3 - The Torah Wrapper and the Torah Binder

Summary

Textile accessories for the Torah scroll are the most sacred ceremonial objects because they come into direct contact with the scroll. This is true of the wrapper (mapah, or mitpaḥat) and the accessories that evolved from it. Various aspects of the sanctity of these objects are discussed in the rabbinical literature. Rabbi Joseph ben Solomon Colon, who lived in fifteenth-century Italy, ruled that the mantle acquires its sanctity as soon as ‘the Torah scroll had been wrapped in the mantle [me’il] once’. Since the mantle was such a sacred object, Jewish communities were careful not to use it for any other purpose. This sanctity, of course, also applied to the wrapper and binder, which were bound around the Torah scroll under the mantle.

The wrapper and binder developed from the mapah, the original accessory for wrapping the Torah scroll, which is why the Latin term mappa was employed to denote all textile objects used to wrap Torah scrolls in Europe. This term referred in rabbinical literature and in dedicatory inscriptions to both the wrapper and the binder, and at times even the mantle. In time, Latin names became widely used by Jews in their vernacular speech to denote binders and wrappers. Only in Italy was the original term mapah used solely to denote the wrapper.

The geographical area covered by our discussion of the binder and wrapper extends to Europe, North Africa, and central parts of the Ottoman empire. The discussion is based on many sources, some dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but the majority from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has a twofold purpose: to indicate what is common to all communities, and to point out the characteristics of local types.

The Wrapper in Italy and the Sephardi Diaspora

The wrapper, the piece of fabric rolled up with the parchment scroll, is an item used in the wrapping of the Torah scroll in Italy and the Sephardi diaspora of exiles from Spain and Portugal. The diffusion of this custom across all Sephardi communities is evidence that its source lay in Spain, and it is possible that its existence in Italy, too, can be put down to the exiles from the Iberian peninsula who settled there.