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 as Shorshei HaShemot. Zacuto left Amsterdam while young and lived in Eastern Europe before moving to Italy. In this article, we demonstrate that Zacuto had already begun to construct this vast lexicographical project in Amsterdam, and that those beginnings are best understood against the background of the magical and Kabbalistic manuscripts available in early seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

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 character and pedagogical and legal purpose of the Shulḥan 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 Shulḥan Arukh as both a manual to practical Jewish life and a key to the vast library of rabbinic literature.

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 permanent banishment, while two of his printers received hefty fines for printing his books. While earlier accounts have explained Paulli’s arrest by pointing to his heretical ideas, Paulli had publicly been advocating his views without causing scandal for years. The present chapter explores an alternate reason for his arrest, focusing on his printing connections that year, which caused Amsterdam’s authorities to associate Paulli with some of Amsterdam’s most outspoken religious dissenters and critics of religious authority.

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.

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. The article argues that although other commentaries replaced that of Elijah of Fulda in popularity in subsequent editions, he should be remembered as the first to establish a tradition of Ashkenazic study of the Palestinian Talmud, and as the scholar who shaped the impagination of subsequent editions.

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.

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 printing of Sefer Hatashbeṣ 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.

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 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.

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 learning and Spanish literary tastes and, in turn, was valued for his knowledge of Arabic. This article examines the encounter in Amsterdam between Western Sephardi and Levantine Jewish learned cultures by a close reading of the paratexts of the two books Tama produced in Amsterdam, published there in 1765: Pe’er ha-Dor (a Hebrew translation of the Responsa of Maimonides from a Judaeo-Arabic manuscript that had belonged to Jacob Sasportas) and Maskiyot Kessef, a medieval glossary of homonyms by Solomon b. Meshullam Dapiera.