The
first Hebrew books printed in the late XV century bear no dates but researchers believe that they were printed between 1469 and 1472 in Rome. Before that, Hebrew books were manually written using quite a number of styles.
Texts that must bear holiness, such as a
Torah scroll, a
mezuza, a
tefillin,
megillat Esther, are written using precisely defined letter shapes. Yet despite the precise rules, due to the large geographic distribution of the Jews as well as to the long history of the tradition, this standard has separated into two:
Ashkenazi and
Sefaradi, plus the styles of
Ari (1500s by Ari) and
Chabad (1700s by
Alter Rebbe) that are not not a result of slow natural change but were set by the two great mystics.
Text that do not bear holiness but still require respect, such as the other religious books and non religious documents, were written either using the same letters as the holy texts but without the
tags and written faster and with less precision.
In addition, Jews developed a variety of styles. In some cases the styles were just a natural development of the standard style
In other cases, the styles copied a local non Jewish style, such as Gothic in Europe
In addition, there was a number of cursive styles, usually local to a geographic area and period. See
Hebrew Cursive
With the beginning of print, many of these styles were simply ported to print and over time many new fonts have been invented, especially with the invention of computer graphics.
On the web we usually see one font as defined in the browsers such as Times New Roman because non standard fonts would require time consuming upload. But in computer graphics and in the printed media the number of fonts is quite large and some of them are quite fancy and only remotely remind the biblical standards.
For example:
that says איזה פחד (how scary)
