Ismar David (1910–1996) emmigrated in 1932 to Eretz Israel from Germany, after winning a design competition organized by the Jewish National Fund. After encountering the local landscapes and the spirit of pioneering, David, a gifted art and calligraphy student in his homeland, was deeply moved. He then wished to free himself from western influences and to base his writing style on the ancient Eastern-Jewish Hebrew style. He started testing his lettering style by incorporating it into his work as a graphic designer, and variations of his writing style can be seen in early posters and various documents he had designed for the nascent State of Israel.

After spending a few years in Israel, David wished to distill his writing style in the form of a body text typeface meant for everyday use, like books and newspapers. He then prepared sketches for an expansive font family, aspiring to create a stylistically diverse, organized typeface as was available in the Latin world. In 1947 a contract was signed with the Intertype Corporation for the manufacture of the type, and in 1954 the first types were published, in light and heavy weights.

During the 1990s the typeface enjoyed a sudden surge in popularity, when a deformed digitization of it was included as the Hebrew default in the Windows operating system.During that decade, the type became the official correspondence font of the Israeli court system.

A more accurately executed digitization of David Hebrew was issued in 2012 by Linotype under the name David Hadash, which offered the entire spectrum of styles envisioned by David – including an unreleased monolinear style.

For the David Libre project, we based the fonts on the David Hadash Formal style. Several adjustments were made, i.e. the sheqel (₪) symbol was slightly altered. It was important to keep the typeface as close to to the original designs and intentions as possible, including the original spacing and the way tracking is kept between different weights (each letter block maintains the same width throughout the typeface).