Treasures in the University of Santo Tomas Library

THE LIBRARY of the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines is displaying some historical treasures to celebrate the University's four-hundredth anniversary:

The other National Library

(By FELIPE F. SALVOSA II, Associate Editor, Business World)

Is it possible for the Filipino nation to trace its emergence to one library?

If, as a scientist once said, "A great library contains the diary of the human race," then the library of Asia’s oldest existing university, Santo Tomas, starts the firsthand account of how the Philippines came to being and who the Filipino really is.

It is but natural for the Dominican-run University of Santo Tomas (UST) to bring out the most valuable among its collection of 12,000 or so rare books in time for its 400th founding anniversary next year, but rather than exhibit them as curiosities like the Crown Jewels or even the Shroud of Turin, the "Pontifical" institution has decided to place the library, and itself in the process, in the context of the global forces that shaped history.

The result is Lumina Pandit: An Exhibit of Historical Treasures, the UST library’s multimillion-peso quadricentennial exhibition that speaks of "spreading the light."

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RARE BOOKS AND JESUITS

The oldest in the collection is an incunabulum, the term for books published before 1501 during the infancy of printing. La Guerra Judaica, printed in Seville in 1492, came by way of Amoy, China in 1937. Josephus Flavius, the ancient Jewish historian who lived in the first century A.D., chronicled the failed Jewish rebellion against Rome as a way of dissuading his countrymen from starting a revolt against a mighty empire. The original Aramaic and Greek was translated into Spanish by the scholar Alfonso de Palencia, who dedicated it to Isabel la Catolica, queen of Castille and Leon, on the year Columbus "discovered" America.

The most valuable item in the UST collection is the Polyglot Bible -- the bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and Syriac -- printed by Christopher Plantin in Antwerp between 1569 and 1572. Five of the eight volumes, covering the Old and the New Testaments, are in the university library.

It came to UST by a sheer accident of history. In 1768, the influential and politically savvy Jesuits were banished from all Spanish territories, suppressed by the Pope due to the geopolitical conflicts of the time. Assets of the Society of Jesus were confiscated by the colonial government, and UST had the first crack at the Jesuits' books. The Polyglot Bible and many others carry the mark Del Colegio de la Compania de Jesus de Manila. The remaining Jesuit books went to the seminaries of Manila and Cebu.

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One correction: Josephus probably wrote his Jewish War in Aramaic, but only his Greek translation of it survives from antiquity, so the Greek would have been the basis for the Spanish translation in 1492.