The House of Twenty Thousand Books (25 page)

The Kabbalah – the mystical premises of which intrigued, though never convinced, Chimen – expounded a doctrine of contraction: an all-encompassing, infinite God had, according to this theory, created the world by contracting Himself to generate an empty space. It seems to me that Chimen was trying to fill as much of that void as possible with words.

He had a Bomberg Hebrew Bible printed in Venice in 1521 – the same year and place that the
Tosefta
(which Yehezkel Abramsky spent a lifetime studying), was first printed, and a mere five years after the city’s Jews had been unceremoniously confined in Europe’s first Ghetto. That Bible was among Chimen’s most prized possessions.

Bomberg was one of the great innovators of the printing press, and created stunningly beautiful editions of the Bible, the Talmud and other texts. In 1992, writing about a Babylonian Talmud printed by Bomberg that he had been asked to evaluate, Chimen’s joy at handling the volumes shone through. ‘Volume one has been affected by dampness, but otherwise the whole Talmud is in very
good condition, wide margins, and with very few marginal notes. All the blank leaves have been preserved, which is most unusual for Hebrew books’. The rarity of the Bomberg artefacts that he saw before him fascinated my grandfather: ‘Complete sets of the Talmud, whether of the first, second and third printing are known only in a limited number of sets. Perhaps a dozen or fifteen sets in the whole world’.

Chimen’s own Bomberg Bible was not the most famous version – those were published in 1524 and 1525, and came complete with essays by the editor, a Tunisian named Yaakov ben Yayim ben Yitzhak ibn Adoniahu; with extensive commentaries by Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra; and with beautiful woodcuts. The margins were perfectly aligned and in some places the Hebrew commentary text spiralled around a verse in circles. But, even if it was not quite of that calibre, Chimen’s Bomberg was still extraordinary. Coming only three-quarters of a century after Gutenberg had first set his printing presses in motion, it was a technological marvel, a Stradivarius of the printing world. Bomberg was as far ahead of Gutenberg in style and technique, in the way he could manipulate space and play around with imagery, as the iPod was ahead of vinyl records half a millennia later. In the space of a few decades, printing had emerged from infancy into the full splendour of adulthood.

Chimen had another Venetian Hebrew Bible, this one from 1621, just a century later than his Bomberg. He had a Torah scroll from Prague, dating to 1610. And, somewhere on those shelves were scraps from an even older Torah, this one from 1557.

In his bibliographic peregrinations, my grandfather had also acquired Hebrew texts printed in Constantinople in the early sixteenth century. One was a text from that city’s greatest sixteenth-century rabbi, the Talmudic scholar, mathematician and Euclid expert, Elijah Mizrahi. This book,
Sefer ha-Mispar
(‘Book of the Number’), was published in 1532, six years after Mizrahi’s
death, by his third son, Israel, and was one of the first secular scientific books to be published in Hebrew. Chimen had another Constantinople volume, too, from ten years earlier – within living memory of the capture of the Roman imperial city by Sultan Mehmed II’s armies in 1453.

Paradoxically, Hebrew printing in what would become the Ottoman capital took off centuries before Islamic printing in the city got a foothold, having been begun as early as 1493 by two Portuguese brothers, David and Samuel Nahmias. In the decades that followed, the Nahmias press published more than one hundred books, in tiny editions that never exceeded three hundred in number, many of them written by Sephardic refugees from the expanding powers of the Spanish Inquisition to the west. ‘Without the Inquisition’, Paul Hamburg, the librarian of the Judaica Collection at the University of California at Berkeley, believes, ‘Spain would have developed as the center of Jewish printing in Europe. That didn’t happen – because the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492’. On his mother’s side, Chimen’s rabbinic ancestors, he once told me, were among those who had fled from the increasingly intolerant Spain and headed east.

By the 1530s, the Nahmias men had been joined in Constantinople by Gershom Soncino, scion of a famous Italian printing company. Gutenberg had printed the first books in Germany, but Jews within the Holy Roman Empire were not allowed to print Hebrew volumes. As a result, it had been in Italy that the first such books were printed, in 1475, thirty years after the German printing revolution. The Soncino family had been amongst the earliest of these printers. The Mizrahi book in Chimen’s collection was one of Gershom Soncino’s productions.

A generation later, these printers were joined by another Sephardic duo, the brothers Solomon and Joseph Yabes. With the Nahmias, Soncino, and Yabes presses all working in Constantinople, the city became one of Hebrew printing’s most
vibrant locales, catering to the Jews living in Balat, a neighbourhood to the south of the Golden Horn; in Haskëy, to the Golden Horn’s north; and in Ortaköy, on the European side of the Bosphorus.

The leaves of many of these books were made of vellum, a thick, soft calfskin material that sounded like small waves lapping up against the shore when the pages were turned; only the very best volumes were printed on vellum. The ink on these pages was as clear five hundred years later as the day they were printed. In a Bomberg Bible, even today, one can still see the black lines inked over certain words in the commentaries by Venetian censors, concerned lest anything remotely hinting at anti-Christian sentiment be allowed off of the presses intact. Originally, the pages would have been loose sheets, tied together with a silk ribbon. Over the centuries, one owner or another had bound them in thick covers, the strongest of them made of pigskin (rabbinic rulings hold that, so long as the non-kosher animal is not eaten, its skin can be used to bind books). Some of the volumes had copper clasps, the metal blueing from oxidisation, to keep them from flapping open. There were small symbols on many of the pages, instructions from the editors to the typesetters. There were commentaries running down both margins: copies of Rashi’s notes on the Talmud were typically given pride of place in the inside margin or ‘gutter’, while the less prestigious commentators’ notes appeared in the outside margin. These were, in a sense, the original footnotes, a scholar’s guide to how the text should be read. Chimen loved the
detective-work
quality of this sort of material, teasing out not just how the Biblical text itself was understood, and how that understanding changed over time, but how the various commentators fed off of each other’s ideas. Over the centuries, more and more commentaries were added in. Today, a Bible can include up to forty commentaries, the various authors’ thoughts printed around the main body of the text in increasingly complex patterns.

I never asked Chimen how he felt when he touched Renaissance vellum, but given his ecstatic love of rare books it must have been an almost sensual thrill. ‘Look at the technology’, Paul Hamburg said, as he showed me a Bomberg that he had acquired for the University of California at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. ‘When you figure out all of it was done by hand – the straight lines and the columns, and the quality of the printing, and the fonts. I get very excited’. Given the awful conditions in which he kept these jewels – Hillway was chronically overheated, and the ceilings often leaked – I suspect that Chimen also experienced some relief knowing that these were books built to last. If they were going to reside in an environment as challenging as 5 Hillway, it was just as well that they were printed on a material as durable as vellum. Even so, the edges of the calfskin pages appeared mottled, as pocked by little brown spots as the arms of an old man.

One level down in the printed word hierarchy were volumes printed on parchment. Slightly less expensive, but still beyond the price of an average sixteenth century buyer, parchment was also made from animal skin (though usually sheep, goat, horse or donkey, rather than calfskin) treated with lime and scraped and dried. The pages were still thick, but they felt crisper, more like card. They were more fragile, more prone to accidental ripping. Chimen had many parchment volumes too.

Most books, however, were made of rag-stock paper. Unlike wood pulp paper, which came to be the norm from the
mid-nineteenth
century on, and which allowed for cheaper, mass-produced books, to be printed, Renaissance paper had no acid content. As a result, instead of fading to brown after a few years, and losing the integrity of its structure, as does most modern paper, the pages of a book printed four or five hundred years ago often survive intact and readable, even if kept in a home as climatologically unsuited to the storage of rare materials as Hillway.

The rare books on Chimen’s shelves published in Ottoman Constantinople and elsewhere gave a sense of the tides of Jewish history – of who was being expelled from which country and when; of which ideas were deemed heretical and where; of regions of tolerance and lands of enforced orthodoxy. In his book purchases, Chimen was drawing maps of safety zones for Jews across time and space. In addition to his Constantinople treasures, his collection also included a number of volumes published in the Lombard city of Mantua, another safe haven for Jewish publishing in the sixteenth century. He had a Haggadah printed in Mantua and dating from 1560; there was also a Yiddish text printed there in 1560 or thereabouts. In his notes, Chimen gave no further details. Which means that it could have been a book titled
Yihus Bukh
(roughly translated as the ‘Ancestry Book’), a rare volume on rabbinical genealogy that would, very probably, have contained information on some of Chimen’s rabbinic ancestors from Iberia. Except for the inconvenient fact that this book never existed; and that rumours of its existence were simply created, out of thin air, by a bibliographic scholar who mistakenly attributed a different title, in Hebrew, to this provenance; and, as rumours do, this error then circulated through the small world of bibliography, acquiring currency with the retelling. A careless mistake; a misreading of a few letters, and,
voilà
, a quest for a Holy Grail. These were the sorts of mysteries that Chimen delighted in.

But, while the volume was not the mythical
Yihus Bukh
, it may have been one of the early Yiddish imprints, from a couple years later, of the Book of Kings. This unidentified volume, like the missing Voltaire letter, is a loose end: in the file-card indexes that he began compiling as a very old man, Chimen, in a rare slip for so meticulous a scholar, never provided a title for this book.

Completing his Mantua collection, Chimen also had several books on the Kabbalah. Mantua, along with Venice, had long been a hub for Jewish mystical thinking, and its printers had made
a name for themselves printing the two most famous books of the Kabbalah: in 1558, they produced the first ever printed edition of the
Zohar
. This was a mystical Aramaic text on the unity of the Godhead, most probably written by the thirteenth-century Spanish rabbi Moses de Leon, but attributed by de Leon himself (on the time-honoured assumption that in religion antique provenance confers legitimacy on an idea) to a rabbi from twelve hundred years earlier named Shimon bar Yohai. They followed that publication with bound books of the
Sefir Yetzirah
, a complex text divided into six chapters and thirty-three paragraphs, which claimed to have unlocked the secrets of the universe through a series of numeric and letters-based codes. Like the Freemasons several centuries later, they believed that extraordinary powers would accrue to those who could successfully decode these ciphers. Chapter six, paragraph six reads: ‘And from the
non-existent
He made Something; and all forms of speech and everything that has been produced; from the empty void He made the material world, and from the inert earth He brought forth everything that has life…and the production of all things from the twenty-two letters is the proof that they are all but parts of one living body’. Everything, in this vision, is about the building blocks of written language, the letters that make up words, which make up sentences, which, ultimately, animate the cosmos. This is the poetry, the mystery, behind Chimen’s obsession with the written word, with the construction of his House of Books.

Followers of the Kabbalah believed in a Tree of Life, linking ten central characteristics (or
sefirot
) of God’s existence and of the universe into a complicated whole, bound together by a series of numeric and astrological mysteries: beauty, mercy or kindness, severity, knowledge, wisdom, understanding, kingship, splendour, victory and foundation. Outside the tree was the all-encompassing divine will, which included not only the possibility of life but also the inevitability of death. Ten
sefirot
, and one crown, known as
the
Keter
and above the
sefirot
the
eyn
sof
, the infinite divine. Eleven steps up the tree of life. Eleven times two equals
twenty-two
, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the magical number out of which all things emanated. Chimen was not a mystic, but he found something extraordinarily attractive about the notion of a world literally shaped out of letters and numbers. He kept, in that room, several beautiful, rare copies of the
Zohar
.

Behind the locked glass doors, there were volumes from Antwerp, from Cracow, from Warsaw. As privileged visitors looked through the collection, they could see not just a history of the Jewish people going back five hundred years and more, but also, and as importantly, a history of printing and of the variations in the Hebrew fonts used by printers on either side of the Alps, from its earliest days in Germany through to the establishment of great publishing houses in the mercantile cities of Amsterdam, Antwerp and elsewhere. These books drew timelines weaving in and out of all these vanished worlds, chronicling the rise and fall of trading empires, the emergence of political centres, the passing of the torch from one hub of learning to the next.