[TEVELE, David].

A very good copy of two rare works on Jewish ethics and homiletics. David Tevele ben Benjamin (c.1615-1699) was a Talmudic scholar born in the Polish province of Posen, later exiled to Hamburg. Shaarei Tzion (‘The Gates of Zion’) and Masoret HaBrit (‘The Bond of the Covenant’) represent the main body of his published scholarly work. They were edited and published together posthumously by Tevele’s son, Rabbi Meʼir ben ha-meḥaber.

The Shaarei Tzion is a work on ethics and ascetics in 13 chapters, drawing on numerous sources of Musar literature including the influential “Sefer Hasidim”. It also includes his own prayers. The Musar system of moral instruction was relatively minor in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, only enjoying a major revival in the nineteenth in Lithuania. Tevele’s commentary provides an interesting example of its development in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is perhaps telling that Steinschneider lists Tevele among those scholars who “introduced critical, Kabbalistic, and other unsuitable explanations” into Masoretic study. (Jewish Literature, p.234). The Masoret HaBrit is a homiletic study of the Torah and the Five Scrolls (comprising the Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth, the Book of Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and the Book of Esther). Together the books are a fascinating and little-studied insight into Jewish scholarship in Germany in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.