Reviewed by: Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library by Joshua Teplitsky Gershon D. Hundert Joshua Teplitsky, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 336; 34 b/w illus. $35.00 cloth. While this monograph presents the biography of David Oppenheim (1664–1736), its focus is on his library. The website of the Bodleian Library (where the books have resided since 1828) describes the collection as the most important and magnificent Hebraica collection ever accumulated. In Oppenheim's era, book collecting was a way of performing high status and accumulating prestige. In terms of the number of books, Oppenheim's collection of roughly 4,500 books and a thousand manuscripts hardly compared to that of Thomas Rawlinson (1681–1725), who possessed 200,000 books but had to sell them at auction after losing his fortune in the South Sea Bubble. Crude numerical comparisons, however, are not useful. Oppenheim's collection included a very large proportion of all the books ever printed in Hebrew and Yiddish. The Bodleian's description is not hyperbolic at all. In the case of the library, Teplitsky argues, the collection not only mapped the power and the influence of the collector but also constituted a key element of Oppenheim's political standing. The book considers both Oppenheim's years of collecting and the collector himself through the prism of the power that the library both reflected and embodied. Although Oppenheim himself did not play the role of court banker or factor, he was a member of a family distinguished even among Court Jews and had ties and links to other such families. His son married the daughter of Samson Wertheimer, who had succeeded David's uncle, Samuel Oppenheimer (1630–1703), as Habsburg Court Jew. Oppenheim's wife, Gnendel, was the daughter of the Hanover court Jew, Leffman Behrens (1634–1714). Though he had access to considerable wealth, David Oppenheim had a rabbinical education. In the manner of itinerant students of the day, he studied with some of the most distinguished Rabbis of central Europe in Metz, Friedberg, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Landsberg, as well as his native Worms. He emerged as a scholar, leading to distinguished rabbinical appointments, which culminated in his appointment as Chief Rabbinate of Prague (1703 to his death in 1736). This was certainly one of the two or three most prestigious positions for rabbis in Europe. It is noteworthy in this connection that Samuel Oppenheimer was a longstanding and major financial supporter of the Jewish community in Prague and that Samuel seems to have seen David as a sort of protégé. By 1717, David Oppenheim was also Chief Rabbi of Bohemia. Despite his move to Prague, Oppenheim kept his library on the estate of his father-in-law, Leffman Behrens, in Hanover, far from the jurisdiction of Prague's enthusiastic Jesuit censors of Jewish books. He kept a catalogue of his library near to hand in Prague. Except for more than seventy approbations, of which more below, Oppenheim published only a negligible quantity of his own extensive writings. In that way, he had no intellectual legacy. His thought "did not infiltrate the yeshiva curricula or shape subsequent intellectual developments" (157). Still, his activities as a patron of authors, in funding the publication of rare manuscripts, and in making rare materials available to scholars in central Europe, were crucial components in the fundamental revision of the Ashkenazic canon, especially in the eighteenth century, that resulted especially from the incorporation at that time of medieval Sephardic works related to the Talmud. [End Page 719] Oppenheim's vast library was instrumental in that it contributed to his accumulating cultural and political capital and enhanced his prestige and his power. To be sure, Oppenheim's distinguished lineage, and particularly his close connection to his uncle, Samuel Oppenheimer, made him a broker of much influence in a variety of domains, even without his magnificent collection. Still, Teplitsky, in detailing "Oppenheim's political activities and the library as a means for their achievement" (9), has accomplished his goal of presenting us...