Amsterdam printing: how "Amsterdam letters" became a mark of quality

It began in 1626: Menasseh ben Israel opened a press under the motto Emet me-Erets Titsmah, the first in Amsterdam owned by a Jew; its first imprint, a Sephardi prayer book, is dated 1 January 1627. In two decades it issued over sixty works, including a well-regarded unvocalised Mishnah; his sons carried it on.

Immanuel Benveniste printed the Amsterdam Talmud in 1644–48 — in a handy small format and cheap enough to reach Poland and the German lands; his architectural title-pages with flanking columns, in the Jewish Encyclopedia's phrase, "became the model for all Europe," and were pirated for generations.

Joseph Athias issued in 1661 a Hebrew Bible edited by the Utrecht Hebraist Johannes Leusden, for which the States General awarded him a gold medal and chain — the only such honour to a Hebrew printer; a second edition followed in 1667. By 1687 Athias claimed to have printed "more than a million Bibles for England and Scotland." With his son Immanuel he issued about four hundred and fifty books; the types and matrices, including work by the great Dutch punchcutter Christoffel van Dijck, later passed to the house of Proops.

Uri Phoebus Halevi, grandson of Moses Uri Halevi, printed from 1658 to 1689: the Josippon and the Bove-bukh (both 1661), Blitz's Yiddish Bible, and — from 9 August 1686 to 5 December 1687 — the first Yiddish newspaper in the world, the Dinstagishe un Fraytagishe Kurantn. In 1692–95 he carried Amsterdam technique to Żółkiew, where his descendants ran a press into the 1820s.

From 1697 the trade passed to the house of Proops, which dominated Amsterdam Hebrew printing through the eighteenth century; in 1730 Solomon Proops issued Appiryon Shelomoh, the first printed sale catalogue of Hebrew books put out by a Jewish printer.

Why the primacy went to Amsterdam: in Italy the Talmud could not be printed after 1553, and pre-publication licensing and post-publication expurgation made production slow and costly, while Amsterdam had no ecclesiastical censorship of Hebrew books at all, cheap capital, the best punchcutting in Europe and Sephardi merchant networks reaching the Levant and the Atlantic. And after 1600 the mass buyer of Hebrew books lived in Poland-Lithuania, closer by sea and river than across the Alps.

Two corrections. "Benveniste printed the first complete Talmud since Bomberg" — no: complete editions had appeared at Lublin and Cracow; his is the first Amsterdam Talmud, and it is expurgated in the passages the censors targeted. And "printed in Amsterdam" does not mean "made in Amsterdam": once *defus Amsterdam* was a mark of quality, presses in Poland, Germany and Italy put the Amsterdam imprint on their own books.