Friday, March 10, 2017

A Genoa Polyglot Psalter is up for auction

FOR SALE: Unread copy of 16th-century multilingual Psalms, loathed by Columbus’s son, up for auction (Ilan Ben Zion, Times of Israel.
Ferdinand Columbus, the famed explorer’s bastard son, had a serious beef with the first multilingual edition of the Book of Psalms, a pristine copy of which goes up for auction in New York next week.

The Polyglot Psalter was printed in Genoa a decade after his father’s death, in 1516, but its two-page footnote on the life of Christopher Columbus on a verse in Psalms 19 mentioning “the ends of the earth” rubbed him the wrong way.

The Polyglot Psalter was the second book ever printed in Arabic, which appeared alongside the original Hebrew and Aramaic, Latin and Greek translations of the text. ...
This psalter (or at least one from the same printing) was mentioned in this post back in 2015. As always, I encourage whoever buys it to keep it available for specialists to study. That can only increase its value.

For past PaleoJudaica posts on Columbus, see here and links.