8 
The Transmission of Jewish Knowledge through MSS and Printed Books
8 EMILE G. L. SCHRIJVER
A beautiful yellow bookcase stood in the house of my deceased grandfather. On the lower shelf were the Holy Scriptures and its commentaries; above these were prayer-books, and what the soul is in need of otherwise; above these were books of customs and of Jewish law; and above these was the Talmud. Like gold coins that shine from a leather purse the golden names of the tractates shone on the leather spines of the Talmud.
This is one of the earliest childhood memories of Samuel Agnon (1888–1970), the first and only Israeli to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1966). It shows, above all, a young child’s fascination with the religious books of his grandfather, but upon further reading it becomes clear that Agnon’s fascination would develop into deep piety in the course of his youth:
When my father or grandfather were in the house I would sit there and study. When, however, my father and grandfather were in the store, I taught my hand the art to write the books of the Talmud. At times, I would trace the frame of the title-page or the contours of the first letters of the Talmud, and I would write myself a Mizrah [a wall decoration indicating the east] with those. Had, in those days, someone told me that there exist more beautiful images than these, I would not have believed him … My grandfather, of blessed memory, left many things … but hardly anything survived in the hands of his children, as the enemy came and plundered everything. But this Talmud was preserved and I still study from it, and at times, when I am writing my stories to kindle the hearts of Israel to the service of the Blessed One, I take a volume from the shelves and read in it and establish a bond with our sages, of blessed memory, and with their holy words.
These quotations from Agnon underline the central role played by the book in traditional daily Jewish life. At least since the Middle Ages Jews have identified strongly with their traditional literature and have laid great emphasis on studying these texts through MSS and printed books in Hebrew and Aramaic and in all other languages employed by Jews in the Diaspora. Agnon’s words also stress the importance of the book in religious education, and it may perhaps be said that in a way the history of the Jewish book is a chapter in the history of Jewish education. Here an attempt will be made to present the history of Hebrew books by concentrating on the role they played in the transmission of Jewish knowledge.
The central book in Jewish tradition is obviously the Pentateuch, the Torah (see 2). It is traditionally written as a scroll and read on Shabbat in synagogue in a yearly or three-yearly cycle. The writing of the Torah scroll is guided by set rules which were laid down in a number of treatises, the most famous being the extra-canonical Talmudic tractate Soferim (Scribes). This tractate served as the starting point for a number of commentators and legislators who expanded on it, the first and foremost being the great medieval scholar Moses Maimonides in his legal code Mishneh Torah. The high esteem for the holy craft of writing Hebrew Scriptures is actually already clear from the Babylonian Talmud. In the tractates Eruvin and Sota two similar passages occur, wherein Rabbi Ishmael, a 2nd-century CE sage, is quoted as saying to a learned scribe:
‘My son, what is your occupation?’ I told him, ‘I am a scribe’, and he said to me, ‘Be meticulous in your work, for your occupation is a sacred one; should you perchance omit or add one single letter you would thereby destroy all the universe.’ (Eruvin, 13a)
The first surviving biblical texts are found in the scrolls discovered from 1947 onwards in eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran (south of Jericho), the Dead Sea Scrolls. The greater part of these finds have been published in the last few decades, and they provide a treasure trove of information on early Jewish book culture and the transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible. For this introduction, two of the most interesting texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are the so-called Genesis Apocryphon and the Isaiah scroll, both found in Cave 1. Although of a completely different literary character, both provide a fascinating glimpse into the textual variety that existed in these earlier days of the transmission of the Hebrew Bible.
After the period of the Dead Sea Scrolls the textual transmission of the Hebrew Bible is much more blurred because of the absence of written source material. This absence is the result of natural decay, of the hostile destruction of Jewish books, and most probably also of the prominence of the oral tradition within Judaism, which may have been responsible for a general reluctance to write down religious texts.
It was exactly during these dark days of textual transmission that the so-called Masoretes developed detailed systems of vowel and diacritic signs that were meant to counter the threat of faulty copying that existed in the Jews’ largely oral culture. The systems, of which various forms exist, were included in later bible codices and in the large majority of early printed editions.
The first bible codices emerge as late as the early 10th century: these are indeed the earliest dated Hebrew MSS of the medieval period. The codices were all copied in the Orient, which is most probably the result both of the presence of the necessary knowledge of its textual intricacies and of the favourably dry climatological circumstances under which they have been kept there in the centuries that followed. The most prominent early bible codices are the Moses ben Asher Codex, the Leningrad Codex, and the Aleppo Codex.
The Moses ben Asher codex contains the earliest date mentioned in a colophon of a Hebrew MS, 895 CE. Now housed in the Karaite Synagogue of Cairo, it was copied in Tiberias and contains the text of the Prophets. A detailed codicological analysis of the MS published by Glatzer in 1988, however, has proved quite convincingly that the codex, with its colophon, was copied at least a century later from an older exemplar. Since then a MS with fragments of the text of Nehemiah, kept in the Genizah Collection of Cambridge University Library and written in Da Gunbadan, Persia, in 904, is considered the earliest known dated Hebrew MS. The earliest dated Hebrew MS larger than a fragment is a codex of the Latter Prophets with Babylonian vocalization, finished in 916, now held in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg.
The National Library of Russia also holds another early codex of the Hebrew Bible, copied in 1008 (MS Firkovich B 19A). This text, also known as the Codex Leningradensis, has served as the basis for the two most important critical editions of the 20th century, the Biblia Hebraica of Rudolf Kittel, first published in 1906, and the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, first published in 1966. Facsimile reproductions of the MS appeared in 1971 and 1998.
The Aleppo Codex is another early, undated MS of the Hebrew Bible. It is now kept in the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem and was copied more than a millennium ago by Solomon ben Buya’a and vocalized most probably by Aaron ben Asher. The synagogue in Aleppo, Syria, where it had been for centuries, was burned down in 1947 and about one third of the MS was lost. Its remaining part was smuggled to Israel a few years later.
The Jewish preoccupation with the quality of textual transmission is also evident from the high regard accorded to a number of old codices with apparently exceedingly correct biblical texts, which still existed during the Middle Ages but have since disappeared. The most famous is the so-called Hilleli Codex. In his chronicle Sefer Yuhasin, written around 1500, Abraham Zacuto reported that the MS was still in existence, but since then no trace of it has been found. Its legendary status confirms the Jewish obsession with a correct text, and, as Zacuto put it, ‘all other codices were revised after it’.
The oral transmission of Jewish knowledge is best known through the concept of the written and the oral Torah, which were both received by Moses on Mount Sinai and assigned equal value as expressions of Divine Revelation. The oral laws were written down for the first time around the year 200 CE in the so-called Mishnah. The oral traditions that were developed around this Mishnah were once again written down in the course of the 4th and 5th centuries CE in the so-called Gemara, which, together with the Mishnah, constitute the Talmud. Two versions of the Talmud exist: a smaller Palestinian version, and a much more elaborate one, the Babylonian Talmud, the version most commonly referred to. This tradition of orality persisted well into the high Middle Ages and even afterwards and, as already indicated, it may account in part for the lack of early medieval written sources.
It is especially the so-called halakhic or legal literature that provides a fascinating glimpse into the specific nature of Jewish textual transmission. The Israeli scholar Israel Ta-Shma coined the term ‘open book’ for this:
A long and intensive review of the medieval Hebrew book indicates that quite often books were not meant by their authors to serve as final statements, but rather as presentations of an interim state of knowledge or opinion, somewhat like our computerized databases, which are constantly updated and which give the user a summary of the data known at the time of the latest updating. In a similar way, the medieval book was sometimes conceived of as no more than a solid basis for possible future alterations by the author himself. There were many reasons—some philosophical and psychological, others purely technical—for this profound phenomenon, which can give rise to serious problems as to finality, authorship and authority of a given work. (Ta-Shma, 17)
A fine example of this, among many others, is Isaac ben Moses of Vienna’s (c.1180–c.1250) halakhic code Or Zarua. This is a huge work, containing abundant halakhic as well as historical material. There are explicit references within the text to the author ‘of blessed memory’, and to later additions by the author himself, which prove that both during his life and afterwards paragraphs were added to it. One may even doubt whether he ever considered his composition as finished at all. It has been suggested that the author constantly added to his own words in the margins of his own MSS of the text, and that these additions were included in subsequent versions of it. The same process may account for the inclusion of his students’ notes.
Interestingly, the very layout of halakhic MSS, especially in the Germanic lands, confirms the open-book nature of texts like Or Zarua. In these MSS ‘central’ texts are often surrounded by all sorts of smaller, commentary-like texts in creative ad hoc layouts. These surrounding texts would afterwards be incorporated into the next, equally authoritative MS witness of the text.
There are, as well, many testimonies of scribal intervention, correction, and editing, especially in colophons. An interesting example is the colophon of the famous Leiden University MS of the Palestinian Talmud, the only surviving complete medieval MS of this work. The scribe reports that he saw himself as forced to correct the text according to the best of his knowledge, since his copy was full of mistakes. He apologizes for any mistakes of his own. The Leiden MS was finished on Thursday, 17 February 1289 in Rome:
I, Jehiel, son of Rabbi Jekutiel, son of Rabbi Benjamin Harofeh, of blessed memory, have copied this Talmud Yerushalmi … and I copied it from a corrupt and faulty exemplar and what I was able to understand and comprehend I corrected to the best of my knowledge. And I am fully aware that I did not reach at all the corruptions and faults I found in that copy, and not even half of them. And may therefore the reader of this book who will find corruptions and faults therein judge me according to my merit and not blame me for all of them. And may the Lord, in His mercy, forgive me my sins and cleanse me from my errors, as it is said [Ps. 19:13]: ‘Who can be aware of errors, clear me of unperceived guilt.’ (Leiden University, MS Or. 4720 (Scal. 3), vol. 2, fo. 303v)
It is important here to emphasize a particular characteristic of Hebrew books of the Middle Ages. This characteristic also permits a more generic focus on textual transmission during the Jewish Middle Ages, i.e. not on biblical or halakhic texts only, but on literary texts as they appear in medieval MSS. As a result of the comparatively very high level of literacy among Jewish men (and a few women), more than half of all the extant medieval Hebrew codices are the product of the work of a learned copyist who copied for his own use, and not of a professional scribe. It goes without saying that this has had a strong influence on the nature of textual transmission, which was formulated by Malachi Beit-Arié as follows:
Contrary to what one might expect, the high ratio of user-produced manuscripts and the critical reproduction of texts in Jewish society did not necessarily improve the transmission of literary works by eliminating their scribal mistakes and restoring their authentic versions, but often engendered scholarly modifications, revisions and re-creations of the copied text that may very well have distorted and transformed the original work … Versions created by learned copyists on the basis of several exemplars or by scholarly conjecture … mixed inextricably disparate channels of transmission or conflated different authorial stages of the text and were dominated by personal choices and judgments. (Beit-Arié, Unveiled Faces, 65–6)
Beit-Arié’s position is that of a modern scholar here. In most cases, earlier users of the ‘distorted’ and ‘transformed’ MSS he describes must have considered the texts before them as authoritative and reliable textual witnesses and have worked with them as such. A striking example of the problems involved here is provided by the text of the Mishnah—which, as already indicated, together with the so-called Gemara constitutes the text of the Talmud—as it is preserved in the only known complete medieval MS of the Babylonian Talmud, now in the Bavarian State Library in Munich (Cod. Hebr. 95). Copied in Paris in 1343, its Mishnaic text shows significant textual differences, far beyond the realm of variant spellings or even wordings, from MSS that are considered to represent a reliable textual tradition of the Mishnah (such as the famous Kaufmann Mishnah MS in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest). The rarity of medieval MSS, even fragments, of the Talmud is generally believed to be the combined result of its enormous size, the strength of oral transmission within Judaism, and, notably, Christian aggression, which resulted (for example) in book burnings in Paris in 1242 and, in 1553, in the prohibition against printing the Talmud in Italy. It is therefore difficult to make any final statement about the reliability of the transmission of the text of the Babylonian Talmud. And yet, in the light of the relative quality of its Mishnaic text, it is hard to believe that the text of the Gemara as it appears in the only known complete medieval MS of its text represents anything else but one of Beit-Arié’s ‘re-creations of the copied text that may very well have distorted and transformed the original work’.
In spite of the active copying by individuals, books were generally rare during the Jewish Middle Ages. As a result, scholars and students saw themselves forced to borrow books, often, to make copies for their own use in the process. In the Talmudic academy of Rabbi Israel ben Petahiah Isserlein (1390–1460), the spiritual leader of 15th-century Austrian Jewry, it was customary for students who possessed books to study them during the day, whereas students without books would borrow them to study at night. It is therefore not at all surprising that the lending of books was considered a great merit. In the medieval Ashkenazic Sefer Hasidim, or Book of the Pious, it is even stated that when lending books one should prefer a student who uses them on a daily basis over someone who does not. It further states that the greater the number of copies taken from a book, the greater the merit of the owner, and that a fear of possible damage inflicted on a book should never prevent one from lending it. The most striking expression of this attitude is the statement that one should rather sell a book to a Christian who lends it to others, than to one’s brother, who does not do so. This general lack of books—in the Middle Ages a larger collection of MSS consisted of some dozens of volumes—would only come to a halt after the invention of printing; even then the relative poverty of the great majority of Jews prevented most of them from building more substantial collections.
Between 1469 and 1473 the first six Hebrew books were printed by three printers, Obadiah, Manasseh, and Benjamin of Rome. The most likely order of production of these books was established by Offenberg in BMC 13 (2005) on the basis of careful typographical and paper analyses of the holdings of the BL and the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam. This analysis does not permit a more precise dating of the individual books.
1. David ben Joseph Kimhi’s dictionary Sefer ha-shorashim;
2. Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret’s collection of responsa;
3. Rashi’s (Solomon ben Isaac) Commentary on the Pentateuch;
4. Levi ben Gershom’s Commentary on the Book of Daniel;
5. Nathan ben Jehiel of Rome’s Talmudic dictionary Arukh;
6. Moses ben Nahman’s Commentary on the Pentateuch.
It must be emphasized that the world’s second specialist in the field, Shimon Iakerson of St Petersburg, in his catalogue of the Hebrew incunabula in the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York (2004–5), is less certain about the exact order of printing. A quick look at the nature of the first six texts ever printed in Hebrew is interesting: two dictionaries, three bible commentaries, and a book of rabbinical responsa (replies to questions about Jewish law); no bibles, no prayer books, no Talmud, no scientific books. Although this would soon be corrected in the course of the 15th century—rather unexpectedly, Avicenna’s medical Canon printed in Naples in 1491 is the largest of all Hebrew incunabula—and other genres would appear in print as well, the rarity (for example) of copies of the earliest editions of Rashi’s commentaries is a clear indication of the popularity of Bible commentaries. Offenberg has even gone so far as to assume that more early editions have existed, of which no copies remain.
The six Rome imprints precede the book that many non-specialists continue to quote erroneously as the first printed Hebrew book, Solomon ben Isaac’s commentary on the Pentateuch; finished on 17 February 1475 in Reggio di Calabria, it is the first printed Hebrew book mentioning a date. There were at least 140 Hebrew books printed in the incunable period. These books were produced by approximately 40 presses active in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and by one in Turkey.
After the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula at the end of the 15th century, Italy became the primary centre of Hebrew printing in the Mediterranean world, with Venice, Mantua, Sabbioneta, and Cremona having the most important presses. A particularly significant chapter in the history of the transmission of Jewish texts is the activity of the famous Venetian press of Daniel van Bomberghen, a Christian printer from Antwerp. He had close contacts with Christopher Plantin; his cousin Cornelius van Bomberghen was one of Plantin’s partners. Van Bomberghen (just ‘Bomberg’ in Hebrew) established his printing press in Venice in 1516 and was active there until his return in 1548 to Antwerp, where he died in 1553. He published first-class editions of the Biblia Rabbinica, i.e. the Hebrew Bible with relevant translations and commentaries, and of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmudim. For his 1522–4 edition of the Palestinian Talmud he claimed to have used a number of MSS in order to achieve the best possible text. Although it is not entirely certain that he really used more than the one MS that is now known as the Leiden MS (its colophon was quoted earlier), his text shows an awareness of textual criticism and a sense of editorial responsibility that would remain the standard for many generations. His was also one of the first printing offices in which Jewish and non-Jewish specialists worked closely together—an example that would soon be followed in other centres of humanist printing such as Basle, Constance, and Isny.
Other important centres of Hebrew printing in the Mediterranean area were Constantinople and Salonika. An interesting aspect of the history of Hebrew printing in the Balkan lands (see 38) is the sale of books in weekly instalments of one or more quires, which would be sold after the Shabbat service on Saturday night. This phenomenon, certainly the result of limited funds, may account for the high number of incomplete surviving copies of books published in these cities. Important centres of printing in the Ashkenazi world were Prague, Cracow, and Augsburg. In these a relatively high number of books for everyday use, especially prayer books, were produced: with these, the issue of textual criticism does not seem to have been very prominent (at least judging from the title-pages). Further Humanist centres of Hebrew printing were Paris, Geneva, Antwerp, and, later, Leiden.
Starting in the second half of the 16th century and on into the 18th century in Italy, the censors of the Office of the Inquisition used to check and expurgate the large majority of Hebrew books in private and community collections. They would often even charge the Jews for their ‘holy’ work. The Inquisition’s special attention to the activity of the Italian Jewish printing presses found its most dramatic expression in the prohibition in 1553 against printing the Talmud. This led to a dramatic decrease in Hebrew book production in general and to all sorts of Jewish self-censorship, either through the active changing of texts in order to make them ‘clean’ for the Inquisition, or through the decision simply not to print certain works that would not avoid the censors’ criticism.
The 17th century is the century of Amsterdam. The first Jew to print Hebrew in Amsterdam was Menasseh ben Israel, who started printing in 1627. Other important Amsterdam Hebrew printers were Immanoel Benveniste, Uri Fayvesh ben Aaron Halevi, David de Castro Tartas, and the members of the printing dynasties of Athias and Proops. Although most printers did have a number of major projects through which they would try to establish their name, judging from their productions most Amsterdam printers were willing to print any book that came with proper funding and reliable rabbinical approbations. For their special projects, however, they would invest considerably, either with their own or with external funds, and would do their utmost to produce the best possible text. An interesting case in point are the two competing Yiddish translations of the Bible that were printed more or less simultaneously in 1678 and 1679. The printer Uri Fayvesh ordered Jekuthiel ben Isaac Blitz to make a Yiddish translation. The translator appeared not to be able to deliver the quality that one of the partners in the project, the printer Joseph Athias, had expected. Athias therefore decided to withdraw from the project, ordering a better translation from Joseph ben Alexander Witzenhausen and publishing it himself. Although both editions were printed in press runs of more than 6,000 copies, neither was a commercial success. On a more general level it may be stated that the Amsterdam printing business, with its vast international network of authors and readers, its high-quality output, and its close contacts with the surrounding non-Jewish world, constituted the last stage in the industrialization and professionalization of Hebrew printing.
The second half of the 18th century was dominated by a major development in the intellectual history of Jewish Europe. The Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah movement, would dominate the world of the book in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and, alongside more traditional presses that catered for the needs of the religious communities, would become responsible for a series of new, critical editions of traditional Jewish texts, textbooks, satirical works, and a number of influential journals. The most important journal was Ha-me’asef (the Gatherer), issued originally by the Society of Promoters of the Hebrew Language and published in various places between 1784 and 1811. The journal soon became the voice of the Jewish Enlightenment. Haskalah goals included getting Jews to adopt the German language and to give up Yiddish, to assimilate into the local culture, and, for literary use, to write biblical (‘classical’) Hebrew instead of what they considered the inferior Rabbinic Hebrew. The best way to implement these ideals was by means of education. Interestingly, fables were considered especially effective for education, which explains why Ha-me’asef contains no fewer than 55 fables.
In the course of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century ever more belles-lettres were published, both in Hebrew and in Hebrew and Yiddish translations. This illustrates the continuing emancipation of the Jewish intellectual classes, as well as the development of what has been called ‘a vigorous, effective, and dynamic publishing apparatus’ (Grunberger, 124). Emerging Zionism was an influential factor as well, since it stimulated the publication of historical novels that connected contemporary Jews with their historical ancestors. One publisher has been particularly important in the development of this ‘publishing apparatus’, Abraham Leib Shalkovich, or Ben-Avigdor. He started off in Warsaw with a series of ‘penny books’ in 1891, and established two conventional publishing houses, one in 1893 and one in 1896. Ben-Avigdor formulated his deeper motivation as follows:
Upon examining the poverty of our Hebrew literature in all its aspects, we recognize that one of the main factors preventing it from developing as it should is the absence from our midst of well-financed publishers who could pay authors and scholars a just recompense for their labor … (Grunberger, 120)
Ben-Avigdor’s and a number of his successor’s efforts paved the way for the development of a national, modern Hebrew literature, publishing the works of such authors as Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) and Saul Tchernichovski (1875–1943).
The emigration of these authors and many of their colleagues to Palestine in the first decades of the 20th century signalled the emergence of Palestine as the centre of Hebrew literature. This shift to Palestine was further strengthened by the major political events of the 20th century, the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe, the mass destruction of European Jews by the Nazis, and the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. Modern Israeli authors such as Abraham Yehoshua (1936–), David Grossman (1954–), and Amos Oz (1939–), are published in Israel and widely translated, read, and appreciated in all modern languages. Oz’s monumental and highly erudite novel A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004) recounts his own family saga and covers Jewish history and intellectual life of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries: while writing about himself and his family, he is also telling the story of the Jews. As such his work is both an integral part of a millennium-old tradition and a worthy representative of the promising future of the Hebrew (for which now read Israeli) book.
S. J. Agnon, Das Schaß meines Großvaters (1925)
M. Beit-Arié, Hebrew Manuscripts of East and West (1993)
—— The Makings of the Medieval Hebrew Book (1993)
—— Unveiled Faces of Medieval Hebrew Books (2003)
M. Glatzer, ‘The Aleppo-Codex: Codicological and Paleographical Aspects’, Sefunot, 4.19 (1988), 167–276 (in Hebrew)
Z. Gries, The Book in the Jewish World, 1700–1900 (2007)
M. W. Grunberger, ‘Publishing and the Rise of Modern Hebrew Literature’, in A Sign and a Witness, ed. L. S. Gold (1988)
M. J. Heller, Printing the Talmud (1992)
—— Studies in the Making of the Early Hebrew Book (2008)
B. S. Hill, Incunabula, Hebraica and Judaica (1981)
—— Hebraica (Saec. X ad Saec. XVI) (1989)
S. Iakerson, Catalogue of Hebrew Incunabula from the Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary (2 vols, 2004–5)
S. Liberman Mintz and G. M. Goldstein, Printing the Talmud (2005)
A. K. Offenberg, Hebrew Incunabula in Public Collections (1990)
—— BMC 13: Hebraica (2005)
D. W. Parry et al., eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader (2004)
R. Posner and I. Ta-Shma, eds., The Hebrew Book (1975)
B. Richler, Guide to Hebrew Manuscript Collections (1994)
E. G. L. Schrijver, ‘The Hebraic Book’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. S. Eliot and J. Rose (2007)
C. Sirat, Hebrew Manuscripts of the Middle Ages (2002)
I. Ta-Shma, ‘The “Open” Book in Medieval Literature: the Problem of Authorized Editions’, BJRL 75 (1993) 17–24
E. Tov, Textual Transmission of the Hebrew Bible (1992)
—— ed., The Dead Sea Scrolls on Microfiche (1993)
Y. Vinograd, Thesaurus of the Hebrew Book (1993)