Bidspirit auction | SHEM TOV IBN SHEM TOV.

SHEM TOV IBN SHEM TOV. Sepher Ha’Emunoth [“The Book of Beliefs.”] FIRST EDITION. Title set within woodcut architectural arch with the printer’s device of an armillary sphere resting on a scroll a verse from Psalm 130:5 (Yaari no. 22). Device repeated at end. ff. 116. Title detached, some dampstaining and trace wormed. Loose in old marbled boards. Sm. 4to. Vinograd, Ferrara 37. Ferrara, Abraham ibn Usque, 1556. A Spanish Kabbalist, R. Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov (d. 1430) was one of the foremost anti-Maimonidean polemicists. This work opposes the philosophy of Jewish rationalists such as Abraham ibn Ezra, Levi b. Gershom (RaLBa’G) and Isaac Albalag - but especially that of Maimonides. A witness to persecutions and conversions of late 14th- and early 15th-century Spain, the author believed that a philosophical orientation was fundamentally incompatible with religious tradition. He viewed Maimonidean intellectualism to be responsible for facilitating apostasy. Sepher Ha’Emunoth is important for the study of early Kabbalah and Zohar. It contains explanations of many Kabbalistic concepts including the inner world of the Sefiroth. See Yeshiva University Museum Catalogue, The Golden Path, Maimonides Across Eight Centuries: Highlights from the Hartman Family Collection (2023) pp. 68-9.