Kennicott Bible
The Kennicott Bible, also known as the First Kennicott Bible, is an illuminated manuscript copy of the Hebrew Bible, copied in the city of A Coruña in 1476 by the calligrapher and illuminated by Joseph ibn Hayyim. This manuscript is considered by some, such as the historian, to be the most important religious manuscript of medieval Galicia. It is also regarded as one of the most exquisite illuminated manuscripts in Hebrew in an article published by the Library of the University of Santiago de Compostela, and the most lavishly illuminated Sephardic manuscript of the 15th century by.
The manuscript was lost to history for a time, and eventually was in the hands of Benjamin Kennicott, a Hebrew scholar and canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, England, who recommended that the Radcliffe Library in Oxford acquire the manuscript, which it did in 1771. It was transferred to the Bodleian Library, Oxford in 1872, where it remains, catalogued under the name of Kennicott. Exact facsimiles have been made and are available in several libraries worldwide.
According to the Jewish historian Cecil Roth, one of the most outstanding aspects of this copy is the close collaboration it shows between the calligrapher and the illuminator, rare in this type of work.
Background
It is not known exactly when Jewish people arrived and settled in A Coruña, but the first documentation of the Jewish presence dates to 1375. Jewish population in A Coruña grew rapidly throughout the Late Middle Ages. It is thought that after the persecution of Jews in Castile, a large number of Jewish people took refuge in Galicia, and particularly in the "Herculean city". The Jewish community in A Coruña traded with Castile and Aragon, and in 1451 they contributed to the rescue of the Murcian Jews with a large sum of money, which could demonstrate the prosperity of the community.The Kennicott Bible was created in A Coruña in 1476, shortly before the expulsion of Jews from Spain. At the time, A Coruña had a prosperous Jewish community which, according to Cecil Roth, was one of the richest Jewish communities on the Iberian Peninsula, owning several Bibles in Hebrew, amongst which he cites the. In addition to economic prosperity, the Herculean Jewish community had a relevant cultural activity, highlighting the largest school of Jewish illuminators in Europe, amongst which stood out in the mid-15th century, who was considered the continent's most distinguished master in the art of mixing colours to illuminate manuscripts and who made one of the most used books in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Renaissance. The fame of A Coruña illuminators is evident in Roth's book The Jews in the Renaissance, in which he cites the most important known Jewish artists from Europe:
Despite this, the existence of a previous tradition regarding the illumination of Hebrew texts in Galicia is not known, so the Kennicott Bible cannot be attributed to a specific school, but according to Kogman-Appel it is an isolated phenomenon.
Not long after the creation of the Kennicott Bible, in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain issued the Alhambra Decree in Granada, which forced those who professed the Jewish religion to leave the kingdom or convert to Catholicism. This caused the exile of many Jewish families. History has lost track of the Hayyim family, as of many others; they may have died in A Coruña, or left Spain. The Hayyim surname appears in different parts of Europe, Turkey, and Palestine, but it is not known if they are descendants of the A Coruña illuminator.
History
In 1476, Isaac, a Jewish silversmith from A Coruña, son of Salomón de Braga, commissioned an illuminated Bible from the scribe Moses ibn Zabarah, who lived in A Coruña with his family on behalf of his patron. He spent ten months to scribe the Bible, writing two folios on a daily basis. Illumination of the manuscript was the responsibility of Joseph ibn Hayyim, who is remembered thanks to this work. According to Cecil Roth, the commission may had been motivated by the presence of in A Coruña, which was owned by the Mordechai Jewish family at least since 1375. British historian suggested:The presence of the Cervera Bible in A Coruña is attested by the birth record of Samuel, son of Mordechai, on folio 450v. Another birth record, of Judah ibn Mordechai, on folio 451v, seems to belong to the same family. It is not certain that the Cervera Bible remained in the city when Isaac commissioned the Kennicott Bible, but it seems possible that it still remained in A Coruña 37 years later, when Isaac de Braga could have seen it and commissioned a similar copy.
The exact date and place of origin of the Kennicott Bible and the identity of the persons who had it produced are attested in a long colophon on folio 438r, which states that the work was finished "in the city of A Coruña, in the province of Galicia in northwestern Spain, on Wednesday the third day of the month of Ab in the year 5236 of Creation", and claims to be solely responsible for the complete text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible: he copied it, added the vocalization notes, wrote all the masorah notes and compared and corrected the text with an exact copy of the Bible. Ibn Zabarah also declares in the colophon that he wrote it for the "admirable young Isaac, son of the late, honourable and beloved Don Salomón de Braga ".
The Alhambra Decree issued by Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1492 caused many Jewish families, including Isaac de Braga, to leave Spain. For the protection of the manuscript Isaac commissioned a Bible box that could be locked with a key, bearing the name of in Hebrew. This is the last mention of the manuscript while still in Jewish hands. The last thing known of its owner, the "admirable youth" Don Isaac, is that he left A Coruña in 1493 by sea with the help of shipowners and royal officers, taking along with the manuscript about 2,500,000 maravedís. A possible route can be traced from A Coruña to Portugal, and from there to North Africa, and then to Gibraltar, where, almost three centuries later, it was acquired by Patrick Chalmers, a Scottish merchant; and eventually the manuscript found its way to Oxford.
The next known record of the manuscript dates to June 1770, when Benjamin Kennicott, an Anglican clergyman, Hebrew scholar, and librarian of Oxford's Radcliffe Library, told the library trustees that "it might add considerably to the Ornament of that Library, if it possessed one manuscript of the Hebrew Bible"; and informed them that he had in his hands such a manuscript, "very elegant and finely illuminated", and that it was for sale. The manuscript had come into Kennicott's hands through William Maule, 1st Earl Panmure, to whom it had been entrusted by Patrick Chalmers. It is recorded in a minutes book of the Radcliffe trustees that they "bought a Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament on 5 April 1771, from Chalmers". The manuscript remained at Radcliffe Library for just over a century. It was transferred to the Bodleian Library in 1872, where it was catalogued under the name of Kennicott, who had made it available to the Oxford library a century earlier.
Initially, the manuscript was not given much importance, as Jewish art was not considered worth studying at the time. It came to be considered a gem of Jewish art after Rachel Wischnitzer published a work in Berlin in 1923 with one of the manuscript's folios reproduced on the cover. Since then, the Kennicott Bible became a subject of analysis, with a detailed description published in 1982, co-written by Bezalel Narkiss, Aliza Cohen-Mushlin, and Victor Tcherikover. In 1985 an exact facsimile reproduction of the Bible was produced under Narkis's supervision, with an introduction by him and Cohen-Mushlin. The in Ribadavia has implemented a digital system for visitors to browse through the manuscript.
The regional government of Galicia acquired a facsimile and put it on display at the, A Coruña. Since 2015 the Comunidade Xudía Bnei Israel de Galiza, on behalf of the Galician Jewish community, has asked that the manuscript be returned to A Coruña, based on moral and historical justice and the historical value that the Bible has for the city. The Asociación Galega de Amizade con Israel also urged the Xunta to have the manuscript returned to Galicia. However, the regional government said after the later loan of the manuscript that there were no plans to ask for its permanent return.
In November 2019 the Kennicott Bible was loaned for six months by the Bodleian Library to the Xunta of Galicia, where it had been created 527 years before, and was displayed in the exhibition at the in Santiago de Compostela.
Characteristics
General characteristics and calligraphy
The Kennicott Bible contains the five books of the Torah, the books of the Prophets and Hagiographers, as well as the grammatical treatise by Rabbi David Kimhi, which was copied from the Cervera Bible. The original copy is bound in brown goatskin with geometric interlacing decoration, and was protected by a wooden box.The Bible is mostly written in two columns of 30 lines each. Ibn Zabarah graced the manuscript with Sephardic cursive written in brown ink on folios measuring by. During the creation of the work there was a close collaboration between scribe and illuminator, perceptible when examining in detail the relationship between the text and the illuminations. This collaboration can also be seen in the decorations made by Ibn Hayyim in the margins and in the space between the columns, where such special blank spaces were not required.
According to Carlos Barros, the Kennicott Bible is "distinguished by the outstanding interpenetration between the scribe and the illuminator, a fact that can be appreciated in the 'mutual gifts' for each other: Moses emphasized the events concerning Joseph, son of Jacob, while Joseph decorated Psalm 90 with particular finesse." The quality of the manuscript did not go unnoticed by the contemporaries of Moses ibn Zabarah, who spoke highly of the work that "it was not made by a man, but by the Angel of God, a perfect sage, pious and holy".
The volume is preserved in a leather case that could have been made by the scribe himself, as can be deduced from a cryptic phrase that appears in the colophon.