In 1245/7 a certain Gossuin (or Gauthier) of Metz compiled two versions (one in rhymes, the second in prose) of a work he entitled Image du monde (Image of the World). It was a work of "scientific vulgarization," written to the attention of the emerging town bourgeoisie and accordingly its prose version was in French. The work, which combines haphazard factual pieces of information and fantastic accounts, was highly popular in the following centuries (nearly one hundred manuscripts are extant) and it was printed very early.
fig. 1: A manuscript of the verse version of the work (copied ca. 1400).
Nothing is known of any Jewish acquaintance with the Image du monde until, out of the blue, an abbreviated Yiddish version appears in print in 1718/9 under the title Sēfer yedîʿat ʿôlām (reprinted: Altona, 1727/8). To this day, the translator/redactor remains anonymous.
fig 2: Title page of the editio princeps of the Yiddish version.
Just a little later, in 1733, a Hebrew version, with the title Tsel ha-‘olam, was printed in Amsterdam. (Tsel [= shadow] is apparently a corruption of tselem, meaning “form,” “image.”) This version is much longer than the Yiddish, but nonetheless far from being a full translation of the prose version of Image du monde (which was its source-text). Only two Hebrew manuscripts of the work are known, both from the 16th century. The title page of the print edition (but not the manuscripts) ascribes the book to Matityahu Delacrat (or Delacraut), an astronomer and Kabbalist who, after having studied in Italy, lived in Poland in the middle of the sixteenth century. The exact nature of his contribution to this text is still under investigation.
fig 3: Title page of the 1733 editio princeps of the Hebrew version.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the book was reprinted (with interpolations) at least 11 more times. Mendele Mocher Sforim (1836-1917) makes the hero of his Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Thirdread it with amazement: readers then had a predilection for the marvelous and wondrous and this drew them to the 600-year-old book. (Possibly the much more serious Sefer ha-Berit by Rabbi Pinchas Elijah Hurwitz [1797] satisfied a similar need.)
fig. 4: Title page of the Munkacz printing of Tsel ha-‘olam (1897).
