Alfonso Cassuto (1910-1999)

On 25 March 1975 the librarian of Amsterdam University Library, Professor S. van der Woude, and the Portuguese antiquarian bookdealer and collector Alfonso Cassuto signed an agreement of sale whereby the famous Cassuto collection came into the possession of the library, to be housed in the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana.

Originally from Hamburg and having emigrated to Portugal when Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Cassuto family built up the library over four generations to form one of the most outstanding Sephardi collections of works by and about Jews originally from Spain and Portugal. It contains around 1,500 items, more than a third of which date from before 1800 (among them various unica), alongside publications from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, studies on the subject, bibliographies, broadsheets, portraits and other objects, in addition to around sixty manuscripts and numerous letters, extracts and documents.

The foundation for the collection was laid by Jehuda de Mordechai Cassuto (1808-1893), a native of Amsterdam who moved to Hamburg and who acquired a sizeable library of Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew works in 1835 in the form of a collection started in the seventeenth century by a Portuguese Jew in Hamburg. Isaac Cassuto (1848-1923), Jehuda’s son, expanded the library considerably and published historical articles based on the collected material.

His son Jehuda Leon Cassuto (1878-1953) had little time to devote to the contents of the library, although he lavished large sums on new acquisitions, leaving the study and description of the books to his son, Alfonso Cassuto (1910-1999). A task which the latter took up enthusiastically, while later also contributing to the further extension of the collection. In 1972, for example, he published a significant article in Studia Rosenthaliana on some of the more costly items in the collection, entitled ‘Seltene Bücher aus meiner Bibliothek’; the good relations with Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana which developed (building on earlier contacts too) probably helped persuade Alfonso Cassuto some years later to sell his collection to the Amsterdam University library. There it is included in the famous Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana

Foto Isaac Cassuto