Abstract Born in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, Moses Zacuto (Moshe Zacut) belongs among the most prolific Jewish figures of his time. He is best known for a wealth of creative work in a wide variety of fields: poetry and drama, halacha, as well as extensive Kabbalistic writings. Zacuto also had a special interest in magical manuscripts and the uses of divine names, which he collected into a lexicon known today a Read More

Abstract This article is a study of the reception history of the most influential Jewish legal code of the post-medieval period, Joseph Karo’s Shulḥan Arukh. The article examines four books printed in Amsterdam between 1661-1708, each of which consist of an edition or adaptation of the Shulḥan Arukh. After a historical précis of each of these, the article shows, firstly, how each represents a different understanding of the characte Read More

Abstract Numerous religious texts were printed that would have been censored, elsewhere including Jewish religious texts. Yet freedom had its limits. In August 1701, Amsterdam’s judiciary council ordered the books authored by the Danish visionary Oliger Paulli, who advocated for a new religion uniting Jews and Christians, to be destroyed. In addition, the council sentenced Paulli to twelve years, imprisonment and later to Read More

Abstract 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 Read More

Abstract Elijah of Fulda was the first Ashkenazi Jew in the Early Modern period to write a commentary on the Palestinian Talmud, printed in Amsterdam in 1710. Through a close reading of the nine approbations that preface Elijah’s commentary, this article reconstructs his itinerary throughout Europe and his journey from relative obscurity to the center of the Hebrew and Jewish book world of his day – Amsterdam. T Read More

Abstract 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 dis Read More

Abstract The first edition of Sefer Hatashbeṣ, 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 pr Read More

Abstract This article considers the halakhic work Orot Hamiṣvot (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 Beli Read More

Abstract In the middle of the eighteenth-century, Mordechai Tama, a Jew from Hebron, left his hometown carrying a manuscript containing his grandfather’s commentary on Midrash Mekhilta, with the aim of printing it in Amsterdam. That plan was unsuccessful, but once in Amsterdam, Tama did become a member of scholarly circles of the Portuguese-Jewish community. He absorbed that community’s blend of Rabbinic l Read More