Hon Ashir - Amsterdam, 1731 - First Edition - Gilt-Ornamented Leather Binding - Signature of Rabbi Bendit Duschenes ...

Hon Ashir - Amsterdam, 1731 - First Edition - Gilt-Ornamented Leather Binding - Signature of Rabbi Bendit Duschenes, Torah Scholar of Prague and the Netherlands in the 18th Century
Hon Ashir, commentaries and novellae on the Six Orders of the Mishna, by the Kabbalist R. Immanuel Hai Ricchi. Amsterdam, [1731]. First edition. Early signature on the title page: "Bendit Duschenes Segal Horowitz of Prague" - R. Baruch Bendit HaLevi Duschenes, Rabbi of Nijmegen in the Netherlands (d. 1803), son-in-law and disciple of R. Meir Fischeles-Bumsla who was a dean of the Prague yeshiva for forty years (d. Kislev 1769). A scion of the Duschenes family of Prague, which produced rabbis and community leaders in Prague for several hundred years (including R. Nechemia Feivel Duschenes, author of Divrei Neva, community leader in Prague in the 17th century, a relative of the Shelah). He went to serve as rabbi of Nijmegen, and was a foremost rabbi in the Netherlands. R. Bendit was the father-in-law of R. Yisrael Landau, son of the Noda BiYehuda, and of R. Avraham Moshe Lehren of The Hague (father of R. Tzvi Hirsh Lehren and R. Akiva Lehren of Amsterdam, founders and heads of the Pekidim and Amarkalim, which administrated the Eretz Israel funds). Other renowned descendants include: his son R. Shlomo Duschenes, a dayan in Liptovský Mikuláš, who was close to the Chatam Sofer; his son R. Naftali Duschenes, father of R. Bendit Duschenes Rabbi of Leeuwarden in the Netherlands (d. 1886), who was one of the administrators of the Pekidim and Amarkalim in 1851. This book was composed by the Kabbalist R. Immanuel Hai Ricchi, author of Mishnat Chassidim, who relates in his first preface that he composed the book over the course of two years in Safed. "I then travelled by ship overseas… and a misfortune befell me at sea, since G-d awakened a spirit of frenzy, and brought me along an unpaved path… and in the hands of harsh masters I was imprisoned, this is the miscreant people, the Barbarians, and they stole all my possessions… and this is what remains of all my toil, this book which I salvaged from the lion's mouth, almost in a miraculous way, of all the books they stole and took away from me…". [4], 168 leaves. 21.5 cm. Good condition. Stains. Bookplate. Fine, early leather binding, with gilt ornaments. A dedication is embossed in gilt letters on the ornamented binding: "Wedding gift, fortune and wealth for the groom R. Eli[yahu] son of the community leader R. Leib Norden, [1773]". Variant. The two leaves of poems, which in most copies appear at the end of the book, were bound in this copy after the title page. Of these leaves in this copy, p. [2b] is blank, whilst in most copies, it contains musical notation for the poem featured on p. [3b].