The Amsterdam Connection: PORT ARMENIANS AND PRINTERS AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD-SYSTEM, 1658–1717

When Menasseh Ben Israel established Amsterdam’s first Jewish-owned printing press in 1627, he initiated a shift in the locus of Hebrew printing from the Italian port cities of Venice and Rome to the Dutch capital in the northwest. The transfer of Hebrew printing to Amsterdam was part and parcel of a larger trend in European print history that also witnessed Venice’s total eclipse by Amsterdam and the transformation of the Dutch city into the foremost printing center in seventeenth-century Europe and the world. Only a few decades following the Jewish precedent, a remarkably similar gravitational shift occurred in the history