JERUSALEM (VINnews) — As Elul begins Monday and some communities prepare to say Selichos for the entire month, the Israeli National Library revealed a rare copy of Selichos which is the oldest known printed version of the Ashkenazi compilation. The book is dated to 1475 and was printed by Rabbi Meshulam Cusi of the town of Piove Di Sacco in Italy. Piove was apparently the first town in the region to allow Jews to settle in it; it hosted a Jewish-owned moneylending business from as early as 1373. Later, when moneylending was prohibited within Padua, other Jewish bankers relocated to Piove di Sacco.
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Cusi was a German-born physician who unlike other printers at the time focusing on study texts decided to publish a prayer book- the oldest known printed prayer book in Hebrew, just 21 years after Gutenberg printed the first Bible.
Cusi printed the books in “Ashkenazi script” and hoped to publish many books but by his untimely death had only managed to print the four parts of the Tur and the Selichos, which may have been completed by his widow Devorah, according to the National Library’s curator, Dr. Joel Finkelman.
Finkelman says that Devorah was privy to the art of printing and helped her husband in the procedure. In the book there is evidence that it was used by two other women, with an inscription by “Mrs. Esther bas R’ Asher” who stresses that ” a person should sign his name on the book so that nobody can come from the marketplace and claim that it is his own.” A later inscription at the end of the book is signed by “Lifheit Bas R’ Asher Shalit.”
Dr. Finkelman says that ” we don’t know anything about these women but apparently saying Selichos before Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur was very important to them. The gentile censor erased some sentences which mocked Christianity but the Jewish worshipers added the words erased by hand in the margins of the selichos. (See above picture)
The library has a number of other valuable incanabula including Hagados from the early period of print as well as machzorim.