In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam became one of the world's most dynamic centres of Jewish life. It was a city where Jews from all corners of the world -- from Portugal to the Ottoman Empire, and from Poland to North Africa -- built new lives in a religiously pluralistic and pragmatically tolerant society, engaged with one another and with Christians of numerous confessions, and participated in the cultural and economic life of the Dutch Republic's newfound global mercantile empire. They built communities -- synagogues, schools, confraternities and libraries -- that astounded early modern visitors both Jewish and Christian. Central to this story is the way Amsterdam became the most important centre for the printing and trade of books in Hebrew and in the multiple languages of the Jews who found their way there. One can hardly write a history of the Jews in the Early Modern period without Amsterdam's printers; conversely, the History of the Book has played a central role in histories of Jews in the Netherlands, in large part, too, thanks to the extraordinary sources of the Ets Haim - Livraria Montesinos Library and the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana at the University of Amsterdam.
To reflect on the history of Hebrew and Jewish printing in Amsterdam, and on the way trends in Book History more broadly can illuminate the history of the Hebrew and Jewish book, the eminent historian of the Jewish book and director of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, Prof. Emile Schrijver, spoke with Dr Theodor Dunkelgrün (University of Cambridge), editor of The Jewish Bookshop of the World: Aspects of Print and Manuscript Culture in Early Modern Amsterdam, published as a new, special double issue of Studia Rosenthaliana: Journal of the History, Culture and Heritage of the Jews in the Netherlands. This podcast thus also marks the festive re-launch of Studia Rosenthaliana (founded 1967) as a fully Open Access journal by the Amsterdam University Press.