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  • The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century
  • Paul F. Grendler
The Censor, the Editor, and the Text:The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century. By Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin. Translated by Jackie Feldman. [Jewish Culture and Contexts.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007. Pp. viii, 314. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-812-24011-5.)

This is a study of Catholic Church censorship and expurgation of Hebrew literature in sixteenth-century Italy. It is the English translation of a book first published in Hebrew in Jerusalem in 2005, and it appears under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania.

The book examines the burning of the Talmud in 1553, the development of Catholic ideas of censorship of Hebrew books as expressed in the various indexes of prohibited books, the Council of Trent, and debates in Roman congregations. Raz-Krakotzkin then discusses the structure of Hebrew book expurgation, pointing out that it involved Christians, Jewish converts to Christianity, and Jews working together in Hebrew printing establishments. He argues convincingly that a major goal of expurgation was to safeguard Hebrew books for Christian readers. The author has read very widely and well in the literature of sixteenth-century printing and Catholic censorship generally, and he avoids polemics. He sometimes gives the papacy and the Church the benefit of the doubt by noting additional, less objectionable explanations for some brutal anti-Jewish actions. Raz-Krakotzkin also points out that Hebrew printing involved both editing and censorship, with sometimes blurred lines between them. A key term was zikkuk (to refine) often found in the colophons of Hebrew books: it meant both correcting and censoring texts.

Chapter 5 is the most important. Raz-Krakotzkin lists and analyzes the principles of expurgation for Hebrew books based on a document probably drafted by a convert who became a censor. The goal was to prepare texts that could be used by Christians and Jews alike, a notion of a common heritage. Although the author does not emphasize it, those who have studied Catholic censorship will notice that the approach and some of the principles of Hebrew censorship were the same as the expurgation rules used to eliminate anti-Catholic words and ideas from books written by Protestants that were otherwise acceptable. Censorship's heaviest impact fell on Hebrew biblical commentary, as the expurgators eliminated or rewrote anti-Christian passages found in the biblical commentaries of such famous medieval scholars as Rashi and David Kimchi. On the other hand, expurgation of Hebrew books of codification (halakha), i.e., texts that explained and interpreted the laws that governed Jewish life, was light. The irony is that although the Talmud was not permitted, the books that contained the commandments and interpretations of the Talmud were. The effect, in the view of Raz-Krakotzkin, was to affirm Jewish autonomous life, that is, "explicit recognition of the Jews' right to maintain their separateness from Gentiles in the basic areas of life" (p. 161).

The book is based on a wealth of secondary literature on censorship and the examination of numerous copies of censored Hebrew books. One merit of [End Page 825] the book for readers (like this reviewer) who do not read Hebrew is to summarize a great deal of recent Hebrew scholarship on these issues. On the other hand, the author is enamored of Foucault, reception theory, and the notion of negotiation. Hence, like almost all scholarship written under this ideological sky this book has excess verbiage that wanders around the topic (especially in the long introduction and conclusion) plus repeated buzzwords. It exhibits a sometimes slippery chronology, and it substitutes the politically correct but chronologically vague "early modern" for the historical "Renaissance," thus leading to misleading expressions as "early modern Hebraism." It employs the first person singular and often omits the pagination of articles in collective volumes in the bibliography. The English reads smoothly, although a few Italian names have been mangled. Despite these faults, the central five chapters offer a balanced and quite intelligent examination of the expurgation of Hebrew books along...

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