Bidspirit auction | (LITURGY). CALLIGRAPHIC HEBREW MANUSCRIPT. Birchoth

(LITURGY). CALLIGRAPHIC HEBREW MANUSCRIPT. Birchoth HaHaftorah . BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN BY THE SCRIBE ELIJAH BUNIMOWITSCH. Four folios written on vellum in an Ashkenazic square and semi-cursive hand in black ink. Incipits and emphasized texts enlarged; each page of text within a unique decorative geometric frame; elaborate word panels at the start of each section; ornate dedicatory cartouche near foot of f. 4r. Each folio backed with white silk-lined card and individually hinged. Bound by Th. Schnell of Frankfurt in elaborately gilt-tooled brown calf with foliate borders, title lettered in gilt on upper cover. Turn-ins gilt; contemporary patterned flyleaves and pastedowns. Page size: 11 x 8 inches (29 x 21 cm). Slight staining and minor thumbing; some warping of card and chipping of ink. Binding somewhat worn at corners and hinges, inner hinge split. Housed in a modern maroon cloth folding case. Frankfurt a/Main, 1889. This meticulously-penned and beautifully-decorated book of blessings would have been kept on the Torah reader’s desk in a synagogue. Two interesting textual features of this work are the inclusion of the words vetikom nakam (avenge the vengeance) in the second post-Haftarah blessing, as well as the varying customs cited regarding the conclusion of the fourth blessing on Yom Kippur - with specific reference to the practice in Frankfurt. ELIJAH BUNIMOWITSCH was a professional scribe and is known to have produced a Torah scroll on behalf of Baron Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild (1828-1901), the last head of the Rothschild bank branch in Frankfurt. After Rothschild’s passing, many of the books he collected were transferred to the Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt, which now holds four Bunimowitsch manuscripts, one of which was written for Rothschild on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1898. The present lot, executed in Bunimowitsch’s signature decorative style and bound by a Frankfurt-based bookbinder (as per one of the Bunimowitsch manuscripts in the collection of the Universitätsbibliothek), includes a (blank) dedicatory cartouche at the end dated 13th Cheshvan, 1889. LITERATURE : Ernst Róth and Leo Prijs, Hebräische Handschriften: Die Handschriften der Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, vol. 1B (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1990), 138 (no. 237), 139 (no. 238), 168 (no. 259). Ernst Róth and Leo Prijs, Hebräische Handschriften: Die Handschriften der Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, vol. 1C (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1993), 67-68 (no. 333). MS Frankfurt a. M. Universitätsbibliothek, Qu. 38 ( http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/mshebr/urn/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-11327 ). MS Frankfurt a. M. Universitätsbibliothek, Oct. 229 ( http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/mshebr/urn/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-10144 ). MS Frankfurt a. M. Universitätsbibliothek, Oct. 230 ( http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/mshebr/urn/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-10159 ). MS Frankfurt a. M. Universitätsbibliothek, Oct. 251 ( http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/mshebr/urn/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-10427 ).