"Libellus de Judaica confessione sive sabbato afflictionis" ["Booklet of the Jewish Confession…"], by Johannes Pfefferkorn. Nuremberg: Joann Weyssenburger, [1508]. Latin.
Antisemitic work by Johannes Pfefferkorn, a convert from Judaism, calling on the Christian world to undermine Judaism and threaten the Jews with expulsion if they refuse to convert. The booklet contains descriptions of Jewish customs pertaining to Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, in particular the prayer "Avinu Malkeinu" ("Our Father, Our King", recited on the Ten Days of Penitence and fast days), which purportedly lays bare the Jewish hatred toward Christians: "Our Father, our King, wipe out every oppressor and adversary from against us / Our Father, our King, close the mouths of our adversaries and accusers...".
The book features four different woodcuts (one appearing twice, both on the title page and in the body of the text), considered to be the earliest illustrations of Jewish customs ever to be included in a printed book ("A Jewish Iconography" p. XIII; see below). For other, later woodcuts depicting Jewish customs, see lot no. 110 in the present auction (illustrated Sefer Minhagim).

The illustrations depict the synagogue on Rosh HaShanah with the blowing of the shofar; the "Tashlikh" service; Erev Yom Kippur with the custom of the penitential rooster ("tarnegol kaparot"), ritual bathing and eating; the synagogue on Yom Kippur with lashes meted out to penitents and the Priestly Blessing. In the synagogue illustrations, the women’s section appears at the bottom. In all the illustrations, the eyes of the Jewish figures are covered, in keeping with the motif of "Ecclesia et Synagoga" (lit. "Church and Synagogue") wherein Judaism is portrayed as a blindfolded woman, in juxtaposition with open-eyed Christianity – a prevalent motif in Christian art of the Middle Ages. These illustrations are seen as inspiration for the woodcuts appearing in Antonius Margaritha's well known antisemitic composition "Der gantz jüdisch Glaub" (Augsburg, 1530)
Pfefferkorn's work was originally written in German (bearing the name "Ich heyß ain büchlein der iudenpeicht") and was published in 1508 in three editions: one in German and two in Latin (of which, one was published in Cologne, and the other in Nuremberg). Woodcuts appeared in all editions, in both German and Latin. These woodcuts were identical in content, but differed slightly in form, and in several details; the present edition is the rarest of the three.

Johannes Pfefferkorn (ca. 1469-1521), a convert from Judaism to Christianity, a butcher or moneylender by profession. He was apparently arrested on charges of theft, and following his release, he and his family members were baptized in Cologne. Was active under the auspices of the monastic Dominican order, served as an adviser to the Flemish theologian Jacob van Hoogstraaten in his efforts to persecute Jews, and was a vocal advocate of the burning of all Jewish books other than the Bible. In the years 1507-1510, he published a number of stridently-worded booklets – the thrust of an unprecedented campaign against Jewish literature. These booklets sought to portray Jewish books – in particular, the Talmud – as the "source of all evil"; with this came Pfefferkorn’s unequivocal demand that they be immediately confiscated and banned.
Following the publication of his booklets, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I issued an order calling for the confiscation of Jewish books, and Pfefferkorn personally led a book-banning campaign in Frankfurt. The banning aroused opposition among a number of German scholars who argued in defense of the books in question, declaring them to contain a hidden treasury of sources underpinning Christian thought and dogma. Among these scholars was Johannes Reuchlin, who became Pfefferkorn’s personal adversary. Thanks to their protests, the book-banning was finally halted.

[10] leaves. 19.5 cm. Good-fair condition. Stains. Slight tears, incl. open tears. Worming holes mended with paper (causing minor damage to print). New binding.

Exhibitions:
· Europas Juden im Mittelalter, Speyer, Historischen Museum der Pfalz, 2004-2005.
· Only on Paper: Six Centuries of Judaica from the Gross Family Collection, Chicago, Columbia College, 2005.
· The Book of Books: Biblical Canon, Dissemination and its People, Jerusalem, Bible Lands Museum, 2013.
· Questions of Faith: Chatrooms at the Dawn of the Modern Era, Ulm, Museum of the Bible, 2016, p. 106 (illustrated).
Reference:
· Alfred Rubens, "A Jewish Iconography", London: Nonpareil, 1981, p. XIII.
· Diane Wolfthal, "Imaging the Self: Representations of Jewish Ritual in Yiddish Books of Customs", in: Eva Frojmovic, ed., "Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other". Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 2002, pp. 189-211.
· Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß, eds., "Revealing the Secrets of the Jews: Johannes Pfefferkorn and Christian Writings about Jewish Life and Literature in Early Modern Europe". Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017 (a detailed bibliography appears at the end of the volume).
· Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History.New York: Penguin, 2004.

This item is documented in the Center for Jewish Art (CJA), item no. 40671.

Provenance: The Gross Family Collection, Tel Aviv, item no. NHB.330.

Écrit par le quel on montre évidemment que dans peu de temps le Commerce sera entièrement detruit dans Avignon, & dans le Comtat, si on n'a recours à des remedes prompts & efficaces ["Writing wherein we clearly demonstrate how trade in Avignon and Comtat will be swiftly (and) utterly ruined, if we do not resort to hasty and effective measures"]. Unnamed printer and place of publication. 1736. French. Rare.

Antisemitic composition purporting to demonstrate the negative influence of the local Jews on the economy of the city of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin (an enclave in the Provence region, subject at the time to the direct rule of the Pope). The work was published in 1736, many years after the expulsion of Jews from France in the 14th through 16th centuries. It was, in effect, an attempt to convince Pope Clement XII to expel the Jews under his protection from the territories of the Papal State in the region of Provence; this was the only Jewish community not to be expelled from France in the previous centuries.
"The Pope’s Jews" (French: "Juifs du Pape") was the term used in reference to small Jewish communities in Provence which remained under the tutelage and direct rule of the Pope over a period of hundreds of years. Members of these communities were spared from expulsion and other legal persecutions by virtue of their residence in the Papal State, in an enclave belonging to the Holy See in the district of the Comtat Venaissin (in what is today Vaucluse, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of France) and were thus immune to the various decrees issued by the kings and rulers of France.
Following the expulsions of Jews from Northern France (1394), Spain (1492), Portugal (1497), and Provence (1501), the enclave remained, for centuries, the only district in all of France and most of Western Europe to be home to a Jewish presence of any kind. The "Pope’s Jews" lived in relative isolation from the rest of the Jewish world; as such, they maintained customs, a "nusach" (version) of prayer, and a spoken language that were peculiar and distinctive only to them. Throughout the period in question, the Jews of the enclave were concentrated in four ghettoes, in the city of Avignon, the communes of Cavaillon and Carpentras, and the town of L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Together, they were known as "the Four Communities" or the "CLA Communities". In the wake of the French Revolution and the reforms of the Napoleonic Code – and with the granting of equal rights and freedom of movement to Jews in France – the Jewish population in the Four Communities gradually and steadily declined, until it disappeared entirely in the course of the Holocaust.

128 pages. 18 cm. Good-fair condition. Stains, incl. minor dampstains. Tears and pinholes to edges of leaves, causing minor damage to page numbers. New leather binding.

For a bibliography of the literature relating to the Jews of the Four Communities, see Hebrew description.

The Sabbatean Movement, Its Roots, Its Twists and Turns, and Its Ramifications (Hebrew), Gershom Scholem’s handwritten Hebrew draft. [1942-1945].
Lengthy draft: manuscript of the introduction Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) composed for his future book "Sabbatai Zevi and the Sabbatean Movement During His Lifetime", First Edition, 1957 (Hebrew); later edition posthumously translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky into English as "Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676", Princeton, New Jersey, 2016. Widely regarded as Scholem’s most important work. Present manuscript: eleven handwritten pages, with numerous corrections, edits, and deletions (incl. one full page crossed out with a thin line). Comment (Hebrew) in margin of first page: "Written between 1942 and 1945 and [then] lost by me for several years, and I was therefore unable to use it as an introduction to my book".
Among other things, the introduction comprehensively traces the history of the Sabbatean movement and discusses its uniqueness, the circumstances behind its birth, and its decline – all from an angle Scholem himself refers to in this particular introduction as the "Law of Dialectics Regarding History". Here, from his deeply profound and lucid perspective, Gershom Scholem makes the following observations (in Hebrew):
"There is no greater falsehood than the idea that truth is simple […] a truth that struggles over its own truthfulness, a truth that is capable of awakening and arousing what sleeps in our depths, and even to light up our dark places, in a word, a truth of life, and a truth destined to emerge from among the living – [such a truth] will not manage to preserve its lofty simplicity for long. Its inherent vitality is doomed to shatter its simplicity, and what had appeared […] as a plain, opaque ball, will most certainly reveal itself today to be a, entanglement of dilemmas and contradictions that permeate to the depths. The hidden side of the truth is a manifestation of its own innate contradictions and in the language of the philosophers, we refer to this great, basic ‘secret’ as ‘the Dialectics of Truth’" (p. 1). (The "Simple Truth" Scholem seeks to investigate is none other than "the vision of redemption and liberation envisioned by the Prophets of Israel" as it came to be reflected in the path taken by the Sabbatean movement from its beginnings in the 17th century until its eventual and final demise in the 19th century.)

The first edition of the book "Shabetai Tzvi VeHa-Tenu’ah Ha-Shabta’it BiYemei Chayav" was published (in its original Hebrew) in two volumes, in 1957, and continued to be widely regarded as Gershom Scholem’s greatest contribution to the field of Jewish studies. The present introduction was a work he had misplaced. It had yet to be found at the time of the publication of the first edition of the book. It remained unpublished for many years; in fact, he only rediscovered it some thirty years later. It was finally published only posthumously – with a number of modifications – as the introduction to the 1987 edition of the book.

[10] leaves (11 handwritten pages, 9 of them numbered). Good condition. Minor blemishes.

"Der Judenstaat, Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage" ["The Jewish State: Proposal of a Modern Solution for the Jewish Question"], by Theodor Herzl. Vienna-Leipzig: M. Breitenstein, 1896. German. First Edition.
First edition of Theodor Herzl’s historical landmark, the first work to clearly articulate his Zionist vision of a Jewish state. Copy with the original paper cover.

86 pages, approx. 24 cm. Good condition. Unopened leaves. Creases. Few stains. Minor tears to edges of several leaves. Cover with several open tears to edges and to spine, professionally restored, with no damage to print. Housed in box lined with red fabric, approx. 27X3X18.5 cm. With two typewritten notes (catalogue listing).

Publication of "Der Judenstaat"
The story behind "Der Judenstaat" – commonly translated as "The Jewish State" and widely regarded as the book that served as the founding statement of the Zionist Movement – can be said to have begun with the so-called "Speech to the Rothschilds", composed by Theodor Herzl in time for his meeting with members of the Rothschild family in 1895. This speech, 22 pages in length, laid out the preliminary outline for what would eventually become Herzl’s grand landmark plan. This outline would gradually undergo a number of incarnations and versions before it sufficiently matured into a full-fledged plan, whereupon Herzl decided to turn it into a complete book.
According to Herzl’s own account, the book was written all at once, in two months of non-stop writing, "while walking, standing, lying, on the street, while eating, at night when the subject would keep me awake…" Once completed, the manuscript would, for the first time, present Herzl’s grand vision in all its glory – a detailed plan for the establishment of a Jewish state, stage by stage, beginning with the gathering and organizing of the Jews of the world, up until the enactment of a legal constitution and the adoption of a national flag. Regarding his thoughts and feelings at the time of the writing, Herzl had this to say: "I do not recall having written anything in my life with such an uplifted spirit as I experienced in the days of writing this book. Heine says that when he was composing his best-known works, he would hear the wingbeat of eagles above his head. Something of that same wingbeat is what I believe I was hearing as well".
Initially, no publisher was willing to print the book. Herzl found himself rejected by all his regular publishers, such as Duncker & Humblot, and the Berlin-based Siegfried Cronbach, who insisted that antisemitism was a waning force throughout the world. In the end, Herzl turned to Max Bernstein, a small-scale Viennese bookseller who agreed to print the book even though he did not share Herzl’s beliefs, nor was he at all sympathetic to the Zionist cause.
In February 1896, a small edition of "Der Judenstaat" was finally published in German with the subtitle "Proposal of a Modern Solution for the Jewish Question". In order to ensure that the work be treated with the seriousness he felt it deserved, Herzl added his academic degree – "LL.D." (Doctor of Laws) – to the authorship of the book.
Immediately upon publication, the book stirred up a maelstrom. A majority of public figures – Jewish and non-Jewish alike – viewed it as nonsensical and absurd; one particular Jewish newspaper editor even offered the use of his personal carriage to transport Herzl to an insane asylum. Among the book’s initial opponents were such unlikely personalities as Hayim Nahman Bialik – soon to be renowned as the "Jewish National Poet" – and Nahum Sokolow, the pioneer of Hebrew journalism who would one day become the author of the first Hebrew translation of Herzl’s "Altneuland". In the words of author Stefan Zweig, "never in [the history of] Vienna had anyone been subjected to such ridicule as Herzl".
As agreed in advance, Max Bernstein published three additional editions (distinguished from the original edition only in minute details on the respective covers and title pages) that same year. He published no subsequent editions of "Der Judenstaat".
Notwithstanding the scathing reactions of public figures and noted academics to "Der Judenstaat", the book succeeded in igniting the imaginations of a great many readers in Europe and around the world, and new editions – in Yiddish, Russian, English, and other languages – appeared not long after the publication of the original German editions.
One of the earliest editions to see the light of day was the Hebrew translation by Herzl’s personal secretary, Michael Berkowitz. It was published by "Toshiah" Publishers in 1896, the same year as the first German edition. In its introduction, Berkowitz brought attention to two "corrections" that Herzl insisted upon in oral communications with him; Berkowitz wrote the following (in Hebrew): "I hereby testify to two issues that relate in particular to the Hebrew translation… In the chapter [entitled] "Language of the Land", after he was made aware that a Hebrew-speaking readership exists for this book, a changed spirit took hold of him, as he was assured that the Hebrew language could surely be rejuvenated… As to the place of settlement… he [likewise] changed his mind… and addressed his attention exclusively to the Land of our Forefathers".
In subsequent years, with the burgeoning of the Zionist Movement and the convening of the early Zionist Congresses, the book came to be translated into yet more languages, and began to appear overseas, particularly in the United States, where Zionism quickly developed into a movement that carried weight and influence. In sum total, during Herzl’s brief remaining lifetime, no fewer than 17 editions of "Der Judenstaat" were published – most in small editions numbering only a few thousand copies, and often in the form of thin, nondurable booklets. Dozens more editions were published following Theodor Herzl’s passing, including translations into such languages as Ladino, Esperanto, Serbo-Croatian, and many others. It was to become one of the best-known Jewish works of all time.
Reference:
1. Theodor Herzl, "Theodor Herzls Tagebücher, 1895–1904", Vols. 1 and 2, 1922. In Hebrew: "Inyan HaYehudim, Sifrei Yoman (1895-1904)", Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1997-2001, Vol. 1, p. 70.
2. Samuel Leib Zitron, "Herzl, Hayav U-Fe‘ulotav", Vilnius: Sh. Sreberk, 1921, p. 52 (Hebrew).