A rare and early printing I acquired this week held within it an important landmark in Hebrew printing, the very first Jewish and Hebrew map of the Holy Land, printed in a 1527 Venice edition of the Mizrahi Commentary on the Torah.
R. Eliyahu Mizrahi (c. 1455-1525 or 1526) was a Hakham Bashi of the Ottoman Empire, and a posek and mathematician. He is best known for his Sefer ha-Mizrahi, a super-commentary on Rashi’s commentary on the Torah, printed first in this edition in 1527. In the Torah portion of Masei, where the text discusses the various locations in the region where the Jews traveled after leaving Egypt, the author added a crude map with name places from the Torah. The map is rather rudimentary, with just a border and a few place names, but its appearance in print was a major achievement, anything other than text was very labor-intensive to include in the printing blocks of the day and thus costly. Subsequently, many other maps were published, and rabbinic works devoted to the subject of geography of the Holy Land were published several times in coming centuries, often including such maps.
The very first map of the Holy Land, though, was published earlier in a non-Jewish work, Rudimentum Novitiorum (a handbook for beginners), which is a history of the world published in Lübeck, Germany, in the year 1475. This map was based on the one drawn by Burchard of Mount Sion (late 13th century), who was a German priest, Dominican friar, and pilgrim who travelled to the Middle East at the end of the 13th century. Interestingly, the map by Buchard has Jerusalem at the center of it and it is oriented with west at the bottom.
