10 - Book Reviews in the Hebrew Press

Summary

REVIEWS OF JEWISH BOOKS in general and of Hebrew books in particular represent a stage in the development of Jewish journalism. Book reviews are an important element of any study of books in the Jewish world since they are a key way of drawing attention to works that potential readers might otherwise not know about.

In this sense, as in many others, Hebrew periodicals shaped public consciousness and opinion, and were a key agent of culture, and some background to put the subject in context is surely in order here. The significance of the topic cannot be overestimated: Henri Jean Martin, a disciple of Lucien Fèbvre, following other scholars, says that, while the eighteenth century was the age of the book, the nineteenth century was the age of the newspaper. As an ex-ample of what the study of journalism could contribute one might cite Richard Popkin's studies of the role of journalism as a voice for the French Revolution and its opponents, or Elizabeth Eisenstein's work showing that journalism replaced the preacher's pulpit as a source of influence on society, agitating vigorously for the advancement of secularization and as a focus of opposition to Western Christianity. Siegfried Henry Steinberg wrote a detailed survey of the development of journalism in Europe in various languages in which he notes that some English newspapers of the mideighteenth century saw the criticism of books as their main mission, even to the detriment of their continued existence. Elizabeth Eisenstein has also devoted a small book to the French cosmopolitan press from the days of Louis IV to the French Revolution in which she laments the fact that journalism, as an educator and as the first printed forum for book reviews, has been ignored by historians of the book and of culture. The period she covers goes beyond that of Steinberg by more than eighty years, and she rescues from oblivion two French intellectuals, Jean Cusson and Denis de Sallo, pioneer book-reviewers, who started a newspaper, Le Journal de Sçavans, on 5 January 1665 with the avowed purpose of ‘serving the Republic of Letters’.

But let us return to the subject of Jewish periodicals.The first forerunners of Jewish periodicals began to appear in the second half of the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century they positively flourished.