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 (review)

REVIEWS 315 of their works. On the other hand, it is not a book easily accessible to those new to Alfred’s world. There is no map or chronology, and those without Old English may find some terms insufficiently explained. Overall, the book is a valuable contribution for the study of intellectual history, the history of political thought, or early medieval kingship. LEANNE GOOD, History, UCLA Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Jackie Feldman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2007) 320 pp. Scholars have traditionally viewed censorship as a mechanism by which an oppressor withholds or even destroys knowledge. Raz-Krakotzkin, however, explores the ways that censorship in sixteenth-century Italy allowed Jews and Christians to establish and articulate a shared cultural sensibility. Censors, most of whom were converts, primarily expurgated polemical anti-Christian elements from Hebrew texts. Jews rarely considered these polemical passages to be instrumental to the proper interpretation of the texts from which they were excised. They often removed them from manuscripts of their own volition, and were eager to see them omitted from printed texts. Further, Raz-Krakotzkin argues, the process of censorship was seldom a matter of implementing consistent ecclesiastical policies. Rather, censorial activity constituted an ongoing dialectical negotiation between Christians and Jews, mostly within publishing houses. The texts that were produced in this era provide historians with a direct witness for how Jews and Christians defined the boundaries of acceptable discourse within their common culture. Raz-Kratotzkin shows how the aim of censorship—to “present a Judaism that was not anti-Christian”—simultaneously created an “autonomous Jewish space” (112). For example, in Talmudic passages the Jew is defined in opposition to the Gentile, especially the Christian . As censors emended the polemical dimensions of these passages, they “created an alternative definition of the Jew” independent of a Christian framework (134). Jews and Christians alike desired a Jewish textual tradition that was not fundamentally anti-Christian. Raz-Krakotzkin shows how Rabbi Leone Modena, like his Christian contemporaries, sought to “eliminate blatantly anti-Christian elements from Judaism” (187). These early modern Jews, like the modern scholars whom Raz-Krakotzkin considers their intellectual descendants, did not consider anti-Christian elements to be central or foundational to Jewish texts or self-understanding. Raz-Krakotzkin locates censors at the nexus of these cultural transitions without crediting them with the creation of the Jewish canon or Jewish self-definition. Christian Hebraist interest in Jewish texts may have provided the impetus for church-sponsored censorship, yet the practice of reshaping texts had internal Jewish roots as well. Raz-Krakotzkin notes Jewish book owners who erased polemical passages independently of Christian pressure , and Jewish editors who incorporated the censors’ values into their own editorial process. He proposes that Jews may have prepared their own indices to “notify the public which passages could be erased without major harm” (94). He often treats converts, many of whom were responsible for the policies and REVIEWS 316 practice of censorship, as Jews whose conversion allowed them to mediate between the Jewish community and Catholic authority. As with all projects that concern origins and influences, this book must tread carefully. Raz-Krakotzkin acknowledges the role of censorship in shaping Jewish thought but minimizes the effects of Christian dominance in censorial activity . He explains church policies on Jewish books while indicating that they were not consistently implemented and that Jews negotiated with them in complicated ways. Jewish discourse existed in the context of Hebraist discourse, developing “in opposition to it, but by adopting similar categories and values, and not necessarily under compulsion” (183). Censorship, then, was not an imposition from the church to the ghetto, but a collaborative and dynamic enterprise . Raz-Krakotzkin explores these tensions by examining an astounding volume of manuscripts and early printed matter. In order to understand the emendations of the sixteenth century, he analyzes textual variants, tracing which passages have been blotted out or omitted, how they have been altered, what substitutions were made, and whether or not they were reinserted later editions. The notes—which run over 100 pages—provide additional examples and demonstrate...