Neofiti 1

This early 16th-century manuscript, written in an elegant Italian square script by three different hands, is the only extant copy of the Palestinian Aramaic Targum of the Pentateuch. The third scribe, Menahem b. Mordecai the physician, added a colophon at the end, in which he stated that he transcribed the manuscript for ‘Maestro Egidio’ in Rome, i.e., for Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532), the renowned Augustinian friar, who later became Cardinal and who was an active collector of Hebrew manuscripts. In 1587 the convert and censor Andrea del Monte left the manuscript in his will to Ugo Boncompagni, who in turn presented it, together with other books, to the College of the Neophytes, whose Library entered the Vatican Library in 1891.