Major Work, Presentation Copy to a fellow scholar
Eine Unbekannte Jüdische Sekte. Erster Teil [All published].
New York: Im Selbstverlag der Verfasser [printed by Karl Angemeyer, Preßburg Tschecho-Slowakei], 1922.
Price: $400.00
About the item
First Edition. Pp. x, 384 pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Major Work, Presentation Copy to a fellow scholar. Half cloth and boards, original printed wrappers bound in. Ex-library with perforated stamp on title page and book-plate. Very good.
Item #54398
Inscribed by the author to Talmudic scholar and historian Henry Malter on the title page: “Seinem Lieben Malter L.G”
This work on an “unknown Jewish Sect” grew out of the author’s critical examination of material published by Solomon Schechter in Fragments of a Zadokite Work (1910); its initial publication was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War, and Ginzberg (author of The Legends of the Jews, etc.) left the second part unfinished at his death. The work was ultimately published in English translation as An Unknown Jewish Sect (Jewish Theological Seminary, 1976), a copy of which accompanies the present volume.
In his foreword to the 1976 edition, the author’s son Eli Ginzberg notes that material contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 “confirms most of the hypotheses that Louis Ginzberg advanced forty years earlier on the basis of his studies of the Zadokite Fragments. It is not often in the history of scholarship that texts are found which describe a group about whom little or nothing was previously known. It is unusual in the history of scholarship for a researcher to venture upon a detailed reconstruction of the life and thought of a largely unknown group from the minute study of a limited number of fragments. It is rare indeed that archeological and paleographical discoveries two generations later provide definitive evidence in support of most of the earlier reconstructions of a venturesome scholar.”.
