From Menasseh ben Israel to Solomon Proops : Amsterdam Jewish Druckwesen in the Library of Isaiah Sonne*

The Isaiah Sonne collection, today preserved in library of the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, contains some seventy copies of Jewish books in several languages (Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and Dutch) printed in Amsterdam during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This sub-collection within Sonne’s wider library, second in number only his copies of Venetian editions, confirms Sonne’s particular interest in Jewish printing in Amsterdam ‐ an interest that runs through his published scholarship and through these books, in the form of Sonne’s marginalia. By connecting his interest as a book collector to his scholarship on Amsterdam Jewry in the early modern era, this article intends to give a first presentation of the Amsterdam editions from the Sonne collection and reflect on the circulation of his particular copies throughout time and space on the basis of material evidence.