How Pages from the World's Rarest Talmud Were Discovered

00:00 We have mentioned in the previous short lecture that, uh, several years after actually it was in fourteen eighty-two, they have started printing in Spain a Chas for the first time. That Chas is not like our Chas, the Gemara is in center, Rashi on one side, the Toses on the other side. They didn't print yet the Toses, only Gemara and Rashi. And this Talmud is very, very, very rare. There is not even one copy of it in the world, only several pages here, several pages there. The reason is because they have published these Gemaras in Spain for the next 10 years, since 1482 till 1492. In 1492 was the expulsion of Jews from Spain and burning of all their Sefer-- their Jewish Sefer. So nothing was left from the Talmud that was published there. If there was anything that is left is if someone purchased there a Gemara and went to another country with it. But after several years, as we shall discuss in the next short lectures, they've started publishing a Talmud with Rashi on one side and Toses on one side. So the early print of the Gemara and Rashi itself over the years became obsolete. Then you put it in the Shemos, and then the binder took it and made out of it the bi- the kind of, uh, hardcover binding when he took several, several pages and glued together and put over it a parchment to give it a form of a hardcover binding. In in 1978, when we were involved in

02:28 cataloging the old books in the library, and we saw every time we saw a soft cover of an old book, we had the techniques of separating the pages and cleaning it. So one of those things that we found in that bindings was pages of this edition of the Talmud with Rashi itself. We have in the library seventeen pages of this edition, fifteen pages of Maseches Chagigah, and two pages of Maseches Bashishonah. I asked then the Rebbe if I should publish it with the introduction of explaining it in the Keves that I was editing then for the Rebbe, Ya'gdol Tehiyah. Although the Rebbe gave the instructions that Ya'gdol Tehiyah should be the purpose of it is to publish written by the Rebbeim of Chabad and Hasidim of Chabad. But since this is such a unique item, maybe I should publish this there too, and the Rebbe okayed I should do it. In that year, there was Reb Chaim Zalman Dimitrovsky. He decided to give out a Sefer with all the pages of this print that is to be found all over the world, some pages in this library and some pages in that library. He traveled to all the libraries, and he copied, made copies of the pages, and then he got it together. He didn't bind it because he knew next year could be found the pages that are between. So if he binds it, he cannot include more pages. So he left it as loose leaves, and he prepared it in three boxes in

04:30 the form of three volumes of a set, and that's how we sold it. When he found out that in the same year we have here seventeen pages, Maseches Chagigah he had. Maseches Bashishonah, these two, these two pages that we have, he didn't have. He asked me permission I should send him, I should let him copy these two pages. He should be able to include it in the sh- the Talmud copy that he's giving out, that he's publishing. I asked the Rebbe, and the Rebbe said, "Why not give it to him? But that should not stop you from editing it and publishing it with the introduction in Keves Ya'gdol Tehiyah." So that's what I did. In addition, since there are some changes between the text in the Talmud and Rashi of this print and of our famous prints, so there is a list of the changes of them. This is the first edition of Talmud published in between the years between the years of 1482 and 1492, before the expulsion of Jews of Spain and then fro- of Portugal.