Kohelet and Shir HaShirim with Rashi’s Commentary. Antique Manuscript Written Prior the Expulsion from Spain. ...

Kohelet and Shir HaShirim with Rashi’s Commentary. Antique Manuscript Written Prior the Expulsion from Spain. Iberia/Spain, 14th-15th Century.

Hebrew manuscript, written on paper, in medium-sized, square Spanish script; beautiful and professional. Within the verses, the writer integrates accentuated and decorated beginning letters and plates, which are larger than the main text’s script. The manuscript comprises 50 leaves and includes Megillot Kohelet and Shir HaShirim, with Rashi’s commentary. In the beginning, the first 16 verses of Kohelet are missing. Otherwise, it is complete.

The manuscript seems to have been written in the second half of the 14th century or beginning of the 15th century, most likely in Spain. The margins contain annotations in smaller than usual script, for that era.

With the expulsion of the Jews from half of the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 15th century, Spanish Jews were scattered to all corners of the world, along with their most precious possessions, their books. Despite this, complete Hebrew sections of Tanach that were written in Iberia before the expulsion are most rare.

The Iberian Peninsula is located in southwest Europe and includes two large countries: Spain and Portugal. It also includes Andorra in the Pyrenees Mountains in the north, and Gibraltar at the southern edge.

The conquest of the peninsula by the Christians in the Middle Ages, encouraged by the pope as a holy war and called the Reconquista, had the unusually strong support of Pope Urbanus the Second. In the Middle Ages, many kingdoms resided in the peninsula, the dominant ones being: Castile-Leon, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal. Slowly, the Christians took control of the peninsula, until they expelled the last of the Moors and the Jews in 1492, when they won the Granada Emirate in war.

The Spanish Expulsion was the forced banishment in 1942 of Castile’s and Aragon’s Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Expulsion under slightly different conditions was decreed five years later, in 1497, on the Jews of Portugal. A year following, in 1498, the Jews of Navarre were also expelled.

 50 leaves. 17x26 cm. Modern cardboard binding.