Because the Ashkenazi letter displayed extreme contrasts of the thick and thin (shading) in its vertical stroke, the calligrapher often decorated the thinnest point with a rosette or circle or another ornament.Īfter the Renaissance, the major work done by calligraphers, especially in Italy, was the making of ketubbot, often enhanced with additional illumination and micrography. Enlarged Hebrew initial letters were favored by artistic scribes of Germany sometimes these were filled in with zoomorphic figures. Only in rare instances were there full-page micrographic pictures. In Germany, masoretic micrography appeared in the margins and initial word panels of Bibles, often drawn into the shapes of animals and grotesques familiar to the Romanesque and Gothic artist. One exceptionally creative calligrapher from Barcelona illustrated, by writing all designs and figures with the text of Psalms, frontispiece pages of a Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur maḥzor with Jewish symbols as well as secular subjects and figures. In Spain, carpet pages were composed of complex geometric interlaces and interwoven palmettes. The texts used for micrographic carpet pages in the Bibles of Egypt, Yemen and Spain were more often from Psalms than the masorah. Scribes in medieval Egypt also decorated ketubbot with micrography. In Ereẓ Israel and in Egypt from the late 9 th through the 12 th centuries, in Yemen in the 15 th and 16 th, and in Spain from the 13 th to the 15 th centuries, frontispiece and finispiece pages were decorated with carpet pages (full-page decorations resembling oriental carpets) that were entirely micrographic, or that combined micrography with illumination. The calligraphers of the Middle Ages and even later ones were trained soferim their script style was that of the sofer, but they were commissioned for their skills in decorating Bible codices, prayer books, * haggahot (books read at the home Seder on the eve of Passover), and * ketubbot (marriage documents), with illuminations, enlarged and decorated letters, and micrography, minute Hebrew script written in geometrical, vegetal and figurative shapes. The art was more important than the purpose, and certain kinds of books and shorter texts became popular subjects for calligraphic expression before and after the Renaissance. Calligraphy, from the Greek kalli (beautiful) graphos (writing), is artistic writing for its own sake. HistoryĮven before the days of printing, there were Hebrew scribes who specialized in calligraphy. Once Hebrew books were printed, by the late 15 th century, the demand for hand-written codices decreased, and although there was always a need for ritual writings, there was not enough work in any one community to support the same number of scribes who had been occupied with writing in the Middle Ages. Standards of script were high, with aesthetics taken for granted. Many of them signed their names in the colophons of the books they wrote, but ritual writings were never signed. In the Middle Ages, scribes wrote Bible codices as well as scrolls, for study and private use. Since ancient times, the Torah scribe was a man of piety, one who donned tefillin himself (thus women were excluded from the profession) and prepared himself spiritually for the sacred task before him. The Hebrew scribe, the sofer, has been called sofer setam at least since the late 19 th century, setam being an acronym of sefarim – books (of the Torah), tefillin (scriptural passages encased in small black leather boxes worn by men during morning prayer) and mezuzot (similar passages affixed to doorposts). Origins - History - Educations - In the USA, Israel & England OriginsĪ distinction must be made between the art of the Jewish *scribe and that of the calligrapher, both in purpose and style of writing and in the education of the writer. One can seek its sources in Hebrew scribal traditions, or one can see it as part of the international revival of calligraphy as an art form, a movement that has grown steadily since the 1960s. The origins of modern Hebrew calligraphy can be found in two ways. Click the table headers to sort alphabetically or by type foundry.Hebrew: Table of Contents| The Aleph-Bet| Revival of Hebrew The tables below are organized according to font support for t’amim and/or niqqud. (If you’d like to support the maintenance of this font pack, please consider becoming a patron.) The font pack is maintained by Aharon Varady, and all the fonts can be downloaded as ZIP file from his github account here. See bottom of page for a font comparison chart ( PDF). Open-source Unicode Hebrew Fonts (sorted by diacritic support and style) Ĭlick on a font name below for a download link, and to review a summary of the font’s diacritic positioning and character support.
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