Haverford College Library preserves fragmentary Hebrew Bible leaves associated with Elvas and dated in Tiago Moita’s corpus to 1467. These fragments are a rare material witness to Hebrew book production in late medieval Portugal.

A Hebrew Bible copied in Elvas

Moita identifies the manuscript as a Bible in fragments, produced in Elvas and copied by a single scribe, Samuel al-Faruni. The copy was commissioned by Moisés, son of Abraão Caldes.

This information is important because it preserves more than the survival of a biblical fragment. It records a city, a date, a scribe and a patron. Together, these elements place Elvas within the network of Hebrew manuscript production in fifteenth-century Portugal.

The surviving fragment

An older Haverford catalogue describes the manuscript as one double leaf of vellum, written in two columns of 25 lines per page. The preserved biblical text includes passages from 2 Kings.

The manuscript should not be read as evidence for a book that remained in Elvas. Its relevance lies in what the fragment documents: the copying of Hebrew biblical material in the city before the forced conversion of Portuguese Jews in 1497.

Hebrew book production in Portugal

The fragments belong to the wider corpus of medieval Portuguese Hebrew books. This corpus includes biblical, liturgical, legal, philosophical and scientific manuscripts copied for Jewish readers, often through direct relationships between patrons and professional scribes.

For Elvas, the Haverford Hebrew Bible fragments are especially significant because the material evidence for medieval Jewish life in the city is limited. They preserve a precise documentary trace of Jewish intellectual and scribal activity in 1467.