Guest post by Eli Genauer, who shares footprints from books in his personal collection:
A Christian Hebraist is a scholar who seeks to learn Hebrew primarily in order to read the Old Testament in its original language. The Protestant Reformation fueled such scholarship and Jewish printers produced Hebrew books to feed this market. I have a Hebrew Bible printed in Amsterdam in 1638 which seems to fit into this category. It contains all 24 books of the Old Testament exclusively in Hebrew but it belonged to a series of Scottish ministers in the 17th and 18th century. It is somewhat ironic that a Jewish Bible would reside in Scotland at that time when Jews were not allowed to live there.
Footprints Journey
The Book
A Hebrew Bible belonging to John Inglis (dated 1648) and his grandson Gershom Carmichael (dated 1699). The Bible was printed in Amsterdam in the Jewish year 5398 by Manasseh ben Israel. The secular date of 1639, which is listed on the title page, does not conform to this Hebrew date.[i]
https://www.nli.org.il/he/books/NNL_ALEPH990012913300205171/NLI
The Colophon
The book is written in the form of a prayer by Mansseh ben Israel, thanking G-d for allowing him to complete his work on the 24 books of the Bible, and the hope that he will be able to print more books. He concludes by listing the date of completion in very poetic terms.
“Completed in the 3rd month following redemption ( the Hebrew month of Sivan), corresponding to the Torah portion of ‘Don’t cut off the tribe of the families of the Kohathites….’ ( Numbers 4:18) In the year of ‘but I trust in G-d’ (the numerical value in Hebrew is 98 indicating the year 5398) according to the abbreviated calculation of our nation. G-d is my rock and my shield”[ii]
Some background on Manasseh Ben Israel
The printer of this edition, Menasseh ben Israel, was born in 1604 on the Portuguese Island of Madeira. Born into a converso family, he was baptized as Manuel Dias Soeiro. When he was a child, his family immigrated to Amsterdam and openly returned to Judaism, and thereafter his name was changed to Menasseh ben Israel. As a young boy he studied at the Yeshiva of the Portuguese community in the city When he reached the age of 18, he was appointed preacher in the Neveh Shalom community in place of the deceased Rabbi Isaac Uziel. His wide secular education and his command of many languages won him a reputation among Christian scholars, who considered him the greatest Jewish scholar of his generation. He wrote books in Spanish and Latin on theological and philosophical subjects and even wrote several works in Hebrew. In 1626 Menasseh ben Israel established the first Hebrew printing press in Holland. In 1655, towards the end of his life, Menasseh ben Israel was invited to England, where, supported by Cromwell, he presented his request for the Jews to be allowed back into England to the Parliament. Unsuccessful at first, he finally won a partial victory, and Jews were thenceforth allowed, with some restrictions, to settle in England. Menasseh ben Israel died in 1657.
Ownership Signatures 
John Inglis – 1648
Gershom Carmichael – 1699
The book first belonged to John Inglis – His daughter was Christian Inglis Carmichael. The book then belonged to her son Gershom Carmichael (grandson of John Inglis). The date listed for Gershom Carmichael is 1699 which is the year in which John Inglis died.
Some Background on John Inglis and Gershom Carmichael
John Inglis, M.A. was admitted to the ministry in Jan. 1658 but deprived of his position by an Act of Parliament in 1662. He was granted indulgence in 1672 and officiated at Hamilton, Scotland (near Glasgow) from 1687 to 1690. He died in November of 1699.[iii] Robert Wodrow wrote that he was ” much esteemed for his piety and gift of preaching.”[iv] He married Elizabeth Stewart, and they had a daughter named Christian who married John Carmichael, minister of Pettinain.
Gershom Carmichael (1672-1729) was born in London and was educated at the University of Edinburgh, 1687–91. In 1694, at the age of 22, he was appointed a master at the University of Glasgow. In 1727 he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, the first person in Scotland to hold a professorial position in philosophy. He was a predecessor to Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid. The Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy writes of him that “Carmichael’s work contributed, very fundamentally, to shaping the agenda of instruction in moral philosophy in eighteenth-century Scotland”
What is most endearing about this book is that one of these Christian scholars attempted to replicate the block type print of the text and left this example of his rudimentary writing skills.[v]
[i] This is noted by the Bibliography of the Hebrew book which states “התאריך העברי והלועזי בשער סותרים זה את זה
“The Hebrew and secular date on the title page contradict each other”. The Hebrew year of 5398 extended from September 1637 to September 1638. The colophon states that the book was finished in the Hebrew month of Sivan of 5398 which corresponded to June of 1638.
[ii] Avishai Elbaum, chief librarian of the Rambam Library in Tel Aviv, commented as follows on the unusual colophon
פתרון לחידה אינני יודע. הכותב מחוייב לחרוז שבו מסתיים כל חלק בקולפון (—תי) ולכן ייתכן שהכוונה כאן לחשבון היהודי במליצה. “לפרט מהפרט” אולי כוונתו לפרט קטן (שהינו חלק מפרט גדול).
[iii] Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae – Oliver and Boyd, Volume III, Edinburgh 1920 page 258
[iv] Analecta, Volume III. Robert Wodrow, Edinburgh, 1842, p.127
[v] My seven-year-old granddaughter formed the letters in a similar fashion. Here for example is the Hebrew word Nachum
compared to
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