Collecting “Val,” as Lunzer refers to the library, has been a passion so forceful that he describes it as lunacy. “Lunacy is this,” he said, “spending $2,500 going to look at a book that costs only $300.”He persuaded Westminster Abbey to part with it, which was no mean feat.
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The story of his collection began in 1948 after he married his late wife Ruth, who was from a Milanese-Jewish family. Her father had hidden a small trove of 16th century Hebrew books from around Italy in his basement when he and his family fled to Switzerland during the Holocaust. After the books were retrieved, her brothers asked him to take care of them.
At first, he tried to refuse, Lunzer said in an interview with the Forward at his New York hotel. But as the newlyweds traveled through Italy, visiting villages that “were magical,” he realized that many of those places had Jewish history and the books reflected that history. “I saw in the books the whole drama of Hebrew printing, with all of its implications, social and political.”
The idea entranced him, and started him on his path.
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Lunzer’s greatest collecting conquest was the Bomberg Babylonian Talmud, printed in 1520 under Papal privilege. It is the first complete Talmud ever printed — becoming all the more rare because on Rosh Hashanah 1553, the Vatican ordered the burning of copies of the Talmud that had been confiscated by the Inquisition. More Church destructions of the Talmud followed.
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Background here.
