To my mind the most inspiringly beautiful and important early Hebrew manuscript of the Bible is that in the remarkable collection of Mr. David Sassoon, of London. It should be reproduced in facsimile so that all students here and abroad might study not only its unique text but its glorious illustrations as well.
One of the great discoveries in the history of these early Bibles occurred right here at our place in New York, seven years ago. Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, the great student of manuscripts, called upon me, and I showed him six pictures from the Bible and said that they were by a Spanish artist of the thirteenth century.
He looked at them for a moment and said, “No, they’re English!” I could scarcely believe him, although no one knows more about manuscripts than he. “Let me take them to my hotel and study them. I think they are the work of the earliest known English illuminator, W. de Brailes.”
CARVED AND POLYCHROMED WOODEN BINDING OF THE
LIESBORN GOSPELS (IX CENTURY)
He took them with him. If they were English they would be immensely valuable—worth far more than I, old Captain Kidd, asked for them. You bet I awaited anxiously his return.
Finally he showed up one day, and said, “The only trouble with you, Doctor Rosenbach, is that you do not use the eyes God gave you.” Lo and behold, he pointed to the halo on one of the saints, and there in neat characters were the magic words: “W. de Brail(es) me f(e)cit.” It was one of the greatest attributions ever made by a scholar, and they were, now beyond even the shadow of a doubt, the work of the very artist he had named. According to Mr. Eric G. Millar: “There has never been a more triumphant vindication of connoisseurship.” These six drawings are now in England in the collection of Mr. A. Chester Beatty, who has one of the choicest libraries of Oriental and European manuscripts. Every year when I go to England I renew, through the kind offices of Mr. Beatty, my acquaintance with the spirit of that doughty old illuminator, W. de Brailes.
Very few forgers have had the courage to try their hands at duplicating Biblical manuscripts. I have always been amazed at the enormous amount of self-confidence a man by the name of Shapira must have had when he offered the British Museum several important-looking manuscript scrolls. They contained the text of the Pentateuch, and were, he claimed, from the very hands of Moses! Of course, every expert and noted scholar who happened to be in London at the time went to see these scrolls, which were placed on exhibition at the Museum. They were scrutinized carefully, admired as works of curiosity, but no one believed for a moment that they were genuine. Any Semitic scholar knows perfectly well that writing for literary purposes was unknown at the time of Moses. Yet even though Shapira had used an alphabet belonging to a much later period in history, his handiwork was decidedly interesting. Finally he was informed that his offerings were considered a fraud. He left England bitterly disappointed and went to Belgium. Not long after he arrived there the continental newspapers announced that Shapira had committed suicide. Even then, when certain of his victims read the lines, they wrote to the papers protesting that the man could not be dead, and openly accused him of fabrication even in connection with his own demise. Such is fame!
The most interesting experiments in the history of pictorial art were the attempts to produce picture books for the use of the middle and lower classes of Europe in the fifteenth century, most of whom could not read. The few specimens of the Block Books, as they are called, extant to-day, indicate they were made up of single leaves printed on one side of the paper only. These blocks were all cut by hand from a slab of hardwood, such as that of the pear or apple tree. When the impressions were finally made, the pages were pasted back to back and bound in rough parchment. It is believed by some authorities that the earliest Block Books date from 1440, although others were undoubtedly printed fifteen to thirty years later.
