Adam Shear

The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy

Introduction: Book History and the Hebrew Book in Italy -Adam Shear and Joseph R. Hacker Chapter 1. Can Colophons Be Trusted? Insights from Decorated Hebrew Manuscripts Produced for Women in Renaissance Italy -Evelyn M. Cohen Chapter 2. Marchion in Hebrew Manuscripts: State Censorship in Florence, 1472 -Nurit Pasternak Chapter 3. Daniel van Bombergen, a Bookman of Two Worlds -Bruce Nielsen Chapter 4. The Rabbinic Bible in Its Sixteenth-Century Context -David Stern Chapter 5. Sixteenth-Century Jewish Internal Censorship of Hebrew Books -Joseph R. Hacker Chapter 6. Robert Bellarmine Reads Rashi: Rabbinic Bible Commentaries and the Burning of the Talmud -Piet van Boxel Chapter 7. Dangerous Readings in Early Modern Modena: Negotiating Jewish Culture in an Italian Key -Federica Francesconi Chapter 8. The Printing of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Italy: Prayer Books Printed for the Shomrim la-Boker Confraternities -Michela Andreatta Chapter 9. Hebrew Printing in Eighteenth-Century Livorno: From Government Control to a Free Market -Francesca Bregoli Notes List of Contributors Index Acknowledgments

Introduction to AJS Review Symposium: The Jewish Book: Views and Questions

In the last several decades, the study of reading, writing, and publishing has emerged as a lively field of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Historians and literary scholars have engaged with a number of questions about the impact of changes in technology on reading practices and particularly on the relationship between new technologies of reading and writing and social, religious, and political change. The new field of the “history of the book,” merging aspects of social and intellectual history with the tools of analytical and descriptive bibliography, came to the fore in the second half of the twentieth century at the same time that the emergence of new forms of electronic media raised many questions for social scientists about the ways that technological change have affected aspects of human communication in our time. Meanwhile, while the field of book history emerged initially among early modernists interested in the impact of printing technology, the issues raised regarding authorship, publication, relations between orality and the written word, dissemination, and reception have enriched the study of earlier periods.

Old Texts and New Media: Jewish Books on the Move and a Case for Collaboration

Abstract “Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place” is a database and research project designed to trace books-in-motion. It brings together acts of careful individual research with large-scale quantification and mapping: using inscriptions, owner’s marks, and catalogs of copies of early Jewish printed books. The project is a cooperative endeavor of four project directors, both faculty and librarian, from different institutions, each representing different fields of Jewish Studies. With the technical expertise of partners at a university-based center for teaching and learning, a mix of paid and volunteer student, postdoctoral, and library based researchers, the project directors have created a database that is transforming the way research on the history of the book is done. This chapter will address collaboration in three aspects: between project directors; between the project and its contributors (individual and institutional, public and private); and between contributors and users. The chapter argues for a new model of iterative projects that relies in part on networked collaboration rather than only on operations in concert by a small, bounded group.

Abraham P. Socher. The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xiii, 248 pp.

Shlomo ben Yehoshua (1753–1800), an Ashkenazic Jew better known as Solomon Maimon, has been of great interest to modern Jews and to the historians who study them. He has also played an important role in the history of modern philosophy as an early critic and commentator on Kantian philosophy. His famous Lebensgeschichte has been reprinted and translated into Hebrew and into English (although incompletely); his commentary on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed has been reprinted a number of times, and his entire corpus is readily available in most university libraries. A quick search on RAMBI and in the Philosopher’s Index will yield dozens of articles and a number of monographs in a number of modern scholarly languages. But much of this thicket of material consists of specialized studies that look at one aspect of Maimon’s life and career: his autobiographical self-presentation, his Maimonidean commentary, his reading of Kant, his portrait of an early hasidic court, his role in the Berlin Haskalah (or perhaps lack thereof), and so on. The best-known aspects of Maimon’s career—his commentary on the Guide, his critique of Kantian philosophy, and his autobiography—are usually presented separately. Some of this is no doubt attributable to distinctive intended audiences and different reception histories. The Hebrew commentary on the Guide, Givat ha-Moreh, was certainly aimed at a Jewish audience and had most of its reception among the Jews of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Maimon’s work on Kant was presented in German to a largely non-Jewish philosophical audience. His German autobiography reached many audiences. While aimed at non-Jews, it was translated into Hebrew and Yiddish and became a blueprint for later maskilic autobiographies. A fourth major aspect of Maimon’s work, his interest in Kabbalah, while noticed by some scholars and treated in a recent monograph by Meir Buzaglo, has by and large not been integrated into the study of Maimon. By tackling all these aspects of Maimon’s career and by