Sefer HaYashar (midrash) - History

History

The earliest authenticated verified version of this Hebrew midrash was printed in Venice in 1625 and the introduction refers to an earlier 1552 "edition" in Naples of which neither trace or other mention has been found. The printer Joseph ben Samuel claimed the work was copied by a scribe named Jacob the son of Atyah from an ancient manuscript whose letters could hardly be made out.

This work is not to be confused with an ethical text by the same name, which, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 14, p. 1099, was "probably written in the 13th century." Scholars have proposed various dates between the 9th century and 16th century.

The Venice 1625 text was heavily criticised as a forgery by Leon Modena as part of his criticisms of the Zohar as a forgery and Kabbalah in general. Modena was a member of the Venetian rabbinate which supervised the Hebrew press in Venice, and Modena prevented the printers from identifying Sefer ha-Yashar with the Biblical lost book.

Behold, it is like Sefer ha-Yashar, which they printed (without my knowledge and without the knowledge of the sages here in Venice, about twenty years ago). Although I removed the fantasies and falsehoods from it, that it is the Sefer ha-Yashar mentioned in Scripture, there are still those who claim that it was discovered during the time of the destruction . But who can stop those who imagine in their minds whatever they wish.

— Leon Modena, Ari Nohem, before 1648

Despite Modena's intervention the preface to the 1625 version nevertheless still claims that its original source book came from the ruins of Jerusalem in AD 70, where a Roman officer named Sidrus discovered a Hebrew scholar hiding in a hidden library. The officer Sidrus reportedly took the scholar and all the books safely back to his estates in Seville, Spain (which in Roman times was known as Hispalis, the provincial capital of Hispania Baetica). The 1625 edition then claims that at some uncertain point in history of Islamic Spain) the manuscript was transferred or sold to the Jewish college in Cordova, Spain. The 1625 edition claims that scholars preserved the book until its printings in Naples in 1552 and in Venice in 1625. Although outside of the preface to the 1625 work, there is no evidence to support any of this story. The work was used extensively but not especially more than many other sources in Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews.

Although there remains doubt about whether the 1552 "edition" in Naples was ever truly printed, the study of Joseph Dan professor of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the preface to his 1986 critical edition of the 1625 text concludes, from the Hebrew used and other indications, that the work was in fact written in Naples in the early sixteenth century. The Arabic connections suggest that if the preface to the 1625 version is an "exaggeration", it was then probably written by a Jew who lived in Spain or southern Italy.