Ms. codex.

Title from Hebrew ed. (Berlin, 1922).

Extracts include Hebrew translations of material from G. B. Botero, Relazioni universali; H. Prideaux, Old and New Testament connected in the history of the Jews and neighbouring nations.

Foliated 1-17, 17-96.

Copy imperfect: Text discontinuous between loose leaves and between quires, and may have been foliated out of order (see following note).

Foliated out of order (as received). Sequence suggested in above contents notes follow a tentative reconstruction of Gershon D. Hundert (personal email communication, 5/1/2013)

Accompanied by 2 slips containing lists and notes relating to the contents of the ms. (by Wischnitzer?)

Shelfmark: New York, Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, MS 10775.

Digitization funded by The National Library of Israel.

Dov Ber, an accomplished Hebrew writer and memoirist, was born in Bolechow, Galicia, in 1723. He adopted Birkenthal as a German name in accordance with the decree of Joseph II in 1772, when the city passed from Polish to Austrian rule. He received a traditional Jewish education, but his father, who was a winedealer and had contact with Polish and Hungarian nobles and priests, engaged a non-Jewish tutor to teach him Polish, Latin, German, and French. Dov Ber took over his father's business, and became the leader of the Bolechow community. He served as interpreter and adviser to R. Hayyim b. Simhah ha-Kohen Rapoport, the chief rabbi of Lemberg, in a debate with the followers of Jacob Frank held in the main church of Lemberg in 1759. Divre Binah, his treatise on false-Messiah movements in Jewish history, and his main literary work, was not discovered until 1910; it was published in part by A. J. Brawer in Ha-Shilo'ah (vols. 33 and 38). The present manuscript was discovered in Jews' College, London, in 1912, was published in the original with an introduction and notes by M. Wischnitzer (Berlin, 1922), and in translations into both Yiddish (Ber Bolekhovers Zikhroynes, Berlin, 1922) and English (The Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow, London and New York, 1922). Dov Ber's two works contain valuable information for the study of Jewish history in Galicia in the 18th century, not only for the Frankist movement but also for the history of the Council of the Lands, the Jewish census in Poland (1764), and for Jewish economic history of that period (Encyclopaedia Judaica)

Hebrew, with some Yiddish: Ashkenazic cursive hand.

Jew's College, London (stamp: ff. 95v and 96r); London School of Jewish Studies Library (stamp: fol. 95v)

Marmorstein, A. Die Memoren Beer Bolechows, Zeitschrift für Hebräische Bibliographie 16 (1913) (in part)

Lewin, B.M. Jahrbuch fü Jüdish-Literarishen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt, 11 (1916) (in part)

זכרונות ר' דוב מבוליחוב, תפ"ג-תקס"ה : יוצאים לאור בפעם הראשונה ... עם מבוא מפורט והערות מסבירות / על ידי מ. ווישניצר (ברלין: כלל, תרפ"ב [1922[)

Ber Bolekhovers zikhroyne`s / ... miṭ araynfir un derḳlerungen fun M. Ṿishnitser. Berlin: Klal-farlag, 683, 1922.

Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow (1723-1805), translated from the original Hebrew ms. with an introduction, notes, and a map by M. Vishnitzer (London; New York: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1922)