Remembering Menasseh ben Israel (part I)

Menasseh ben Israel, rabbi, scholar, philosopher, diplomat and Hebrew printer, 1604-1657

Earlier last year, I put together a special display

for the annual meeting of the

Hebraica Librarians Group,

at the Brotherton Library,

University of Leeds, 26 April 2007. I thought some of you might like to see it.

2007 marked the 350^th anniversary of the death of Menasseh ben Israel – rabbi, scholar, diplomat and Hebrew printer. Although his mission to Cromwell to re-admit Jews into England remained inconclusive at the time, English Jews consider him the father of their modern-day settlement here. It is fitting that a special display of his works should be mounted at the Brotherton Library, the repository of Cecil Roth’s collection of books and manuscripts. For Roth (London 1899- Jerusalem 1970), honoured as “Friend of the Sephardic Community”, had a special interest in Menasseh ben Israel.

Roth’s monograph A Life of Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat was first published in Philadelphia by the Jewish Publication Society of America in 1934 (reprinted 1975, translated into Hebrew 1960). But Menasseh ben Israel is himself of interest to Hebraica librarians: he revolu-tionised Hebrew printing, made Amsterdam the capital of Hebrew publishing and helped create a new standard of Hebrew typography that became widely known, imitated and pirated as “Defus Amsterdam” (Amsterdam print) and “Otiyot Amsterdam” (Amsterdam letters). What also emerges strikingly is the multilingual nature of his world: Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Dutch and English.

By the time Roth began his career as Hebraica collector, some of Menasseh’s imprints were already rarissima. It was gratifying to be able to reunite Roth’s rare Menassiana for the first time since they had entered the Brotherton Library 25 years ago, and display them together with treasures from other collections in the same library.

The image above is a portrait of Menasseh ben Israel by Salom Italia, engraved 1642, the original of which is in the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam.