Books in the Ets Haim Yeshivah: Acquisition, Publishing, and a Community of Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam

Abstract

This essay concerns the place of books in shaping three decades (1728–60) during which Amsterdam’s Portuguese community deepened and expanded its rabbinic study. It discusses two sets of sources primarily. The first consists of annual book acquisition lists discovered in the records of the community’s Ets Haim yeshivah. These lists provide insight into contemporary reading habits and interests, the Ets Haim’s education system and literary emphasis, and the economics of book production and commerce. The second set of sources comes from the hundreds of Hebrew books printed in Amsterdam during these decades. Members of the Ets Haim composed and published their own books, edited the work of their peers, and facilitated the publication of texts authored or brought to the city by rabbinic scholars from abroad. Paratextual material elucidates relations between authors, publishers, editors, printers, and rabbinic leadership. This research shows that the Ets Haim expended huge sums of money on book acquisition, thereby placing unprecedented resources at the disposal of its religious intellectual elite. In turn, the yeshivah’s students enjoyed significant freedom to work and produce as they saw fit. As a direct outgrowth of this freedom, the production and dissemination of books facilitated interaction and collaboration between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews still in many ways demarcated along communal lines.