Rabbis with Inky Fingers : Making An Eighteenth-Century Hebrew Book Between North Africa and Amsterdam

The first edition of Sefer Hatashbe, a collection of responsa printed in Amsterdam in 1739 at the press of Naftali Herz Levi Rofé, is a magnificent example of the fine typography and engraving that contributed to the prominence of 18th-century Dutch Jewish printing. Through an examination of the newly identified manuscript copy which was used in the printing house to typeset this book, I trace the story of the printing of Sefer Hatashbe through the efforts of Meir Crescas of Algiers, and his collaboration with Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Maghrebi, and Italian Jewish communities. I demonstrate how the material facets of book production both relied on and reinforced the various networks ‐ intellectual, financial, religious, communal, familial, social ‐ that linked Jewish communities around the Mediterranean Basin and beyond, across class, nationality, and language.

“They say I am becoming greater than my peers” : An apprentice-scribe in early eighteenth-century Amsterdam*

This article examines an unknown collection of 16 letters written by the 14-year-old Moses Samuel ben Asher Anshel of Gendringen found in a small booklet for Purim that he copied in Amsterdam in 1713. In the letters, written in Hebrew and Yiddish and decorated with illustrated frames, Samuel (as he calls himself) writes to his parents about his studies and ambition to become a professional scribe. This article discusses Samuel’s letters as sources for the history of Jewish book culture in Early Modern Amsterdam, and for the history of professional Jewish scribes and copyists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It does so by offering an analysis of Samuel’s descriptions of his studies and his own self-perception, and of the letters in context of their presence in Samuel’s booklet.

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.

Benyamin Dias Brandon’s Orot Hamivot (1753) : Halacha and Polemics in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam*

This article considers the halakhic work Orot Hamivot (1753) of Benyamin Dias Brandon, and its posthumous co-editor, Isaac Cohen Belinfante. The article situates this publication in the intellectual Portuguese-Jewish milieu of eighteenth-century Amsterdam and the kinds of scholarship and ideals of erudition that were fostered in its Ets Haim yeshiva. More specifically, the article shows how Brandon’s and Belinfante’s work contributed to a wider tradition of literature, flourishing in the early eighteenth-century, that combined halakhic arguments with polemical defenses of rabbinic authority. This literature built on seventeenth-century precedents, but it also broke new ground by incorporating developments in natural science, such as theories of atomism, into halakhic thought.

Four Editions, Four Faces, One Book: Printing the Shulan Arukh in Amsterdam, 1661-1708

This article is a study of the reception history of the most influential Jewish legal code of the post-medieval period, Joseph Karo’s Shulan Arukh. The article examines four books printed in Amsterdam between 1661-1708, each of which consist of an edition or adaptation of the Shulan Arukh. After a historical précis of each of these, the article shows, firstly, how each represents a different understanding of the character and pedagogical and legal purpose of the Shulan Arukh, and secondly, how each of these publications reflects editorial decisions shaped by different anticipated readerships. The article then reflects on the way these editions relate to the socio-cultural contexts of Amsterdam in this period. The history of these four publications, the article concludes, helps us understand the remarkable success of Shulan Arukh as both a manual to practical Jewish life and a key to the vast library of rabbinic literature.