The First Jewish Books and the Early History of Jewish Reading

Among the earliest surviving dated Jewish codices are a group of Bibles that were produced in the Near East—Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, and Iraq—between the early tenth and mid-eleventh century. Known as Masoretic codices—because they also are the first Bibles to contain the marginal annotations known as the Masorah—these books have long attracted scholarly attention for multiple reasons— for their biblical texts and Masoretic annotations, for their codicological significance, and for their decoration and art. This article seeks to show that they also represent a watershed moment in the early history of Jewish reading.

The first half of the article describes these codices and their contents, the Masorah in particular. The second half of the article argues that these codices are our earliest evidence for a professional class of Jewish readers, namely, the Masoretes, who are the first figures known in Jewish history to have acquired actual knowledge of the Bible from the visual experience of reading its text on a written surface. In the earlier classical rabbinic period, knowledge of the Bible was primarily acquired through the auditory experience of hearing the Bible read aloud. The final part of the article attempts to contextualize this signal moment in the history of Jewish reading practice within a number of other contemporary and early medieval developments, including the rise of Karaism and the growth of new types of biblical interpretations, peshat in particular.