The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy

Chapter 4. The Rabbinic Bible in Its Sixteenth-Century Context

CHAPTER 4 The Rabbinic Bible in Its Sixteenth-Century Context David Stern Since the publication some thirty years ago of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the revolutionary impact of printing on Western culture has been the subject of scholarly debate.1 These debates have centered on the very nature of the transition from manuscript to print: over the question as to whether print was indeed a revolution in the true sense of the term; and whether its dramatic, near-universal impact lay in the technology of printing itself or in the changes wrought by its human agents and their consumers within local communities—printers, editors, booksellers, and readers. Whether print was revolutionary or not, however, there is no large disagreement over the fact that its invention and wide adoption at the very least intensified a vast array of effects. These range from the increased standardization, fixation, and preservation of texts to the exponential increase in their diffusion and circulation; the reorganization of knowledge that took place as a result of that diffusion and enlarged readership; and the disruption of social, religious, and intellectual hierarchies produced by the demystification of textual mastery and the new forms of access to knowledge that now became available to anyone able to acquire a printed book. Even in the manuscript age, book production had been a collaborative effort—between scribes, patrons, illustrators, binders, and so on. The new technology of print, however, created a new social institution, the print shop. The social space of the print shop brought together different professionals and figures from the world of the book—authors and printers, Rabbinic Bible 77 translators, typefounders, correctors, artists and engravers, and booksellers, censors, clients, and book buyers; and not infrequently, these figures were persons from entirely different cultural and religious worlds as well— Catholics and Protestants, Jews, apostate Jews, and emigrants from Byzantium following the Ottoman conquest. Because of the particular complications of printing technology, the cooperation of all these different artisans and professionals became an absolute necessity, and the degree of their collaboration ever more complex. The print shop became their meeting-place, their common social space.2 And within its walls a new type of figure also emerged, that of the editor; indeed, by the mid-sixteenth century, the editor had begun to eclipse the author as the central figure in book production.3 The rise of the editor was also accompanied by the invention of what were effectively unprecedented types of books that the new technology for the first time made possible. As Eisenstein and others have shown, this was certainly the case with the new scientific literature that emerged after print.4 It was also true of such genres as the polyglot Bible, most famously the Complutensian (1514–17).5 The eye-catching format of this book, with its columns of parallel texts in different scripts laid out next to each other across the full width of a page opening, may not have been literally impossible in a manuscript, but the massive editing and expert labor in multiple languages required to produce these pages was virtually inconceivable before the development of the new technology. For the Jewish book, the effects of print were manifested in all the ways just mentioned, but its impact—particularly after the year 1500—was even more radical in still another way: It changed the very nature of the Jewishness of the Jewish book. Before the sixteenth century—whether in the age of manuscripts or in the fifty-year incunable period of early Jewish printing—the Jewish book was essentially a text by a Jewish author written in Hebrew script (whether the language was Hebrew or one of the Jewish languages like Judeo-Arabic or Yiddish) and produced by a Jewish scribe or printer for a Jewish reader. Beginning in the sixteenth century, particularly in Italy, and specifically in Venice, which dominated the Jewish book market for the first half of the century, none of these verities could any longer be taken for granted. Gentiles regularly owned the printing houses; Christians (who were sometimes former Jews) wrote books in Hebrew; Christian Hebraists were avid readers of Jewish books; and not all Jewish readers (like conversos who had returned to Judaism) could be assumed to know Hebrew; with the result that books for Jews were now produced in 78 Chapter 4 languages other than Hebrew or one of the...