Lost and Found: A Rashi from 1484

There are old books, there are rare books, and then there are books whose very existence was once unknown. Two leaves now coming to light belong to that last, extraordinary category. Printed in Spain in approximately 1484, they are survivors from a previously unidentified edition of Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah, produced during the earliest decades of Hebrew printing. More than five centuries after they left a Spanish printing press, the two pages have resurfaced, and their appearance raises the tantalizing possibility that they once belonged to the very same copy as ten fragments that led one of the world’s foremost Rashi scholars to identify the existence of this lost edition in the first place.

For anyone accustomed to seeing Rashi printed on virtually every page of a modern Chumash, it is difficult to appreciate just how extraordinary these leaves are. Today, Rashi’s commentary is ubiquitous. In the fifteenth century, however, a printed Hebrew book was itself something of a technological marvel. Hebrew printing was still in its infancy, printers were experimenting with fonts and page design, and the texts they chose to print were drawn from manuscript traditions that could differ from one another. There was no standardized Hebrew book industry, no uniform set of fonts and no assumption that a printed edition would look like the editions familiar to us today. Every printing was, in its own way, an experiment. These two leaves preserve one such experiment, and, remarkably, they preserve evidence of a printing that had disappeared from the bibliographical record.

The pages contain Rashi’s commentary on passages in Parshat Beha’alotcha and Parshat Shelach in Sefer Bamidbar. But their real story begins with the Hebrew letters themselves. To the untrained eye, the typography may simply look ancient. To a specialist in Hebrew printing, however, it contains a wealth of information. The distinctive Sephardic letterforms, unusual combinations, abbreviations and other typographical conventions point toward the Spanish printing tradition of the late fifteenth century. In an age when printers did not necessarily identify themselves in the way later printers would, typography can serve as a kind of fingerprint. A particular form of a letter, a recurring combination or a characteristic method of setting the page can help scholars determine where and when an anonymous book was produced. Here, those clues point to Spain and to approximately 1484, placing the leaves squarely within the first generation of Hebrew printing.

That date alone would make the fragments remarkable. But the story becomes considerably more fascinating when the leaves are viewed in light of the research of Prof. Jordan S. Penkower, one of the leading authorities on the textual history of Rashi’s biblical commentary. Several years ago, Penkower was presented with ten partial leaves from what appeared to be an unknown Spanish printing of Rashi. The fragments had suffered the fate that befell countless early Jewish books: only the upper portion of each page had survived. Yet even those incomplete pieces contained enough information to suggest that something important had escaped the bibliographical record. 

What followed was essentially a bibliographical detective story. Penkower compared the fragments with other known fifteenth-century Hebrew printings of Rashi and then went beyond the printed books, examining an extensive collection of manuscript witnesses. Rashi’s commentary had circulated for centuries before the invention of printing, copied by scribes in different Jewish communities and transmitted through different textual traditions. Penkower compared the newly discovered material with manuscripts from Ashkenazi, Italian, Spanish and Eastern Jewish communities, seeking to determine where this mysterious printing fit into the complicated history of Rashi’s text. His research ultimately established that the ten fragments represented an additional, previously unknown printing of Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah, attributed to Spain and dated approximately 1484.

The results were published in his study, “Rashi’s Pentateuch Commentary: Ten Folios of a Newly Discovered Spanish Incunabulum,” in Habent sua fata fragmenta, pages 227–241. The title of the collection is particularly appropriate to this discovery. Fragments really do have their own fates. A complete book can be dismantled, its leaves scattered, and its identity forgotten. A page that once belonged to a volume studied by generations of Jews can eventually become binding material, be separated from its neighbors and pass through several hands without anyone realizing what it once was. Centuries later, another fragment can emerge and suddenly the pieces begin to tell a story again.

That is precisely what makes the two present leaves so exciting. They were not among the ten fragments that appeared in the 2015 auction and were studied by Penkower. Instead, they appear to fill exactly a gap in the sequence of pages discussed in his research. In other words, the newly surfaced leaves do not merely resemble the previously known fragments; they fit into the missing portion of the sequence. This creates the very strong possibility that the two leaves came from the same original copy as the ten fragments that formed the basis of Penkower’s study. If that possibility is borne out, what was once a group of ten damaged fragments may actually represent portions of a single fifteenth-century volume, with these two additional leaves restoring part of the sequence that had been missing.

Somewhere around 1484, a Jewish printer in Spain set the words of Rashi into type. The resulting book may have been handled by students, rabbis and families in Spanish Jewish communities. Its pages were read at a time when the Jewish communities of Spain were approaching one of the most dramatic turning points in their history. Only a few years later, in 1492, the Jews of Spain would be expelled. The volume itself somehow survived. Eventually, however, its pages were separated. One part survived in fragments. Another portion disappeared. And now, more than five centuries later, two additional leaves have emerged that may belong to that same original book.

The historical setting makes the discovery all the more poignant. The Spanish Jews who produced and used this volume lived in a world in which Torah scholarship, manuscript culture and the new technology of printing were beginning to intersect. The Hebrew printing press offered Jewish communities an entirely new way of disseminating Torah. Instead of a single scribe laboriously copying a manuscript, movable type allowed the same text to be reproduced in multiple copies. Yet the earliest printers were still dependent upon manuscripts, and the printed page did not immediately eliminate the variations that had accumulated during centuries of handwritten transmission.

That is why the text on these leaves matters so much to scholars. The fifteenth century was a period before Rashi’s printed text had become fully standardized. Different manuscripts could preserve different readings, and early printed editions could reflect the particular textual sources available to individual printers. When Penkower compared this Spanish printing with other incunabula and with numerous manuscripts, he was not simply trying to establish that the pages were old. He was studying them as witnesses to the transmission of Rashi himself. A word, spelling, phrase or other textual detail can provide evidence about the history of the commentary and the manuscript tradition from which a printer worked.

In this sense, the two leaves have two distinct identities. They are artifacts of early printing, but they are also textual witnesses. They tell us something about how Jewish books were physically produced in fifteenth-century Spain, while simultaneously telling us something about how the words of Rashi were transmitted before the printed editions of later generations fixed the text into the forms familiar to us.

The typography adds another layer to the story. Fifteenth-century Spanish Hebrew type has a character of its own, reflecting the traditions of Sephardic scribal writing and the experimentation of early printers. The forms of individual letters, the way certain letters are joined, the use of abbreviations and other compositional features all help establish the identity of a printing. Such evidence is particularly valuable when dealing with an anonymous incunabulum, because the title page or colophon that might ordinarily identify a book is often missing – or, as in this case, the complete book itself has vanished. The surviving type becomes one of the few surviving fingerprints of the printer and his workshop.

Hebrew incunabula are among the most coveted survivors of Jewish printing history. Their original print runs were generally small, and the books themselves were subject to the same hazards as any other physical object – but with an added vulnerability. Later generations often had little appreciation for the rarity of an early printed book. Volumes could be dismantled, damaged or reused. Leaves could be incorporated into bindings or discarded. Once a book was broken apart, its pages could travel independently for centuries. It is therefore entirely possible for an otherwise lost fifteenth-century edition to survive only in a handful of isolated fragments, each one separated from the others and unaware, so to speak, of its former companions.

This is what makes the possibility of reconnecting these two leaves with the ten fragments studied by Penkower so compelling. The newly discovered pages appear to occupy precisely the missing space in the sequence. They provide an opportunity not merely to add two more leaves to the known corpus of Hebrew incunabula, but potentially to reconstruct a little more of a book that scholars did not know existed until relatively recently.

There is also something fitting about the fact that the book in question is Rashi. Of all the Jewish books that might have been chosen by an early Hebrew printer, Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah was among the most natural and important. Rashi had been dead for nearly four centuries when these pages were printed, but his words were already deeply embedded in Jewish life. His commentary had traveled from medieval France into the study halls and homes of Jewish communities throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. By the time a Spanish printer set his words into type, Rashi was already an essential figure in Jewish Torah study. The appearance of his commentary among the earliest Hebrew printed books is itself a testament to the authority and popularity his work had achieved.

The two leaves therefore represent far more than an old piece of paper. They are survivors from the birth of Hebrew printing, products of the Sephardic printing tradition of fifteenth-century Spain, witnesses to the textual history of Rashi’s Torah commentary and possible remnants of the same physical volume from which ten fragments were studied by Prof. Penkower. They connect the modern collector and scholar directly to a moment more than five centuries ago, when Hebrew printing was still new and the Jewish communities of Spain were approaching the end of an era.

Perhaps most remarkable of all is what these pages tell us about survival. The printer who produced them is unknown. The workshop has disappeared. The original volume is lost. The community that first read its pages was eventually expelled from Spain. The book itself was broken apart, and its leaves were scattered across the centuries. Yet the words survived. A fragment appeared in one place, another fragment somewhere else, and scholars painstakingly began reconstructing the story. Now two more leaves have surfaced, seemingly fitting into the missing sequence.

For more than 500 years, these pages have waited quietly to be recognized for what they are. They were once simply leaves of a book. Today, they may be pieces of a lost Rashi, survivors of an unknown Spanish incunabulum and newly recovered evidence from one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of Jewish books. In the long journey of Rashi’s words – from the medieval scholar in France, through generations of manuscript transmission, into the first Hebrew presses of Spain and ultimately into the hands of modern scholars and collectors – these two humble leaves occupy a remarkable place. They are small fragments of paper, but they preserve an enormous story.