KESEF NIVHAR (COMMENTARY ON GENESIS, EXODUS, AND LEVITICUS), RABBI JOSIAH PINTO, DAMASCUS: ABRAHAM BEN MATTATHIAS BASEVI AND ISAAC AND JACOB BENEI ABRAHAM ASHKENAZ[I], 1605-1606

The only full-length Hebrew book printed in Damascus up to modern times.

Rabbi Josiah ben Joseph Pinto (1565-1648), scion of a prominent Sephardic family, was born and spent most of his life in Damascus but also lived for a time in the Holy Land. While his principle teacher was Rabbi Jacob Abulafia (ca. 1550-ca. 1622), Pinto also learned Kabbalah from Rabbi Hayyim Vital (1543-1620). An accomplished preacher and commentator, he collected his sermons on the Torah in two volumes entitled Kesef nivhar and Kesef mezukkak. 

To publish his scholarship, Pinto engaged the services of Abraham ben Shabbetai Mattathias Basevi, who had previously helped run a printing office in Salonika, as well as those of Isaac and Jacob, sons of Abraham Ashkenazi, the famous partner in the short-lived Safed printshop (see lots 252, 253). Unfortunately, Pinto’s efforts ultimately came to naught; the fonts from the brothers Ashkenazi were apparently well worn, making the labor of printing arduous and the final product aesthetically displeasing. Pinto therefore stopped publication of Kesef nivhar after Leviticus and sent the entire book to be printed in Venice, where it finally appeared in 1621. No other full-length Hebrew book would be published in Damascus up to modern times. According to Avraham Yaari, “Damascus is the only one among the large Jewish communities of the East in which a Hebrew printshop was not established in the nineteenth century.”