A Companion to the History of the Book (30 page)

The eighteenth century saw the development of a large number of smaller printing centers in the German lands and in Eastern Europe. An indication of the total number of printed books up to 1736 is provided by the collection of David ben Samuel Oppenheimer (1664–1736): after a life of collecting, he left more than five thousand printed Hebrew works, a collection purchased by Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1829. Although new printing centers, such as Metz and Paris in France, and especially Livorno in Italy, did continue to appear, by 1760 the center of Hebrew printing had really moved to Eastern Europe. The import of Hebrew books from abroad was effectively prevented there. Western Europe generally had become much more tolerant toward the Jewish book, but in Eastern Europe ecclesiastical and governmental censorship became more severe even than in sixteenth-century Italy.

The majority of printing presses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eastern Europe were active in such well-known centers of the Hasidic movement as Vilnius, Shklov, and Zhytomir, as well as in a large number of smaller places. In the German-speaking countries, the presses of Anton Schmidt and Joseph Hraschansky in Vienna and of the Jüdische Freyschule in Berlin were most active. They mostly catered for the needs of a rapidly developing market of adherents of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. The famous press of Wolf Heidenheim, who published a large number of critical editions of biblical and liturgical works in Rödelheim in the first half of the nineteenth century, was important as well. In North America, Christian printers had included isolated Hebrew words in theological studies as early as the seventeenth century. But in the course of the nineteenth century, as a result of the mass immigration from Eastern Europe to major North American cities, including Toronto, Hebrew presses were established by Jews.

The trends of the nineteenth century continued into the early twentieth, with Eastern Europe and its orthodox community becoming ever more important, and the traditional centers, such as Germany and the Netherlands, losing their importance entirely. Between the two world wars a short renaissance of artistic typography occurred in Europe. Artists such as El Lissitzky had art books published in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and Berlin. The Soncino Gesellschaft in Berlin fostered fine Hebrew printing and produced, among others, an important Pentateuch edition between 1931 and 1933. World War II destroyed Hebrew printing all over Europe. After the war, the State of Israel became the world center of Hebrew printing, with a few important exceptions only in orthodox circles in the United States. Nowadays, in spite of rapidly developing digital possibilities, there are very few printers outside Israel that may be considered capable of producing Hebrew books of any typographical value.

The two most important Jewish languages, other than Hebrew and Aramaic, are Yiddish and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). Yiddish printing started in the sixteenth century. Through their Hebrew studies, humanist scholars became acquainted with Yiddish and, guided by their Jewish teachers, started to study it. This Germanic language with Semitic elements in Hebrew characters triggered their intellectual curiosity and at the same time helped them to learn to read Hebrew more easily, through the reading of Yiddish texts that were largely understandable to them. Important early centers of Yiddish printing were Constance, Isny, and Augsburg in southern Germany, where a specially developed “Yiddish type,” an adaptation of the handwritten semi-cursive Ashkenazic book hand, was developed. Later on, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, large numbers of Yiddish books were produced in Amsterdam and Germany. With the shift toward Eastern Europe in the late eighteenth century, Yiddish printing moved there as well. In the course of the nineteenth century Yiddish gradually became an object of study in the Yiddish language itself, stimulated by socialist, romantic, and nationalist ideologies. This development was accompanied by the appearances of numerous original literary works by Yiddish authors, as well as translations of famous non-Jewish authors. In late eighteenth-century Germany, the adherents of the Haskalah published a considerable number of works in grammatically sound German, printed in Hebrew characters. These texts are often mistaken for Yiddish. Nowadays, public interest in Yiddish literature is increasing rapidly: especially in Israel and North America, new editions of Yiddish literature have begun to appear.

It is noteworthy that the Western Sephardim of France, and later of northern Germany, Holland, and England, did not read their Spanish in Hebrew characters, but rather in Latin characters. It should be realized, therefore, that Ladino printing in Hebrew characters was done for, and mostly by, the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman empire and not for the Western Sephardim. The history of printing of Ladino is generally divided into three periods. The first began with the publication in Constantinople in 1547 of a Polyglot Bible with a Ladino version, by members of the Soncino printing dynasty. Interestingly, this work was not followed by a larger number of Ladino publications. A limited number of books were published in the course of the sixteenth century in Constantinople, Salonika, and Venice, but during the entire seventeenth century, even into the first decades of the eighteenth century, only a few Ladino volumes were published. One reason may have been the strong objection to the use of the vernacular among Sephardic leaders in the Ottoman empire, which is a recurring theme in Ladino works, even as late as the nineteenth century.

The second period began in 1730 with the publication of the works of Abraham Assa and of Jacob Culi’s (1665–1732)
Me-am Lo’ez
. This period saw the emergence of a completely new literature: the
Me-am Lo’ez
(an extremely popular commentary-like paraphrase of the Pentateuch), the first daily prayer book, the first complete Bible (with translations by Abraham Assa), the first book on Jewish history, and a number of books on Jewish law. The two most important publishers (and harsh competitors) in Constantinople were Jonah Ashkenazi (born in the Ukraine) and Benjamin Rossi.

The third phase began with the Vienna Ladino publications of 1811. The Gentile printer Anton Schmidt published a row of Ladino books for a market of Viennese Turkish Jews and their Sephardic co-religionists in the Balkans. In order to provide the Ladino market with the books they needed, Schmidt hired a Belgrade Jew, Israel ben Hayyim, who became his foremost translator and editor, and who also produced a new Ladino translation of the Old Testament, published by Schmidt in 1815.

Post-medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

The invention of printing did not bring an end to the production of Hebrew manuscripts, but it goes without saying that the Hebrew handwritten book lost a great deal of its popularity. Toward the end of the fifteenth and in the course of the sixteenth century, manual copying of Hebrew texts became a relatively marginal phenomenon, especially in Europe. In the Orient the situation was different, as there, due to a general scarcity of printed Hebrew books, many Hebrew manuscripts were produced well into the twentieth century. The production of Hebrew manuscripts since the invention of printing may be divided roughly into four overlapping categories.

First, there were certain liturgical texts that had to be written by hand according to Jewish law, such as Torah scrolls,
tefilin
, and
mezuzot
. Descriptions of the rules and practices connected with the copying of these texts may be found in a vast body of medieval and post-medieval tracts on the topic, among which Moses Maimonides’
Hilkhot sifre torah
in his halakhic code
Mishneh torah
is probably the best known. Many of these texts were derived from the extra-canonical talmudic tractate
Soferim
.

The second category included single decorated sheets (for example,
ketubot
, Ten Commandments, Omer calendars), decorated scrolls (usually the Book of Esther, occasionally Psalms and other smaller biblical books), and calligraphic art. One of the most important traditions that developed after the Middle Ages, both in the East and in the West, was that of decorating the
ketubah
, the Jewish marriage contract.
Ketubah
decoration was especially popular in Italy where, from the sixteenth century on, it became customary to read aloud the text of the marriage contract in front of the congregation. This custom inspired well-to-do families to order beautifully decorated
ketubot
, as an appropriate present to the newlyweds, but certainly also just to show off. Italian
ketubah
artists were inspired by both the rich contemporary Christian visual culture and the immediate Jewish milieu. On account of their extensive use of Hebrew texts in the decorative programs and their selection of specifically Jewish subject matter, the majority of the artists may be assumed to be Jewish. This is also true for the Italian artists of the sixteenth century who initiated another artistic tradition: that of decorating Hebrew scrolls of the Book of Esther. Since the divine name does not appear in the Book of Esther, Esther scrolls, or
Megilot
, were manufactured with lavish illustration and/or decoration, comparable to that of the aforementioned
ketubot
. Such scrolls were used for the reading of Esther during the Purim festival in private households. Scrolls for synagogue reading were never illustrated.

Thirdly, decorated books were written during the eighteenth century
be-otiyot Amsterdam
(“with Amsterdam letters”) in central and northern Europe. Apart from several dozen surviving decorated daily and festival prayer books, meant primarily for synagogue use, these manuscripts were usually deluxe Passover rituals, Books of Psalms, prayer books for the Sabbath, and smaller collections of occasional prayers, such as circumcision manuals. The manuscripts were commissioned by middle-class and upper-class Jews, whose names appear on many title and dedication pages.

One of the most striking characteristics of what is often called the eighteenth-century school of Hebrew manuscript illumination is the fact that the manuscripts were modelled after contemporary printed Hebrew books, especially those of Amsterdam, which were esteemed highly for their typographical quality. Many European printers, from the beginning of the eighteenth century onward, even went so far as to print the word “Amsterdam” in large type at the bottom of the page, where one would expect the name of the place of printing. This indicated that the book was printed “with the letters of Amsterdam,” not in the city of Amsterdam. The Hebrew scribes of the eighteenth century adopted this custom and many scribes indicated that their manuscripts were copied in the style of the Amsterdam imprints.

Today, a maximum of 450–500 decorated central and northern European Hebrew manuscripts of the eighteenth century survive. The earliest manuscript produced during this revival is almost certainly a magnificent daily prayer book, copied in Vienna between 1712 and 1714 by Aryeh ben Judah Leib of Trebitsch, Moravia, which is now in the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. It is in itself puzzling why the new phenomenon would start off with such an elaborate daily prayer book, whereas the large majority of later manuscripts are smaller. Possibly the new fashion developed out of the existing custom of producing handwritten synagogue prayer books with occasional decoration, which were often donated to Jewish communities by the well-to-do. Once one scribe came up with the idea to write his manuscripts in accordance with the Amsterdam printed book tradition, perhaps others followed. In any case, most of the later, usually smaller, manuscripts were apparently prepared not for the upper-class but for the middle-class market.

At first, eighteenth-century artists copied directly from their printed models, and even tried to imitate in pen and ink their characteristic copper engravings. But soon the artists felt the urge to create their own illustrations. They usually maintained the most important elements of the Amsterdam compositions, but changed the costumes, furniture, and decor, in order to make the reader of the manuscript feel more at home with them. The two most important centers of this eighteenth-century decorated Hebrew manuscript production were northern Germany and the Bohemian/Moravian region, but there are examples of decorated Hebrew manuscripts written “
be-otiyot Amsterdam
” from practically all Western European countries, including Italy, France, the northern Netherlands, and even England.

The fourth important category of Western post-medieval Hebrew manuscripts are those that probably may be compared best to their non-Hebrew counterparts, such as autograph manuscripts, literary remains, bound correspondence, and archival material. Although these make up the majority of existing Hebrew manuscripts, modern systematic research on the topic from the point of view of book production is almost entirely lacking.

The post-medieval situation in the Oriental countries differed considerably from that in the Occident. Because printed books were usually scarce, there was often an almost “medieval” demand for handwritten books. Therefore, for Oriental manuscripts, a distinction between medieval and post-medieval is rather artificial. Little is known about the actual circumstances under which post-medieval Oriental manuscripts were produced, with the exception of perhaps the Yemenite community. The only systematic research done on the topic is Shalom Sabar’s (1990) work on marriage contracts, which offers only limited insight into manuscript production in general. When studying Oriental Hebrew manuscripts in a more systematic way one would at least have to consider Moroccan, Palestinian, Yemenite, and Persian manuscripts as groups worthy of separate attention, while there may be reason to define even more subdivisions. Modern research on post-medieval Oriental manuscripts is therefore more than necessary, but it should be realized that it will be hampered considerably by the large quantities of available material.

In 1991, Alexander Samely published an important analysis of the various shapes that Hebrew manuscripts in general, but especially those of the post-medieval period, may take (Samely 1991: 13). He distinguishes: