(SASSOON FAMILY)

Small Shevithi Protective Plaque.
Hebrew manuscript written in elegant square script in various sizes on vellum. Displays the Divine Name of God (the Tetragrammaton), Psalm LXVII arranged as a seven-branched Menorah and surrounded by multi-colored stylized flowers and foliage with Kabbalistic formulae. * Housed in: National Bank of India envelope, the front of which contains an autograph note signed by Flora Sassoon in her distinctive Hebrew hand: “This Menorah was given to me as a gift by R. Joseph, my father’s uncle, in the month of Adar I, 1935. He received it from my grandfather, the Tzadik Suleiman, Kislev, 1894.”
4.5 x 6.5 inches.
(India): 19th century
The verse (Psalm 16:8) “I place [Shevithi] the Lord before me always” is regarded by the devout as a focus of meditative contemplation. Hence the “Shevithi” became a distinct genre of Jewish ceremonial art, embellished with mystical and artistic features, as an object of veneration.===Clearly members of the Baghdad-Bombay-London Sassoon Family paid great heed to such piety and carried the present Shevithi as a personal talisman.===Flora (Farha) Sassoon (1859-1936) was married to the businessman and philanthropist Solomon David Sassoon (1841–94), and was a unique, published, rabbinic scholar in her own right. She was the mother of the great bibliophile David Solomon Sassoon (1880-1942) and grandmother of the learned Solomon David Sassoon (1915-85).