There is a paradox at the centre of the Portuguese story, and it is a paradox about books rather than about people. For roughly four centuries, from the middle of the twelfth century to 1497, the Jewish communities of Portugal held the westernmost position in a scholarly tradition whose entire purpose was the preservation of the received Hebrew Bible. The masorah they wrote into the margins of their codices was not of their invention. It was the work of the masoretes of Tiberias, most of all of Aaron ben Asher in the tenth century, carried west through Egypt and North Africa and into Spain, and kept in Iberia with a fidelity that the surviving manuscripts still demonstrate. The communities of Lisbon, Faro, Porto, Coimbra and \u00c9vora stood at the far end of that chain. They copied Bibles, illuminated them, argued about them, and in the last decade of the fifteenth century they printed them. Portugal’s first book of any kind was a Hebrew one.<\/p>\n
What is left inside Portugal is very nearly nothing. The first comprehensive inventory of the Portuguese holdings, published in 2017, found twenty-three Hebrew manuscripts and fragments in the country’s public libraries and state archives – a number that sounds like the inventory of a book tradition and is in fact the inventory of a wreck. Almost all of them are pieces: a Deuteronomy fragment in Ashkenazi script, a charter or two, a few leaves recovered from bindings. The codices themselves are elsewhere. They are in London, in Madrid, in the Escorial, in Rome, and the Portuguese Hebrew printing of the 1480s and 1490s produced books that are now among the rarest incunabula in existence. The obvious inference, that Portugal was a poor country with a thin scribal tradition, is the wrong one, and this essay’s first business is to say why.<\/p>\n
The reason is legal. Everything that determined what got copied, what got printed and what got written down in Portugal was decided in the crown’s chancery and in the tribunal that administered the Jewish communities, and it was decided with a fiscal eye. The privileges that protected the communities made them taxable. The statutes that restricted their landholding made them debtors. The forced baptisms of 1373, 1386 and 1496-97 made the transmission of the Hebrew text a clandestine act, and clandestine acts produce different books. The argument of this essay is that the Iberian masorah is best understood as a product of that pressure: a western port for an eastern cargo, whose cargo was repacked in Venice by a man from Tunis, and whose shipping papers were drawn up by tax collectors, lawyers and Inquisitors. It follows the thread from the charter of 1144 to the Second Rabbinic Bible of 1525, and it closes with the return of a community to Lisbon in the twentieth century, because the last chapter of the manuscript trail is also the last chapter of the story of the people who carried it.<\/p>\n
The legal history of the Portuguese Jews begins with a document that is habitually read as an act of generosity and is better read as an act of accounting. The privilege granted to the Jews of Lisbon by Afonso Henriques, conventionally dated to 1144 or 1145, is the foundation stone of the Portuguese Jewish quarter, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not say. It does not say that the Jews of Lisbon are to be protected in the exercise of their religion. It says that a population is to be settled in a strategic place, given certain rights, and made taxable. Lisbon in the middle of the twelfth century was a city at the hinge of the Reconquista, recently taken and not yet secure, and a self-governing Jewish community inside the walls was worth having to a crown that wanted a settled, ordered, taxable population rather than a mobile one. The privilege is the legal form of that calculation.<\/p>\n
What the privilege created was a juderia – a district with its own law, its own officers and its own obligations – and it is important to see that this was governance rather than philanthropy. The Jews of Portugal were not merely tolerated; they were constituted as a unit of jurisdiction, and jurisdiction in medieval Iberia was also taxation. A community that could be governed separately could be assessed separately, and a community assessed separately could be required to deliver a fixed sum to the crown with a degree of predictability that no other arrangement could have given. That predictability was the point. A population that could not be assessed could not be governed, and a population that could not be governed could not be protected either.<\/p>\n
That arrangement was revised in 1292, when Dinis I reorganised the charter system in a series of forais that assigned the Jewish population to defined judicial districts and attached to each a specified tribute. The clauses of these documents are the clearest evidence that the juderia was a real seigneurial unit rather than an administrative fiction. The standard provisions forbid Christians from serving under Jewish lords, and they place restrictions on the extent of land a Jewish proprietor may hold. Both clauses point the same way. The first is a control on jurisdiction, designed to stop the autonomous power of a Jewish lord from spilling outside the quarter. The second is a control on property, and it had the effect of converting a population of landowners into a population of tenants and debtors to the crown. The exact wording varies between the transcriptions in the foral literature and the popular summaries, so it is safer to state the character of the measure than to quote its clauses.<\/p>\n
The fiscal consequences were enormous, and they are the key to everything that follows. A community that cannot accumulate land cannot accumulate capital, and a community that cannot accumulate capital cannot readily accumulate manuscripts. What it has instead is a fixed obligation: the tribute, the collectible tax, the price of the community’s continued legal existence. And the instrument through which the crown assessed it was the tribunal dos Judeus, the Jewish tribunal constituted as the crown’s fiscal organ for the Portuguese communities, working in a partnership of state and communal authority that ran in both directions. It collected money; it also adjudicated the internal disputes of the community; and it was, in effect, the seed of the Iberian rabbinic constitution, the communal tribunal that would go on governing the Sephardic communities of Amsterdam, Salonica and the Ottoman cities long after Portugal’s own had been broken. That institutional double face – fiscal agent and communal court – is worth holding on to. The same body that carried the money to the crown also kept the records, and it is in those records that the community’s own account of itself survives.<\/p>\n
Twice before the catastrophe of 1497, the crown tested whether the Jewish community could be dissolved rather than taxed. In 1373 Pedro I mounted a preaching campaign against the Jews and then pressed for mass conversion; in 1386 Fernando I renewed the pressure. The mechanics and the numbers vary from source to source, and no figure should be given for either episode, but their significance does not lie in their numbers. Both were a dress rehearsal for the policy that would be executed in 1496 and 1497: that a population which had been taxed for keeping its religion could instead be required to profess it. The precedent is what matters. Once the crown had established that mass baptism was administratively possible, the question was no longer whether it would happen again but when.<\/p>\n
The scale of what was at stake is best expressed as a range, because no reliable figure exists. Estimates for the Jewish population of Portugal on the eve of the expulsion circulate from roughly twenty thousand to more than a hundred thousand for the kingdom as a whole, and from a few hundred to several thousand for Lisbon alone; the spread reflects the fact that most of these numbers are later estimates projected backwards rather than contemporary counts. Am\u00e9lia Aguiar Andrade’s study of the physical disappearance of the medieval juiveries in Portuguese cities at the end of the Middle Ages is a more useful corrective than any single figure, because it shows a physical landscape of walls, streets, quarters and houses being dismantled over a matter of decades. By the time that work was complete, the communities that had lived in those quarters had been dispersed, converted or emigrated, and the paper they had left behind had been confiscated, hidden, burned or carried out of the country by whoever could carry it.<\/p>\n
There is a useful irony in the way the Iberian story begins, and it sets the pattern for everything that follows. The Sephardic elite of the eleventh century was destroyed twice, by two different powers, in two different directions. Samuel ha-Nagid, born in Cordova in 993, was the vizier of the Muslim caliph Abd al-Rahman III at Cordova, and when he was killed in Granada in 1055, or by the reckoning of other sources in 1056, the killing was done by a Muslim mob. His son Joseph ibn Nasi succeeded him in the vizierate and was himself killed in the massacre of Granada in 1066, when a Muslim-Christian conflict in the city destroyed the Jews of Granada who were caught between the combatants. The sequence reads like an allegory of the Iberian position for the next three centuries: the community was squeezed from one side and from the other, and it was no single persecutor that did the damage.<\/p>\n
Samuel ha-Nagid’s career is worth retelling briefly, because it shows what a masorete’s scholarship looked like at its zenith in this period, and what a masorete’s scholarship was for. He was trained in Hebrew grammar and lexicography by Judah Hayyuj, and in Arabic, Latin and Berber by masters outside the community. When the Berbers overran Cordova in 1013 he emigrated to Malaga, where his calligraphy was the qualification that got him noticed and where he was employed as private secretary to the vizier Abu al-Qasim ibn al-‘Arif. When Abu al-Qasim died, Abd al-Rahman III appointed Samuel in his place. A Jew was running the administration of Muslim Spain, and the arrangement held until his death.<\/p>\n
What he wrote is the point. His biblical commentary is lost, but it was cited by Ibn Ezra and others. His grammar was a work in twenty-two treatises, known as the Kitab al-Istighna or Sefer ha-‘Osher. His dictionary of biblical words is the best known of his works and is cited by Ibn Ezra in particular. He also copied a Masoretic Bible, and the Hilkata Gibbarwa displays precisely the kind of masoretic expertise that the tradition expects of a man in his position. There is no attested masoretic compendium of his, whatever else may be attributed to him: what a masorete of the eleventh century actually produced was more often a lexicon, a grammar, a note on a difficult orthography, a copy of the text with the apparatus in the margin. The lexicographer’s craft and the masorete’s craft are the same craft seen from two ends. The first collects and orders the words; the second counts and checks them.<\/p>\n
The stories that attached to him afterwards are worth marking as stories. There is a legend, repeated in the Christian polemical literature of the period, that a Jewish convert to Christianity was responsible for the conversion of the Ka’ba. That legend belongs to polemic rather than to biography. The biographical facts are the appointment as vizier, the murder in Granada by a Muslim mob, and the succession of the son who died in the massacre of 1066.<\/p>\n
It is worth being concrete about the object he copied, because the eleventh-century Masoretic Bible is a different sort of book from the grammars and dictionaries that made ha-Nagid’s reputation. It is a codex of the received text, in three columns, carrying the vowel points and the accents in the hand, with the masorah in the margins above, below and beside the writing – the great masorah recording the occurrences of words and their forms so that a copyist can verify his work against it, and the small masorah marking the forms as they appear in the running text. The masorah is not a commentary. It is a control system, and it turns the codex from an isolated act of copying into a node in a chain of verification. When ha-Nagid set about copying such a book he was entering into a practice that had been running for four centuries and that would run for another six, and what the Iberian masoretes inherited was the practice rather than the man.<\/p>\n
Set beside the Iberian masorah, ha-Nagid’s work raises the question the rest of this essay answers. He was a product of the Arabic-speaking scholarly world of the Andalusi caliphate, and his masoretic competence was exercised there, in a court and in a lexicon, and not in the Tiberian tradition whose findings the masorah itself records. The masorah that Portugal’s scribes wrote into their Bibles was not his and not his school’s. It was the work of the masoretes of Tiberias, most of all of Aaron ben Asher in the tenth century, and it reached Iberia by a long westward route, carried as a fixed apparatus in the margins of a text. Ha-Nagid shows what a masorete’s scholarship was for in the broadest sense – the preservation of the received text, in the hands of men who understood that the text was a thing that could be lost. But the masorah of Iberia was a vessel carrying an eastern cargo, and the vessel was made of Iberian paper, Iberian leather and Iberian law.<\/p>\n
It is worth holding that image, because the argument of the sections that follow depends on it. A western port is not the same thing as a western origin. Portugal received the masorah, kept it, and copied it with a fidelity that is still measurable four and a half centuries later. And then, for reasons that were legal and fiscal rather than theological, it found itself unable to keep the cargo at all. What follows traces the building of the vessel, its loading, and its dispersal, and asks at each stage what the law of the land did to the shape of the book.<\/p>\n
The scale of the Portuguese book trade has to be measured against what survives inside the country, and the measurement is stark. Tiago Moita’s inventory of Hebrew manuscripts in Portuguese public libraries and state archives, the first comprehensive one ever made, finds exactly twenty-three manuscripts and fragments. Almost all were produced in the Iberian Peninsula between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and they are distributed across the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, the Biblioteca P\u00fablica Municipal do Porto, the Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, the Biblioteca P\u00fablica de \u00c9vora, the Pa\u00e7o Ducal at Vila Vi\u00e7osa, the Biblioteca P\u00fablica dos A\u00e7ores at Ponta Delgada and the Torre do Tombo. That figure is not a measure of Portuguese scribal poverty. It is a measure of what four centuries of confiscation, hiding and dispersal left behind, and the two facts must be kept apart.<\/p>\n
The fragments themselves tell the story more clearly than any generalisation would. In Coimbra the Biblioteca Geral da Universidade holds a Deuteronomy fragment, in Ashkenazi square script, belonging to a fourteenth-century German manuscript (Cofre 1 and Caixa B 12) – a small piece of the international traffic in Hebrew books of which Iberia was a part, caught in a Portuguese binding. The Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal preserves illuminated codices (Iluminado 72 and Iluminado 3) and further manuscripts among Cod. 13490 and Cod. 11676. In \u00c9vora the surviving items include codices from the CXXIV and CXXV series (CXXIV\/2-47d, CXXIV\/2-48d, CXXV\/2-14) and a Gaveta 8. At Vila Vi\u00e7osa the Pa\u00e7o Ducal holds Hebrew volume XIV. In Porto the Biblioteca P\u00fablica Municipal preserves manuscripts from the Santa Cruz collection (Ms. Santa Cruz 63) and others (MS-FA-14, Ms. 98, Ms. 105), and at Ponta Delgada the Biblioteca P\u00fablica dos A\u00e7ores holds Cofre 270 Res. A manuscript of the Pentateuch with the masorah in the margin is now British Library Add. 20747. And the Torre do Tombo holds the documentary residue of the community’s legal life: the charters of the chancery of Dinis I, the collection of cartas, the Corpo Cronol\u00f3gico<\/em>, and the cartulary of the cathedral of Lamego. Those are not biblical codices. They are the paper of the fiscal state, and they are the reason the other paper cannot be understood on its own.<\/p>\n At the head of what the copying industry produced stands a manuscript known as the Sefer he-Aruk, copied at Seia in 1284-85. It is the anchor piece of the late medieval Portuguese school, the starting point of the study that became Moita’s dissertation at the Faculty of Letters in Lisbon in 2017, and the object that gives the phrase Escola de Lisboa its meaning: a school of Hebrew illumination that produced books of a recognisable kind, with a carpet page, a programme of painted headpieces, and a masorah worked into the margin. The journal has already treated the Lisbon Bible and the Portuguese school of Hebrew illumination at length, and it has treated biblical micrography and the masorah figurata at length, so it would be idle to re-narrate those objects here. What is needed in their place is the question of what the school was for.<\/p>\n The answer is that it was an industry, and that the masorah was its machinery. The masorah magna, written in the upper and lower margins, and the masorah parva, in the outer margin beside the text, are not ornament. They are a control system. The great masorah records, word by word and form by form, every place in which a given word occurs in the Bible, so that a copyist can check his work by counting rather than by understanding; the small masorah marks the occurrences of forms and spellings in the running text. The apparatus is what makes a codex verifiable. A scribe working from an exemplar without it is copying at the limit of his memory; a scribe working with it is copying against a checksum. And a checksum, unlike memory, is transmissible: it can be carried from one copy to the next, generation to generation, without the text decaying in the way that unguarded texts decay.<\/p>\n This is the technical heart of the Iberian contribution, and it is easy to miss because the margin looks like an aesthetic choice. It is not. The Iberian masorah is an apparatus of control, and the Iberian codices that carry it are nodes in a chain through which the received text could be checked rather than merely repeated. That is the difference between a tradition that preserves a text and a tradition that copies one. It is also why the masorah in the margin of a Portuguese codex is not the same object as the masorah in the margin of an Italian or an Ashkenazi codex of the same century: it is the same method applied under different legal conditions, to different materials, for different readers, in a country where the entire community was a fiscal unit and where the books it produced were, from the beginning, potentially evidence.<\/p>\n The paradox of survival is worth stating plainly. Portugal’s production was substantial, and its survival on Portuguese soil is minimal. The codices are in London, where the Lisbon Bible is preserved as British Library Or 2522-2525; the deluxe Hebrew Bibles of the Spanish crown are in Madrid at the Biblioteca Nacional de Espa\u00f1a and in the Escorial; and the great Iberian codices that stand beside the Lisbon Bible in the history of the masorah are not in Portugal either. Any comparison of Portuguese survival against that of other countries is therefore a statement about the Inquisition’s dispersal and not about the fertility of Portuguese scriptoria, and the distinction should be made early, because the two readings point in opposite directions and only one of them is a fact about manuscripts.<\/p>\n On 30 June 1487, in the Jewish quarter of Faro, Samuel Gacon – also known as Samuel Porteira – finished the first book ever printed in Portugal. It was the Pentateuch: square Hebrew type with the vowel points but without the accents, set from Spanish manuscript predecessors, in types cut by the converso Joannes Escribano. It was the only complete copy, printed on vellum, that carried the masorah in the margin at all, and the journal has already followed that single volume through its bindings, its marginalia and the extraordinary legend of the English raid that never happened. There is no need to repeat that account. What matters here is the legal shape of the enterprise that produced it, because the printing press is where the fiscal state and the scribal tradition collide most directly.<\/p>\n Print changes what a legal regime can do to a text. A manuscript is unique, and a unique object can be hidden, burned, or carried over a border in a saddlebag; its loss is a single loss. A printed edition is a factory product with a fixed capital cost – the type, the press, the formes – and it can be multiplied. That multiplication is precisely what makes it attractive to a crown: a press in Faro is a source of tax, a source of employment, a source of copyright, and an object of surveillance that can be seized in one action. It is also, from the point of view of a tradition devoted to a single received text, an instrument of enormous leverage. Once the Pentateuch can be set in type, the question of which manuscript is the exemplar becomes a question of which witness gets to be the standard. That is the question the rest of the Iberian story turns on.<\/p>\n The sequence of Portuguese Hebrew printing is short and violent. After Faro in 1487 came Lisbon in 1489, where Eliezer Toledano printed Nahmanides’ commentary on the Torah in mid-July of that year, the second book produced in Portugal. From 1489 into the 1490s the press shifted to Leiria, where Toledano continued to work. In 1496 came Zacuto’s Almanach Perpetuum<\/em>, printed in parallel Latin and Spanish versions in a Hebrew house – the first case of a book in a vernacular language being produced in a Hebrew press, and the first Hebrew-printed book with a Latin counterpart. Also from 1496 comes the Faro imprint of a series of Talmudic tractates, including Gittin<\/em> and Berakhot<\/em>. This is the shape of the enterprise as it ended: an astronomical table in two vernaculars for navigators, and a set of legal works for a community about to be dissolved.<\/p>\n Those last books are also the best case study in how Portuguese printing history has to be reconstructed, because their colophons do not say what the older literature said they said. Shlomo Pereira established that the Faro colophons had been long misattributed, and that the discovery of a Faro colophon inside a sixteenth-century Italian binding proved the provenance beyond reasonable doubt while leaving the date of completion and the identity of the printer uncertain. The lesson generalises. A press that closed suddenly leaves behind type, forme-fragments, bindings, and a colophon in the wrong book. Portuguese printing history is, to a large extent, an archaeology of misfiled pieces, and the uncertainty is not a defect of the record but a fact about what happens to a working industry when the law closes it down.<\/p>\n The closure was legal, and it was fast. The expulsion decree of 30 April 1496 ordered the departure of the Jews from Portugal by the end of October 1497, though in practice the deadline was pressed forward and most of the community had gone before the autumn of 1497. Whatever the precise sequence, the presses stopped and the printers left, carrying their equipment and their expertise with them – the trade in knowledge proved far more durable than the metal. Judah Gedaliah, who had worked in the Lisbon shop, took the Lisbon material to Salonica and founded the first Hebrew press there. The exports of Portugal’s book trade after 1497 were people, and they took the trade with them.<\/p>\n Looked at in this way, the loss of 1497 was not one event but two, and they have to be kept apart. The first was the dispersal of the manuscripts, which was a slow process of confiscation, concealment, purchase and emigration over a generation, and which had begun long before 1496. The second was the destruction of the productive capacity, the presses and the type, which was instantaneous and irreversible. The manuscripts could be recovered, and a great many were, by the people who carried them out. The presses could not be replaced, because a press requires capital, a licence and a community with the security to invest in a fixed asset, and Portugal had by 1497 none of the three. This is the difference between a country that loses its libraries and a country that loses its ability to print, and the second is the more serious, and it is the one that Portugal suffered.<\/p>\n The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 sent a religious migration northwards into a country whose crown had spent two centuries taxing the very population now arriving at its border. Castilian and Aragonese Jews crossed into Portugal in 1492 and 1493 and settled in Lisbon, Porto and Faro, and their arrival strengthened precisely the community the Portuguese crown had been trying to diminish. The refugees brought manuscripts, they brought skills, and they brought a religious identity that was now sharpened by the experience of expulsion rather than blunted by it. It is a common feature of the Iberian story that persecution produced a hardening, and it is worth keeping that in mind when the decree of 1496 arrives: the communities it addressed had just been reinforced by the arrival of the most committed Jews in Iberia.<\/p>\n The decree of expulsion of 30 April 1496 ordered the departure of the Jews from the kingdom by the end of October of the following year. The exception, or rather the alternative, was conversion. In practice, and in the space of a few months, the crown converted an expulsion into a forced baptism: those who would not leave would be baptised, and the baptism was to be administered without their consent. The campaign that began with the children in June 1497 and widened through the summer was the practical instrument of that policy, and it was carried out by the crown, by the municipal authorities and by the parish clergy acting together, which is to say by the ordinary machinery of government rather than by any extraordinary tribunal. That distinction matters, because it explains why the episode is so sparsely documented in legal terms and so densely documented in narrative ones.<\/p>\n The best-known episode in the narrative is the gathering at Tagilde, near \u00d3bidos, in the estuary, where a crowd of unbaptised children and their families were brought together in the second half of 1497. What is attested in the literature is the assembly and the pressure brought to bear upon it. What is legendary is the drowning: the story of the boats that were refused and the children cast into the water belongs to the martyrological tradition of the Iberian middle ages and to the ancient motif of the Children of the King, in which a king’s children are martyred miraculously and their blood avenges them. It is a construction of the martyrologio tradition, and it is best read as one. The date of October 1497 sometimes attached to the episode should be treated with corresponding caution; the second half of 1497 is the safer formulation.<\/p>\n This is the point at which the sources have to be handled with unusual care, and the disagreement is instructive. The Encyclopaedia Judaica<\/em> article on forced baptism, by Cecil Roth, states flatly that in Portugal in 1496 and 1497 practically the whole of the considerable Jewish community of the country were hounded into Christianity by actual violence or were baptised forcibly notwithstanding their protests. The same article contrasts this with the general Iberian pattern, where perhaps the majority of the insincere conversions were not the immediate result of actual violence. On Roth’s reading, Portugal is the exception, and it is an exception of method. Many modern specialists are less certain, and they are divided on three separate questions: whether the children consented in any meaningful sense to what was done to them, how large the number of deaths was, and whether the edict of 1496 was executed with systematic violence or with sustained and indiscriminate pressure that was not, in every case, lethal. The honest position is to attribute Roth’s reading to Roth, to present the medieval narrative sources – the Lisbon communal chronicle material, the Shemot Devarim<\/em> and Darkhei Emet<\/em> tradition, the responsa – as claimants rather than as a record, and to state that the death toll is unknown.<\/p>\n What is not in dispute is the legal condition of the survivors. A New Christian, a converso<\/em>, was liable to the auto-da-f\u00e9 and to the re-baptism of his children; the children of converts were made liable in their turn, so that the machinery reproduced itself. A community that had been taxed for centuries for the privilege of keeping the Torah was now required to profess a faith it had been charged with not keeping, and the price of refusal was the loss of property, of status and of the protection of the law. This is the moment at which the legal condition of the people and the legal condition of the book come apart. Before 1496 a Hebrew Bible in Portugal was protected by the privileges of the juderia and constrained by them. After 1496 it was neither protected nor merely constrained. It was evidence.<\/p>\n The \u00e9migr\u00e9s of 1497 to 1506 went in several directions – the Ottoman Empire, Italy, North Africa and the Netherlands – and they carried the books with them. Among them was Do\u00f1a Gracia Nasi, the daughter of a converso banking family and the widow of the Mendes bank, who died a Jew at Ferrara and whose name will return, in a rather different guise, as the dedicatee of the most famous Bible printed for New Christians. That is the thread that runs out of this section and into the next: the communities that could no longer be public in Portugal became a market abroad, and the market had its own books.<\/p>\n The Portuguese Inquisition was established in 1536, and its Lisbon tribunal began to hold auto-da-f\u00e9 proceedings in 1540; the Goa tribunal followed, its first auto-da-f\u00e9 in 1560, and the Coimbra tribunal completed a triangular structure of Portuguese religious jurisdiction that reached around the world. The institution is usually described as an engine of persecution, and it was one. But it was also, in a way that its enemies understood better than its friends, an economy. A tribunal that ran on denunciation, on confiscated property, on reconciliations and on the remission of penalties required a constant supply of the accused, and the accused were manufactured, in part, by the continued existence of the communities that had been forced to convert in 1496-97. The Portuguese New Christians were not the residue of a persecution. They were the raw material of a second one, and the book trade that supplied them is one of the oddest commercial structures in the history of the written word.<\/p>\n The mechanics of the auto-da-f\u00e9 are well documented, and they matter here because they are the mechanics of a paper economy. The denunciation – the dela\u00e7\u00e3o<\/em> – was an instrument of state, but it was also an instrument of private settlement, and the sources show communities paying for it. Informants traded in accusations; the accused paid reconciliation penalties; the penalties went to the crown, the tribunal and its dependents; and the whole business was operated by families such as the Fonsecas and the Mascarenhas, whose control of the inquisitorial courts in the sixteenth century made the tribunals, in effect, commercial concerns operating with the full authority of the crown. The meios do perd\u00e3o<\/em>, the conditions of partial remission that placed a penitent in a status of permanent legal disability, completed the mechanism: the convert who was reconciled was a man who could never quite stand up in his own community again.<\/p>\n Into this system the Hebrew book entered as contraband of a particularly dangerous kind. Rabbinic literature was forbidden – the Talmud, the Shulchan Aruch<\/em>, the Zohar<\/em> and the bulk of the rabbinic corpus – and the trials in Lisbon, \u00c9vora and Coimbra are full of discoveries of hidden Hebrew books. The scale of the confiscations was such that King Manuel appointed agents to seize every Hebrew book in the country, as Elijah Capsali records, and Rabbi Abraham Sabba, known as the Tzror ha-Mor, was imprisoned for six months for trying to recover manuscripts he had himself buried. The concealment of the books was correspondingly inventive. Codices were disbound and sewn into Christian bindings; they were left in convent libraries, where a Hebrew manuscript among the Latin folios of a Franciscan cellar would take years to be found and might never be looked at; they were carried in the packs of people who left, and they were, above all, taught by mouth, from memory, in houses where a Hebrew page read aloud to a child was itself an act of resistance.<\/p>\n That last is the point where the masoretic tradition becomes clandestine in a way that changes its transmission. The teacher who re-educated Jewish children in the Hebrew letters and in the practice of the religion was known to the community by a Hebrew term of its own, the hamorim<\/em>, and the use of that word matters. It is not a formal office but a descriptive label drawn from internal usage, a cipher for a category of person that the Inquisition’s own vocabulary also had to invent. The clandestine teacher had no manuscript. He had memory, and the traditional grammar of reading, and the sequences of the accent system transmitted by ear, because that is how a tradition survives the loss of its apparatus. Where the masorah in the margin is a checksum, the oral masorah is the checksum kept in the head of a man who is committing a crime by keeping it.<\/p>\n Two names from this world are securely attested and both of them belong in the argument. Isaac Abravanel, whose Hebrew commentaries and whose diplomatic career made him the indispensable hinge between Iberian exegesis and Christian patronage, is the figure through whom the tradition was carried into the courts of the Italian peninsula and the Ottoman world; he was a man who wrote for both audiences, and who knew exactly what the law of his own country would do to a Hebrew book. And Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adonijah, who moved from Tunis to Venice, is the figure through whom the masorah was made into a printed apparatus and thereby carried into the whole of European printing. Neither man is a Portuguese, and that is precisely the point. The Portuguese contribution was made by Portuguese-trained people who could not make it at home.<\/p>\n It is worth being precise about what is meant here, because the phrase hidden books can slide into sentiment. The crypto-Jewish economy of the Portuguese book trade was not a romance. It was a system in which concealment, denunciation, confiscation and clandestine teaching operated on one another, in which the survival of a Hebrew text often depended on a Christian monk’s indifference, and in which the same household might be the keeper of a Bible and the supplier of an informer. Jos\u00e9 Faur’s typology of the four classes of converso – ranging from those who continued to live as Jews in secret, through those who converted outwardly and practised inwardly, to those who converted and then informed against their own community – demonstrates that the moral categories of crypto-Jew and sincere convert do not map neatly onto the evidence. Isra\u00e9l Salvator R\u00e9vah’s study of the Marranes<\/em> is the classic account of the same terrain from the European side, and the Portuguese tribunal’s files are among the fullest surviving records of it. The catalogue of the Lisbon tribunal’s papers is one of the instruments by which that material is now being worked, and G\u00e9rard Nahon’s survey of the literature on Portuguese inquisitorial practice remains the standard scholarly map, and its shape is that of a machine that ran for two centuries.<\/p>\n Solomon ibn Verga wrote his chronicle in the 1520s, in the last years of his life in Italy, and the work survives at Vat. ebr. 390, ff. 58r-84v, in a composite codex in the Vatican Library. It is the text known as the She’elot u-Mivhar<\/em> – the questions and the choice, also known as the Shevet Yehudah<\/em> – and it was printed in the sixteenth century under the title Mivhar ha-Mivharim<\/em>, the choice of the choices, in 1554, possibly at Adrianople; it was prepared for the press by his son Joseph ibn Verga. The Vatican catalogue flags the section of the composite manuscript that carries the She’elot<\/em> as the longer version of the work. That shelfmark is worth stating precisely, because the chronicle is one of the most frequently misattributed documents in this field: the other famous Vatican Hebrew manuscript, Vat. ebr. 448, is a Pentateuch with the Targum Onkelos in three columns, with the Babylonian vocalisation later changed to Tiberian punctuation, and it has nothing whatever to do with Ibn Verga.<\/p>\n Ibn Verga’s book is a work of history written as a series of theological disputations, and the form is the argument. The chapters put a question to a named authority – a rabbi, a philosopher, a Christian theologian – and the answers, assembled from the Jewish sources available in Iberia and North Africa, become a history of the community from the earliest times to the author’s own day. Ibn Verga’s sources were substantial: the Josippon<\/em>, the ninth-century chronicle; Ibn Daud’s Sefer ha-Kabbalah<\/em>, the book of tradition; Nathan ha-Bavli; the letters of Maimonides; the chronicle of Profiat Duran; and the work of Isaac Abravanel. And in his preface Ibn Verga warns his reader that of the disputations he sets down, some are authentic and others imaginary. The warning is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the admission of a man who knows that he is writing the record of a catastrophe out of a memory that has already been damaged, and who is telling the reader in advance how much weight the record can bear.<\/p>\n Ibn Verga’s own trajectory is the best single case study in the essay, because it walks the entire arc of Portuguese Jewish history in a single life. In 1487 he was sent to M\u00e1laga to ransom captives taken in the war, which is how he came to be in Andalusia at the moment that Spain was turning. He settled in Lisbon on the expulsion from Spain in 1492. From 1497 he lived as a converso, one of those who, in the phrase preserved in the responsa, did not come under the waters. He was permitted to leave in 1506, and by the 1520s he was in Rome. That sequence – a man sent by his community to negotiate for its captives, who then watched its dissolution, who then wrote it down abroad – is the shape of the Portuguese chronicle tradition as a whole.<\/p>\n The second tradition is the Ibn Yahyas of Lisbon. David ibn Yahya died in 1543, and his son Joseph ibn Yahya was the chronicler of the Lisbon community and the author of the Darkhei Emet<\/em>, the deeds of truth, also cited as the Shemot Devarim<\/em>, the names of the words, a sixteenth-century chronicle that is the anchor of the community’s self-narration. The Latin translation of the work and the manuscript shelfmarks of its witnesses require verification and are not asserted here; what can be said securely is that the chronicle survives in a number of manuscripts, that it was printed in the seventeenth century, and that its preface on the destruction of the community and the danger of forgetting makes it the founding document of the Portuguese Jews’ account of themselves.<\/p>\n These chronicles circulated in manuscript for a long time and then, once the communities they described had settled abroad, they circulated in print. Their Latin translations, made for readers who could not use the Hebrew script, are the instruments of their wider reputation, and the identity of those translators and the shelfmarks of the manuscripts behind them require more verification than can be offered here. What can be said is that the tradition was read, and read as history, well outside the circle for which it was written, and that the shape of the Portuguese catastrophe entered the European imagination as a set of images that have never entirely gone away: the galley rather than the synagogue, and the boat that was refused. The second of these is legend rather than event, and the legend is itself evidence – a community that could not preserve its books preserved its grief in a story, and told the story so well that it outran the facts.<\/p>\n The genre as a whole deserves the name it usually gets. Iberian Jewish historiography of this period is response rather than record. The premise of the Darkhei Emet<\/em> and of Ibn Verga’s She’elot<\/em> is a premise of loss: the community has lost everything – its schools, its courts, its presses, its quarter, its books – and therefore it writes, because writing is the only form of preservation still open to it. That is the same logic that governs the masorah itself, inverted. The masorah exists because a text might be lost and might be corrupted, and it therefore keeps a redundant record of everything the text says so that the redundancy can be checked. The chronicle exists because a people might be lost, and it therefore keeps a redundant record of everything that happened to them so that the event can be checked. Both are instruments of survival against loss, and both are, in the end, acts of fidelity to something that the writer believes has been destroyed.<\/p>\n The most instructive Portuguese book of the sixteenth century is not a Hebrew book at all. It is a Bible in Spanish, printed in gothic type in the Latin alphabet, with no Hebrew column anywhere in it – and that absence is the whole argument. Its full title says exactly what it claims to be: Biblia en lengua espa\u00f1ola traduzida palabra por palabra de la verdad hebrayca<\/em>, the Bible in the Spanish language, translated word for word from the Hebrew truth. It was produced at Ferrara by Abraham Usque, known in Iberia as Duarte Pinel, working with Yom-Tob Athias, known as \u00c1lvaro de Vargas, and it appeared in two issues: one dedicated to Do\u00f1a Gracia Nasi and dated 14 Adar 5313, and one dedicated to Ercole II d’Este and dated 1 March 1553. The journal has published the Ferrara Bible at length already; what is needed here is not its bibliography but its logic, because the logic is the logic of the legal condition of the book in Portugal.<\/p>\n The logic is this. The text is the Masoretic text. Its division into chapters and verses follows the Hebrew rather than the Latin, and its versification follows the Masoretic system rather than the Vulgate’s, so that the scripture a reader is given is in the arrangement the masoretes laid down, in the sequence of books that the Hebrew codices carry. What has changed is the script. A New Christian in Ferrara, in Amsterdam or in Antwerp might be able to read Spanish and might not be able to read Hebrew characters at all, and might in any case be unable to own a Hebrew book in a country where owning one was evidence. Set the text in Latin type and the same book becomes legible to a reader who has been excluded from the script as well as from the faith. The Ferrara Bible is, in this precise sense, a masoretic text in a legal costume that the masorah itself could not have worn.<\/p>\n The comparison that makes the point sharpest is with the other model available at the time. Eliezer Soncino’s Constantinople Pentateuch of 1547 sets the Hebrew text with the Targum Onkelos and parallel versions in Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Greek, all in Hebrew characters – the classic model of the Hebrew-column Bible, in which the reader who can read Hebrew reads in Hebrew and the reader who cannot uses the vernacular column and the commentary around it. The Ferrara Bible rejects that architecture. It has no Hebrew column because in the circumstances of its production a Hebrew column was not needed and was not safe. Two presses, both serving Sephardic populations displaced from Iberia, both working from the received Hebrew text, and they made opposite decisions about script.<\/p>\n The afterlife of the Ferrara Bible was long and its afterlives were numerous. It was reprinted in Amsterdam from 1611, and those Amsterdam reprints are the reason the book is known at all. Its printing history has been revised: S. S. Rypins collated forty-nine copies in the 1950s and argued against the older account, which held that there were two distinct versions made for two distinct audiences. That older account has not held, and the better view is the one that ties the Latin script to the converso reader. Moshe Lazar produced the critical edition in 1992 and the facsimile in 1996, and the book made its way into the great vernacular tradition of Spanish Protestantism through Casiodoro de Reina’s Biblia Reina-Valera of 1569, which was itself printed in Basel and drew on the Ferrara tradition. In that sense the Masoretic text of the Iberian masorah entered the Spanish language through a route that ran through the diaspora, through Italy, through the Netherlands and through Basel, and never once through a Portuguese press.<\/p>\n There is a further loss in the transposition that is easy to miss and worth naming. Hebrew vowel points and accents are not decorative marks; they are a reading technology. They put the pronunciation on the page, and they record the musical grammar of the cantillation, and a Hebrew Bible without them is a consonantal skeleton that only a trained reader can negotiate. The Ferrara Bible, set in gothic type in the Latin alphabet, is a Bible without the apparatus that made it performable: no pointing, no accents, and the masorah reduced at best to the notes that a Latin-script reader could use. The Hebrew division and versification are retained, because those are structural, but the material that made the text sing has been set aside in favour of script. That is what a translation under duress looks like from the inside: the Masoretic text carried in the one form the law will allow.<\/p>\n There is a further irony in the Ferrara Bible’s Spanish language, and it belongs to the argument of this essay. The Spanish of the Ferrara Bible is a Spanish that was spoken by a community which had been taxed, baptised, denounced and dispersed. The language survived the people; the Hebrew script did not survive them in the same place. A Hebrew Bible in Portugal in 1500 was a dangerous object. A Spanish Bible printed in Ferrara for New Christians abroad was a commercial product, and the Portuguese contribution to it was a matter of people, training and capital rather than of printing. This is the shape of the contribution that the rest of the essay describes: Portugal produced masoretes, and the masoretes went elsewhere to do their work.<\/p>\n The strongest claim Portugal can make to the received Hebrew Bible is not a manuscript but a printed apparatus, and it was made by a man who was not Portuguese. Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adonijah was born in Tunis, the great Sephardic port of the western Mediterranean, and settled in Venice, where he worked for Daniel Bomberg. His Second Rabbinic Bible, printed in 1524 and 1525, was the first printed division of the Hebrew Bible into ketiv<\/em> and qeri<\/em>, the written and the read forms; it was the first printed Bible to separate the masorah parva and the masorah magna from the text and to arrange them as a real apparatus; and its masorah became the basis of the marginal masorah of the standard printed Hebrew Bible, which is to say that a reader of a printed Bible in almost any language, in any century since, has been reading a Portuguese-descended apparatus. Geoffrey Khan’s study of the edition establishes these things, and it establishes something else, more uncomfortable and more interesting, at the same time.<\/p>\n For a century and more the received account of the masorah at the end of a codex or a printed Bible – the material conventionally called the masorah finalis – was that it reproduced a second, ancient masoretic source, distinct from the Ben Asher material carried in the margins, and that this second source could be traced to an Iberian exemplar. The view descends from Wickes and it had the great merit of being wrong in an interesting way. On the evidence now assembled by Khan, the masorah finalis is not the witness of a lost codex. It is a sixteenth-century compilation, drawn in its great bulk from the Sefer Okhlah we-Okhlah<\/em> and its related rabbinic compilations, and the second ancient masorah is not there to be recovered. The labels themselves are part of the problem: as Khan’s work makes explicit, the terms masorah magna and masorah finalis are in much modern writing terminological misnomers for material arranged at the top and bottom of a codex or at the end of a printed Bible. They are labels rather than designations of distinct textual layers, and they should be used as such, once and with that understanding, and then used freely.<\/p>\n What survives of the Iberian connection is real, but it is a different kind of connection, and stating it correctly matters more than preserving the older version of it. The Iberian masorah is a faithful western descendant of the tradition of Ben Asher of Tiberias, transmitted west and copied with great fidelity; it is not the source of anything lost. And the Iberian codices – the deluxe Hebrew Bibles of the Spanish crown in the Escorial and at Madrid, the Lisbon Bible now in London – are evidence about the state of the masorah in the fifteenth century. Compared with the Aleppo Codex, the great Ben Asher witness, and with the Leningrad Codex, they allow us to see precisely where Jacob ben Hayyim’s printed text departs from Ben Asher and where it follows Iberian readings instead. The Iberian codices are the evidence for the fifteenth-century state of the masorah. They are not the source of a lost seventh-century text, and the difference between those two statements is the difference between a real and a phantom tradition.<\/p>\n The physical argument for Iberian masoretic fidelity is the manuscript known as the Escorial Bible, which is MS G.II.8 of the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. It is the deluxe liturgical Hebrew Bible of 1482, with a carpet page, painted headpieces and a micrographic masorah worked into the margins. It was the reference copy used in the preparation of the Complutensian Polyglot, printed at Alcal\u00e1 de Henares between 1514 and 1517, and thence, through the Antwerp Polyglot, into the Biblia Regia of Antwerp of 1568-72, the great eight-volume royal Bible that carried the Iberian text into the heart of European printing. Its marginal notes in red ink are commonly attributed to Alfonso de Zamora, though that attribution is scholarly inference rather than a statement made in the book itself, and it should be given as an attribution. One shelfmark has to be corrected here, because it is a common error: MS I.i.8 of the same library is not a masoretic codex at all. It is one of the two volumes of the Castilian Biblia romanceada<\/em>, the Pre-Alfonsine Bible translated from the Vulgate, and belongs with I.i.6.<\/p>\n What remains genuinely open, and what Khan’s volume is the current state of, is the question of degree. It is broadly agreed that the Iberian masorah descends from the Ben Asher tradition by way of the east. What is contested is how far Jacob ben Hayyim’s printed text follows the Iberian codices against the Ben Asher tradition as transmitted, and how far the Aleppo and Leningrad codices should displace the Iberian witnesses in the reconstruction of the text. Philip Phillips’s initial report on the masoretic notes in the manuscript RNL Evr II B 80+ is a case in point: an Iberian codex whose masorah is now being collated line by line against the printed tradition, so that the question of Iberian influence on the printed text can be asked with evidence rather than with confidence. The answer is not yet in, and an essay that pretended otherwise would be doing the field a disservice.<\/p>\n There is a further afterlife, and it is the one that makes the Iberian masorah a continuing rather than a finished business. The Sephardic communities that carried the Iberian masorah out of Iberia and into Amsterdam rebuilt the book trade there, with the Amsterdam Hebrew presses and the houses of Proops and Athias at their centre, the Ferrara Bible’s Amsterdam reprints from 1611 among their products, and the “Portuguese Hebrew types” circulating through a market that was, in the first half of the seventeenth century, the capital of the Hebrew book trade in the world. From Amsterdam the Iberian masorah travelled east again, carried by the Sephardic Jerusalem ideal that had been forming since the sixteenth century and that found its centres in Safed and in Jerusalem, where the Iberian masorah became the local tradition and where the Ottoman printed Hebrew Bible tradition began. The same masorah, the same apparatus, the same habit of the checksum in the margin, moving west and then east again, carried by the people who had been forced to carry it.<\/p>\n On 5 December 1996, five hundred years to the day after the expulsion, the synagogue of Lisbon hosted a commemorative service that brought together a community which had, for most of the previous five centuries, existed only as a memory in other people’s books. Ren\u00e9-Samuel Sirat’s account of that ceremony is a modest and moving document, and its significance is larger than the occasion. A people who had been expelled had marked the anniversary of their own expulsion in the synagogue they had been expelled from, and the synagogue was standing, and there were people in it.<\/p>\n The material inheritance had come home first, and its recovery is a story with unresolved details. The surviving records of the Lisbon synagogue – its registers, its accounts, the administrative paper of a community that was itself an arm of the crown’s fiscal apparatus – were located and catalogued in the later decades of the twentieth century, a recovery whose precise chronology and circumstances have never been fully reconstructed and which remains a subject of archival work rather than of settled history. This is worth stating as a methodological point rather than as a reproach. The Portuguese story is one in which the paper outran the record, in which the *juiveries* were physically dismantled while their contents were dispersed, and in which the survival of any given document was a matter of accidents of hiding, purchase, neglect and the changing priorities of institutions. A community that has been present on Portuguese soil, in however attenuated a form, for five hundred years after having been expelled from it, is doing the same work as the chroniclers and as Jacob ben Hayyim: the work of reassembly.<\/p>\n The descendants of the Lisbon community who had settled in Palestine and later returned to Portugal, the group generally known as the Lishbonenses, completed that return in the 1990s, some of them settling in towns such as Belmonte and Coimbra that had their own Portuguese Jewish histories. The date of the beginning of that movement and the precise pattern of individual settlements are matters on which the surviving accounts differ, and it is safer to describe the phenomenon than to date it too precisely. What is certain is the shape of it: a community that had left a country in a hurry in 1497 and had spent five centuries in the cities of the Ottoman Mediterranean, in Italy and in the Netherlands came back to the capital it had been expelled from, and found that the synagogue was there, and that the archive was there, and that the Hebrew books had been carried out rather than burned, and that some of them had come back too.<\/p>\n It is worth remembering what it is that came back. The synagogue of Lisbon, with its Torah scrolls and its lamps and its books of the Prophets, is a working building and not a museum piece, and the community that uses it is not a reconstruction of a community that ended in 1497 but a body of people who came from elsewhere and have built a life in the city their ancestors left. The twentieth-century return therefore repeats, in a quiet key, the sixteenth-century dispersion: a centre is made, and it is made elsewhere, and it is made by people who carry with them the books and the habits of the place they have left. What is different in the late twentieth century is only that this time the movement runs towards Portugal, and the books are not being smuggled out of a country that has made them illegal but gathered as a heritage by a country that has begun, slowly, to make room for them.<\/p>\n The Sephardic Jerusalem ideal gave that return its meaning. For centuries the Iberian communities had understood themselves as belonging to Jerusalem even while living in Lisbon or Amsterdam or Salonica; the longing was a theology of exile with a fixed address, and it was carried as an institutional fact in the form of the synagogue, the cemetery, the school and the hebra. The city that the Sephardic Jerusalem ideal made real was Safed, and then Jerusalem itself, where the Iberian masorah became the local tradition and where the Ottoman printed Hebrew Bible took shape. What the twentieth century saw was the strange inversion of that pattern. The centre had moved to the east and the periphery had come back to the west, and the descendants of the people who had carried the masorah out of Portugal in 1497 brought it back in the closing decades of the twentieth century, as a heritage rather than as a burden.<\/p>\n Which brings the essay back to its spine. Portugal’s contribution to the received Hebrew Bible is a dispersed contribution, and the dispersal is not a failure of the tradition but its condition; the manuscripts are in London, Madrid, Rome and Paris, the printing is in the hands of an Italian house, the standardised apparatus was compiled by a Tunisian Jew in Venice out of materials that were partly Iberian, and the chronicle of the community was written in Rome by a man who had been sent to M\u00e1laga to ransom captives. Almost nothing of it is in Portugal. The work of the new community is to reassemble the record, and that is precisely the operation Jacob ben Hayyim performed on the masorah in Venice when he gathered the dispersed notes of the Tiberian tradition into a single apparatus, and precisely the operation Ibn Verga performed on the memory of the community when he wrote down a history of a people who had lost everything. The masorah was always this: not a decoration on the margin of a text, but a machine for checking that a text had not been lost, built by people who knew what loss was made of, and transmitted by people who had every reason to believe it would be their own.<\/p>\n There is a paradox at the centre of the Portuguese story, and it is a paradox about books rather than about people. For roughly four centuries, from the middle of the twelfth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":919,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[829,821,45,820,825,828,827,34,822,826,824],"class_list":["post-918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-places-communities","tag-expulsion","tag-faro","tag-hebrew-bible","tag-hebrew-printing","tag-ibn-verga","tag-inquisition","tag-lisbon","tag-masorah","tag-portugal","tag-samuel-ha-nagid","tag-sephardic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Printing: Gacon’s Faro, the Lisbon and Leiria Presses, and the Loss of 1497<\/h2>\n
1492-1497: Exile, the Forced Baptisms, and the Boat That Never Sank<\/h2>\n
The Inquisition, the Crypto-Jewish Economy, and the Portuguese Book Trade<\/h2>\n
The Chronicle Tradition: Ibn Verga and the Ibn Yahya Family<\/h2>\n
A Bible for the New Christians: The Ferrara Bible of 1553<\/h2>\n
The Masorah That Portugal Left Behind: Jacob ben Hayyim and the Masorah Finalis<\/h2>\n
Return: The Synagogue Archive, the Lishbonenses, and the Closing of the Circle<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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