Sephardi Printing in the Ottoman Empire: A Workshop at the Printshop

Noam Sienna  (visiting scholar at Rutgers University) and the Yiddish Printmakers Cooperative.

A reservation is required at rsvp@primolevicenter.org – Indicate the program title in the subject line.

Explore Sephardi printing in the early modern Ottoman Empire through this interactive, hands-on workshop! Using woodblocks, hand-set type, and manual printing presses, we will attempt to replicate one of the printed texts from the press of the Ibn Nahmias family of early 16th century Constantinople. Refugees from Spain after the Expulsion of 1492, the Ibn Nahmias family established a printing house that operated until 1530: the first printing house of any kind in the Ottoman Empire, and the first, the longest-lasting, and the most productive Sephardi printing house of the early modern Mediterranean. Bringing together Dr. Sienna’s bibliographic research on the Ibn Nahmias press with embodied practice in traditional techniques of bookmaking, this workshop offers participants an experiential understanding of the development of print technology in the first century after its introduction, and the differences in its meaning in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic worlds.

The Cooperative at Bookhouse is an initiative of Sophie Edelhart, who has worked extensively with the Balinson Hebrew Type Collection as a fellow and apprentice in the Massey College Bibliography Room at the University of Toronto; Caleb Sher, who is currently working on the Yiddish type at the Yiddish Book Center; Jacob Romm, teaching assistant for a letterpress seminar at Yale University; Jay Saper, who has taught a course rooted in Jewish book arts at Middlebury College, and EJ Youcha, a private practice bookbinder and artist who trained at the North Bennet Street School. 

Noam Sienna is currently the Aresty Visiting Scholar at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, with the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and the Rutgers Initiative for the Book. He researches Jewish book cultures in the medieval and early modern Islamic worlds, and is currently working on a socio-bibliographic study of the first Hebrew press in the Ottoman Empire. He received his PhD in History and Museum Studies from the University of Minnesota, and is also a Senior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. His first monograph, Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds, appeared from Indiana University Press in 2025, and received the 2025 Book Award from the Middle East Librarians Association. He is also a practicing book artist whose work brings together historical and contemporary expressions of Jewish visual and textual culture, focusing on reviving and preserving traditions of Hebrew calligraphy and Jewish letterpress printing

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Image: Sefer Ammudeu Golah, Rabbi Isaac Ben Yosef of Corbeil, (Constantinople: Samuel Ibn Nahmias, ca. 1510)