Domsa Károlyné, Fekete Gézáné, Kovács Mária (szerk.): Gondolatok a könyvtárban / Thoughts in the Library (A MTAK közleményei 30. Budapest, 1992)

KÖNYVTÁR ÉS HAGYOMÁNY – LIBRARY AND TRADITION

The Ulm mahzor (ms. A 363) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and its missing Haggadah Gabrielle Sed-Rajna Centre National de la Recherche Scientlfique Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, Paris The famous collection of manuscripts and rare books of David Kaufmann,

1 given to the Oriental Department of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1905, contains some highly important manuscripts, many of which are among the must valuable witnesses of medieval Jewish bookpainting. Indeed, David Kaufmann was not only a passionate collector, he was also a fine art connoisseur and his survey of Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, the first attempt to give the great lines of the history of this art, is still today, after almost a century, an estimable study of a long neglected aspect of Jewish culture.

2 Some of these precious manuscripts, like the Mishneh Tor ah executed in 1296 in North-Eastern France,

3 or the Haggadah from fourteenth century Catalonia,

4 are now available in luxurious facsimile editions. And all the illuminated manuscripts have been described in detail in volume IV of the Iconographical Index of Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts, co-published by the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Israel Academy of Sciences and the French National Research Center (CNRS).

5 The realization of this project was made possible thanks to the enthusiastic support of Professor Dr. G. Rózsa, to whom we would like to offer the present paper as tribute and grateful homage. Although the descriptions given in the Index deal with all aspects of the manuscripts - codicology, history, paleography, decoration and illustrations -, these descriptions do not pretend to provide final studies of the manuscripts, but „ Gondolatok a könyvtárban " 91