Manuscript Migration: The Multiple Lives of the Rubenstein Library's Collections
Bearing Witness: Greek MS018
When a manuscript moves, much can be lost. Pages are misplaced, bindings crack, covers fall off, and earlier lives are hidden or obscured from view. This twelfth-century December Menologion, a collection of Saints Lives for the month of December, has suffered each of these setbacks. Still, it survives as a witness to nine centuries of resilience and dispossession. Designed to be read on December 6, the third story recounts the life of Saint Nikolas of Myra and his secret visit to the home of three poor girls at night. He left each of them a bag of gold for a dowry, saving them from a life of sin. Saint Nicholas is a distant model for Santa Claus.
Greek MS 018 was once part of a thirty-six-volume collection of saints lives, a “Menologion” containing stories to be read on assigned days throughout the Church Year. This December Menologion preserves the lives of fourteen saints remembered early in the month, from Saint Barbara (December 4th) to the Saints Eustratius, Auxentius, Mardianus, and Orestes (December 13th) following the version written by the tenth-century Constantinopolitan scholar Symeon Metaphrastes. With its companion volumes, MS 018 would have been read aloud in a Greek orthodox setting, perhaps a monastery. At some point, the manuscript was brought to Southern Germany where it entered the rare book market, and from there it was taken to London.
How did MS 018 move from Southern Germany, to London, and then to Durham? Perhaps National Socialism had something to do with it. Published in 1938, Albert Ehrhard’s indispensable guide to Greek liturgical manuscripts places this manuscript in the Ludwig Rosenthal Antiquariat, a Jewish owned antiquarian bookstore in Munich, Germany. Under a policy of forced “Aryanization,” the National Socialists liquidated the store’s stock in 1938 and the store’s owner, Nathan Rosenthal, was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. Nathan Rosenthal and his wife Johanna were eventually transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and murdered. Other members of the family fled to England and Holland and survived. Duke purchased what is now Greek MS 018 fifteen years later from London bookseller Raphael King. When and how did the manuscript travel to King’s bookshop in London? Conclusive evidence has yet to be discovered.
Founded in 1909, the Ludwig Rosenthal Antiquariat was once a flourishing rare bookstore in Munich, Germany. Now based in the Netherlands, Mrs. Edith Petten-Rosenthal is the current proprietor of this venerable establishment.
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Research contributed by Jennifer Knust, Manuscript Migration Lab Co-Director, and Professor of Religious Studies, Duke University. Dr. Knust continues to research and plans future publications on this item.
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