Special Sale

Special Sale

By Eliezer Brodt

פרנס לדורו, התכתבות ר’ אליעזר ליפמן פרינץ עם חכמי דורו, ההדיר וביאר מאיר הרשקוביץ, עורכת ראשית אלס בנדהיים, ערך והקדימם מבואות ר’ נריה גוטל, ירושלים תשנ”ב, 503+ 45 עמודים

פרנס לדורות, ר’ אליעזר ליפמן פרינץ הגהות ומאמרות, ההדיר וביאר מאיר הרשקוביץ, עורכת ראשית אלס בנדהיים, ערך משנה ר’ נריה גוטל, ירושלים תשנ”ט, 496 +15 עמודים.

About twenty years ago I discovered two remarkable seforim titled Parnas Ledoro and Parnas Ledorot in a library. Baruch hashem at the time I was able to find copies to purchase. Eventually I found some more copies and was able to supply them to some other friends.

These two volumes are beautifully produced and are “must owns” for those interested in the kind of works that contain fascinating bibliographical materials along side correspondences with many Gedolim and other “book people”. Just to Highlight some of the who’s who that the author R’ Eliezer Liepman Philip Prins corresponded with was the Netziv, R’ Chaim Berlin, R’ Meir Yona, His son R Mordechai, R’ Yaakov Shor the Chafetz Chaim and many others. In addition, the volumes include his glosses on Shas, the Yosef Ometz, Netziv , and numerous articles he wrote. These volumes are fully annotated, along with introductions to each letter, full of valuable background material.

In a recent, beautiful Tablet Magazine article devoted to the Person Behind the production of these remarkable volumes, Mrs. Els Salomon-Prins Bendheim, Dr. Theodor Dunkelgrun writes:[1]

Els Salomon-Prins Bendheim, who died this past January in her hundredth year, happened upon a spectacular library, a collection of more than 6,000 manuscripts, printed editions, and ephemera, when she first visited Jerusalem in 1949 at the age of 26. The library was the life’s work of the Dutch scholar Eliezer Liepman Philip Prins (Arnhem 1835-Frankfurt 1915). Els Salomon-Prins Bendheim was his granddaughter. With time, she discovered, the library had become an archive of sorts. The margins teemed with manuscript annotations and tucked between the pages she found letters from some of the most prominent rabbis and scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The encounter with his books lit a double flame of love and learning within her, and she devoted the rest of her life to safeguarding her grandfather’s memory by editing his correspondence and his marginalia, in Hebrew and in Dutch, faithfully trying to capture the portrait in his library.

Dr. Theodor Dunkelgrun than goes on to describe:

Mrs. Bendheim… gave me copies of the three books (two in Hebrew, one in Dutch) that she had devoted to her grandfather: Liepman Philip Prins: His Scholarly Correspondence (1992), Liepman Philip Prins: His Scholarly Contribution (1999) and Marginalia: An Amsterdam Scholar from the Mediene (2001). Together, those books painted a portrait of a remarkable figure—a learned independent scholar, book collector, contributor to Jewish scholarly journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as to the Dutch Jewish press. From his home in Arnhem, he had set out to connect with the leading Jewish figures of his time. Eventually, his correspondents would include Solomon Buber, Meir Friedmann (Ish-Shalom), Solomon Geiger, Louis Ginzberg, Esriel Hildesheimer, British Chief Rabbis Nathan Marcus Adler and Herman Adler, Yisrael Meir Kagan (the Chafetz Chaim), Naftali Zvi Judah Berlin (the Netziv), his son Chaim Berlin, and Samson Raphael Hirsch.

It was through his membership of this modern republic of rabbinic letters that Prins had made his greatest contributions to Jewish scholarship, as a connector and go-between with unsurpassed knowledge about the worlds of Jewish scholarship and Jewish books. Aware of the Romm publishing house’s preparations for a new edition of the Babylonian Talmud and with an insider’s intelligence about Amsterdam’s Hebrew printers, Prins managed to secure a unique and invaluable source for Vilna editors to include: a copy of the Frankfurt 1720 edition of the Babylonian Talmud densely annotated by the brilliant Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697-1776) that had come into the possession of Amsterdam’s Proops printing family (Emden’s copy of the Talmud survived, and came to Jerusalem in 1934 when the National Library acquired books and manuscripts from the Romm printing house).

The inclusion of her grandfather’s glosses on Tractate Hullin in the “Vilna Shas” and the acknowledgement of his contribution to what became the Talmud’s canonical edition in the Acharit Davar (the publishers’ general epilogue at the end of Tractate Niddah) were the source of Mrs. Bendheim’s greatest yichus. Several years later, Prins supplied the Moravian scholar David Kaufmann with one of two surviving manuscripts to use for the first edition (1896) of the memoirs of Glikl bas Leib of Hameln (1646-1724), the most important surviving ego-document of any Jewish woman written prior to modern times.

For a short time only these two volumes are available for purchase ($24 for the TWO volumes before shipping). For more information about this email me at Eliezerbrodt-at-gmail.com.

Part of the proceeds will be going to support the efforts of the the Seforim Blog.

Here are the TOC of the two volumes.

Volume I:

Volume II:.