Hatam Soferet

Look what's on sale at Sotheby's!

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:20:17 GMT

A Highly Important Decorated Esther Scroll, Venice: 1654 Scribe: Estellina daughter of Menahem

Estellina daughter of Menachem!

*Jen waves at Estellina across the centuries*

If you've got a very good imagination, you might be able to picture how happy I was when this Sotheby's catalogue arrived in my email (thanks, Lipman and PR). You don't need any imagination at all to understand why, though.

The other deeply pleasing dimension of this particular scroll is that there are no known complete decorated Esther scrolls predating this one. There are fragments, but no complete ones.

Here's a section from the catalogue text (page 272):

The present scroll is extraordinary on several accounts, first and foremost in its pride of place as the earliest complete decorated megillah. As attested to by the dated colophon at the conclusion of the text, the scroll was completed on Tuesday, 3 Adar, 5324 [= 15 February, 1564] in the city of Venice. The colophon however reveals an even more remarkable feature the individual who wrote this scroll was a woman, Estellina daughter of the Katzin Menahem, son of the Rosh Katzin Jekutiel. Estellina was clearly a member of a wealthy and eminent family indicated not only by the titles accorded to her father and grandfather (both Katzin and Rosh Katzin denote distinguished official positions within the Jewish community) but also by the presence of a coat of arms painted onto the scroll directly after her colophon. Prominently displayed in an elaborate gold frame festooned with flowing ribbons and occupying an entire column, the coat of arms consists of a gold crown above another image that is difficult to decipher, as the paint has been abraded.

As well as being "[t]he earliest complete decorated Esther Scroll," the cataloge describes it as "[t]he only known Esther Scroll to have been written by a woman in the pre-modern era."

I'm writing to Sotheby's to ask if I might be allowed to see it in person, even though there's no chance of my buying it ($600,000 to $800,000, says the catalogue. Hollow laughter). Given that I'm among the first of her successors, and all that.

I wonder who taught Estellina halakha. I wonder if her mother was cross with her for writing a Megillah instead of doing ladylike things such as embroidery. I wonder if she read from it.

I'm so glad to have met her!

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other note on ny times article/soferot generally

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:21:20 GMT

Further to previous post squeeing about Julie.

Her primary teacher is Jen Taylor Friedman, a New Yorker born in Britain who is just 30 but among the very few women to have completed an entire Torah. According to Ms. Wolf, she may indeed be the only one who has ever done so.

"I’ve never seen a source that says otherwise," Ms. Friedman said in a telephone interview. "But 'ever' is a big word, and Judaism has been around for a long time."

As ever, I would be charmed to see a source which says otherwise. There's bound to be one somewhere. We know we've had female copyists, general non-ritual scribes, and I've had one source sent me which speaks of a woman who wrote a chumash; it is possible to interpret that as "a sefer Torah for ritual use," but yeshiva-educated scholarly-rabbi friend RHCY says it means a regular book-type chumash, and he generally knows what he's talking about. We know women have worked on repairing Torahs, both many generations ago and within the past twenty years. Writing? Don't know.

A Torah's a big, expensive thing, right? Before the late twentieth century, if you were somehow in the Torah trade - married to a sofer, or something - and you somehow got the skills and materials and free time and you wrote a Torah, you weren't going to tell everyone about it! because then your Torah would have no market value. Scribes have never earned much; you can't afford to throw away a whole Torah like that. You're going to pass it off as your husband's and you're going to sell it.

Of course that isn't very proper, because technically it wouldn't be fit for ritual use, pre-gender-egalitarian congregations - that's why it has no market value - call it economic necessity, call it feminism, call it what you will, Judaism is a religion of human beings, not of saints. Of course it's happened. It'd be pretty darned remarkable if, in the whole of Jewish history, no woman had ever written a Torah. If nothing else, that would mean that I, me, Jen, possess some quality that no other Jewish woman has ever had, and that's preposterous.

What I have is the luck to live in a generation where I could write a Torah openly, as part of a community that was happy and excited about that. That's what's unusual about this generation of female scribes. Not that we write Torah, but that we're part of a world that can accept that.

This perspective rarely comes across in articles, you understand. Journalism doesn't really do in-depth explanations of subtle points that detract from the thrust of the story. For practical purposes, the simplified version does the job - conveys what is exciting without needing lots of feminist-historical consciousness.

This is why Julie's Torah project is arguably more exciting than mine. We've got the whole "gosh look a vagina wrote a torah" thing out of the way, and we can get on with the important thing, which is "gosh look, a Torah."

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Hooray nice articles about Julie!

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:47:23 GMT

Yay Julie, in the New York Times!

Ms. Seltzer’s performance — an admittedly odd word for what she’s up to, and one she doesn’t like — at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco [is] unique and compelling...

As the central element of a new exhibition, “As It Is Written: Project 304,805,” a simply and elegantly organized introduction to the fundamental role of the Torah in Jewish life, she is creating a new holy scroll.The work is indisputably artful, but it’s not intended to be expressive. The idea is to copy exactly; writing a Torah is less an act of creativity than of sublimation.

“I know the museum sees it that way, but if I thought this was a performance, I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Ms. Seltzer said.

And indeed, in that very denial lies the art in her performance. Watching her impossibly steady hand, the deft maneuvering of the quill (each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet requires its own separate technique) and the inexorable progress of the text across a column and down a page yields a palpable sense of ancient ritual that slows your breathing, and you can’t help seeing that she is communing deeply with the text as she copies it. The writing is an act of faith...

What I like best about this is that she's in the paper not for being A Woman Coo Ur Gosh, but as A Torah Scribe Doing Something Unusual who just happens to be a woman. That is tremendous. That's the world I want to be part of - where women doing things isn't remarkable just because they're women.

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SQUEE BOUNCE BOUNCE YAY

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:37:29 GMT

SQUEE BOUNCE!

This is my chum/student/colleague Julie Seltzer. She's just started writing her first full Torah.

She's doing it as part of a year-long exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, all about the Torah - and as the living heart of their Torah exhibition, they have my Julie writing a real Torah.

There's a GORGEOUS video of her here. It's nine minutes, and it's really really really well done. Seriously recommend watching it. I'm so proud of her I practically burst. You're AWESOME, Julie love. Awesome.

Really go watch it. And go see her if you're in SF. Tell her I sent you.

(J article IF article)

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a question about mezuzot

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:36:19 GMT

Q: Do you write mezuzot? Can you write some for me?

A: The thing about mezuzot is that unlike megillot, there's no way to justify women writing them, outside of wholesale egalitarianism. Not even in Shira Chadasha-type egalitarian Orthodoxy. I can't write you mezuzot unless you're okay with saying me and a man have exactly the same level of obligation to lay tefillin.

If you are okay with that, I personally probably don't have time to write you a mezuzah because they take me ages and I get headaches, but I have various students and friends who can do you very nice mezuzot in the $40-60 range, so email me.

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