Hatam Soferet

Drawer 9 has a lot of pretty things like this:

Image copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Used with permission. Click to see bigger.

They’re mostly in Italian or Latin, and they have the most lovely illuminated borders, with coats of arms of cardinals.

What they are are testimonials. When you supplied things such as furniture to cardinals’ households in seventeenth-century Rome, they might give you a testimonial, which you could use to secure business from other households. JTS has lots of these from a family named Ambron, who were merchants supplying a lot of things to a lot of people.

The testimonial might also give the holder permissions and privileges for other things. You might be allowed to be treated as a member of the cardinal’s household (“don’t mess with this person or I the cardinal will mess with you”), or to live in a fancy district outside the Jewish ghetto, or to travel freely and trade within the Holy Roman Empire. All things that regular Jews couldn’t necessarily expect. The Ambrons supplied the Vatican’s army, as well as the cardinals at home and abroad, so after a time they were guaranteed a market as well.

I admit that my eye was caught mostly by the prettiness of these, but they are also very interesting. This family, the Ambrons, eventually built up a whole network of merchant trading across Europe, part of the Jew-as-trader narrative.

I don’t know what happened to them eventually. There’s one testimonial issued in 1804 “during the Napoleonic occupation of Tuscany,” saying that they have the job of supplying the military there. I suppose that when Napoleon broke the power of the Pope and emancipated everyone including the Jews, Jews who relied on papal preference didn’t fare too well. And then when the papacy’s power came back I suppose they were much more anti-Jew than before, even if the Ambrons had been in a position to supply them with stuff, but war doesn’t always treat networks of merchants kindly.

Other pretty elements from various testimonials, which I’d like to adopt into calligraphy pieces sometime or other:

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

This is from the wedding of Julius Lorsch and Rebecka Cahn, special call number DR6-R36. A Hochzeits-Hagada, dated 1911, Fulda.

I like the little photos stapled to the top here. Julius has a very traditional German Yekkish käppchen, and Rebecka looks like she has those over-the-ears buns that were in style in the 1920s.

Julius and Rebecka perhaps had a sentimental attachment to Pesach; they have a Wedding Haggadah, which follows the form of the Pesach Haggadah. I assume it featured at the wedding dinner; it’s full of cute little poems about the couple. Maybe written by their friends or family?

The front reads:

Hochzeits-Hagada
das ist
Seder und Erzählung
von der Verliebung, Vehrlobung und Verheyratung
des ehrengeachteten und frommen
Herrn Dr. Julius Lorsch
und der hochachtbaren, fürnehmen und minneglichen Jungfrau
Fräulein Rebecka Cahn

Here’s one of the poems. I chose this one because it shows us that Becki was also Dr. Cahn.

Thanks to Phillip Lipman for translation. You see it isn’t Great Poetry or anything, but it’s Telling The Story of The Couple, like the haggada tells the story of the Jews. Which is cute.

For your edification, here are all the pages. All images, as usual, copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America, used with permission, click through to see larger versions. Anyone with good German who wants to translate the whole story of the couple is more than welcome to share it with the rest of us!

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Images copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Used with permission. Click to see larger version.

DR6-L16 contains two items: a flyer and a wedding invitation.

IMPORTANT EMERGENCY APPEAL FOR HACHNOSAS KALOH

Dear Brothers and Sisters:
I beg you with great respect. I am a refugee in this country. I have fled from the Iron Curtain (Budapest), where I had my own Beth Hamedrash. Now, I have to marry off my dear daughter very soon. I beg you to help me as much as possible. You should also take part in this Great Mitzvah Hachnosas Kaloh.

In merit of that Mitzvah you should have long life, happiness and luck in every way.

With blessing and best wishes, I am

Very sincerely yours,

RABBI JOSEF WEISS

Hachnasat kallah is about making sure a bride has what to set up house with and funds to have a wedding. If you move in frum circles you get hit up regularly for money for poor brides like this.

“Marry off my daughter” rubs me up the wrong way, honestly. “I need lots of money so that someone will take my daughter off my hands because they wouldn’t take her free with a pound of tea,” is what I hear. Okay, this has been the way of the world for centuries, or millennia, but it’s still annoying.

It also seems sort of chutzpahdik to say “giving me money is a big mitzvah, you should do it,” but I guess you get good at that if you run a yeshiva.

Anyway, he apparently did pretty well out of it; the daughter got married in due course, and note the fancy invitation with embossing and monogram, and the wedding venue was Gold Manor, apparently a Simcha Palace.

For funsies, I looked up Gold Manor, where the wedding was held. It’s now the site of Black Veterans for Social Justice, but I’m not good enough at American architecture (or Google archaeology) to know whether the building on Google Street View is the one that was there in 1953. But I did find an anecdote about Gold Manor in 1954, from Philip Fishman’s book A Sukkah Is Burning:

…the Tzehlemer Rav was then asked to be the mesader kiddushin (the rabbi responsible for the wedding sacraments). After the wedding ceremony the rav was nowhere to be found. He had left the wedding hall with the ketuba–the traditional wedding document required by Jewish law to be given to the bridge–still in his possession. Apparently, he had not yet been paid for his services. Either my father or my older brother eventually found him outside the wedding hall, wrote him a check, and obtained the ketuba’s release.

I like that.

I couldn’t find anything at all about Yosef Weiss, or E. Miriam his daughter, or Chanandl his son-in-law. Pity. It’s a rather sad reflection on how things went generally; all these scholars who managed to avoid getting killed in the war or trapped by communism, who came to America, where Torah learning was very very different; less of it, for starters, and already-established yeshivot, for another. The lucky ones found money and followers and joined the learning scene, and the unlucky ones sank into obscurity.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.