Obj. ID: 27379
Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts IM Isaac Meir Hayyim Moses Gabbai of Baghdad Rosettes Esther Scroll, Baghdad, 1848
The scroll opens with two decorative prefatory panels with the Hebrew inscription in large, hand-drawn, and painted letters. Similar letters can be seen around the second of the prefatory panels and along the whole length of the upper and lower margins of the scroll. The letters painted on the margins form the elaborated genealogies of Mordecai and Haman that allude to the oral tradition known from the Targum Sheni. The opening part of the scroll and the spaces between the text columns are adorned with colorful rosettes.
The scroll is mounted on a turned wooden handle.
Several scrolls decorated in a similar way are stored in private and institutional collections (e.g. BCM 75, Braginksy Collection, Zurich; MS 182/114, IM, Jerusalem), however, not all of them bear the note of the artist-scribe.
For similar decoration see also Siman Tov Piyyutim of 1864: https://cja.huji.ac.il/browser.php?mode=set&id=11818.
For another scroll decorated with Hebrew letters on the margins see ID 36175.
sub-set tree:
O | Ornamentation: | Letter
O | Ornamentation: | Foliate and floral ornaments | Floral motif
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The Book of Esther in Hebrew with 4 prefatory panels and traditional genealogies of Mordecai and Haman in the margins
The scroll is formed of 5 sheets containing 21 columns of the text with 17 lines.
The scroll is described in:
Isaiah Shachar, Jewish Tradition in Art, the Feuchtwanger Collection of Judaica, Jerusalem 1971, 158, object 417.
Chaja Benjamin, The Stieglitz Collection: Masterpieces of Jewish Art, Jerusalem 1987, object 191.
Other scrolls featuring similar pattern are described in:
Schöne Seiten. Jüdische Schriftkultur aus der Braginsky Collection, eds. E. Schrijver, F. Wiesemann, E.M. Cohen, S. Liberman Mintz, M. Schmeltzer, Zurich 2011, 306‒307.
A Journey through Jewish Worlds: Highlights from the Braginsky Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts and Printed Books, eds. E.M. Cohen, E. Schrijver, S. Liberman Mintz, Amsterdam 2009, 272–273.