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The New York Public Library, Dorot Jewish Division
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Tikun Midot ha-Nefesh
by Solomon ibn Gabirol
(MS, Bologna, 1546-7).
Ibn Gabirol's important and original work of moral philosophy, the Correction of Character, was composed in the 1040s in Spain. The present copy was made 500 years later, evidently in Bologna. The inscription at top left of the title page reads: "This volume is the work of my hands, Samuel ben Elhanan min ha-Archivolti, in the year 5407." The time and the place, the books Archivolti wrote and the ones he copied, suggest a cultural moment with more than an echo of the "golden age" of Spanish Jewry. Poet, grammarian and talmudist, Archivolti could number among his contemporaries in Bologna such Renaissance men as Azariah dei Rossi, Jacob Mantino, and Obadiah Sforno. In 1568, exceeded in size among Italian Jewish communities by only Rome and newly by Venice, Bologna was completely emptied of Jews by papal edict. Archivolti went to Padua and became principal of the yeshivah there. His students from these years include the prodigy and polymath Leone Modena and the Christian Hebraist, Marco Cardinal Marini.
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