The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy

Introduction: Book History and the Hebrew Book in Italy

INTRODUCTION Book History and the Hebrew Book in Italy Adam Shear and Joseph R. Hacker The printing of books: began [lit. ‘‘was located’’] in the city of Mainz, by a Christian man named Johannes Gutenberg of Strasbourg, and this was in the first year of the pious emperor, Friedrich, in the year 5200, 1440 according to the Christians. Blessed is the one who grants knowledge and teaches wisdom to humanity. Blessed is the one who has strengthened us in his mercy in a great technology such as this, for the benefit of all inhabitants of the world; there is none like it. And nothing matches it in value among all the sciences and technologies since the day that God created man and set him in the world, including the divine sciences and the seven liberal arts, and the other ad hoc disciplines of arts, crafts, metalwork, construction, woodworking, stonework, and the like. Every day, the press reveals and publicizes useful things and many devices, through the vast numbers of books printed for workers in all fields. —David Gans, Sefer z .emah . David (1592)1 At the end of the sixteenth century, looking back not only at Jewish history but also at the ‘‘history of the world,’’ the Prague Jewish chronicler and scientist David Gans viewed the invention of printing in moveable type as the greatest of God’s gifts. Because printing could rapidly spread knowledge of all sciences, arts, and crafts, it surpassed all these in utility. Print was thus a kind of meta-art that made possible greater wisdom in all other fields. Gans’s praise may be hyperbolic, but his testimony echoes other praises of the new technology by Jews and non-Jews throughout the early modern period.2 2 Introduction The available evidence suggests that Jews adopted the new technology very quickly. According to surveys of fifteenth-century book production based on the holdings of major public libraries, at least twenty thousand— and perhaps as many as thirty thousand—editions (in all languages) were printed in the first sixty years of printing.3 Although Hebrew printed books were not a numerically significant factor in those numbers, they emerged early in the history of the new technology. The first Hebrew printed books appeared in the 1470s, and the latest research on Hebrew incunabula reveals approximately 140 certain editions of Hebrew works (and perhaps several more than that) printed between circa 1470 and 1501.4 The Hebrew printing industry expanded rapidly over the next fifty years, and between 1501 and 1550 more than 1,350 books were printed.5 Surveying a vast array of bibliographies and library catalogs, Anat Gueta counts some 5,630 editions of Hebrew books in the period from 1540 to 1639.6 This includes neither Yiddish works nor other works in vernaculars using Hebrew type nor the large number of Christian Hebraist works, mainly in Latin but containing some Hebrew type.7 The numbers increased even more dramatically in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so much so that Zeev Gries has argued that sixteenth-century Hebrew production should be viewed as a relatively minor activity.8 Regardless of absolute numbers, however, when we look at perceptions and behavior, it seems that during the second quarter of the sixteenth century Jews in Europe and the Ottoman Empire came to see print as the preferred method for publishing a book; at this time we can also identify the first major cultural effects of the print medium. However, the fact that print came to be seen as the major medium of publication did not mean—as has been pointed out repeatedly in the last several years—that manuscript production ceased or that manuscripts ceased to be an important part of Jewish cultural life. Manuscript production of certain texts used for liturgical purposes (especially the Torah scroll and the Five Scrolls) continued apace. And although printing opened up ownership of ritual and liturgical texts to a wider audience, Jews who came into possession of manuscript prayer books or Passover Haggadot tended to save them. Lavishly illustrated manuscripts of the Passover Haggadah became a new luxury item in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in Northern Europe. Intellectuals continued to produce manuscripts of other scholars’ texts for their own use (this is done right up to the invention of the photocopier), and quite obviously committed their own thoughts to writing (right up to Introduction 3 the invention...