Biblia Kennicott/ Biblia da Coruña
The Jewish Bible of A Coruña, known as the “Kennicott Bible,” is the most important religious manuscript left to us from medieval Galicia. It is a masterpiece of medieval Hebrew Bibles and is currently housed in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.
Etnologic Museum
A Jewish Bible in 15th Century Galicia
It contains 922 pages in Hebrew, 238 beautifully illuminated, the five books of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), the books of the Prophets and Hagiographers, and a grammatical treatise copied from an earlier Bible that served as its model, known as the “Cervera Bible,” made in the year 1300 and preserved in the National Library of Lisbon.
For Judaism, the religion of the Book, nothing is more important than the Bible, which means ‘books’ in Greek. These ‘books’ of the Old Law are shared in some way between Christians and Jews, as they constitute our Old Testament.
A young and wealthy Jewish man from A Coruña admired the manuscript “Cervera Bible,” owned by the Jewish family Mordechai from A Coruña, so he hired an accomplished calligrapher to make a copy for him, who finished the work on July 24, 1476, thanking in the colophon of the new Bible the “admirable young Isaac, son of the late, honorable and beloved Don Salomón de Braga.”
