A sumptuously-illustrated volume containing the first exposition in Hebrew of the astronomical theories of Galileo Galilei.

The Jewish community of Amsterdam began to take form around the close of the sixteeಞnth century with the arrival of a group of Sephardic Jews. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, their Hebrew literary needs were usually filled by importing books from Venice and Poland at great expense. Perhaps recognizing a business opportunity, Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel (1604-1657), the son of conversos who had immigrated from Lisbon to Amsterdam circa 1613/1614, opened Amsterdam’s first Hebrew press in 1626. Over the following three decades, his firm would go on to issue a wide range of titles in Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and even English.

The present work takes its name from Elim, the oasis in the Wilderness with twelve springs and seventy palm trees to which the Children of Israel arrived shortly after the Splitting of the Sea (Ex. 15:27). Its author, the peripatetic polymath Rabbi Joseph Solomon Rofe (del Medico/Delmedigo) of Candia (1591-1655), had come to Amsterdam in the summer of 1626 and there befriended Ben Israel. The book consists of twelve general (“springs”) and seventy specific (“palm trees”) queries posed by the Karaite scholar Zerah bar Nathan of Troki to Delmedigo, as well as the latter’s replies, in which he touches on numerous subjects, including algebra, trigonometry, physics, metaphysics, Kabbalah, astrology, astronomy, and cosmology. Sefer elim is headed by a hand🐷some portrait of Delmedigo commissioned by Ben Israel in 1628 from W. Delff, after a painting by W.C. Duyster, and is richly illustrated throughout with numerous woodcuts.

Delmedigo had become an adherent of Galileo Galilei’s theories about the movements of the sun and the planets during his student years at the University of Padua and incorporated them into his replies to Zerah. When the deputies of the Amsterdam Sephardic community got wind of the unorthodox contents of Sefer elim in 1629, they ordered an investigation to determine whether Delmed🔯igo’s writings contained anything “contrary to the honor of God and [H]is holy law and good morality.” While the final report of the investigating committee has not been preserved, it appears that at least some material was deemed objectionable, given that nine of Zerah’s general questions were left unanswered in the book as printed.

Provenance

Moses Leib Poritz (?) (title page of Sefer elim)

“Rab𒊎bino Ernesto Stein, Milano Campo Adriatico” (pastedown of upper board) and “Stein Yerachmiel Ernesto, rabbino capo della Comunità isra💝elitica dei campi profughi” (rear flyleaf)

Literature

Lajb Fuks and Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew Typography in the Northern Netherlands[,] 1585-1815: Historical Evaluation and Descriptive Bibliography, vol. 1 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1984), 103-105,𓂃 116-117 (nos. 150-151).

Marvin J. Heller, The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged Thesaurus, vol. 1 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 470-471.

Steven Nadler, Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (New Haven and London𝓰: Yale University Press, 2018), 49-57.

Vinograd, Amsterdam 20