Research on the Earliest Jewish Printing in the Islamicate World
A central Global Judaica sub-project focuses on the Ibn Nahmias brothers’ press in Istanbul, the earliest press established for Hebrew printing in the Islamicate world, which began in 1493 and continued into the mid-sixteenth century. Postdoctoral scholar Noam Sienna has examined the Ibn Nahmias’ books in the Fisher Library, along with some comparative examples held by other libraries, and is compiling the information gleaned from these copies into a socio-material bibliography of early Hebrew printing in the Ottoman Empire. Sienna’s research on the materials used by this press, such as their fonts and ornamented borders — supplemented by the important work of Hidden Stories co-PI Alex Gillespie and collaborator J.D. Sargan on the paper stock used in their 1493 edition of the Arba‘ah Turim (forthcoming in a festschrift in honor of Martha Driver) — reveals a diverse set of origins in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Istanbul itself. On the social level, Sienna is collecting and translating the various paratexts written by printers, editors, and correctors, which explicitly link the creation of these books to the repair of the trauma of the Exile from Iberia. Thus, these books embody Mediterranean networks of connectivity and migration, and articulate how the labour of bookmaking was integral to the efforts of the first generation of Sephardi exiles to rebuild communal memory and ensure religious continuity in a time of trauma and transformation.
Yiddish Hand Press Printing at University of Toronto
Sienna and the Hidden Stories project are partnering with Kit MacNeil and colleagues at the University of Toronto’s Massey College Bibliography Room to study and print with their Balinson Type Collection to further research on the materiality of Jewish printing in Canada. Henry Balinson (born Yedidya Beylinson, 1888-1961) was a Yiddish printer and journalist who immigrated to Canada from Ukraine in 1911, and ran a multilingual print shop (including Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish) in Hamilton, Ontario, for the following five decades. The remaining physical materials of Henry Balinson’s print shop are now divided between the Bibliography Room of the Robertson Davies Library, Massey College (11 fonts of vintage Hebrew metal type and 3 fonts of Hebrew wood type) and the Ontario Jewish Archives (Balinson’s archive of business papers, printing proofs, and personal effects). It has become clear that these archives provide a very significant opportunity to engage with both the transnational development of Yiddish printing between Eastern Europe and North America, as well as with the collaborative ties of the printing industry with diverse local communities in the Canadian context.
