Marco Antonio Giustiniani

Marco Antonio Giustiniani was a Venetian patrician and printer of Hebrew books.

Marco Antonio opened his printing shop in 1545. In the following seven years he produced eighty-five Hebrew books, and the Babylonian Talmud. For a while Marco Antonio enjoyed a monopoly as the only large-scale Hebrew publisher in Venice that brought him a considerable profit.

However, soon the new publishers emerged in the market like Alvise Bragadin and Giovanni di Gara and entered into competition with each other. A commercial dispute between Giustiniani and Bragadin was transformed by the Roman Curia, to which they appealed, into an accusation of having published a heretic text full of blasphemies against the God. Consequently, the destruction of the Talmud is ordered. Although printing of Hebrew books was again allowed in Venice in later period, it proceeded under censorship and operated in circumstances when Venice lost its supremacy in this field in favor of other European cities.