Engraver, etcher, and draftsman Shalom Italia was, as his name indicates, from Italy, where his family worked in the Mantua printing industry. However, probably attracted by the opportunities in the growing metropolis, he made his way to Amsterdam by 1641. Among Shalom Italia’s works are illustrated ketubot (marriage contracts), book illustrations, and portraits of the community’s leading figures, such as Menasseh Ben Israel, who was the founder of Amsterdam’s first Hebrew printing press and an advocate for the readmission of Jews to England.
Born to converso parents and baptized as Manoel Dias Soeiro, Menasseh Ben
Israel moved as a boy with his family to Amsterdam, where
they reverted openly to Judaism. In 1626, he established the first…
The alphabet doesn’t have enough letters, you say, to form the names of so many inexpressible feelings, unexpressed for lack of words, and I say to you that we don’t have enough life, that too much…
Says Moses, son to my Master, my father, R. Israel—may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing for the world to come—seeing that the illustrious author [Joseph Karo] of the Bet Yosef [Th…