David Solomon Sassoon

The importance of his private collection of books and manuscripts cannot be overestimated, since it affords scholars the opportunity to examine some twenty-four distinct liturgical rites used by the different Jewish communities of the nineteenth century: Aleppo, Ashkenazi, Egyptian, Italian, North African (Morocco), Tunis, Tlemcen, Karaite, Sefardi (Spanish), Bene Israel, Cochin, Turkish, Yemen, among others.

When David and his mother visited the Holy Land in 1925, he acquired the Decisions of Rabbi Isaiah ben Mali di Trani the Elder (thirteenth century) on Hullin (MS No.

[4] Sassoon also obtained in Yemen a hand-written copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, written in Spain in the fourteenth century (1397).

[5] Of the sixteen liturgical works (siddurim) that Sassoon obtained in Yemen, the earliest dates back to the early 16th-century (1531 CE).

[8] Today, most of what remains of David Solomon Sassoon's private collection of Hebrew manuscripts is stored at the University of Toronto, in Canada, although a small cluster of manuscripts from his estate are now at the British Library, which were either offered to the library in lieu of tax, or were purchased at Sotheby's auction sales in the 1970s.