The Amsterdam Hebrew Bibles of Joseph Athias

Joseph Athias was a Sephardi printer and publisher who worked in Amsterdam in the second half of the seventeenth century. His editions of the Hebrew Bible, the first completed in 1661 and the second in 1667, were prepared with the help of the Calvinist Hebraist Johannes Leusden, and they became, by way of the edition of Everard van der Hooght in 1705, the ancestors of the standard printed Hebrew text used by scholars in Europe and America until the later nineteenth century. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld and Bart Wallet, in a recent survey of the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, observe that both Jewish and Christian authorities had given their approval for the publication of the first edition, and that after the second edition appeared the States General awarded Athias a gold medallion and chain.¹ The Athias Bibles therefore belong to the history of Jewish printing, to the history of Christian Hebrew scholarship, and to the history of the printed Masoretic text at once.

This article describes the printer, his Bibles and their text, the type in which they were set, and the later fortunes of both. The sources for Athias’s life are not in full agreement, and the reference works disagree on several dates. Where they do, the differences are noted rather than resolved, since the documentary studies on which a resolution would depend have not been consulted for this article.

The Printer and His Family

The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the Athias family as a Spanish family distinguished by the number of its scholars and promoters of learning, some of whose members lived in Italy and Palestine in the sixteenth century, while another branch settled in Hamburg, Amsterdam and London.² Cecil Roth, writing for the Encyclopaedia Judaica, adds that the family was memorable in rabbinic scholarship, in Hebrew printing and in the annals of martyrdom under the Inquisition.³ The best-known member of the family before Joseph was Yom Tob Athias, who with Abraham Usque printed the Spanish Bible of Ferrara in 1553, which has been described in this journal in The Ferrara Bible of 1553; the reference works do not state how he was related to the Amsterdam printer.

The accounts of Joseph Athias’s early life differ. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that he was born in Spain, probably at Córdoba, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and that as a young man he was sent by his father to Hamburg to receive a Jewish education.⁴ The second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, in an entry by Abraham Meir Habermann revised by A. K. Offenberg, gives his place of birth as Spain or Portugal and his date of birth as 1634 or 1635, and describes him as a man of considerable learning. It records, on the authority of the eighteenth-century Amsterdam writer David Franco Mendes, that the Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel sought Athias’s opinion before publishing a political play.⁵ The later date would be consistent with the rest of his career, which began in the late 1650s and continued until his death in 1700.

The family’s connection with the Inquisition is attested in Athias’s own books. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that the edition of the code of Maimonides completed by his son records that Athias’s father had been burned at an auto-da-fé at Córdoba on 9 July 1667.⁶ Enschedé’s history of the Dutch typefoundries quotes the colophon of the fourth volume in translation: the work had been done to the order and at the cost of the young man Emanuel, son of Joseph, son of the martyr Abraham Athias, who for the sake of his belief in the unity of God had been burned in the city of Córdoba on 17 Tammuz 5427, that is, in 1667.⁷ Roth’s entry, by contrast, places the burning of Abraham Athias at Córdoba in 1665.⁸ The colophon, which comes from the family itself, is the better witness.

The Press in Amsterdam

Athias’s press began its work in the late 1650s. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, his first book was a prayer book according to the Sephardi rite, published in 1658.⁹ The Jewish Encyclopedia states that he seems to have settled in Amsterdam somewhat before 1658, and names as an early product of his press a Tiqqun Sefer Torah with an introductory poem by Solomon de Oliveyra, issued in the following year.¹⁰ The press produced works in many languages, especially in Hebrew, Yiddish, Portuguese and Spanish, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the enterprise as successful.¹¹

The scale of the business can be judged from its later acquisitions. In 1681, after the death of Daniel Elsevier, Athias bought the stock and equipment of the publishing house of the Elseviers, which included the non-Hebrew types cut by Christoffel van Dijck. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that the origin of his Hebrew material is not clear, that the Hungarian typecutter Nicholas Kis probably worked for him, and that Athias also experimented with stereotype printing and with the printing of textiles. In 1687 he announced that he had printed more than a million Bibles for England and Scotland.¹² The announcement implies Bibles in English for a Protestant readership, and it shows that Athias’s press served a Christian market as well as a Jewish one.

Enschedé’s account of the Amsterdam typefoundries adds details of the foundry. A type specimen issued by Athias, of which a copy survives in the library of Leiden University, is headed in Dutch as a specimen of letters cut by the late Christoffel van Dijck and cast under the care of Jan Bus at the house of Joseph Athias in the Zwanenburgerstraat in Amsterdam. The sheet was printed from the forme set up for the specimen of the widow of Daniel Elsevier, with seven founts added. At its foot Athias noted that he had various other choice letters which could not be shown for lack of room, and Enschedé observes that Athias certainly had Hebrew and rabbinical faces reserved for use in his own books.¹³ An advertisement of 25 April 1686 announced that Athias had reorganised his typefoundry and moved it to a house on the Nieuwe Herengracht opposite the Plantage. His affairs there did not prosper, and he was obliged to make over a half-share in the foundry to the widow of Jan Jacobsz. Schipper, whose descendants later acquired the whole. These arrangements did not affect the Hebrew matrices, which remained the property of Athias and, after his death, of his son.¹⁴

Athias was admitted to the Amsterdam printers’ guild, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, on 31 March 1661, in recognition of the reputation that his Bible had won him.¹⁵ His other publications included a Pentateuch with the Five Scrolls and the prophetic readings in 1665, an edition of the Psalms with a Dutch translation in 1666–67, for which Leusden again served as proof-reader, the ʿEn Yaʿaqov in 1684–85, and prayer books according to both the Sephardi and Ashkenazi rites. The same entry describes his printing house as one of the best equipped in Amsterdam, and states that his wealth enabled him to spend freely on the cutting and casting of type and to demand artistic work from his designers and die-sinkers.¹⁶ Levie Bernfeld and Wallet estimate that the house produced some 450 titles in all.¹⁷

Leusden and the Edition of 1661

The editor of the Bible was Johannes Leusden, a Calvinist theologian and Hebraist. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that he was born in 1624, that he had numbered Jews among his teachers, and that in 1650 he became professor of the Hebrew language at the University of Utrecht, the institution now known as Utrecht University. Besides his work on the Bible he translated, at Utrecht in 1656, the list of the 613 commandments that stands at the head of Maimonides’ code, and he corresponded with the Mather family of Puritan New England.¹⁸ The Jewish Encyclopedia describes him instead as a professor at Leiden.¹⁹ Johannes Enschedé, writing in 1768, spoke of professors of both Leiden and Utrecht among those who had corrected the edition, and the Jewish Encyclopedia’s statement may reflect that broader tradition; but the professorship that Leusden held was the chair at Utrecht.²⁰²¹

A copy of the first edition in the library of Eton College shows the form of the book. Its Latin title describes it as the sacred Hebrew Bible corrected and collated with the most ancient and accurate manuscript and printed copies, and its imprint states that it was printed at Amsterdam at the press and expense of Joseph Athias in 1661. The Eton copy is in two octavo volumes. The catalogue notes that the main text is in Hebrew and the preliminaries in Latin, that there are additional engraved title-pages in Hebrew, and that the edition was prepared by Athias from Buxtorf’s edition of 1619, with proof-reading and a preface by Leusden.²² The Eton copy itself has a history that illustrates the readership of the book. It bears the inscription of John Rowe of the Middle Temple, dated 24 June 1669, a further inscription recording its gift by Rowe to Thomas Rundle, and a label recording its donation to Eton by John Reynolds in 1751.²³

The Jewish Encyclopedia article on editions of the Bible, by Crawford Howell Toy and Richard Gottheil, describes the basis of the text in slightly different terms. Athias, it states, edited the text using Buxtorf’s edition and the traditional text that had come down from the Soncino Bible of 1488, with a comparison of two manuscripts.²⁴ Buxtorf’s Bibles belonged to the tradition of the Rabbinic Bible edited by Jacob ben Hayyim at Venice in 1524–25, whose influence on later printing, including the Athias editions, is discussed in this journal in Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible and in Daniel Bomberg’s Venice Press. The title’s claim of collation with ancient manuscripts should therefore be understood in the limited sense that the reference works describe: the edition was a careful revision of the printed text rather than a new text established from the manuscripts.

The date of the first edition is given in more than one way. The Eton record and the abstract of Levie Bernfeld and Wallet give 1661.²⁵²⁶ Christian David Ginsburg, writing in 1897, refers to it as the edition of 1659–61, which suggests that the printing extended over more than one year and that the title bears the date of completion.²⁷ The Jewish Encyclopedia similarly states that Athias was engaged on the Bible during the two years that followed the appearance of his first books.²⁸

The Numbering of the Verses

The feature of the Athias Bible most often mentioned in later literature is its numbering of the verses. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Leusden calls it the first Hebrew Bible in which the verses are numbered, and adds that the edition became well known for its exactness and its beautiful printing, and served as a model for almost all editions of the Bible up to the nineteenth century.²⁹ The history of chapters and verses in the printed Bible has been told in this journal in Chapter and Verse Divisions from Langton to Nathan. The particular claim made for Athias, however, needs qualification.

George F. Moore examined the question in 1893. He showed that the verses had been numbered throughout, with a Hebrew numeral at every fifth verse, in the Great Bible printed by Daniel Bomberg in 1547–48, and that this practice was followed in the Sabbioneta Pentateuch of 1557, in the Bible printed by Christophe Plantin in 1566 and in other sixteenth-century editions. He called the statement that the numeration of the verses was first extended to the whole Bible by Athias in 1661 an absurd blunder, and noted that the preface of the edition of 1661, written by Leusden, gave a clear account of what the innovation actually was.³⁰ Moore quoted Leusden’s fuller statement in his Philologus Hebraeo-Graecus. There Leusden explains that in the old Hebrew Bibles, such as those of Bomberg and Münster, the verses were not marked in the margin with Hebrew letters; that about the middle of the preceding century every fifth verse came to be marked in the margin with Hebrew letters; and that finally, in 1660, in the Amsterdam edition of Joseph Athias, every verse was marked with Latin numerals, except every fifth verse, which kept its Hebrew letter in the old manner. Leusden added that this had been done at his own suggestion and urging, and that such numerals had never before been attached to any Hebrew text.³¹

Moore accepted the first part of Leusden’s account and corrected the second. The use of Arabic numerals for the intervening verses, verses 2, 3 and 4, 6 to 9, and so on, beside the Hebrew numeral for every fifth verse, was introduced by Leusden and Athias in 1661. But there were older editions in which every verse of the Hebrew text had an Arabic numeral, among them the Antwerp Polyglot of 1569–72 and the separate edition of its Hebrew text with interlinear Latin translation, and Moore noted that Leusden’s preface of 1661 was itself more cautious, saying only that no Bibles had been published, so far as he knew, in which the verses were so distinctly marked.³² Ginsburg reached the same conclusion independently. He traced the marginal Arabic numerals against each verse to the edition of Benito Arias Montano printed at Antwerp in 1571, and concluded that the frequent statement that Athias was the first to introduce numerals against the verses was inaccurate.³³

The Athias edition also altered the treatment of the chapters. Ginsburg reports that Athias not only broke up the Hebrew text into the chapters of the Latin Bible, following the example of earlier editions, but went so far as to incorporate the number of chapters in the Masoretic summary at the end of each book of the Pentateuch and to coin a mnemonic sign for it. At the end of Genesis, after the number of verses, the middle verse and the number of the portions of the annual and the triennial cycles, he states that the book has fifty chapters, with a mnemonic drawn from Isaiah 33:2; similar notes follow at the end of Exodus with a verse from Psalm 37:31, of Leviticus with Genesis 26:3, of Numbers with Deuteronomy 32:29, and of Deuteronomy with Psalm 111:1. Ginsburg regarded this as an invention passed off as part of the Masorah, and noted that it was copied by Jablonski in 1699, by Van der Hooght in 1705, by Opitius in 1706 and by Maius in 1716, who could not distinguish the genuine from the added parts of the summary.³⁴ Moore adds, citing Leusden, that for some deviations from the accepted division of the chapters in the edition of 1667 the editor claimed the authority of a Hebrew manuscript, which Moore thought could only have been a copy in which the beginnings of the chapters had been noted from the apparatus of Isaac Nathan’s concordance.³⁵

The Edition of 1667 and Its Reward

The second edition was completed in 1667. Enschedé’s history notes that it was dated 1667, and describes it as still much used and regarded as a model.³⁶ The Jewish Encyclopedia gives the date of the second edition as 1677. This is evidently an error, since the same entry mentions a broadside published by Athias in 1669 in defence of that edition, and the other reference works and Theodor Dunkelgrün’s study of the controversy over the book all give 1667.³⁷³⁸³⁹ The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the second edition as more carefully prepared than the first, and printed with still more beautiful type and decoration.⁴⁰

For this edition the States General of the Dutch Republic awarded Athias a gold medal and chain. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that they were worth 600 Dutch florins and that a cut of the medal appears on the title-page.⁴¹⁴² Johannes Enschedé, the typefounder, writing in his specimen book of 1768, gave a fuller account. He wrote that the edition had been corrected by the most learned rabbis and doctors of the Law and by professors of the universities of Leiden and Utrecht, and that the States General had honoured Athias with a privilege for twenty-two years and with a gold chain and a medal of thirty-six lood of fine gold. He quoted Athias’s preface to the effect that such an honour had not fallen to the lot of any Israelite within the memory of man.⁴³ The modern editors of Enschedé’s history point out, however, that Johannes Enschedé gave the date of the Bible wrongly as 1665 and wrongly asserted that the type he had bought had been used to print it, so his statements are not to be relied upon in every detail.⁴⁴

The edition did not escape criticism. The Jewish Encyclopedia records a small broadside by Athias, Coecus de coloribus, “The blind man on colours”, published at Amsterdam in 1669 against the criticisms of the edition made by Samuel Maresius.⁴⁵ Dunkelgrün’s article of 2012 in Studia Rosenthaliana, whose title takes up the same image, describes the episode as the defence by Athias and Leusden of their Hebrew Bible of 1667.⁴⁶ The contents of that study have not been consulted for this article, and the details of the controversy are therefore not discussed here.

A different kind of criticism was recorded by Nicholas Kis, the typecutter who probably worked for Athias. According to a note in Enschedé’s history, Kis wrote in his Mentség that Athias offered a guilder for every error found in his Hebrew Bible, but that in England a Jew told him he had found at least four hundred.⁴⁷ The anecdote cannot be checked, and the number of errors it implies is uncertain. It does show, however, that the accuracy of the Athias Bible was a matter of public claim and of public dispute in its own time.

The Yiddish Bible Affair

Athias’s reputation was damaged by another publication. The Jewish Encyclopedia describes at length the dispute over two rival Yiddish translations of the Bible printed in Amsterdam in the 1670s. The printer Uri Phoebus had engaged Jekutiel Blitz to make a translation and had obtained from the Council of Four Lands in Poland a privilege prohibiting reprints for ten years, and later a privilege from King John III Sobieski. One of his compositors, Joseph Witzenhausen, made a rival translation, for which Athias became printer and publisher, and Athias obtained privileges for it from Holland and Zeeland and further protection from the Council of Four Lands. The edition of Phoebus appeared in 1678, and that of Athias in its complete form in 1679, with a Latin preface dedicated to the Great Elector, Frederick William of Brandenburg.⁴⁸

The Encyclopaedia Judaica summarises the matter more briefly: Athias was accused of appropriating long-term copyright and reprint privileges that the Polish Jewish authorities had granted for a Yiddish translation of the Bible.⁴⁹ The Jewish Encyclopedia itself warns that the affair had been discussed so fancifully, and that so much of what had been written about it was pure invention, that nothing could be determined with accuracy, the literature having consisted mainly of loose leaflets and broadsides that had become rare.⁵⁰ The episode is relevant to the history of the Hebrew Bible only indirectly, but it shows the competitive conditions in which the Amsterdam Hebrew presses worked and the importance that privileges, Christian and Jewish, had for them.

Immanuel Athias and the Code of Maimonides

Joseph Athias died in Amsterdam in 1700. The Jewish Encyclopedia gives the date as 12 May 1700, while Enschedé’s history, citing the archival research of I. H. van Eeghen, gives 4 May 1700.⁵¹⁵² His son Immanuel, who according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica had been a partner in the business since 1685, took it over. The most celebrated product of the later years of the press was the edition of the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides in four volumes, begun by Joseph and completed by Immanuel. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that it was printed in 1,150 copies and dedicated to Moses Machado, army purveyor to King William III, who had given financial support to the business.⁵³ The Jewish Encyclopedia, citing Steinschneider, describes it as one of the most elegant and most admired products of the Hebrew press.⁵⁴

Immanuel then began to print the commentary Leḥem Mishneh on the code. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that three volumes had appeared by the time of his death, which it dates to 1709, although the same entry gives his dates as about 1664 to 1714.⁵⁵ Enschedé’s history records that the supplement to the third volume appeared from his house in 1703, that the supplement to the fourth volume was produced in 1714 from the press of the bookseller Salomon Proops, and that Immanuel died on 3 January 1714.⁵⁶ The later date is supported by the archival evidence that Enschedé’s editors cite, and the year 1709 in the Encyclopaedia Judaica may refer to the last volume of the commentary rather than to his death.

The Athias Types and the Proops Family

The Hebrew matrices of the Athias press had a long afterlife. Enschedé’s history, again following Van Eeghen, records that Immanuel had always kept them, and that after his death they passed to a distant relative, Abraham Athias, printer and typefounder, whose foundry was on the Houtgracht. It was sold at auction on 25 February 1761 and bought by the Proops family.⁵⁷ The Encyclopaedia Judaica names this Abraham as Abraham ben Raphael Hezekiah Athias, who printed Hebrew books in Amsterdam from 1728, and the purchasers as the brothers Joseph, Jacob and Abraham Proops.⁵⁸

The Proops brothers were proud of their acquisition. In a notice in a Jewish almanac for the year 5523 (1762–63), quoted in translation in Enschedé’s history, they announced that on Wednesday, 21 Adar 5521, that is, 25 February 1761, they had acquired what had long been hidden away as a most precious treasure, the matrices and moulds made by the famous printers Joseph, Emanuel and Abraham Athias, for all manner of square Hebrew letters with and without vowels and accents and for Rashi and German rabbinical faces. Among the books printed with them they listed the works of Maimonides, the large and small Bibles, the small Pentateuch and Psalms, and the Bible in Judaeo-German. They added that it was now impossible for printing that looked exactly like that of Athias to be done by anyone but themselves.⁵⁹ In the preface to their Judaeo-Spanish Bible of 1762 they wrote that God had put into their hands the matrices of all the letters of the press of Joseph and Emanuel Athias, which had stood idle for many years.⁶⁰ The Sephardi book trade of Amsterdam in which the Proops and Athias firms worked is described in this journal in Sephardic Portugal and the Hebrew Bible.

The history also corrects a long-standing attribution. Johannes Enschedé, who bought a pointed Long Primer Hebrew from the successors to Athias’s foundry in 1767, stated in 1768 that it had been cut in 1662 or 1663 by Christoffel van Dijck for Athias. The modern editors show that the type was not one of the famous Athias types, which were of an earlier and more artistic fashion, that no punches were kept with the matrices, and that the Proops preface of 1762 proves that the true Athias matrices had remained in the possession of the Athias family until 1761.⁶¹

The Proops firm and its successors used the Athias material until 1917. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that in that year the collection known as the Athias Cabinet was sold at auction and acquired by the Tetterode firm, the Typefoundry Amsterdam, and that in 2001 the library of the University of Amsterdam received the cabinet and its contents on permanent loan.⁶² Offenberg described the cabinet in Studia Rosenthaliana in the same year.⁶³ The description of the Tetterode collection now held by the Allard Pierson, the museum of the university’s collections, states that the Hebrew punches and matrices in the eighteenth-century Athias cabinet include material by the typecutters Nicholas Kis, who lived from 1650 to 1705, and Jacques-François Rosart, who lived from 1714 to 1777, both of whom worked in the Netherlands.⁶⁴ Since Rosart was born fourteen years after Joseph Athias died, the cabinet as it survives must include material added after the time of Joseph and Immanuel as well as the original equipment of their press.

The Athias Text among the Later Editions

The reception of the Athias text can be followed in the account of later editions given by Toy and Gottheil. A further edition was brought out at Berlin by Daniel Ernst Jablonski, with a comparison of all the earlier editions, and was reissued in 1712 and, without vowels, in 1711. Toy and Gottheil date Jablonski’s first edition to 1690, while Ginsburg gives 1699.⁶⁵ Jablonski’s text in turn became the foundation of the edition of J. H. Michaelis at Halle in 1720, for which Michaelis compared five Erfurt manuscripts and nineteen printed editions. The Mantua Bible of 1742–44, edited by Raphael Ḥayyim Basilea and Felice Marini, was in large measure a reprint of Michaelis.⁶⁶ The Athias text was therefore transmitted not only through Van der Hooght but through a second line of German editions, and both lines carried with them the features that Athias and Leusden had introduced.

One of those features was the treatment of the chapter numbers in the Masoretic summaries. Ginsburg was surprised that Raphael Ḥayyim Basilea, the editor of the text of Norzi with the commentary Minḥat Shai printed at Mantua in 1732–44, should have been taken in by it. Raphael Ḥayyim did not simply copy Athias in the Pentateuch but extended the practice, entering the number of chapters in the summaries at the end of every book of the Prophets and the Writings and inventing mnemonic signs for them. Ginsburg added that Norzi’s autograph manuscript of the Minḥat Shai, then in the British Museum, contained none of these innovations.⁶⁷ He found it equally remarkable that Wolf Heidenheim, in his edition of the Pentateuch with the commentary ʿEn ha-Qore published at Rödelheim in 1818–21, denounced the practice of incorporating the numbering of the chapters in the Masoretic summary as a mixing of the profane with the sacred, and yet adopted it at the end of each book exactly as it appears in Athias and his followers.⁶⁸ Ginsburg’s criticism shows how far the conventions of the Amsterdam edition had become part of the printed tradition, even for editors who knew that they were not Masoretic.

The verse numbers spread more unevenly. Moore observed that the convention of marking every fifth verse with a Hebrew numeral, established in the sixteenth century, was not universally adopted: the edition of Manasseh ben Israel printed at Amsterdam from 1635, and the Mantua Bible of 1742–44, have no verse numerals at all.⁶⁹ The Athias system of Arabic numerals for the intervening verses was, on Moore’s account, an addition to the older Hebrew numeration rather than a replacement of it. Its later prevalence followed from the authority of the edition itself, which, as the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Leusden already quoted observes, was imitated by nearly every later printing until the nineteenth century.⁷⁰

The family itself remained prominent in Amsterdam after Immanuel’s death. The Jewish Encyclopedia lists, among the members of the Portuguese community of Amsterdam in 1675, several bearers of the name, including an Abraham Atias described as “el viejo”, the elder. It records that Abraham ben Raphael Hezekiah Athias was a printer in Amsterdam from 1728 to 1741, that David Israel Athias served as ḥakham of the Portuguese community from 1728 until his death on 22 March 1753, and that his son Jacob Hezekiah Athias was a member of the Talmudic academy ʿEts Ḥayyim in Amsterdam from 1737.⁷¹ The same entry describes Immanuel’s office as the source of the most elegant editions of Hebrew works, among them the code of Maimonides.⁷² These details place the press within a continuing family and communal setting, in which the printing of Hebrew books was one activity among the learned and religious offices that members of the family held.

Van der Hooght and the Received Text

The most lasting influence of the Athias Bible was exercised through the edition of Everard van der Hooght, published at Amsterdam and Utrecht in 1705. Toy and Gottheil describe Van der Hooght’s edition as practically a reprint of the Athias-Leusden edition, with variants from a number of printed editions at the end. It was much prized for its excellent and clear type, but no manuscripts were used in its preparation. Its text was followed by Proops, by Houbigant, by Simon, by Kennicott and by Hahn, and it came to be regarded as a kind of textus receptus, the Vienna edition of Meir Letteris in 1852 showing very few changes from it. The first Hebrew Bible printed in America, published by William Fry at Philadelphia in 1814, followed the text of Van der Hooght.⁷³

Two of these descendants have been treated in this journal. The Paris Bible of Charles-François Houbigant reprinted Van der Hooght’s Hebrew text without vowel points, and Benjamin Kennicott used the same edition as the standard against which his collators recorded the readings of the manuscripts, as described in Kennicott, De Rossi and the Eighteenth-Century Collations of Hebrew Manuscripts. In each case the text that served as the point of departure was, at one remove, the text of Athias and Leusden.

The Athias text thus occupies a central place in the history of the printed Hebrew Bible. It was not the first edition to number the verses, as Moore and Ginsburg showed, nor was it a new text established from the manuscripts. Its importance lay rather in the combination of a careful revision of the received text, a convenient system of reference, and a typographical quality that earned the praise of Jewish and Christian readers alike. Through Van der Hooght and his successors that combination fixed the form in which the Hebrew Bible was read by scholars in Europe and America for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until the editions of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries returned to the Masorah and the medieval manuscripts.

Notes

1. Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld and Bart Wallet, “Athias’s Bible”, in Jews in the Netherlands (London: Routledge, 2023), ch. 18, abstract. *
2. Richard Gottheil, Meyer Kayserling, J. Vredenburg et al., “Athias, Atias, or Athia”, Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–06), entry “Joseph b. Abraham Athias”. *
3. Cecil Roth, “At(h)ias”, Encyclopaedia Judaica, at Encyclopedia.com. *
4. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
5. Abraham Meir Habermann and A. K. Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edn, at Encyclopedia.com. *
6. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
7. Charles Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century, English edn (Haarlem: Stichting Museum Enschedé, 1978), digitised at Bibliotekus, p. 95. *
8. Roth, “At(h)ias”. *
9. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
10. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
11. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
12. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
13. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, pp. 94–95. *
14. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, p. 96. *
15. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
16. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
17. Levie Bernfeld and Wallet, “Athias’s Bible”. *
18. Joseph Elijah Heller, “Leusden, Johann”, Encyclopaedia Judaica, at Encyclopedia.com. *
19. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
20. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, p. 96. *
21. Heller, “Leusden, Johann”. *
22. Eton College Collections, catalogue record B15605, Biblia sacra Hebraea correcta & collata (Amsterdam: Joseph Athias, 1661), shelfmark DDb.8.20–DDb.8.21. *
23. Eton College Collections, record B15605. *
24. Crawford Howell Toy and Richard Gottheil, “Bible Editions”, Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–06), sections “Various Editions” and “Van der Hooght”. *
25. Eton College Collections, record B15605. *
26. Levie Bernfeld and Wallet, “Athias’s Bible”. *
27. Christian D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897), p. 27. *
28. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
29. Heller, “Leusden, Johann”. *
30. George F. Moore, “The Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses in the Hebrew Bible”, Journal of Biblical Literature 12 (1893), pp. 73–78, pp. 75–76. *
31. Moore, “Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses”, pp. 76–77. *
32. Moore, “Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses”, pp. 77–78. *
33. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 107–108. *
34. Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 27–28. *
35. Moore, “Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses”, p. 73, footnote. *
36. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, pp. 95, 97. *
37. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
38. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
39. Theodor Dunkelgrün, “Like a Blind Man Judging Colors: Joseph Athias and Johannes Leusden Defend their 1667 Hebrew Bible”, Studia Rosenthaliana 44 (2012), pp. 79–115, record at Peeters Online Journals. *
40. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
41. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
42. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
43. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, p. 96. *
44. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, p. 97. *
45. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
46. Dunkelgrün, “Like a Blind Man Judging Colors”. *
47. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, p. 95 n. 2. *
48. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
49. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
50. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
51. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
52. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, p. 95 n. 3. *
53. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
54. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
55. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
56. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, pp. 95, 97 n. 1. *
57. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, p. 97 n. 1. *
58. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
59. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, p. 98. *
60. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, p. 97. *
61. Enschedé, Typefoundries in the Netherlands, pp. 96–97. *
62. Habermann and Offenberg, “Athias, Joseph and Immanuel”. *
63. A. K. Offenberg, “The Athias Cabinet”, Studia Rosenthaliana 35 (2001), pp. 100–102, record at UvA-DARE. *
64. Allard Pierson, University of Amsterdam, “Collectie Tetterode”, collection description. *
65. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 28. *
66. Toy and Gottheil, “Bible Editions”. *
67. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 28. *
68. Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 28. *
69. Moore, “Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses”, p. 76. *
70. Heller, “Leusden, Johann”. *
71. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
72. Jewish Encyclopedia, “Athias”. *
73. Toy and Gottheil, “Bible Editions”. *