Scribe and illuminator:
David bar Pesah
Ink, watercolor, and opaque pigment on vellum
Germany, 14th century
Dorot Jewish Division, NYPL
The Padua Ashkenazi Mahzor
This large folio festival prayer book, undoubtedly commissioned by a German Jewish community for the use of its cantor, was in more recent times in the possession of the Jewish community ("Università Israelitica") of Padua. There it served as a paradigm of the Ashkenazi (i.e., German) rite for the research of Samuele Davide Luzzatto, foremost modern Jewish theologian, founder of the field of Jewish liturgiology, and revered teacher at the Padua rabbinical seminary. His comprehensive autograph collation appears at the end of the manuscript and is dated 1848. A century later, the codex was presented to The New York Public Library, together with the Padua Italian Mahzor (another exquisitely executed manuscript festival prayer book, also in two volumes and on vellum, but this time dating from the Renaissance and following the Italian rite), one of many munificent gestures to the Jewish Division of New York corset king and bibliophile, Louis Rabinowitz.