The Hebrew incunabula are a group of Hebrew books, pamphlets or broadside printed before the year 1501.
Only about 100 incunabula are determined to have been definitively printed before 1500. There are eight of which either no copy is known, or the time and place of publication can not be definitely determined. Currently, more than 100 incunabula have been discovered since an article was first written about the topic in The Jewish Encyclopedia in 1901.
The total number of identified Hebrew incunabula is about 175, though more may exist or have existed. A list of ascertained incunabula is given in tabular form below, and to these may be added the last-mentioned eight, which include the Talmud tractates Ketubot, Giṭṭin, and Baba Meẓi'a, each printed separately by Joshua Soncino in 1488–89, and of which no copy is known to exist. The same fate has met all the copies of the Leiria Edition of the Early Prophets (1494). There is also a siddur of the Roman rite, probably published by one of the Soncinos, and, from its type, likely to be of the fifteenth century. This was first described by Abraham Berliner; a copy is possessed by E. N. Adler of London, and an incomplete copy is in the library of Frankfort-on-the-Main. In addition, there are two editions of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, one possibly printed in Italy in the fifteenth century, a copy of which is in the library of the Vienna community; the other, parts of which Dr. E. Mittwoch of Berlin possesses, was probably printed in Spain.
Date of first printing The date at which printing in Hebrew began can not be definitely established. There is a whole series of works without date or place (12-21) which experts are inclined to assign to Rome (where Latin printing began in 1467), and any or all of these may be before the first dated work, which is an edition of Rashi's commentary on the Pentateuch, published in Reggio, Calabria, by Abraham Garton, 5 February 1475. It may be assumed that the actual printing of this work took some time, and that it was begun in the latter part of 1474. Even this must have been preceded by the printing of the four parts of the Arba'ah Turim of Yaakov ben Asher, finished 3 July 1475, in Piove di Sacco by Meshullam Cusi, which must have taken considerably longer to print than the Rashi. It is exceptional for Hebrew works to be dated at all before 1482, but from that time onward to 1492, during which decade two-thirds of the Hebrew incunabula were produced, most of them are dated. With the expulsion from Spain in 1492 the Hebrew printing-presses in that country were stopped, and those in Italy and Portugal produced only about a dozen works during the remainder of the century.
Places of printing Hebrew books were produced in the fifteenth century in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, the Ottoman Empire, Leiden and Paris though several of the printers were of German origin, as Abraham Jedidiah, the Soncinos, Ḥayyim ha-Levi, Joseph and Azriel Gunzenhauser. The period under review was perhaps the nadir of Jewish fortunes in Germany. Expulsions occurred throughout the land, and it is not to be wondered at that no Hebrew presses were started in the land of printing. In all there are known seventeen places where Hebrew printing took place in the fifteenth century—eleven in Italy, three in Spain, and three in Portugal, as may be seen from the following list, which gives in chronological order the places, the names of the printers, and numbers (in parentheses) indicating the works printed by each, the numbers having reference to the following table.
Table of incunabula