THE SHIFT from script to print in the sixteenth century heralded a reshaping of Ashkenazi literary models. In this article I shall trace some reactions amongst Ashkenazi intellectuals to this shift, which are indicative of their general attitude to the structural changes in patterns of the transmission of knowledge during the period. My main concern will be with certain developments within intellectual circles, primarily in connection with changes in the way halakhic literature—the core of the Ashkenazi literary canon—was written and transmitted.

RABBI HAYYIM OF FRIEDBERG AND THE DEBATE ON REMA'S TORAT ḤATAT

Hayyim ben Bezalel of Friedberg, brother of Maharal of Prague, was one of the most prominent Ashkenazi scholars of the sixteenth century, and a member of one of the most distinguished families in Ashkenazi society at the dawn of the modern era. Reacting to the printing of a halakhic manual—the first of its kind in the domain of Ashkenazi culture—he wrote:

This passage is from R. Hayyim's Vikuaḥ mayim ḥayim, a sharply polemical tract against the book Torat h.atat by R. Moses Isserles of Cracow, later known by the acronym Rema and renowned for the mapah (tablecloth) that he spread, so to speak, over the Shulḥan arukh—that ostensibly Sefardi work whose surprising acceptance in Ashkenazi society was one of the signs of the process I trace here.