These sixteenth-century Hebrew books are a priceless possession. Yet above and beyond the intrinsic value of the books themselves, they are valuable as evidence of two central features in the history of early modern Jews. The first, is that throughout this time period, the Jews were very much a “People of the Book,” just as they have so often been described. This we see not only in the fact that in a number of lands – North Africa, the Holy Land, the Ottoman Empire - Hebrew books were in fact the first books to be printed, but also in the physical condition of the books today, where pages that have been defaced by either censorship or Time have been lovingly re-written in.

The second critical feature for which these books are a testament is the fact that, for many Jews, the sixteenth century was a time of upheaval and change.  We see this, for example, in the marginalia of so many of these books, where readers’ comments and annotations are written in a number of different languages in a single volume – Italian, Russian, Yiddish, Polish - like so many sign posts along the highways of Jewish history. We also see it in the printing history of the books themselves. Hebrew colophons and title-pages are studded with names like Venice and Sabbioneta, Fez and Constantinople, Lublin and Cracow – towns and cities which still loom large in Jewish history, or which have long since faded away. Decades after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal many Jews were still in search of a home, and this search left its mark on the Hebrew book. The briefest reference to a name or a place can be eloquent of an entire trajectory of Jewish history, of a whole series of events and processes for which the title-page is the merest short-hand.

Take the title-page from Maimonides’s Moreh Nevukhim (see the image on the Introduction page) and it was printed in 1553 in Sabbioneta, a little town in northern Italy.

This was the fourth book printed at the small Hebrew press founded by Tobias Foa in Sabbioneta – and the first one to bear the name of Cornelius Adelkind, a printer long associated with the Hebrew presses in Venice. Adelkind’s name appears on a long list of Hebrew books produced in Venice, 112 books to be exact, as far back as 1519.¹ That Adelkind’s name should suddenly appear, in 1553, on an imprint from Sabbioneta is a sign of the times. For in 1553, the Hebrew presses in Venice were closed, by Papal decree, and the Talmud and other Hebrew books publicly burned in cities across Italy: Venice, Rome, Bologna, Ancona, Padua. Only in Sabbioneta and in Ferrara were Hebrew presses allowed to operate, an anomaly due to the complicated relations between the individual rulers of these city-states and the Pope. Sabbioneta, as it so happened, and as the title-page so clearly proclaims, was ruled by Duke Vespasian Gonzaga – and under his rule the Hebrew press was allowed to remain open.²

No less evocative of the stirring events that shaped Jewish life in the sixteenth century is this title-page from the opposite side of the Jewish world, plain and unornamented though it is. It comes from Gal shel Egozim, a book of sermons by Menahem ben Moses Egozi, a rabbi active in sixteenth-century Constantinople.³ From the few lines of text on this title page, we learn that the book was printed:

in the home of the illustrious lady (הגברת המעטירה), woman of valor, Doña Reyna Nasi, may she be blessed above women in tents [Judges 5:24], widow of the prince and magnate in Israel, the lord Duke Don Joseph Nasi and in her house here, in Bel Vidir, which is near Constantinople, the great city, and under the rule of our lord the king, the great and powerful Sultan Murad, may his glory be exalted.⁴

Compressed in these lines are several hundred years of Jewish history and one of its most fascinating stories. The saga of the Nasi family, which began in Spain, contains all the elements of some impossible drama: the forced conversion to Christianity of a rich and influential Jewish family; a great mercantile empire that traded with kings; the long search for a safe haven in which to return to Judaism; the journey to the Ottoman Empire under the auspices of a welcoming Sultan; and the palace of Belvedere, near Constantinople, where members of the Nasi family proceeded to cultivate Jewish learning and set up a printing press of their own.⁵

All this and more from a few lines on a title-page—and the Library’s collections are rich in such moving testaments to history.