Odyssey of a book

The three volumes of Kaftor Vaferah that we have today might well have been lost to posterity.

By GLORIA DEUTSCH
The three volumes of Kaftor Vaferah that we have today might well have been lost to posterity. Although written between 1315 and 1322, the first printed edition bears the imprint Venice, 1549. This is because the manuscript he carried with him disappeared at his death, but fortunately some copies had previously been distributed and one was found in 1515 by Isaac Kohen Sholal, the nagid of Egypt. This copy was printed by Meir ben Jacob Frantz who attributed it to the nagid. David Conforte, the 17th-century literary historian, was the first to ascribe it to Haparhi. The second edition was published in 1849 in Berlin, edited by Hirsch Edelman, and a third in Jerusalem, 1897-8, edited by Moses Luncz. Haparhi wrote other books - we know this because he quotes them in Kaftor Vaferah - but four are no longer extant. The two remaining are medical treatises, one a translation of a Latin work and one on purgatives.