100; 87 ff., folio, 342:220 mm., wide margins, age and damp staining, old hands of previous owners on many ff. A good copy bound in contemporary leather over wood boards, rubbed.

In 1714, R. Judah Aryeh Leib ben Joseph Samuel, av be it din of Frankfurt-am-Main, arranged to have the Talmud printed in Amsterdam by Samuel ben Solomon Marquis and Raphael ben Joshua de Palacio. They began printing with Berakhot, but were forced to discontinue printing in 1717 due to the approbations issued for the 1697-1699 Frankfurt-am-Oder edition of the Talmud. These haskamot functioned as rabbinic prohibitions, or copyrights, preventing rival editions from being issued for a specified period of time.

Unlike the intervention of non-Jews into the printing of the Talmud, where the objection concerned the content of the Talmud, the sole concern of restrictive haskamot was commercial enterprise. At the same time and place that Aryeh Leib began to print his Talmud, the Proops press commenced an edition of their own. Judah Aryeh Leib, whose own haskamot preceded the Proops edition, objected to the publication of a rival Talmud and brought the matter before a rabbinic court. After printing only tractate Berakhot, Proops had to stop printing his edition. Thereupon, Proops reputedly spread allegations that Aryeh Leib's edition of the Talmud was rife with errors, perhaps with the objective of selling his own edition. R. Moses Frankfurter, editor of the Aryeh Leib edition, offered to reprint any page that contained a serious error.

Regardless, nether printer was legally permitted to print the Talmud due to the still-effective Frankfurt-am-Oder approbations. In 1715, Michael Gottschalk began to print his second edition of the Talmud, relying on his first-edition approbations. Thus, after completing Yevamot, Marcheses and Palacio discontinued printing at the behest of Gottschalk's claim that he had obtained the sole authorization to print a Talmud.

Judah Aryeh Leib, however, resumed printing three years later in Frankfurt-am-Main at the press of Johann Koelner. Printing began with Kiddushin, possibly with the intent of publishing only those tractates not printed in Amsterdam. In fact, whether due to greater demand than originally anticipated or for other reasons, the entire Talmud was printed in Frankfurt-am-Main. To demonstrate their continuity, the title pages of the latter edition were modeled after the former; as a rule they even display the same chronograms, which are adjusted to reflect the later dates.

Heller, Printing the Talmud, YU Museum, p. 254