A ship struggles through rough water beneath the title of this Spanish Bible. Its broken mainmast and the creatures surrounding it suggest the dangers of a voyage. For the Iberian conversos who found refuge in Italy, the image could speak to their own experience: forced conversion, persecution, and departure from home. The battered vessel invites us to read the book as part of their passage toward a place where they could live openly as Jews.
Printed in Ferrara in 1553, the Ferrara Bible brought the whole Hebrew Bible into Spanish in Latin letters. Among its intended readers were descendants of Jews compelled to become Christians in Spain and Portugal. Some had preserved Jewish practices in secret; others had grown up with little knowledge of Judaism. Once they joined Jewish communities, readers with limited Hebrew needed books through which they could learn.
Abraham ben Solomon Usque, a Portuguese printer and editor known in Portugal as Duarte Pinhel, had himself left the Iberian Peninsula for Ferrara. Working with Yom Tob ben Levi Athias, he helped prepare and publish this Bible. His press also issued the Spanish Orden de Roshasanah y Kipur in the same year. Together, biblical translations and prayer books gave readers access to Jewish religious life through a familiar language and alphabet.
The Spanish nevertheless makes demands on its reader. The title promises a translation “word for word” from Hebrew, and the text closely follows Hebrew syntax and word order. It draws on translation traditions cultivated by Spanish Jews before the expulsions. This language of biblical translation differs from everyday spoken Judeo-Spanish: it carries the syntax and structure of Hebrew into Spanish; the divine name appears as “A.,” standing for Adonai, the word traditionally read in its place. The alphabet and vernacular so familiar to converso readers would open up a text for them whose phrasing preserved the language of its Hebrew source.
The publishers issued the Bible with alternative dedications for different audiences. Each copy carries one dedication or the other. Copies intended for Christian readers honor Ercole II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, whose protection helped make the city a refuge for Iberian Jews. Copies intended for Jewish readers honor Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi, a merchant and philanthropist from a Portuguese converso family who came to practice Judaism openly. She used her wealth and influence to assist Jewish refugees and support Jewish cultural life. The dedication to her acknowledges that patronage.
The Ferrara translation also reached Christian readers: Casiodoro de Reina drew on it for his Spanish Bible of 1569. The alternative dedications through which the publishers addressed Jewish and Christian audiences testifies to its value to both communities. Of course, we cannot attribute the two dedications to a purely ecumenical spirit: the ducal printing privilege announced on the title page supplied the political authorization under which the book appeared, and allowed such a Jewish translation permission to appear at all.
The historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi described the sustained re-education of former conversos in Jewish communities, emphasizing the role of vernacular books. His account of seventeenth-century communities helps illuminate this earlier undertaking. A Spanish Bible could introduce readers to scripture as Jews studied it, while retaining a language they already knew. On the title page, the ship remains at sea. The book itself offered its readers a resource for rebuilding Jewish life after the voyage.
