Printer, Publisher, Peddler:
The Business of the Jewish Book

II. Publisher

“Publisher: a person or a company in business to issue for sale to the public through booksellers books, periodicals, music, maps, etc..”

As the business of the Jewish book evolved during the last five centuries, so did the role of the printer. Specialization gradually separated the craft of printing from the business of publishing. Vernacular publishing continued to widen the potential audience of readers of Jewish books beyond the limited constituencies of literate Jews and Christian scholars of Hebrew. Networks of commerce and communication, kinship and community emerged that bound together Jewish communities as well as non-Jewish readers from the Atlantic basin to the Indian Ocean.

During the late eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, the publisher-editor came to the fore with the rise of Jewish serial and subscription publishing. Atlantic port Jews began publishing English-language periodicals and books during the 1840s as a means to advance an enlightened, observant form of Judaism, identified in large part with Sephardic rather than Ashkenazic religious culture and history. By the mid-nineteenth century, the number of Jewish editions had grown into the tens and hundreds of thousands. At the same time, the world Jewish population surged for the first time into the millions. The number of documented subscribers just to books published in Hebrew is known to have been well over 350,000. Meanwhile, the potential reading public for Jewish books published in vernacular languages was enlarged by mass literacy, a consequence of public education and other kinds of enlightened reform programs.

A. The Beginnings of Serialized Jewish Publishing

Isaac Hezekiah ben Samuel Lampronti, 1679-1756.
[Other Contributors:Jacob Daniel ben Abraham Olmo, 1690-1757].
Reshit bikure katsir : talmud Torah shel k.k. Firarah...
Venice : [s.n.], 475 [1715].

From the Dropsie College Library Collection, Gift of Walter H. Annenberg and the Board of the Annenberg Research Institute.

The physician and scholar Isaac Lampronti, the first “encyclopedist” of the Jewish people, is also noteworthy for having attempted to publish the first periodical in Hebrew, entitled Reshit Bikure Katsir. Lampronti’s idea was to provide a forum for discussion of Jewish legal and ritual questions. His serialized publication contained studies by his students at the Talmud Torah (a Jewish educational institution) in Ferrara. Due to controversies raised in its pages about the appropriateness of local customs connected with the priestly blessing, financial support was withdrawn and the periodical ceased publication after only three issues.

ha- Me’asef.
Königsberg: Anshe hevrat dorshe leshon `ever, 1783-1811.

From the Dropsie College Library. Gift of Walter H. Annenberg and the Board of the Annenberg Research Institute.

Among the beacons of Jewish enlightenment in late 18th century Germany, known today as the “Haskalah,” was ha-Me’asef (“The Gleaner”), the earliest successful periodical published in Hebrew. Its publication was announced April 13, 1783 in a prospectus called Nahal ha-Besór. The editors and publishers, such as Isaac Euchel, Joel Loewe and Aaron Wolfssohn were maskilim, the intellectual exponents of the Haskalah. Ha-Me’asef began publication in Koenigsberg in 1784 and then relocated to Berlin.

B. Enlightened Jewish Publishing in the early 19th century

Sulamith: "Eine Zeitschrift zur Beförderung, der Kultur und Humanität unter den Israeliten."
Edited by David Fraenkel [Vol.1 ed. by David Fraenkel and Joseph Wolf; vol. 2 and subsequent vols. by Fraenkel] Leipzig : A. Reinicke, 1806-[1848]. Jahrg. 9 called also Neue Folge. Suspended 1838-1844. Dessau : Im Verlage der Redaction, 1807-1848

Purchased at the Kestenbaum and Company Auction, November 13, 2001.

While the first haskalah publications were printed in Hebrew characters, one of the distinctive features of nineteenth-century enlightened Jewish publishing was the employment of vernacular languages and alphabets. In Germany, the editors of Sulamit, David Fraenkel and Joseph Wolf, introduced German-language periodical publishing, printed in Gothic characters “for the advancement of Culture and Humanism among the Jewish Nation (“… zur Beförderung, der Kultur und Humanität unter den Israeliten.").

Bikure ha-`itim. Superseded by Bikure ha-`Itim ha-hadashim
Vienna : Anton Shmid, 581-592 [1820-1831].
[Vol.1-3 ed. by Shalom Ben Jacob Cohen, 1772-1845; vol.4-5 ed. by Moses Israel Landau, 1788-1852; vol. 6 ed. by Solomon Pergamenter; vol. 7-8 ed. by Issaschar Baer Schlesinger; vol. 9-10 ed. by Isaac Samuel Reggio, 1784-1855; vol.11-12 ed. by Judah Loeb Jeiteles, 1773-1838].

From the Isaac Leeser Collection held in the Dropsie College Library. Gift of Walter H. Annenberg and the Board of the Annenberg Research Institute.

By the 1820s, a new center of enlightened Jewish publishing was emerging in Vienna , the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which included areas of Northern Italy and its Adriatic port cities, such as Trieste. Evidence of the hybrid and profitable nature of Jewish religious publishing during this time is the fact that Vienna’s most important printer-publisher of Jewish religious works, including prayer books, and the periodical Bikure ha-itim (“The First Fruits of the Times”), was a Christian named Anton von Schmid.

C. Victorian Jewish Publishing in the Atlantic World

The Voice of Jacob.
Edited by Jacob Franklin, David Aron de Sola, Morris Raphall.
London [ England ]: B. Steill, 1841-).
Vol. 1, no. 1 (Sept. 16, 1841)-vol. 7 ( Aug. 18, 1848 )

From the Isaac Leeser Collection held in the Dropsie College Library. Gift of Walter H. Annenberg and the Board of the Annenberg Research Institute.

The Voice of Jacob was the first Anglo-Jewish newspaper. Published in London , beginning on the eve of the Jewish New Year in 1841, its title undoubtedly refers to the first name of its principle editor, Jacob Franklin. The Voice of Jacob was distributed across England; for example, in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Cheltenham, Plymouth, Dover, Portsmouth, Canterbury, to Edinburgh, Scotland, to the West Indian islands of St. Thomas, Curacao, and Barbados, to the U.S. port cities of Charleston, South Carolina and Philadelphia, to Wellington, New Zealand, as well as to Corfu, Odessa, Paris, and Smyrna.

The Occident, and American Jewish advocate: a Monthly Periodical Devoted to the Diffusion of Knowledge on Jewish Literature and Religion.
Edited by Isaac Leeser [and Mayer Sulzberger in its final year of publication].
Philadelphia : Printed by (C. Sherman et al), vol. 1 (April 1843) - vol. 26, (March 1869) and Advertisers. [publication suspended Dec. 1852-Mar. 1853].

From the Isaac Leeser Collection held in the Dropsie College Library. Gift of Walter H. Annenberg and the Board of the Annenberg Research Institute.

Isaac Leeser is regarded as the most important Jewish publisher-editor in antebellum America. His Occident, published here in Philadelphia , was the first monthly Jewish periodical in the United States and the most successful of the three Atlantic Jewish periodicals displayed here. Leeser personally handled and/or supervised all aspects of the publication, including editing, advertising, and distribution. The printing of the periodical was carried out by C. Sherman, but Leeser himself sometimes set the type. Significantly, the Occident's readership (like that of the Voice of Jacob and the First Fruits) was not limited to Jews. Letters from Christian ministers often graced its pages.

Edited by Moses N. Nathan and Lewis Ashenheim.
Bikurei ha-yam = The First Fruits of the West, and Jewish monthly magazine: a Periodical Specially Devoted to Jewish Interests.
( Kingston, Jamaica : printed by R.J. Decordova, vol 1, no. 1 Febrary 1844 – vol. 1, no. 8, August-September [all published], 1844).

From the Isaac Leeser Collection held in the Dropsie College Library. Gift of Walter H. Annenberg and the Board of the Annenberg Research Institute.

The cover of this rare first issue features a bi-lingual title with the Hebrew left un-transliterated. The second word in the title phrase [“Bikure ha-yam”] or “first fruits of the sea” undoubtedly referred to their Caribbean-based newspaper, but the initial word “bikure” (first fruits [of]) perhaps also alludes to the enlightened Jewish journal Bikure ha-‘itim published in Vienna from 1820-31. The editors’ decision to translate the word (yam) figuratively as “west” (like Leeser’s Occident) instead of literally as “sea” indicates that they conceived of their island press in the hemispheric context of the Atlantic littoral, and not in the local or regional terms of the Caribbean.

The Weekly Gleaner [ha-Me’asef]. Circular to our Friends and Agents.
Julius Eckman, Editor
San Francisco : [Julius Eckman, Offfice No. 110, Sacramento Street , second floor], [1857?].

From the Isaac Leeser Collection held in the Dropsie College Library. Gift of Walter H. Annenberg and the Board of the Annenberg Research Institute.

The Hebrew name (ha-Me’asef) of this weekly English-language Jewish periodical, the first of its kind to be published in the American Far West, echoes the title of the first haskalah Hebrew periodical by the same (Hebrew) name. Eckman, an itinerant rabbi born in Prussian Posen had ministered to Jewish congregations in Richmond , VA , Charleston , SC , and Mobile , AL before settling in San Francisco. He served as the editor and publisher of the Weekly Gleaner, for which he solicits subscribers in this rare pre-publication circular.

[Alfred Trumble].
“ The Jews in America.”
[ New York : Frank Leslie's Publishing House], August, 1877.
Extracted from Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, vol. 4, no. 2, Aug. 1877.

Purchased at Raynor's Historical Collectibles [on-line] Auction on Thursday, January 23, 2003, thanks to a generous gift from Mr. Gilbert Mathews, ’ W'70, Member of the University of Pennsylvania Library Board of Overseers.

Featured in this famously illustrated (non-Jewish) monthly are depictions of scenes of Jewish rituals and festival customs. As with Bernard Picart’s 17th century engravings of Jewish ceremonies, this monthly issue is designed to appeal to non-Jewish audiences. Trumble tries here both to peak his American readership’s curiosity and to explain American Jewish life in a positive fashion to them once he has their attention.