Unpublished cross-cultural manuscript: a 19th century literary witness to the Jewish community in India
Sefer Shomer Ha’brit (The Book of the Guardian of the Covenant) and other stories. Autograph manuscript (signed in the title).
4to (159 x 198 mm). 122 pp. on 61 ff., ink on paper, closely written (ca. 36 lines per page) in a square Polish Hebrew hand with interspersed vocalised poems. Bound in 1927 in brown library cloth, spine with printed label and stamped in gilt with the Sassoon MS number.
€ 18.000,00
From the renowned Sassoon collection of important Hebraica: a 19th-century literary witness to the Jewish community in India. The present manuscript is one of only nine by Halevy that have survived, all in the Sassoon Library. It contains two texts, partly in verse: the first is an essay of Jewish mysticism glossed in the catalogue as "a story in 56 chapters". The second is an six-part mystical treatise ("Sefer ketav yosher divre emet", pp. 78 ff.) containing many autobiographical details in the introduction.
Asher Isaiah b. Moses Isaac b. Haim Ze'ev Halevy was an East European Jew based in Darjeeling. Born in Galicia (then part of the Austrian Empire), he travelled throughout Europe before he set off, at the age of 24, on a journey to the Orient where he would spend the rest of his life. Working as a shopkeeper, a cobbler and a mohel, he lived in Baghdad, Burma and Calcutta, ultimately moving to Darjeeling in 1902. Asher Halevy was a prolific writer of Hebrew poetry and prose, especially on psychology, history, and religion, including commentaries on the Psalms and Esther, but also on the rite of circumcision and the geography of the Himalaya. Of all his surviving works, only two have been published: his Himalayan geography (in the Judeo-Arabic periodical "Magid mesharim", or The Speaker of Truths, Calcutta 1896-97) and a part of his autobiography ("Harpatka'otav shel Asher ha-Levi", or The Adventures of Asher Halevi, covering the years 1866-68), which was edited by Avraham Yaari in Jerusalem in 1938.
Sassoon was proud of having discovered and preserved the entire autograph poetical and fictional manuscripts of Hallevy, writing of his acquisition of the present item: "Even in those parts of India where there are only comparatively recent settlements of Jews, I was able to collect some documents of communal interest and preserve the collected work of an otherwise unknown prolific Hebrew writer, Asher Isaiah Hallevy, some of whose writings I discovered at Darjeeling, in the Himalayas".
Provenance: David Solomon Sassoon (1880-1942), purchased in Darjeeling; his sale, Sotheby’s, 21 June 1994, lot 76.
Paper evenly lightly browned. Final page a little chipped and frayed along the outer edge, but without any substantial loss to text. A few later leaves of pencil notes in Hebrew, probably by Sassoon, are loosely inserted.
Sassoon MS.850. D. S. Sassoon, Ohel Dawid: Descriptive Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan Manuscripts in the Sassoon Library (1932) II, p. 1035. D. S. Sassoon, Asher Isaiah ha-Levy, in The Jewish Chronicle Lit. Supplement, July 1930, pp. 4-5.
