In June, 2025, Noam Sienna published his monograph Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds (Indiana University Press). As physical as well as textual artifacts embedded in cultural networks during a period of religious, political, and cultural transformation, Jewish books and their literary networks transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish communities from Fez and Tunis to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Livorno. Sienna’s volume examines book production, distribution, and use among North African Jews from the late medieval period to the 19th century, demonstrating the ways in which books connected vibrant networks of Sephardic Jews within a complex and interconnected Mediterranean world.
In June, 2025, Noam Sienna published his monograph Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds (Indiana University Press). As physical as well as textual artifacts embedded in cultural networks during a period of religious, political, and cultural transformation, Jewish books and their literary networks transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish communities from Fez and Tunis to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Livorno. Sienna’s volume examines book production, distribution, and use among North African Jews from the late medieval period to the 19th century, demonstrating the ways in which books connected vibrant networks of Sephardic Jews within a complex and interconnected Mediterranean world.
Sienna’s chapter “Wrapping the Word: The Textiles of the Torah Scroll,” part of the Hidden Stories collaborative project Textiles in Manuscripts: A Local and Global History of the Book, will be published by De Gruyter in December 2025.
Sienna’s essay, “Tzena u-Re’ena (Go Out and See): The World of Jewish Books,” appears in a published collection, Early Modern Jewish Civilization: Unity and Diversity in a Diasporic Society, edited by David Graizbord (September 2024).
Research on Early Jewish Printing
While in the UK in the summer of 2025, Sienna undertook several weeks of research on 16th-century Hebrew printing, supported by a generous grant from the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust. Sienna surveyed imprints from the early Constantinople Hebrew press (1493-1530) operated by the Ibn Nahmias brothers in the collections of material from the Cairo Genizah now held at Cambridge University Library, the British Library, and the Bodleian Library. This included work to:
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Identify fragments of known and unknown editions from the press
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Record copy-specific information from early Constantinople imprints to help reconstruct the working process of this press
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Document the early movement of the press’s books through provenance research
The Genizah collections showed that Constantinople imprints were an important part of early modern Jewish libraries in Cairo. Well over 100 fragments were identified, representing more than fifty separate titles printed from 1493-1530. Moreover, in addition to pages from completed books, it was clear that the Genizah was also the destination for waste sheets from this press (among others) that had been discarded and circulated as part of the trade in recycled paper for use as wrappings, bindings, etc.: several sheets of unfolded, unsewn, and uncut folios and quartos were found, including one with the same page accidentally printed on both sides. Perhaps most importantly, fragments were found, in both the Cambridge and Oxford collections, that can be assigned to the Constantinople press on the basis of their paper and typography, but have not yet been identified with any previously known edition. These include liturgical, halakhic, and literary works, in both Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish. Sienna’s research will elucidate how these findings expand our knowledge of the work of the Ibn Nahmias brothers and the larger context of Jewish book production in the 16th century.
The examination of complete volumes in these collections also proved illuminating. Provenance markings (almost all unrecorded in previous cataloguing) showed how these books moved from Constantinople in the first few decades after their production into other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Yemen, Italy, and Central Europe. Finally, many copy-specific variations, including watermarks, stop-press corrections, offprints, and other errors in presswork, were found to illustrate the working procedures and material conditions of this press. The most important of these was a perfectly preserved imprint of a fallen type sort in the British Library’s copy of Perush ha-torah leha-ramban (Constantinople, 1522), allowing us to measure the height and width of their medium square type (3mm wide, 26mm high) — this leads to many further possible insights about the physical equipment of this press, and how the Ibn Nahmias brothers’ involvement in typefounding and typesetting was similar to or different from other presses of their era. While fully interpreting all the data gathered during this trip is far from complete, Sienna is confident that his research will be the subject of a future monograph.
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.
