The print shop headed by Jewish-Italian humanist Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino (1460[?]-1534) produced a dazzling array of materials: Rabbinics, Talmud tractates, Latin and vernacular Italian poetry, illustrated chivalric epics. This wealth of sometimes contradictory material has led several later Jewish bibliographers to question whether Gershom and Hieronymus were even the same person, inventing ‘histories’ of conversion. The ‘defense’ of his devout Jewishness is no less overdetermined (telling us more about 19th-centiry German-Jewish anxieties). Their source was in the material aspects of some of Soncino’s titles: decorative borders, acting as a kind of architecture, which he repurposed between ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ titles. I present these decorative borders and my findings on the Venetian artisan whom Gershom commissioned for their creation, and expand on his supposedly ‘promiscuous’ use of the same material apparatus for both specifically ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ titles. This use, I argue, is what led later bibliographers to ‘marranify’ his work.The print shop headed by Jewish-Italian humanist Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino (1460[?]-1534) produced a dazzling array of materials: Rabbinics, Talmud tractates, Latin and vernacular Italian poetry, illustrated chivalric epics. This wealth of sometimes contradictory material has led several later Jewish bibliographers to question whether Gershom and Hieronymus were even the same person, inventing ‘histories’ of conversion. The ‘defense’ of his devout Jewishness is no less overdetermined (telling us more about 19th-centiry German-Jewish anxieties). Their source was in the material aspects of some of Soncino’s titles: decorative borders, acting as a kind of architecture, which he repurposed between ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ titles. I present these decorative borders and my findings on the Venetian artisan whom Gershom commissioned for their creation, and expand on his supposedly ‘promiscuous’ use of the same material apparatus for both specifically ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ titles. This use, I argue, is what led later bibliographers to ‘marranify’ his work.
The print shop headed by Jewish-Italian humanist Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino (1460[?]-1534) produced a dazzling array of materials: Rabbinics, Talmud tractates, Latin and vernacular Italian poetry, illustrated chivalric epics. This wealth of sometimes contradictory material has led several Jewish bibliographers to question whether Gershom and Hieronymus were even the same person, inventing ‘histories’ of conversion. The ‘defense’ of his devout Jewishness is no less overdetermined (telling us more about 19th-centiry German-Jewish anxieties). Their source was in the material aspects of some of Soncino’s titles: decorative borders, acting as a kind of architecture, which he repurposed between ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ titles. I present these decorative borders and my findings on the Venetian artisan whom Gershom commissioned for their creation, and expand on his supposedly ‘promiscuous’ use of the same material apparatus for both specifically ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ titles. This use, I argue, is what led later bibliographers to ‘marranify’ his work.