This impres­sive new study is an exam­i­na­tion of a por­tion of a Sephardic illu­mi­nat­ed Masoret­ic Bible com­plet­ed, accord­ing to the colophon, in 1477. Tran­scribed by Moshe Ibn Zabara, it was lat­er heav­i­ly glossed by Mena­hem b. Judah de Lon­zano (ca. 1555-ca. 1624). Jor­dan S. Penkow­er and his asso­ciates — Andreina Con­tes­sa, who exam­ined the dec­o­ra­tions, and Tamar Leit­er and Shlo­mo Zuck­er, who described the palaeog­ra­phy — con­clude that the copy­ing of this Pen­ta­teuch was an ear­ly scrib­al cre­ation of Moses Ibn Zabara, pos­si­bly pro­duced pri­or to 1476: the text was tran­scribed in a lighter shade of brown ink than the scribe used in lat­er works; more­over, the work dif­fers from his lat­er works in the script and in one form of the Tetragrammaton.

The main focus of this mono­graph, how­ev­er, is the life and work of Mena­hem de Lon­zano — in par­tic­u­lar the text-crit­i­cal gloss­ing of the Zabara codex, which Lon­zano car­ried out a cen­tu­ry lat­er. Through painstak­ing effort over many decades, Penkow­er was able to track down a num­ber of the books both in man­u­script and print­ed form once held and glossed by Lon­zano. This enabled him to com­pare, ana­lyze, and detail the gloss­es found in Zabara’s work.

Accus­tomed as he was to gloss­ing texts, Lon­zano was eager to exam­ine the Zabara Bible, a text which was by then dis­tin­guished as being a high­ly accu­rate Bible, exam­in­ing the text and the maso­rah (“tra­di­tion”) with great care. Penkow­er asserts that Lonzano’s rig­or and pre­ci­sion in eval­u­at­ing the text can prob­a­bly be explained : “… in light of the project that Lon­zano was plan­ning — a care­ful cor­rec­tion of the Bible text: spelling, vocal­iza­tion and accen­tu­a­tion, as well as the cat­e­gories of songs and the open and closed sec­tions.” Lon­zano worked by com­par­ing the Zabara text to the Alep­po Codex. Based on his com­par­i­son, Lon­zano con­clud­ed that in the case of the Pen­ta­teuch, Zaabara’s text tend­ed to be high­ly accu­rate, but in the case of the Prophets and the Hagiographa the com­par­isons sug­gest­ed that the Zabara text (as well as sev­er­al oth­er texts which Lon­zano exam­ined) were not as accu­rate as the Alep­po codex. An impres­sive work, illus­trat­ed with approx­i­mate­ly 150 col­or pho­tos of microg­ra­phy, Penkower’s vol­ume should appeal to a broad audi­ence, from those study­ing Renais­sance and ear­ly mod­ern Jew­ish his­to­ry to those seek­ing knowl­edge of Bib­li­cal text crit­i­cism and his­to­ry of the Book.

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