RARE Ha-Mitzpeh המצפה Complete Run 1-6 New York 1910-11 Judaica Americana For Sale

Only six issues of Ha-Mitzpeh were ever published, and all six are present here, bound together in a single volume. Individual issues occasionally surface, but complete runs are exceptionally scarce, and almost never come up for sale.

This is a particularly interesting piece of Judaica Americana, documenting the formative period in which distinguished Eastern European rabbis attempted to establish and adapt traditional Orthodox Jewish scholarship and communal life to the realities of early twentieth-century America.

Ha-Mitzpeh was established in New York in 1910 by Rabbis Yudelovitz and Eskolsky as a Torah and rabbinic periodical devoted to Jewish law, scholarship and matters confronting contemporary Jewish life.

The journal's short existence makes a complete set particularly desirable: publication ceased after just six numbers in 1911.

The present volume contains:

No. 1 — Sivan 5670 [1910]
No. 2 — Tammuz 5670 [1910]
No. 3 — Av 5670 [1910]
No. 4 — Elul 5670 [1910]
No. 5 — Nisan 5671 [1911]
No. 6 — Sivan 5671 [1911]

Each issue retains its original elaborately decorated title page.

Rabbi Abraham Aaron Yudelovitz (1850–1930) was a major rabbinic scholar of his generation.

Born near Minsk, he studied at the famed Volozhin Yeshiva and held a succession of European rabbinic posts before becoming Chief Rabbi in Manchester, England. He emigrated to the United States in 1904, where he served in Boston, taught at RIETS, became rabbi in Bayonne, New Jersey, and later served the celebrated Eldridge Street Beth Hamidrash Hagadol in New York.

A prolific halachic author, he published numerous volumes of responsa under the title Beit Av, as well as works of homiletics and other rabbinic scholarship.

Rabbi Jacob Eskolsky (1875–1931) was another fascinating figure in the development of American Orthodoxy.

Born in Mir, Belarus, and educated in the great Lithuanian yeshiva world, he immigrated to America in 1907. After serving in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he came to New York and became rabbi of Anshei Slutzk and subsequently Anshei Bialystok on the Lower East Side.

Eskolsky was active in numerous important American Jewish organizations, including Agudath Ha-Rabbonim, Ezras Torah and American Mizrachi, and became involved in some of the significant rabbinic and kashrut controversies of the period.

Beyond its rabbinic scholarship, this run of rabbinic journals is a fascinating physical artifact of Jewish New York and the Lower East Side more than a century ago.

Among the particularly evocative material are contemporary advertisements and notices, including an advertisement for the:

Hebrew National Sausage Factory
47–49 Pike Street
New York, N.Y.

as well as material giving Rabbi Eskolsky's address as:

162 Henry Street, New York

These advertisements and notices place the journal directly within the bustling immigrant Jewish world of the Lower East Side.

The volume also contains contemporary/early manuscript annotations and marginalia, as shown in the photographs, as well as old institutional/library stamps. These have been left entirely intact and add considerably to the historical character of the volume.

The extreme brevity of Ha-Mitzpeh's publication history makes complete runs inherently scarce.

A complete six-issue run was offered by Winners sales in 2017, where it was estimated at $700–800 and sold for approximately $600 including buyer's premium.

Complete sets appear very infrequently on the market.

For collectors of Judaica Americana, American Jewish history, rabbinic periodicals, the Lower East Side, American Orthodoxy, Hebrew printing in America, or early twentieth-century responsa and rabbinic literature, this is a particularly desirable survival.

INCLUDED IN THE IMAGES ARE THE ENTRIES FOR BOTH RABBIS IN MOSHE D. SHERMAN'S 'ORTHODOX JUDAISM IN AMERICA: A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY AND SOURCEBOOK' (GREENWOOD PRESS, 1996)