Obj. ID: 37188
Jewish printed books  Arba'ah ve-Esrim, Basel, 1536

This text was prepared by William Gross:

Chained bindings were often used in the monastic libraries of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These bindings both protected the books and manuscripts from theft and maintained the books in their proper place on the shelves. The chained-book phenomenon has long since passed from usage and such bindings are rare. To find a Hebrew Bible from the first century of printing with its original chain binding is an extraordinary rarity and perhaps a unique occurrence.
This Bible was printed in Basel in 1536, being the second edition after the first one appeared in 1534. It is the first appearance of Sebastian Münster 's famed Bible edition presented entirely in Hebrew. The publisher Hieronymus Froben and, before him, his father Johannes, who was the first printer of Hebrew books in Switzerland, published quite a number of Hebrew books in conjunction with this great Christian humanist Hebraist. The Hebraists thought that in order to really know the Bible it was necessary to study it in its original language, and that it was not wise to depend on the translations prepared by scholars with personal interests. While these Hebrew books were thus intended primarily for a Christian Hebraist audience, the current Tanach was also intended for Jews, as demonstrated by its list of haftarot for the entire year “as per the Sephardic customs and other Jews”. The printing of Hebrew books continued through three generations of the Froben family.
Sebastian Münster (20 January 1488 – 26 May 1552), in addition to being a Hebraist, was also a cartographer and cosmographer. His work, the Cosmographia from 1544, was the earliest German description of the world.
The printer Hieronymus Froben was the son of Johannes Froben, founder of the Froben printing-house, the most significant supplier of Hebrew books in Basle. Johannes published his first Hebrew title in 1516, and continued to publish as many as 250 titles, among them Hebrew/Latin books of the Bible and grammatical works. Hieronymus inherited his father's press upon the latter's death in 1527, and passed it on to his own sons, Ambrosius and Aurelius, when he died in 1564.
Editor: Sebastian Muenster, 1488 - 1552