É. Apor (ed.): David Kaufmann Memorial Volume: Papers Presented at the David Kaufmann Memorial Conference, November 29, 1999, Budapest.

DAVID, Abraham: Historical Sources in the Kaufmann Collection: The Case of the Expulsion from the Papal States (1569)

HISTORICAL SOURCES IN THE KAUFMANN COLLECTION: THE CASE OF THE EXPULSION FROM THE PAPAL STATES (1569)* Abraham David (Jerusalem) As a historian with a particular interest in sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance Jewry, 1 have found David Kaufmann's Hebrew manuscript collection to be an invaluable research tool with its some six hundred codices, most of which Kaufmann purchased in Italy, touching upon all aspects of Hebrew culture. As a staff member of the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the National and University Library, Jerusalem, I have been privileged to catalogue a large part of this collection. In the course of my work on material from the Kaufmann Collection I have found several dozen anthologies of letters, known in modem Hebrew as iggeronim, or epistolaries in English. And as you shall see today, these iggeronim can serve as a vital historical source.' Let me describe these anthologies. By and large, they are compilations of model letters chosen from various spheres of Jewish life for use as correspondence textbooks. Their editors, who earmarked these letters for educational purposes, and also for teaching Hebrew and appropriate literary style, omitted many of the identifying details found in the originals: dates, names of people or places. Even in the absence of identifying details, however, these correspondence textbooks, whose sixteenthcentury representatives alone number in the thousands, are of great historical value. They form an untapped treasure trove of prime archival material that contributes greatly to our understanding of various aspects of Jewish life, especially in Renaissance Italy. The great historical value of these iggeronim was first recognized more than a century ago by David Kaufmann himself. Although used for certain studies of Jewish life in Renaissance Italy in the past, there is currently a much greater interest in the discovery and publication of these collections for the purposes of historical research. * Published in a slightly different version: The Expulsion from the Papal States (1569) in Hebrew Sources. In: The Most Ancient of Minorities - The Jews in Italy. Ed. by S. G. Pugliese. Westport-London 2002. 91-99. 1 On the iggeronim see: Yacov BOKSENBOIM, Iggerot Beit Carmi. Tel-Aviv 1983. 9-15; Dov RAPPEL, Hebrew Epistolaries (in Hebrew) = Mehkerei Yerushalayini be-Sifrut 'Ivrit 13(1992) 119-135. 27