As stated by the head of the Judaica Research Center, dr. Lara Lempertienė, “incunabula are the greatest treasure for libraries, because there are few of them in the world. Here we are talking regarding the context of all cultures and all languages.”
According to her, incunabula comes from the Latin word for “that which is in diapers”: “These are the very first ‘newborns’ in the history of book printing.” Incunabula are books that appeared from the beginning of printing (the world’s first printed book, the Bible, was printed by Johann Gutenberg in 1455) until 1501. Books from a later period, called paleotypes, are also very valuable, but incunabula occupy a very special place in every library’s collection.”
The National Library currently has 90 books of this type, and the newly discovered one – 91. It is likely that this incunabula is unique in Lithuania.
“The First Prophets” is characterized by a particularly beautiful ancient font, beautiful vignettes, highlighted L. Lempertienė. In addition, the great value of the book lies in the comments of David Kimchi, a famous Bible interpreter.
“In this book, we also found traces of the work of the censor, because inside certain lines of the text are crossed out with black, opaque ink. Throughout the history of Jewish book printing, publications were carefully scrutinized to ensure that they did not contain any anti-Christian sayings. Of course, it was evaluated subjectively by each censor,” said the head of the Judaica Research Center.
It is not yet clear how this book came to be in Lithuania, as there are no signs of the owner. However, as L. Lempertienė stated, the seal of the rabbi of Vilnius without a name was found on the front page of the book: “Does this mean that he was the owner?” It is not clear, because each incunabula has its own story.
According to “kedem-auctions.com”, the value of this book reaches 30 thousand. euros.
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2024-07-06 01:16:05
