Folio, (341 x 245 mm), 97 ff. Manuscript notes and corrections on ff. 74v, 76r–80r, 81v–83r, 84r–85r, 86v, 89r and 93r. Modern vellum over boards, very slightly scuffed; modern paper flyleaves and pastedowns. Light scattered staining, dampstaining in the upper outer quadrant throughout, small tear to upper edge of f.7.

Although individual tractates had previously been printed, Daniel Bomberg’s edition of 1520–23 was the first printing of the Babylonian Talmud in its entirety. Bomberg, a Christian printer from Antwerp established in Venice, obtained an exclusive privilege and the approval of Pope Leo X for the undertaking, employing Jewish scholars and proofreaders in its preparation. The National Library of Israel describes the result as the first complete printed Talmud, while the Posen Library emphasizes its lasting consequence for Jewish learning throughout the diaspora. The first Bomberg Talmud is also important for preserving the text before the extensive censorship imposed upon many later editions.

Its greatest legacy is the tzurat ha-daf, the familiar form of the Talmudic page: the Mishnah and Gemara occupy the centre, surrounded by Rashi and the Tosafot. Bomberg also established the foliation by daf—each leaf cited by its recto (a) and verso (b)—that was adopted by subsequent printers and remains the standard means of citing the Babylonian Talmud today. Thus a reference such as “Yoma 85b” still directs a modern student to substantially the same textual location established in Venice in 1520.

The present volume is Tractate Yoma, the fifth tractate of Seder Mo‘ed (“Festivals”), devoted to Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Its first seven chapters reconstruct in extraordinary detail the Temple service performed by the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest: his preparations, sacrifices, entry into the Holy of Holies, incense service, confessions and the ritual of the two goats. In this sense Yoma preserves the rabbinic memory of a form of Jewish worship that had ceased with the destruction of the Second Temple.

The final chapter turns from the Temple service to the observance of Yom Kippur after the Temple, including fasting and the five traditional forms of self-denial. It culminates in one of the best-known ethical teachings of the Mishnah: while Yom Kippur effects atonement for transgressions between man and God, offences committed against another person require reconciliation with the person who has been wronged.

This particular edition of Yoma therefore has significance on two distinct levels. Textually and religiously, it transmits one of the central tractates governing Jewish understanding of repentance, atonement and the lost Temple ritual. Bibliographically, it belongs to the edition that transformed the physical transmission of the Oral Torah. Manuscripts inevitably varied in arrangement; Bomberg’s printed page gave geographically dispersed Jewish communities a common textual reference system and helped create a remarkable degree of uniformity in Talmudic study.

The manuscript annotations and corrections preserved on numerous leaves are consequently of particular interest. They demonstrate that this was not merely a collected early Hebrew book but a studied Jewish text, bearing evidence of engagement with its contents. Such marginal intervention is especially appropriate in a Talmud volume, a book whose very typographical construction embodies layers of commentary, interpretation and debate.

A highly important volume from the first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud: the first printed Yoma in the Bomberg Talmud, devoted to the Temple service and laws of Yom Kippur, and part of the edition whose page design and foliation became—and remain—the universal framework of Talmudic study.

Provenance: Sotheby’s, New York, Important Judaica, 20 December 2018, lot 170.

A. M. Habermann, Ha-madpis Daniyyel Bombergi u-reshimat sifrei beit defuso, Safed, 1978, p. 33, no. 20; Vinograd, Thesaurus of the Hebrew Book, Venice 24; USTC 1792468.