PSALMS WITH COMMENTARIES, EDITED BY RABBI GERSON MARGALIOT, SAFED: ISRAEL BEN ABRAHAM BAK, 1833

The first psalter printed in the Holy Land.

The book of Psalms occupies a special place in Jewish tradition as a text meant for both study and worship. The present volume combines these functions by bringing together devotional formulas for weekdays, Sabbaths, and holidays and two commentaries: Metsudat tsiyyon, an elucidation of the straightforward meaning of the words by the eighteenth-century Rabbis David and Jehiel Hillel Altschuler; and Be’urei zohar, an adaptation of Rabbi Israel ben Moses’ Sefer tamim yahdav (first edition: Lublin, 1592-1593), which cites the Zohar’s explanations of the biblical text. At the end of the volume appears seder pidyon nefesh, a short extract from Sefer likkutim yekarim (Lvov, 1792) that details a procedure meant to help the sick. A parallel, pocket-size edition of this psalter that replaces the above commentaries with that of Rabbi Hayyim Joseph David Azulai (Hida; 1724-1806) appeared at the Bak press the same year.

The period that followed would bring great challenges to Israel Bak. A peasants’ revolt in 1834, the great earthquake of 1837, and a Druze uprising in 1838 disrupted not only his printing enterprise but also his farming activity in a village near Mount Meron. Even some of the books he issued were not spared: hundreds of copies of his Psalms editions sent by ship to Izmir drowned at sea, and many more volumes were destroyed during the aforementioned rebellions. Following a short interlude in Egypt, Bak would relocate to Jerusalem, where he reestablished his publishing house and thus founded the city’s first Hebrew press.