Did a 15th-Century Jew Beat Gutenberg to the Printing Press?

You wouldn’t think a lecture on “Quantifying Paper-Ink-Type Interaction” would be news. You especially wouldn’t think it after reading, in the proceedings of last August’s convention of the International Association of Paper Historians, a dry abstract of this lecture stating that the goal of its Israeli presenters, Moshe Rosenfeld, Eyal Nimny, and Elyakim Kessel, was “to “provide quantitative metrics extracted from printed texts in order to reveal systematic patterns of variability.” Not even being told by the abstract that such “metrics” were brought to bear “on early printed Hebrew works” would have prepared you for last month’s newspaper reports that some of this material consisted of two printing sheets, comprising 32 pages of a 15th-century siddur that was older than the 1454-55 Gutenberg Bible and thus a remnant of Europe’s earliest printed book.

Rosenfeld, a Jerusalem book dealer, came across the two sheets in 2015, when he found them concealed in an old book binding. The sleuthing which brought him to believe in their antiquity is impressive, one of its elements being a careful study of 15th-century watermarks, the signature of paper makers that can tell us the approximate time and place of their product. (In this case, Rosenfeld says, they show that the paper was produced between 1418 and 1439.) Yet Rosenfeld could never have built a case for the siddur’s being a European first without the work of another detective who laid the ground for it over a hundred years ago. This was the French clergyman Pierre Henri Requin (1851-1917), a Catholic vicar and art historian who in 1891 published a study entitled Les origines de l’imprimerie en France, “The Origins of Printing in France.” Requin’s study is alluded to in chapter on “The Printed Book” in the Jewish historian Cecil Roth’s 1959 work The Jews in the Renaissance, which helped point Rosenfeld to his conclusions—and since Roth, rather uncharitably, failed to mention Requin by name or give him his due, let us do so now.

While engaged in research in the municipal archives of the southern French city of Avignon, Requin came across a file of old Latin legal documents dating to the 1440s and pertaining to a certain Procopius Waldfogel, a goldsmith and native of Prague then living and working in Avignon. Two of these documents, drawn up by a local notary, dealt with an agreement between Waldfogel and a local resident referred to as Davino de Caderossia, Judeo, de Avinione, “Davin [David] de Caderousse, a Jew, of Avignon.”