The paragraphs on books from the "Book of the Pious," §§ 873-932, have been collected (and translated into English) by the Rev. Michael Adler, in an essay called "A Medieval Bookworm" (see The Bookworm, ii, 251).
The full title of Mr. Alexander Ireland's book—so much drawn upon in this
essay—is "The Book-Lover's Enchiridion, a Treasury of Thoughts on the
Solace and Companionship of Books, Gathered from the Writings of the
Greatest Thinkers, from Cicero, Petrarch, and Montaigne, to Carlyle,
Emerson, and Ruskin" (London and New York, 1894).
Mr. F.M. Nichols' edition of the "Letters of Erasmus" (1901) is the source of the quotation of one of that worthy's letters.
The final quotation comes from the Wisdom of Solomon, ch. vi. v. 12; ch. viii. vv. 2, 16; and ch. ix. v. 4. The "radiance" of Wisdom is, in ch. vii, 26, explained in the famous words, "For she is an effulgence from everlasting light, an unspotted mirror of the working of God, and an image of His goodness."
MEDIEVAL WAYFARING
The evidence for many of the statements in this paper will be found in various contexts in "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages," in the Hebrew travel literature, and in such easily accessible works as Graetz's "History of the Jews."
Achimaaz has been much used by me. His "Book of Genealogies" (Sefer Yochasin) was written in 1055. The Hebrew text was included by Dr. A. Neubauer in his "Mediaeval Jewish Chronicles," ii, pp. 114 et seq. I might have cited Achimaaz's account of an amusing incident in the synagogue at Venosa. There had been an uproar in the Jewish quarter, and a wag added some lines on the subject to the manuscript of the Midrash which the travelling preacher was to read on the following Sabbath. The effect of the reading may be imagined.
Another source for many of my statements is a work by Julius Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, Berlin, 1893. It presents many new facts on the medieval Jewries of Germany.
The quaint story of the Jewish sailors told by Synesius is taken from T.R. Glover's "Life and Letters in the Fourth Century" (Cambridge, 1901), p. 330.
A careful statement on communal organization with regard to the status of
travellers and settlers was contributed by Weinberg to vol. xii of the
Breslau Monatsschrift. The title of the series of papers is Die
Organisation der jüdischen Gemeinden.