#30 'For generations to come'
Painted words, entrusted to winged guardians, to keep living words, like a harmonica, alive in living mouths and minds. I can get so lost in ancient pages
An extraordinary Jewish illuminated manuscript known as the Rothschild Vienna Mahzor came to market in February. This was only the second monumental High Holiday prayer book to be sold in over a century (after the Luzzatto High Holiday Mahzor sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s in 2021) and one of only three known to remain in private hands.
Ancient Jewish prayer books are not uncommon, but illuminated ones are extremely rare. This one, which dates to the early 15th century, fetched $6.4 million, considerably more than its pre-sale estimate low of $5 million.
The Mahzor measures 320mm tall by 230mm wide and counts 202 folios, each thick with dazzling illuminations: lots of gold leaf and expensive pigments, lapis blue, copper green, cinnabar red … The number of pages alone suggest great investment: producing such a book habitually required hundreds of sheepskins. Sharon Liberman Mintz, a specialist in books, manuscripts and textiles at Sotheby’s in New York, recalls a scholar who would hold up a large manuscript, and ask what people saw. “Tradition,” some would answer. “Heritage,” others would venture, or “Biblical text”. “‘Me’,” she said he’d say, “‘I see a flock of sheep’.”
The Mahzor’s Ashkenazi origins and intended use for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers are clear in the Hebrew text, as well as the iconography deployed. Liberman Mintz says it is both perfectly legible, despite its grand old age of 600 years, and beautifully penned. “Not only that, but the prayers are very, very familiar. If you go to the synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur and you say Kol Nidre, well, it’s right there,” she says: on Fol. 162v. What look like two green parrots, with red feet, sit atop the initial words of the prayer.
In its illustrations, the Mahzor boasts lions as symbols of God’s power and might, and dragons too. The latter, scholars increasingly suggest, reference not Gothic iconography but the notion of overcoming sin, which is what these High Holidays are all about. The gate motif, meanwhile, speaks to the liminal space in which to approach God in prayer.
The book has a storied past. Only parts of its provenance, however, are well documented.
In the early 1840s, the Frankfurt-born Austrian banker Salomon Mayer Rothschild purchased the Mahzor in Germany as a gift for his son and heir Anselm Salomon. “I bought this book in the city of Nuremberg,” he writes in a dedication in Hebrew on a title page he had added to the front, “for one hundred and fifty-one gold coins and gave it as a gift to my dear and pleasant son, crowned with virtues and merits, Anselm Baron von Rothschild.” He specifies that he is writing from Frankfurt am Main and that the date is “Friday, the eve of the month of Elul in the year 5602”, that is 5 August 1842.)
One hundred and fifty-one gold coins in the mid-19th century, as Liberman notes, was not an insignificant sum of money: “Even at that time, they realised that that illuminated monumental Ashkenazi High Holiday prayer books, generally, were not things that one came across every day.”
From 1842 until 1938, the Mahzor remained in the family’s possession. Then, when Nazi forces seized the Rothschild palace in Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938 and arrested its owners and plundered its contents. The prayer book was sent along with a fraction of the library’s contents to the Austrian National Library. There it lay uncatalogued for decades.
That it should have thus remained ignored by the institution — lost essentially, in librarian terms — is concerning, given that the Rothschild connection was never not visible: it was always clear to whom it should be returned. The family’s baronial coat of arms sits gilded right on that title page at the front of the tome. Researchers from the Center for Jewish art in Jerusalem had catalogued the library’s Hebrew manuscripts as early as the late 1990s. The Mahzor however was not subject to restitution until 2021, when the Austrian National Library loaned it for an exhibition celebrating the legacy of the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family.
Quite how the Mahzor came to be made in the first place — and for whom — is much less clear. We know the scribe’s name, Moshe ben Menahem, from a note he wrote in the colophon. And we know he completed it on February 22, 1415.
But that is all we know for certain.
Liberman Mintz says that for such a book to be produced, a certain amount of stability, wealth, patronage and community would have been needed. In the early 15th century, synagogues were not large. Most people did not have prayer books. Not everyone could read. Destined for celebratory, communal use, the Mazhor was created, she says, “for a highly established community that could call upon a cantor to pray from this monumental manuscript and have everybody around it see it from all angles.” There are notes in Yiddish in the margins, one specifying “das sagt der hazan aus” (“this is recited by the cantor”), and wax droplets on several folios that betray the candles by which the prayers were read.
Scholars are fairly certain the book was not kept in the synagogue but in a private home. A piyyuṭ (liturgical hymn) found in the late 13th-century Worms Mahzor blesses the person entrusted with carrying it to temple. Imagine ferrying to and fro a book of this size and evident heft. What a burden and what an honour.
Contrary to the monastic scriptoria in which Christian manuscripts were illuminated*, there was no such medieval scriptorium production of Hebrew manuscripts. Jewish scribes lived a freelance, itinerant life, moving from town to town in search of work. Marginalia point to ben Menahem having worked on this Mahzor in Vienna, then it traveling on to Swabia. Quite where it went next is lost to time.
Just five years after the Mahzor was completed, Austria’s entire Jewish population was destroyed in the Vienna Massacre of 1421. The import of the book enduring despite this catastrophe is underscored by the prayer with which Rothschild ends his dedication: “May he be blessed with a long life, for safekeeping for generations to come, so that the Torah of God may forever be in our mouths, amen selah.”
Notes
*In 2022, I commissioned art historian Sophie Kelly to write this piece about how the Lindisfarne Gospels came to be for The Conversation. It is one of the pieces I think about all the time:
“Sometime around the turn of the 8th century on Lindisfarne, a windswept island off the English coast in Northumbria, a monk by the name of Eadfrith sits down and sharpens his quill. He dips it into the black ink pot before him and, guided by the light of flickering candle, traces the first words of the Gospel of John on to blank parchment.
In principio erat Verbum.
‘In the beginning was the Word’.”
What an opening paragraph …
World of echo
Just this amazing IG duet cover of Blackbird :
and a baby who knows what to do: