Asher Isaiah Hallevy
Asher Isaiah Hallevy
Asher Isaiah Hallevy
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Asher Isaiah Hallevy
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Asher Isaiah Hallevy

Autograph manuscript, ‘Shomer Ha’brit’ and other stories, Calcutta, 1886

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Asher Isaiah Hallevy
Autograph manuscript, ‘Shomer Ha’brit’ and other stories, Calcutta, 1886
In Hebrew. 61 leaves, 190 x 150mm, on paper, c.36 lines per page, written in a square Polish hand, sections in verse with vocalisation. Bound in 1927 in brown cloth, stamped with the Sassoon MS number. Provenance: David Solomon Sassoon (1880-1942), his MS.850, purchased in Darjeeling; his sale, Sotheby’s, 21 June 1994, lot 76.

From the renowned Sassoon collection of important Hebraica: a 19th-century literary witness to the Jewish community in India. The present manuscript contains two texts, partly in verse, the second beginning on p.78 and containing many autobiographical details.

Sasson was proud of having discovered and preserved the entire autograph poetical and fictional manuscripts of Hallevy, writing the following of the acquisition of the present manuscript: ‘Even in those parts of India where there are only comparatively recent settlements of Jews, I was able to collect some documents of communal interest and preserve the collected work of an otherwise unknown prolific Hebrew writer, Asher Isaiah Hallevy, some of whose writings I discovered at Darjeeling, in the Himalayas’.

Published: D.S. Sassoon, Ohel Dawid, Descriptive Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan Manuscripts in the Sassoon Library, 1932, vol. II, p.1035.

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