1 - Sixteenth-Century Jewish Makers of Printed Books and the Shaping of Late Renaissance Jewish Literacy

Summary

SOON AFTER ITS EMERGENCE in the mid-fifteenth century, the medium of printed books was introduced into Jewish culture. Around 200 Hebrew incunabula are known to exist, the oldest being dated to the 1460s (Freimann and Marx 1967–9; Offenberg 2004: p. xlv). Beginning in the 1480s with the emergence of presses run by different members of the Jewish Soncino family in Italy and elsewhere, a wide variety of genres appeared in print. The Soncino editions were distinguished among printers at the time by both the accuracy and beauty of their typefaces (Habermann 1978: 13–96). By 1500 the technology of hand-press printing had been perfected, and did not undergo any substantial changes until the beginning of the nineteenth century (Gaskell 1985: 2; McKerrow 1962: 7). The new medium became widespread among the Jews by the 1520s at the latest, with the emergence of the Venetian firm of Daniel Bomberg. During this period the printed book became an object of everyday life, not limited to the intellectual elite, as indicated by the rich production of locally marketable liturgical works in Prague (Sixtová 2012a: 33).

As a cultural phenomenon, the early printed book must be seen as a radical innovation in the age of complex cultural transformations both within and outside Jewish society (Eisenstein 2002). Indeed, the ‘knowledge explosion’ spurred by the rise of the printing press, according to historian David Ruderman (2010: 14–15), was a key factor in the formation of early modern Jewish cultural history, in addition to accelerated mobility, a heightened sense of communal cohesiveness, a crisis of rabbinical authority, and a blurring of religious identities. Speaking of the printing press, Ruderman builds on the seminal interpretation of Elizabeth Eisenstein, who described the printed book as a major agent of cultural change during this period (Eisenstein 1979).

In his synthetic study, Ruderman investigated the impact of the new medium. Building on the magisterial research of Elchanan Reiner (1997, 2000), he pointed especially to the break between the fluid oral and scribal tradition on the one hand and the hegemony of printed text on the other, to the relation between the printed book and the teacher's authoritative capacity, and to the emergence of a new textual corpus, merging Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions (Ruderman 2010: 99–103).