Isaac bar Judah Yudeh Katz

Printer

Isaac bar Judah Yudeh Katz of Prague was one of the first Jewish printers. His press was one of the longest operating in Sulzbach, Germany. He and his colleague printers came to Sulzbach from Prague due to the Imperial closure of the Hebrew press in Prague. They began printing in 1669 with a Yiddish “Birkat ha-Mazan” and accompanying Haggadah with woodcut illustrations. The press would continue to run until 1851, in possession of the Frankel-Arnstein family. The press first passed to the ownership of the Bloch family in 1684, and from 1699 until 1851, the year the press shut down, it was held by the Frankel-Arnstein family. The Sulzbach press printed 702 works.