Sepharad

Isaac Abravanel

Rosh Amanah [“Pinnacle of Faith"]

Constantinople, 1505

Printed in Constantinople by David and Samuel ibn Nachmias in 1505, this book is a defense of the medieval rationalist rabbi Maimonides. The author, Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508), was a leader of the Spanish Jewish community during the Inquisition period and counted himself among the 300,000 Jews expelled from Spain between 1492 and 1497 (the figure of 300,000 comes from Rabbi Abravanel's own estimate; the actual number is likely lower).

Like Abravanel, the ibn Nachmias brothers were Sephardim, a term for Jews of Spanish origin. In 1492, as refugees of the Spanish Expulsion, they made their way to the Ottoman Empire, a haven of tolerance in comparison to Europe at that time. The ibn Nachmias brothers established their Hebrew printing press in Constantinople in 1493—the first press of any language in the Ottoman Empire—and operated it until 1518.

The press published religious texts of exceptional quality, of which Rosh Amana, with its first page framed by an intricate woodcut, is a striking example. Though Constantinople's role in the first generation of printing is little known, it was responsible for over 100 Hebrew titles by the start of the 16th century.

At present, Rosh Amana is the oldest complete book in the Western Libraries' Rare Book Collection.

Hayyim Palache

Sefer Hikeke Lev ["Resolve of the Heart"]

Salonika, 1851-52

Greece is home to Europe's oldest Jewish community, the Romaniote, who according to tradition have lived in the region since the Roman Exile in 70 CE. In 1492, a further Exile, the Spanish Expulsion, led to thousands of Jews taking refuge in Salonika (modern-day Thessaloniki) in Ottoman-ruled Greece, which by 1513 would emerge as a center of Hebrew printing.

Rabbi Hayyim Palache (1788-1869) served as chief rabbi of Smyrna (Izmir) from the 1850s until his death and wrote approximately eighty books in the course of his career, both in Hebrew and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). Among these is the book pictured here, Sefer Hikeke Lev, a collection of responsa (rulings and commentary on Jewish law printed by Sa'adi Halevi Ashkenazi (1820-1903), Salonika's most important 19th-century Jewish printer, who issued most of Palache's work. Among Halevi's 200-plus publications were Salonika's first Jewish periodical (El Lunar) and its longest-running one (La Epoca, 1875-1911), both of which were published in Ladino.

Jacob ben Solomon ibn Habib

Ein Yaakov ["Eye of Jacob'], part III

Calcutta, 1841-1842

Ein Yaakov is a collection of stories and legends from the Talmud compiled by Rabbi Jacob ben Solomon ibn Habib (c. 1445-c.1515). Like the Talmud from which it drew its source material, it was the target of 16th-century Papal bans and burnings. It is also one of the earliest Jewish books printed in India.

In 1840, Eleazar ben Aaron Sa'adiah Iraqi ha-Kohen, the book's printer, established Calcutta's first Hebrew press, likely casting his own type. He was part of the city's Baghdadi Jewish diaspora, which consisted of merchant traders from modern-day Iraq and Syria who, beginning in the 18th century, settled along trade routes and in port cities on the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.

'Abdullah Somekh

Sefer Zivhe Tsedek

Baghdad, 1904

Rabbi Abdullah Somekh (1813-1889) was a scholar and rosh yeshiva (head of the Jewish religious academy) in Ottoman Baghdad. Renowned for his interpretations of halakha (Jewish law), he issued responsa to vast numbers of queries from Jewish communities in Ottoman Iraq, Persia, and the Baghdadi diaspora communities in India and China.

Zivhe Tsedek, a posthumous collection of his rulings centered on kosher slaughter practice (the title translates to "Just Slaughter"), became a handbook for Baghdadi Jews across Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. Shown here is the 1904 edition of Sefer Zivhe Tsedek from the Baghdad printing house of Rabbi Shlomo Bekhor Hutsin and Son. In 1867, Hutsin opened the third Hebrewlanguage printing house in Iraq, from which he issued books of Torah, science, and history in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic.