rare and wonderful: adding to our special collections
One day last December, we were contacted by someone who wanted to offer us a book printed in the 16th century. This isn’t an everyday occurrence, and we were delighted when Thérèse Klein, an elderly Hungarian Jewish expatriate invited us over to tell us a story. The book is a commentary on Psalm 33, penned by the Jesuit monk Robert Carindal Bellarmino (1542-1621) in 1585, and was given to Thérèse’s father Bela by a cousin, Vincenzo Vernaleone Bela did not survive the Nazi incursion into Hungary but Thérèse and some of her family managed to make it out of the country before the Soviet invasion in 1956, settling in France until she and her brother emigrated to Canada in the 1960s.
Graphic header page from Institutiones linguae Hebraicae, 1585
Bellarmino was born in Montepulciano in Siena, the son of noble, albeit impoverished, parents. He entered the Roman Jesuit novitiate in 1560 and remained in Rome for three years where he was appointed cardinal of the Catholic Church. Immediately after his appointment, Pope Clement made him a Cardinal Inquisitor, in which capacity he served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno and concurred in the decision which condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake as a heretic. Bellarmino was also one of the primary inquisitors present at the trial of Galileo. In his 1633 trial Galileo’s new cosmic map collided with the world of Scholasticism and absolutism that held power in the Catholic Church. This marked both the end of Galileo's freedom and the Italian Renaissance.
“Si Deus pro nobis quis contranos—Labia sacerdotis custodiunt scientium…”
"If God will meet us for us, the lips of the priest guard those who know..."
Although not a Jewish text, the Institutiones linguae Hebraicae joins many other volumes in the rare books collection originating from other religious traditions. The collection includes books from Christian writers such as the Origines sacrae, an apologetic work printed in 1666 by Edward Stillingfleet, as well as a book of Psalms from 1773 printed in Glasgow.
Our rare books collection is an amalgam of a few small private collections donated by individuals, combined with the largest single donation of 1500 volumes via the Offenbach Archival Depot, the organization that distributed heirless property to libraries in Israel and North America in the early 1950s. Since we began our rare books workshop initiative in 2014, the library has been graced with several welcome donations of rare volumes: notably, a 1536 printing of Josephus’s Bello Judaico as well as a 1727 edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The JPL has never had a budget to actively acquire rare books, relying instead on donations like Ms. Klein’s that complement the 1800 volumes in the rare books collection. This volume, a commentary on Psalm 33, forms part of a larger corpus of commentaries on all 150 Psalms.
