SHAḤOR

SHAḤOR (Czerny, Schwartz), family of pioneers in Hebrew printing in Central Europe. ḤAYYIM joined the first printing group in prague (see kohen family) in or before 1514. After 1522, when the group disbanded, he joined Meir Michtam in issuing two works of prayer, in 1525 and 1526. During most of 1526 he evidently prepared almost all the woodcut illustrations for the Passover Haggadah of Gershom Kohen. Some have doubted that Shaḥor made almost all the woodcuts for the Haggadah as he is not mentioned in the colophon; however, four illustrations contain a small letter shin and it was the practice of non-Jewish woodcut artists to mark their work with their initials. Moreover, one of the four represents King David, and David was also his father's name. The shin similarly appears near a lion in the Haggadah's third full border (ornamenting the verse shefokh ḥamatekha); Shaḥor could have considered the lion a suitable "family crest," for it is a royal symbol, and his father's personal name was synonymous with royalty in ancient Israel and in Jewish tradition. Furthermore, in his Pentateuch of Augsburg (1533) the first page of every book is ornamented with two small figures: one, a crab, is probably a zodiacal sign of his birth month; the other, a lion, was evidently retained as a "family crest." To adorn the opening page of his Pentateuch of Ichenhausen (1544), he copied onto a new woodcut the complete third border of Gershom Kohen's Haggadah with the lion (Kohen retained and reused the original), and he used it again for the opening page of his seder seliḥot of Heddernheim, 1545. It might be noted, too, that in the 1518 Pentateuch of Prague's pioneer printers, Shaḥor is listed second (after Gershom Kohen) in the colophon to part 1 (end of Exodus), which part contains two full borders; in the colophon to part 2, which has no new woodcut ornamentation, he is listed last. This indicates that he made those two borders as well. In April 1527 a royal privilege made Gershom Kohen the sole Hebrew printer in Bohemia and Shaḥor had to leave Prague. Taking with him a good amount of type and equipment, he became an itinerant printer, comparable only to Gershom soncino (although his output was much smaller). About 1529 he settled in Oels, Silesia (near Breslau), where he printed a Pentateuch with a partner. A storm destroyed the printing shop, however, and Shaḥor left Silesia. In 1531 he reached Augsburg, a center of humanism, where he apparently used the press of August Wind, a Christian printer who issued some Hebrew texts for the clergy. Until 1540 he produced nine works of quality (including a modest but handsome Passover Haggadah in 1534), evidently helped by his son ISAAC and son-in-law Joseph b. Yakar, who were listed in the colophon of their edition of Jacob b. Asher's Turim (1540). In this period (1531–40) Shaḥor traveled about, too, in an attempt to sell his stock. Conditions worsened, though, and in the final years in Augsburg the family could not issue its planned volumes. At his request the influential apostate Paulus Emilius went to Ferrara, Italy, in 1541–42 to explore possibilities for the Shaḥor family to settle there, but nothing came of it. In 1543 the family moved to Ichenhausen, Bavaria, where it issued a prayer book with Judeo-German translation as well as a Pentateuch. Political unrest and local war made them move on, however, to Heddernheim, near Frankfurt on the Main, where they resumed printing in 1545. Evidently, though, the family finally concluded that there was little hope for a stable future in Germany, for it soon left for lublin , perhaps by 1547. An official permit for printing could not be obtained until 1550, by which time Shaḥor had died and his son-in-law Joseph b. Yakar had left to try his luck in Italy. With giustiniani he produced a Pentateuch in Venice (1548), but then rejoined the family. Until 1554 he and Ḥayyim's son Isaac Shaḥor ran the press jointly, producing a notable Polish maḥzor in 1550. By 1557 Shaḥor had died, leaving a small son; his brother-in-law might also have died, as his name no longer appears in the press's output. The family craft was carried on by Kalonymus b. Mordecai Jaffe, the husband of Ḥayyim Shaḥor's granddaughter (i.e., Joseph b. Yakar's son-in-law), together with two partners, one of whom may have been an elder son of Ḥayyim Shaḥor's son Isaac. The family's printing privilege of 1550 was renewed in 1559, and under Kalonymos and his sons the press continued in Lublin for many years. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: A.M. Habermann, in: KS, 31 (1955–56), 483–500 (with full bibliography); idem, Ha-Sefer ha-Ivri (1968), 127–8, 138, 196; C. Wengrov, Haggadah and Woodcut (1967), index. (Charles Wengrov)