La culture livresque des juifs d'Italie a la fin de la renaissance (review)

When the original Hebrew version of Baruchson-Arbib's book was published in 1993 (Sefarim ve-kor'im: Tarbut ha-keri'ah shel Yehude Italiyah be-Shalhe ha-Renasans [Ramat Gan]), it represented a pioneering effort to approach a crucial aspect of early modern Jewish cultural history—the study of reading habits with the aid of quantitative methodologies developed by the French school Livre et société. As Jewish reading culture in the early modern period remains an under-explored territory, and a comprehensive database of Hebrew and Jewish book lists is still a desideratum, Baruchson-Arbib's volume successfully contributed to defining the reading interests of Mantua Jewry at the end of the sixteenth century, while concurrently raising important questions for the understanding of the Jewish cultural ambience during the Italian Renaissance. The appearance of an abridged French translation of the work is therefore welcome. It will allow students of reading and printing practices unfamiliar with Hebrew to benefit from the contributions to the field offered by Baruchson-Arbib over a decade ago.

This case study was based on a corpus of 438 inventories of private and pubic libraries owned by Mantuan Jews—a sample composed of some two thousand people, representing 6 percent of the Italian Jewish population at the time. The lists, cataloguing 21,142 volumes, were prepared by the Jews of Mantua in 1595, following an order of expurgation issued by the Church. Up to this book's publication, all the scholarly articles examining lists of Jewish books in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period had consisted only of small-scale investigations of personal libraries. Baruchson-Arbib was the first to offer a complete overview of one cultural area (despite its admittedly limited geographical scope), employing the Mantua inventories not only to shed light on basic bibliographic data—titles, authors, printers, places and dates of publication—but also supply valuable insights into the socio-economic and cultural universe of their compilers.

Baruchson-Arbib's research, based on numerical analysis, is presented in twenty-three numbered tables and twenty-five (regrettably, unnumbered) lists detailing the Hebrew, Yiddish, and vernacular books inventoried. The documentation provides a clear and precise confirmation of cultural trends and patterns detected in previous analyses of Hebrew book lists from Italy. The findings corroborate existing knowledge of a marked difference in the education of Italian and Ashkenazi Jews during the Renaissance. Mantuan Jews of Italian origins owned more Hebrew grammars, copies of the Mishnah, and kabbalistic works than the local Ashkenazim, who demonstrated a keener interest in halakhic and homiletic literature. On the other hand, Baruchson-Arbib innovatively exploits the data to challenge some of the traditionally accepted wisdom on Italian Jewish culture. Surprising as it may appear, philosophical and scientific works enjoyed a similar diffusion among Italian and Ashkenazi Jews, while historical and leisure literature, as well as books in the vernacular (mostly chivalric poems), were especially diffused among the Ashkenazi Jews.

Besides providing a more nuanced interpretation of Ashkenazi culture in Italy, Baruchson-Arbib interprets the low percentage (2.4 percent) of vernacular works found in the Mantua inventories as an indication of the scarce impact exerted on Jewish culture by the Italian Renaissance. Against the "assimilationist" views propounded by Cecil Roth in his classic The Jews in the Renaissance (1959), the author suggests that the Jews of Italy, relatively well integrated in their surroundings both socially and economically, saw in their libraries a site of Jewish cultural specificity—spiritual and intellectual refuge. Unfortunately, this precious insight is flawed by the nature of the source employed. The 1595 expurgation decree only applied to Hebrew books, and it is legitimate to doubt whether the few inventories describing vernacular works represent a reliable sample. More convincingly, the author concludes her analysis by drawing attention to the shifts in reading habits engendered by the invention of the printing press...