Tombstone of Sarah, Wife of Joshua Soncino

1735

Tombstone with Hebrew inscription. — Sarah Soncino, who died in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul, Turkey) in 1735, was a member of the prominent Soncino family, which established a printing press there in 1530, one in a long line of printing shops the family had already established in Soncino, Casamaggiore, Brescia, Barco, Fano, Pesaro, Ortona, Rimini, and Cesena in Italy, and Salonika, beginning in the late fifteenth century. The Soncino family published the first printed book in Hebrew in 1483 (the talmudic tractate Berakhot) and are considered pioneers of Hebrew publishing.

Credits

Tombstone of Sarah, the wife of Yehoshu’a Soncino, Kuzguncuk Cemetery, Istanbul. Lot # D-8, Stone # 99, September 14, 1735. Courtesy of the academic research site “A World Beyond: Jewish Cemeteries in Turkey, 1583–1990” of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University. Previously published in: Minna Rozen, “Metropolis and Necropolis: The Cultivation of Social Status among the Jews of Istanbul in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” from Studies in the History of Istanbul Jewry, 1453–1923: A Journey through Civilizations (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2015), figs. 26–27, pp. 229–230.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 5.