JAFFE, MEIR OF ULM

JAFFE, MEIR OF ULM (15th century), German scribe and bookbinder. Little is known about his life except that his father was probably Israel b. Meir of Heidelberg, the scribe of the Darmstadt haggadah . Meir Jaffe wrote the Cincinnati Haggadah toward the end of the 15th century. He was also a skilled bookbinder, as a decree of the Nuremberg Council in 1468 invited "Meyerlein, Juden von Ulm" to come to Nuremberg to bind a Pentateuch. Signed in Hebrew "Meir Jaffe, the designer," this hand-tooled binding is in the Bavarian State Library (Cod. Hebr. 212). No other works can be ascribed to him with certainty. The itinerant scribe and bookbinder Israel son of "Mohar" of Brandenburg, who was involved in the Trent Ritual Murder trial of 1475, may have been Meir Jaffe's son. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: L.A. Mayer, Bibliography of Jewish Art (1967), index. (Joseph Gutmann)