Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library by Joshua Teplitsky (review)

Joshua Teplitsky's first book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library (Yale University Press, 2018), is a biography about David Oppenheim, the Chief Rabbi of Prague from 1703 until his death in 1736. The author recounts how Oppenheim's Library became the most important space for Jewish scholarship during the early modern period, as evinced by remarkably well-documented historical research.

The Library is now preserved in the Bodleian catalogue of Oxford University, and is one of the two essential Hebrew catalogues in the Bodleian—the Hyman archive being the other one. The relevance of Oppenheim's Library was recognized by the Hebrew scholars Steinschneider and Neubauer in the nineteenth century, whose descriptions of the library's contents in their catalogues have become indispensable to the specialized reader referencing Oppenheim's books and manuscripts. Nevertheless, David Oppenheim's figure as a collector has escaped the English academy's notice.

There are only two biographies on the subject: one in German by Hugo Lieben (1928) and another in Hebrew by Duschivinsky. The latter published an article for an English-language audience about David Oppenheim's life in the 1930s, which is one of the few resources available about him. The aforementioned works center only on Oppenheim's person and disregard his Library as the object that built his image as Nasi of the Land of Israel.

The Library itself was, as Teplitsky states, the means through which Oppenheim gained his reputation, and it is this which serves as the protagonist of the present biography. Considering the Library as a character is one of the book's highlights: the detailed descriptions of the life of the objects that form the Library depict the complexity of the owner's identity. Oppenheim built his voluminous collection by acquiring smaller corpuses from unfortunate families obliged to sell their books. Moreover, he traveled (or sent a proxy) to every Jewish community in order to find manuscripts and rarities for his catalogue.

The books were seen as commodities: their absorption into Oppenheim's collection reveals the central place that the culture of book ownership held during early modernity for Jewish families, which informs our understanding of the transmission of knowledge in Jewish culture. Teplitsky uses this starting point to consider Oppenheim's political position—and immense power.

Throughout the five chapters structuring the book, Teplitsky portrays the significance of book culture to the history of Jewish culture and interweaves these historic events with the story of the collector. Oppenheim's passion is described alongside his position as a central figure as Patron and Rabbi for Central European communities. Being the chief Rabbi of Prague and a member of one of the most prosperous families of the Court Jews, he offered his patronage to new authors and to the Jewish communities. He was the nephew of Samuel Oppenheim, who had financed the Habsburg Monarchy's wars, which also made him the most important of the Court Jews. David Oppenheim inherited from his uncle a vast number of books as well as his uncle's distinction, connections, and wealth.

Teplitsky delivers insights about the history and politics of books, and, by doing this, he offers the reader access to the complicated world of publishing Jewish authors during the early modern era. As Teplitsky states, this was unique to the Jewish world, due to the rabbinical approbata (haskamot). The haskamot appear on a page between the title page and the introduction. They consist of some words praising the author's erudition and social connections. A book containing such information was protected from excessive outlay, and its distribution depended on particular publishers to whom copyright was granted.

The weight of Oppenheim's reputation was such that he lent it to new authors and newly printed works. In this way, he fashioned himself and widened...