Joseph Athias

Origins and early life

Joseph Athias was born around 1635 in the Iberian peninsula, in Cordoba according to some sources and Lisbon according to others, into a family of Marranos, Jews forced into Christianity who kept their faith in secret.

Work and career

His father Abraham Athias paid for that faith with his life: he was burned alive as a Judaizer at the auto-da-fé of Cordoba on 29 June 1665, a fact recorded in the Inquisition's own registers. Joseph had by then escaped to the north, through Hamburg to Amsterdam, where he could live openly as a Jew, and in 1658 he set up a Hebrew printing house. In 1661 he became the first Jew admitted to the Amsterdam booksellers' and printers' guild, and that year he issued an edition of the Hebrew Bible edited by the Leiden professor Johannes Leusden that was the first to number every verse, a convention the whole world has followed since.

Recognition

The second, corrected edition of 1667, printed with the elegance for which Amsterdam was famous, was rewarded by the States General of the Netherlands with a gold medal and chain, and it remained the standard text of the Hebrew Bible for over a century. He was also a pioneer of mass printing in the vernacular: using an early form of stereotype plates, he printed, by his own account, more than a million English Bibles for the British market and Bibles in Spanish, Yiddish and German, and he bought the great Elsevier type foundry in 1673.

Overreaching, he went bankrupt, and the printing house passed to his son Immanuel, who carried it on into the eighteenth century. Joseph Athias died in Amsterdam on 12 May 1700, and the Hebrew Bible on most desks still bears the numbering he introduced.