Yeshiva University Museum, The Museum of Biblical Art, and the Morgan Library & Museum. Her exploration of the world of nature as it relates to Biblical texts has been enriched by her background and work as a renowned natural science illustrator.

The ten illuminations that comprise You Renew the Face of the Earth illustrate passages from Hebrew Psalm 104, a song in celebration of all creation. This great hymn to the divine in nature directs our awareness to the miracle of our world. The sentiments expressed in this psalm have a particular relevance to our own era, a time of growing consciousness of the profound effect of human enterprise on nature, and of questioning our role as stewards of our planet.

In a number of the paintings, Wolff has portrayed flora and fauna that the ancient Psalmist would certainly have known, and that may still be found in the land of Israel today. She has included the flowers and grasses of its fields and forests, birds which pass through the land each spring and fall, and sea creatures of the Mediterranean, from a precious Murex snail to the great whales.

“And the Mountains Rose” (vv. 5-8), from You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104, fol. 2.
“The Earth is Full of Thy Creatures” (v. 24), from You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104, fol. 7.
“Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Formed” (vv. 25-6), from You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104, fol. 8.

Lavishly Illuminated Hebrew Bible from Medieval Spain

The Kennicott Bible counts among the most significant medieval manuscripts from Spain. It is a noble, exceptional work containing a Hebrew Bible, which contains the text Sefer Michlol by Rabbi David Kihmhi alongside the Tanakh.

The colophon at the end of the manuscript, in which the scribe has immortalized himself by name, is a special feature that is extremely useful to scholarship: in 1476, the famous Moses Ibn Zaraba completed the work with the help of the illuminator Joseph Ibn Hayyim in La Coruna in northwestern Spain.

The 922 pages of this Hebrew Bible, which is amazingly preserved in its original gorgeous binding, combines an exuberant and golden splendor of ornaments, carpet pages, and figurative representations, often of a humorous character. The manuscript received its name from the Hebraist and Christian cleric Benjamin Kennicott, who researched the manuscript in the 18th century.

large illuminated manuscript open to a page spread

open view of illustrated manuscript

open view of illustrated manuscript

Survivors’ Talmud

Known as the “Survivors’ Talmud” or “US Army Talmud,” this Talmud was distributed to Holocaust survivors in the US Occupied Zone in Germany. The title pages, illustrated in yellow and black, depict both the suffering and the hope for redemption of the Jewish people. The bottom shows life in the concentration camp and the top shows the yearning for a new Jerusalem. The images are attributed to the artist Grisha Ronsenkanz, who was active in the Displaced Persons camps, and later emigrated to Miami, where he taught both Hebrew and Jewish studies.

Yellow page with line drawings at top and bottom and red Hebrew lettering in the center

Moï Ver’s Poland

Joining our collection of works by the important avant-garde photographer and painter Moï Ver (born Moses Vorobeichic, changed later to Moshé Raviv-Vorobeichic)—including all three editions of his visual study of the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius—is this remarkably rare collection of photographs. POLIN (Poland) features ten pages of stunning photographic plates of Jewish life in Poland during the interwar years, preceded by two pages of text in Hebrew. Found in only three other research libraries, the portfolio will be instrumental to the research of JHU Jewish Studies professor Samuel Spinner, who is studying the corpus of Ver/Vorobeichic, and to generations of Hopkins researchers to come.

moi ver polin portrait

The Immigrant’s Handbook

A practical guide to American life for the benefit of recently arrived Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

Collected Poems of Hafiz

This illuminated manuscript in hand-painted lacquer binding does not simply contain a collection, in a beautiful Arabic manuscript, of the verse of the celebrated fourteenth-century Persian poet Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī, known as Hafiz—it is also an incredible work of art. The poems of Hafiz, many of them ghazals celebrating earthly and divine love, were so well-regarded that many copies of his Divān were created over the centuries after his death.

This gorgeous copy from the nineteenth century comes from the library of the renowned British bookbinder Francis Bedford, and was probably rebound and decorated by him. The lacquer covers feature a lush arrangement of hand-painted pink and yellow flowers on the outside and bouquets of irises on the inside.

spine of book Diwan Hafiz

A Century of Jewish Thought

One of only seven known copies worldwide (and the only in the state of Maryland) of a speech given by Baltimore’s own Henrietta Szold to the Baltimore section of the National Council of Jewish Women. It explicitly discusses Zionism by name more than a year before Theodor Herzl would go on to convene the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in August 1897.