The first JPS translation was completed in 1917 by a committee led by Max Margolis and was based on the scholarship of its day. Its literary form was consciously based on that of the King James Version; Margolis, a non-native speaker of English, felt that was the proper standard of language that Jews should adopt for their translation. The Old JPS translation was used in a number of Jewish works published before the 1980s, such as the Pentateuch and Haftaroth edited by J. H. Hertz and the Soncino Books of the Bible series. The translation committee included Cyrus Adler, Solomon Schechter, Kaufmann Kohler, Samuel Schulman, and David Philipson. However, Schechter and Jacobs died before the translation was completed.
Some of the copies had been printed with a serious printing error. A typesetter dropped a tray of type for first chapter of Isaiah and had incorrectly reset the type.
... summary obtained from Wikipedia