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Shlomo Pereira, "Monuments de Papel E Pergaminho: Hebrew Printing in Portugal at the End of the 15th Century" (Chabad Portugal Press, 2025)
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Host Rora Rousey
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network Jewish Studies Channel. I am your host, Rora Rousey, executive director of Jewish Unity through Diversity Institute, where we explore the future culture of our heritage. Today, we're really delighted to speak with Rabbi Professor Shlomo Perera about his book Monuments of Paper and Hebrew Printing in Portugal in the late 15th century, published by Chabada Portugal Press in 2025. Welcome, Rabbi Pereira, and thank you for joining us here today.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Thank you so much. My pleasure.
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Host Rora Rousey
So we usually start. Rather than me introducing you, I'd rather you introduce yourself and give us the highlights. What we need to know before we delve into the book.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Well, what you need to know about me? Well, I describe myself as, throughout my life, having two different hats. On one hand, I have a professional career in academia with an endowed chair at William and Mary, and so with a life of research. And on the other hand, I'm a rabbi also at and I'm the director of education of Chabad. So I'm very much interested in everything and anything that is Jewish. I'm very much interested in anything that relates science or history with Judaism. And in particular, a great passion of mine is Jewish history. And here I have to say immediately that my passion is Jewish history because I don't believe that history is about the past. History is about how we see the past, how we feel the past, and we are what we remember. So it's before me never about the past. It's about what we learn from it now.
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Host Rora Rousey
And yet you call the book monuments.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Yes. So the idea behind monuments, called it monuments of paper and parchment, is because for a whole variety of reasons in the Iberian Peninsula, but quite in particular in Portugal proper, you don't have. It's not as if, like, if you go to Poland or go to other places, you can see this old synagogue, that old synagogue. Now in Portugal, you basically cannot find anything. There are no monuments of any type. There are no leftover synagogues. And part of it was the natural ravages of time, Part of it was all the persecutions, and part of it was major. Part of it, several earthquakes that destroyed everything. So you don't really, if you're looking in Portugal for the evidence or for something that relates at a very tangible manner with what was a very strong presence in the end of the 1400s. So mostly in the period between the Spanish expulsion, 1492, and the forced convergence in Portugal in 1497, it was a massive process. And the only thing that you have left from that period that has been overlooked by and large, and that's why the book comes into the picture, is those monuments of paper and parchment. That's the manuscripts, and that's all the printing. In particular the printing, that was a very advanced technology when it got to Portugal, you had a pioneering role. So those are our monuments. That's what we can show for what. Not conventional monuments, but very important monuments.
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Host Rora Rousey
And so I guess that answers also why this book was important to put out there is these are the monuments. Unless I'm reading it wrong. You tell me.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Yes, well, this comes also in the framework of. Well, if I just told you that history is not about the past, it's about the present. For me, then the obvious question is, what am I trying to accomplish? What's the point? What's the point with this? And this book is part of a general effort to bring to the forefront, bring to the limelight, the contributions of the Jewish people in the Iberian Peninsula. The contributions are very important, very deep, very significant in many different realms. And I'm not just talking. And actually, I'm not even primarily talking about, from a Jewish perspective, Jewish scholarship. I'm talking about just scholarship in general, their contributions in mathematics or in astronomy or in poetry or whatever it might have been. So I'm very much interested in bringing that to the forefront because, honestly, I'm a little bit, forgive me the expression, sick and tired of the narrative about the Iberian Peninsula. Being about they tried to kill us. We know that. We know that. But what I want to show is how much we were accomplishing while they were trying to do that. So the point is, there is a certain perspective on Iberian Jewish history that is not only not very well known in the Jewish world, but but is even less well known in the Iberian settler world. And so I feel very strongly that by bringing these memories, by bringing these. The work of the Portuguese Jewish community and Spanish Jewish community at the time, by bringing that in the forefront, we can contribute to building bridges with everybody else in these countries and say, look, we have a common past, if you want. And not just we have a common past, but there are some contributions and there are some perspectives that we can bring to the table that you're not necessarily familiar with and you may even overlook. So we can contribute by bringing Jewish history into the table, we can contribute to enhancing what Iberian history is. And that's the bridge that we want to. That's really one of the main objectives. And of course, we are not forgetting the context. The context is very important. But we want to talk about the contributions and so that everybody can be proud of the accomplishments of these people that were in Portugal and Spain at the time. They were Jewish and they were doing things that are incredibly important. And some people either don't know what they did or if they know what they did, they don't even know they are Jewish. So it's sort of. They're clarifying this one point I should mention really fast is that by looking at the documents from the time, the Jewish documents, the Hebrew documents from the time, there is a lot of perspective that we can bring into the history, because one of the main characteristics of the rabbis of that period.
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Host Rora Rousey
I just kind of cut you off for one minute because I don't think clarified exactly the period. It's a very small period that you're talking about here. So let's just make sure. Clarify this period.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Sure. So the period that I'm really the most interested is the end, and let me be relative vague about that, the end of the 1400s. So the last couple of decades of the 1400s. When we talk about this period, I'm also always very careful not to talk about Portuguese Jews or Spanish Jews. I'm very careful to talk about Iberian Jews. And the reason why I do that is because, especially if you look at the last decade of the 1400s, the overwhelming majority of the Jews that were in Portugal, they were not Portuguese, they were Spanish. So by the end of the century what you have is the criminal crop of Iberian Jewry located in Portugal. And the Jewish population in Portugal at the time was like maybe 15%, maybe even more than that. But again, it was to a large extent a community of exiles, of people that were expelled from Spain. And this is not just after 1492, even after, for the last century. If you think about the big Pogroms in 1391 started in Seville and so forth with old forced conversions in Spain, there was nothing like that in Portugal. There were many people that already fled to Portugal at the time. So throughout the 1400s, the Jewish community in Portugal that was important, but became overwhelmingly important because got the criminal crop of the Spanish Jewry. You're talking about the Abu Abs, you're talking about Benevenists, you talk about the Brabanelles. You're talking about Ibn Irias, although those were in Portugal. You talk about Ibn Khabib. But all of those families ended up in Portugal. And it's absolutely fascinating to see how important this generation was. This generation, incidentally, of the immediate ancestors of Josef Caro. His uncle was in Portugal at the time. He was a Hoshi Shiva in Lisbon at the time. And the uncle was a very instrumental person in the life of Ravi Yosef Caro. According to some opinions, they actually ended up raising him after his father Ephraim passed away.
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Host Rora Rousey
Which you're going to also say that you found a callophone that said maybe Rabbi Josef Caro was actually born in Portugal.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Yes. So, I mean, that's another fascinating thing is looking at the manuscripts and see, these are the type of things that when you approach things from a Jewish perspective, it brings a different. It brings a whole different light into things. I was not the first person to notice that there was a colophon of a manuscript. That was the manuscript that was written in 1481. 1481, in a small city in Portugal, in the southern areas of Portugal. I was not the first person to notice that that colophon mentioned that the book was written in Pharaoh, but nobody really paid attention to the fact that the book was written. But the manuscript was done for the great sage, Rabbi Ephraim Caro, who is the father of Rabbi Joseph Caro. Now, if you know that Rabbi Ephraim Karl ordered a book from the southern area of Portugal, I'm actually writing something about that because this is fascinating. What is the book that he asks to be the manuscript that has to be copied for him? Is the.
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Host Rora Rousey
Of the rush, the response?
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
It is the response is the response of the legal response of the rush that is a big legal opinion or legal commentator in Jewish law. And it so happens that. It so happens that Asher Ben Yihil, that is the name of this rabbi, he ran away from Germany. He basically had to run for his life, for Germany, and he settled in Toledo. And most of these legal briefings were written in Toledo. And imagine what it means about life in Toledo at this stage, when you have a Karo family from Toledo, a very prominent family from Toledo, Roshi, yeshivas, the leaders of yeshivas and everything. And they are asking for a copy of a manuscript of a book that is completely linked to Toledo from a place in Portugal. This tells you how deteriorated the Jewish life was in Toledo already at that time. And furthermore, it suggests that it's very possible that Rabbi Ephraim Caro was in Portugal at that time. And if so, it's very possible that Rabbi Joseph Caro, the great codifier of Jewish law, not only that, but it's possible that he was born in Portugal. Nobody knows for sure. People think that maybe Toledo, but it's because the family is from Toledo. But this is tangible evidence that he may have been born in Portugal.
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Host Rora Rousey
So not only do we have to learn from the manuscripts, but we also have so much to learn from the colophons themselves.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
And there is something also very unique, I would say, about the Iberian commentators of this time, and it is they never refrained in their writings to talk about their own experience. So, for example, imagine that we are studying Rashi, the Rashi commentary on the Torah. That is the most classic rabbi of choice, the most classic commentary studied in Jewish studies of the Torah. We don't see in this commentary, in the middle of saying, oh, this passage of the Torah means X, Y and Z. We don't see the author of the commentary saying, oh, incidentally, in my life, this is happening. We don't see any of it with the Iberian commentators. Rabbi Abrabanel, Rabbi Yosef Karo, I mean, Itzhaktaro Ablo Ab, all of them, they feel free to tell about their lives and about their experiences. And we know a lot about what happened and what they were going through because of what they write in their commentaries about their own lives. So that's a fascinating part of it.
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Host Rora Rousey
And that's a way to kind of get a view into it. Let's talk a little bit about Tahlis. Right. Hands on the colophones themselves, you said it takes detective work to uncover them. And one of the examples you gave was Rabbi Moshe Ben Nachman and his callophone and can you take us through a little bit of how you were able to uncover some things? That one specifically stuck out to me, but you can choose another one.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Yes.
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Host Rora Rousey
Yeah.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
So basically the problem, this is the thing about the colophons. And let's think about the simple ones, because the more sophisticated ones, it's basically they are speaking in an idiom that say, if I show that Hebrew to a Hebrew speaking person today, they will not understand because it is almost one biblical reference after the other. So it's a very cryptic. You have to know that this is a quote from the book of Psalms, it's from the book of Job, and it's everything mingled together. So well, a very interesting exercise is actually to ask when artificial intelligence program to translate that and it's gibberish, nothing comes out of it because this is not translating words, is how all the ideas flow and everything. But the simple colophons that basically they tell something about where the work was completed, who was the printing, the printing person behind the thing, who the book was for potentially or was sponsoring the book and the date. And let me give you an example that is maybe. Well, it's a fascinating example from many different perspectives. Is one of the volumes of the Talmud that was printed, that was printed in Portugal on the Tractate Brachot. And the Tractate Blessings is actually the first tractate of the tongue. And the colophon is basically two lines. And in those two lines, it creates enormous mysteries. Why? For two reasons. First, because the date is not as if they. The date is phrased in like December 1st of. That's not the way it is. So first of all, it can be like, well, this was finished in the week of the parsha something. Or even that is not the parsha. It say the week of Vayeshev. That's the Torah portion of this week. It gives you the password, it does not even tell you what gives you the verse, that does not even tell you where the parsha is from. And so first of all, we have to look for when that is. But the most difficult part of it is that the year. There are several different ways of presenting the year of completion. All of them are from creation. But the big thing is whether or not you're including, including. And incidentally, this is still something that we do today. We don't write very often the millennium, the five millennium. So it's five, seven, six, eight. But we don't have. We don't write the five. Right? We don't write the five. We just say the hundreds and so forth. The hundreds.
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Host Rora Rousey
So, right, when we're talking, I just want to clarify that we're talking about the Jewish year. And you usually write it in Hebrew letters. So you're only going to write the last. The last few letters. You're not going to put in the hey or the five in the parentheses.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
So it's basically Tafshin Nun. Essentially you're just going through the hundreds, the dozens and the units. You don't read the millennia. The millennia is sort of implicit, right? We don't use it. But what if in the statement about the year, you have the letter hey? That is a letter that represents five. Is that the millennia or is that to be added to the vessels? Or what do you do with it?
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Host Rora Rousey
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
So this is a big thing because it basically means that some books might have been written, for example, or printed in 1491 or 1496 and it makes a huge difference which one it is. And in my research in that I have come to the conclusion and writing some information about that, some of my research that the overwhelming majority of the times, the hay in those cases actually refer to the millennia. They are not to be added because we would end up with books. For example, in Spain proper printed in 1494. They cannot be printed in 1494. That was after the expulsion already in Portugal, they printed in 1498 could not be. So because of this, when you compare the whole universe of colophons, you see that at least in this generation, that's the way it was done. So you have a big confusion about the week, the date and the year. And sometimes in the case that you are mentioning, the year is even or the date is implied by some astronomical or astrological coincidence of certain planets. Which of course, goes with astrology being a very important field at that time.
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Host Rora Rousey
Which we're gonna talk about soon.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Okay. Because at the time, astrology and astronomy were not different, they were the same field. So anyway, so in those two lines in the colophon of the Talmud from Pharaoh, you have already a huge problem to decide in an intelligent way what the date is. And then you have another issue. That is the name of the person is different from the name from the other people, the other books that were printed in Pharo. So we have to ask, okay, they are both Shmuel, incidentally, they both have the same first name, but one is Shmuel Gacon and the other is Shmuel Portero. Are they the same person or what's the story? So you have to investigate. And in this case, I'm completely convinced that it's the same person, because Portero was actually a title. It was a legal title of the people that were basically appointed by the court to be the liaison with the Jewish communities and other communities, not just the Jewish communities, but it was a legal position, a very prestigious position. So let's say if you have Jewish courts that decided certain things, Jewish courts were autonomous. This was the person that would take all the information from the Jewish courts and take to the crown and to the royal courts. So that's a very prestigious position. That was a portero. That's what it was. But again, you have to decipher these things and look at the overall context and see what is. There's nothing automatic about it. Now, the thing that is very interesting also, but that's a little bit more pathetic than interesting, is a lot of the people that did some of the research on this before, first of all, they didn't know Hebrew. They were not very familiar with certain things, so they didn't know how to read certain things or what they meant in between the lines. But more importantly, the number of people that forgot the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars is mind boggling. Because at that time, the calendar that existed was the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian calendar. So when you translate from the Hebrew calendar to the non Jewish calendar, you have to be mindful of that, otherwise dates are wrong. So again, just.
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Host Rora Rousey
No, these are all important points.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Fascinating.
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Host Rora Rousey
And one of the points also is you were mentioning that you have to be fluent in Hebrew. You also have to be fluent in Portuguese. You also have to be fluent in Spanish, because you're bringing together all these different things. And I want to mention, I think it's important to mention that the book itself, you felt it important to put in Portuguese as well as in English. So there are side by side English and Portuguese in the books.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Yes, that's one. Actually, one of, if you want to use that term. One of the trademarks of this line of work is that all the books that we have produced, and this is already the fourth book that we produced, all of them are bilingual, all of them are Portuguese and English side by side. And this is on purpose, first of all, because many of the topics refer to Portugal, but it's on purpose because that's our way of saying that we want to make this information as widespread as possible to everybody that may be interested in Iberian history and in Jewish history and so forth. Now, it's also a coincidence, or maybe not a coincidence, but it's an interesting, less poetic reason why we do it, be it in both languages, is that it so happens that me and my co author, look, we sound like a joke, okay? Because I'm a Portuguese rabbi that does rabbinic stuff in the United States, he's an American rabbi that does rabbinic stuff in Portugal. So again, it sounds like a joke, but because of it there is this Portuguese and the English connection. And we've used it very intensively, not only to. To bring on board, if you want, the Portuguese authorities. And for example, the first book that we published that is called Jewish Voices from Portugal in English, this book, we have the great honor of having the president of the country writing the preface of the book. And the president of the country is an intellectual, and the president of Portugal is more of a decorative type of position. But it also means that he's not very controversial, which is a good thing. So anyway, he wrote the preface and for us it was important because we are producing the Jewish book, we are producing information from a Jewish past in Portugal. And we almost wanted to have the certification of the non Jewish authorities, saying we are doing these from the bottom of my heart, for our hearts, for the sake of exploring this common heritage. We want to share this common heritage. We don't want. The objective is not anything male ethic or the objective is just a very pure objective of showing this is how much we contributed. And just let's share the memory together, that share these memories together. There is one of the way I phrase these for the Portuguese authorities that is very meaningful for them. But if you don't know the context doesn't mean anything is there is a passage from the Portuguese national anthem that it says that from the mists of memory, we hear the voices of our forefathers. And my take is always that from the midst of a Jewish memory, we are hearing the voices of our Jewish forefathers. It's a component of the whole thing. And I think it's one of the reasons why this word has been really so well received is we are not pretending that nasty things didn't help, but it's a very construct, it's a very positive. And what we want to do is inspire the Portuguese Jews now and the Iberian Jews now to see. To use that example and say, let's contribute to building our societies. Let's contribute. Let's participate. Let's be as wonderful citizens as these guys were 500 years ago.
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Host Rora Rousey
And it's a wonderful concept of you're bringing to light the printing by printing again. So tell us a little bit, just to have a little taste, because in the book you talk a lot about the printing presses. Can you just give us a little bit of a taste of what type of printing presses? And then we know they were done by 1497, give or take.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Yes. So the first thing to mention is that printing, and I find myself having to sort of mention that printing is so far from a curiosity or a footnote in human history. And certainly in Jewish history, printing, it was a paradigm shift in terms certainly of Jewish history because we depend so much on books. And books were very difficult to produce. It could take easily a year to copy a book. And suddenly, with this new technology of the movable characters of the printing press, we could produce 10 books a day. I mean, it's a complete paradigm shift. Now you can have all the people that were not particularly friendly towards Jews confiscating books and destroying books as much as they want, because we could just replace them. I mean, we didn't have Amazon or things like that at the time, but it was much easier to withstand that onslaught and to keep the books. So that's one of the things, the other is to realize in terms of printing that when printing reached Portugal, the Jewish printing, Hebrew printing started in Italy and then moved to Spain and then to Portugal. When it started to Portugal, it basically had already all the knowledge. So that when Jewish printing, Hebrew printing reached Portugal, it was already leading the way in terms of printing in general. So while in Italy, Hebrew printing was somewhat marginal in Spain was somewhat marginal in Portugal, with all this Jewish presence, Hebrew printing was leading the way, was really the most. The strongest force and the most vibrant force in printing. The first book printed in Portugal was the Pentateuch. The second book printed in Portugal was a Hebrew book as well. In this short period of less than 10 years, more than two thirds of the books printed in Portugal were Hebrew. So it was a massive contribution. But more important than that is what happened after. And this is one of the big innovations of, if I may say so, of my. Of this work, is that it looks like we are talking just the last decade of 1400s. But if you look at the second part of the book, we are talking much more than that, because the people, the people that were printing in Portugal in particular, but also to a certain extent in Spain, these are the people that take the printing press, the printing technology throughout the Ottoman Empire. So the first printing presses in the Ottoman Empire are Hebrew printing presses. The first two, three, the several first books are Hebrew books. And all of them, all these printing presses are from printers that were exiled from Portugal. There is another of the issues that I am working on that is using a specific decorative frame. There is a specific decorative frame that was used first in the Spanish printing of Hijar in the middle 1480s, then was used in Lisbon. Exactly the same frame. The same frame. So we have here immediately this frame can tell us where things were going, where people were going, what is the transmission of information. It came from hr, ended up in Lisbon. Then a couple of years after, while there was still printing in Lisbon, it shows up in Constantinople. In Constantinople is used until like 1509. And then you can see the same frame being used in Salonica for a few years, incidentally used in Salonica by a printer of the name Yehuda Gdalia, that was a printer from Lisbon. He has his name in several books from Lisbon. So we know that he was from Lisbon. And he actually talks about that in the printing of. Is an extremely important book written at that time. And it was the first printing. And he has lots of information about himself, be it as it may. So you have in Salonika using this frame. And then the same frame is used in 1515 or so in Thais in the North Africa, again by a guy that is Rabbi Shmuel Netivot, that was from the Hebrew printing of Lisbon.
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Host Rora Rousey
So influence went way beyond, way beyond.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Way, way, way beyond. And this is true about the printing, it's true about the authors. A lot of what produced was produced in the Iberian Peninsula in terms of Jewish manuscripts and things like that was published only much later already in Italy. So the Contributions. I mean, the fertilization of all the rest of the world that was brought forth by the Megura sheikha. Still, the exiles from the Iberian Peninsula was absolutely incredible. That's another area, incidentally, where I use an expression from one of arguably the most famous, the most important, the dearest Portuguese poet, not Jewish at all Portuguese. And he has a massive work. This actually was written in the late 1500s. It's a massive work talking about the process of discoveries and everything, the biggest maritime voyages of Portugal. So it's an epic thing. And in this epic, he refers to Portugal as we gave new worlds to the world. So the Portuguese gave new worlds to the world. And I think this is a fascinating concept because this is what the Jews that were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula did. It was to give new worlds to the world. I mean, if you keep tracing, it's Iberian refugees that go to the Ottoman Empire. It's Iberian refugees that become completely, overwhelmingly dominant in the 1500s. In Tzfat, in Jerusalem is those that then become the big sages, the big leaders in Amsterdam, in Hamburg and London, and that's the ones that end up in Brazil and Latin America, and that's the ones that end up then in North America, New Amsterdam. So it's, as I like to say, this was the Mugura Sheikh, Castile. The exile from Castile was an end, but much more than that was many new beginnings.
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Host Rora Rousey
So I want to go back to something you said at the beginning, before we close out a little bit, but I think it's important you said at the beginning that these are not only Jewish texts. So I want to pick up on one that I know you speak about a lot, the Almanac Perpetuum. Am I saying it correctly? Rabbi Abraham Zacuto. So, yes, we call him Rabbi Abraham Zacuto, but we can just as easily call him Dr. Abraham Zacuto. In my mind, based on what I know.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
He was Rabbi Zacuto. And of course, you could call him doctor and professor, because he was a professor at the University of Salamanca for quite a while. And he was an astronomer, astrologer, as well as a mathematician and cartographer. He designed maps and so forth. And he is arguably the most important, the most important scientist, if you want, of that period, by a long shot. Why? Because he's not Jewish.
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Host Rora Rousey
Scientists. Scientists.
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Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Scientists in general, right? Yes, scientists in general. So he was the head mathematician of Portugal. The head astronomer of Portugal. He was the leading astronomer in Spain before. And this is not just talking about. Because, I mean, you can claim whatever you want, but we have a copy of the Homanach perpetuum, a previous copy, a handwritten copy of the Almanac Perpetuum that has notes by Christopher Columbus. And this Almanac Perpetuum is at the Columbine Museum in Seville. So it was the type of book that was extensively used by the navigators, and in particular the Portuguese navigators, Spanish all navigators, the Arabic navigators, all everybody. Why, why, why was this so important? His work. So important. His work was fundamental because at this stage, the name of the game was to navigate in the high seas. This is a paradigm shift in terms of navigation. The navigation until that time was really very close to the coast. Being very close to the coast, you can guide yourself by the coast. When you go to the high seas, you better know about the currents, you better know about how to orient yourself about to know where you are. You don't have a GPS yet, right? So that's what Rabbi Zakutu developed, is the equivalent to what we would now call a gps, except that it's an incredibly rough and convoluted thing. Not the GPS itself, it isn't. But what does he do? He designs a whole frame of calculations, mathematical calculations, astronomical calculations that allow you to look at the relative positions of the different stars and planets and so forth in the sky. And by doing that, you can identify where you are. So you can use triangulations and whatever. That's basically what GPS does today. But these are mathematical forms of mathematical tables that tell us that if the difference between the distance between this and that in that location is a certain thing, it tells you where you are. So now, other thing that you need, aside from those tables, is you need an instrument. You need an instrument to read the information that then you go to the tables to investigate it is a big problem because, look, we have astrolabes that measure distances and things like that on land, but you didn't have anything like that to be used at the sea, and you didn't have anything like that to be used during the day to look at the stars or to look at the sun. So he developed not just the tables, but developed a special type of astrolabe that allows for all these measurements in the high sea. Both astrolabe and the tables were extensively used by the Spanish and the Portuguese navigators. And then they were translated in Arabic, they were translated in Italian, they were translated in lots of things. So these fundamental contributions for that specific period. And incidentally, incidentally, you know, the big poet that I told you, the big poet that wrote this Epic about Portuguese navigation in the late 1500s. He actually mentions the Rabbi Zakutin miscontributions, which is pretty amazing at that time. This is 100 years after the expulsion and the forced convergence. And basically Rabbi Zakuto was the mind behind. Well, it's inconceivable to have high sea navigation without his information not only about that, but also about currents in the southern tip of Africa. The currents are very dangerous there and tend to live. And again, these vessels at that time, they were taken by the currents and by the wind. So you need to know a lot about those things. You don't have all the benefits of technology that they have today that you can steer the ship whatever you want. So it was major, major, major contribution of Rabbi Abraham Zakutuk. And this is also a case of someone that it's very easy to ignore that he was even Jewish. I mean, there are. I mean, most people know about his contributions in Portugal and Spain, but the fact that he's Jewish is sort of marginal. He's not just Jewish. He was a big rabbi writing on lots of important things. And it was not a small fry. It was a big one. Very, very big one. One of the pieces of evidence that I like to bring to basically prove that I'm not exaggerating when I'm talking about the contributions of Rabbi Abraham Zakuto is that he is the only rabbi of long period that has a crater in the moon named after him. Okay, so the Zagutu crater is named after him because of his contributions to astronomy and cartography and so forth. And this was the naming of the craters in the moon, incidentally, was started in the 1700s by a Jesuit priest. So Ysdwund brought that into the limelight and then it was confirmed and everything by NASA in the beginning of the 20th century. But the origin of all these names goes a little bit further back. So it's very recognized. Now why is this significant? Because his book of almanac, Perpetuum, in the Spanish and Latin translations, to the best of my understanding, was the last book that was printed in Portugal in a Hebrew printing shop. Now, this is not a Hebrew book, and that in and of itself is an incredible thing to think about. But this is in the history of humanity, the first non Hebrew book that was printed in a Hebrew printing press. It's the first time. There is nothing before this. There are some after, but very few. So having a Hebrew printing press, printing books that were not in Hebrew was very unusual. And we can see why it's A very unusual because basically it means having a completely new set of letters, type, character types and everything. It's building a second business. And the fact really is that if you have this non Hebrew printing that close to the period of expulsion and forced conversions, if you have a Hebrew printing house that is willing to make such an incredible investment in a new printing branch if you want, it's not very likely that they were expecting trouble.
- [47:20]
Host Rora Rousey
Right.
- [47:22]
Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
It's not likely.
- [47:25]
Host Rora Rousey
They thought they would continue and print more and more.
- [47:28]
Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm sure that they didn't create this new line of printing just to print one book.
- [47:35]
Host Rora Rousey
Right.
- [47:36]
Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
All the evidence at that time was that the non Jewish printing, the non Hebrew printing houses that were already in activity in Portugal at that time, they were very busy. They were very busy producing a line of books. That was one of the first series of books that they produced. That was the name of the books was about the life of Christ. And the thing that's interesting is that these books, it's self explanatory what they are about that the King wanted very much these books to be printed very fast because it was very sick and he ended up dying before the books were printed. But they were putting such intensity in the demand of the activities on non Hebrew printing in Lisbon. That's basically where it was non Hebrew printing at the time. That in and of itself could explain why they have to resort to a Hebrew printing for the swarmonet.
- [48:42]
Host Rora Rousey
Yeah.
- [48:43]
Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
For this almanac. Now if you look at the colophon we were talking about the colophon in the colophon of the almanac, it says clearly that this book is of the authorship of Rabbi Abraham Zakutu. It was actually translated by Rabbi Joseph Vezino and it was done by request of his one Excellency and I don't know what King Emmanuel from Portugal. So it says there that it was commissioned basically by the Crown. So actually one of the most moving documents that I've seen, this is not a printed document, but it's almost a receipt where the King pays. This must be very early after Rabbi Zakut moved to Portugal, that he's paid by the King a certain amount of money for his services as a mathematician to the crown. And Rabbi Zakut signs the receipt in Hebrew with his name, Rabbi Abraham Zakut. It's a very, very moving from 1493 maybe.
- [49:55]
Host Rora Rousey
So we know that they weren't thinking that they're going to be expelled, that's for sure.
- [49:59]
Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
No, no, no.
- [50:00]
Host Rora Rousey
So I have to say this has been enlightening, and there's so much more in the book as well. So just for our listeners, this is really a small taste of what's in there, and we're looking forward to hearing more and seeing more and reading more. So thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
- [50:22]
Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
My pleasure.
- [50:24]
Host Rora Rousey
We have been speaking with Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira about his book Monuments of Paper and Hebrew Printing in Portugal in the late 15th century, published by Chabad Portugal Press in 2000 and available on Amazon and other places. It has been a true pleasure to continue exploring the diversity of the Jewish people, Follow Jewish Unity through Diversity Institute on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and on our podcast upcoming Stories of Our Voices of Our Jewish Grandmothers.
- [51:00]
Rabbi Professor Shlomo Pereira
Sam.