No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Introduction to AJS Review Symposium: The Jewish Book: Views and Questions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2010
Extract
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.
- Type
- Symposium: The Jewish Book
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2010
References
1. On the development of book history, see Howsam, Leslie, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
2. This group sponsors a Web site (Modiya Project, http://modiya.nyu.edu/) that contains details of their work over the years.
3. Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, The Manfred R. Lehman Memorial Master Workshop in the History of the Jewish Book, http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jwst/lehmann.htm.
4. For a list of members of that group and their topics of research, see http://www.cjs.upenn.edu/program/2005-2006/list.html.
5. Quntres is available at https://taljournal.jtsa.edu/index.php/quntres/index. Alei Sefer is available through Bar-Ilan University Press at http://www.biupress.co.il/website_en/index.asp?category=62.
6. For example, the organizers of the Early Modern Workshop, an annual project dedicated to translation and discussion of primary sources for early modern Jewish history, devoted the 2009 workshop to the issue of Jewish reading practices. See “Reading across Cultures: The Jewish Book and Its Readers in the Early Modern Period,” http://www.earlymodern.org/workshops/2009/.
7. Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, “Print and Jewish Cultural Development,” in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Grendler, P. et al. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999), 3: 344–46Google Scholar; Gries, Zeev, The Book in the Jewish World, 1700–1900 (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007)Google Scholar; and most recently Ruderman, David B., Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 3, “Knowledge Explosion.” For additional references on more specific areas, see the works cited by Dweck in his essay.
8. I am grateful to Elisheva Carlebach for her support of the Working Group and for her invitation to submit these essays to AJS Review.
9. For reasons of time, we were not able to invite contributions from scholars working on the rabbinic period or the medieval period. See below for some comment on the study of the Jewish book during the period in which manuscript codices were the primary means of disseminating texts.
10. Darnton, Robert, “What Is the History of Books?” Deadalus 111 (Summer 1982): 65–83Google Scholar.
11. See Adams, Thomas R. and Barker, Nicolas, “A New Model for the Study of the Book,” in A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, ed. Barker, N. (London: The British Library, 1993), 5–43Google Scholar.
12. My use of the term content here is self-consciously a reminder that our conceptualization of past periods is shaped by our own time. I doubt very much that I would have characterized the nature of the texts in an early modern printed book using the rubric of content before the invention of the Internet.
13. For a recent study of the importance of the codex in the emergence and spread of Christianity, see Grafton, Anthony and Williams, Megan, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14. To my knowledge, no comprehensive survey of the impact of the scroll-codex transition on Jewish culture exists. For a survey of the existing studies on the early Hebrew codex, see Reif, Stefan C., “The Impact on Jewish Studies of a Century of Genizah Research,” in Jewish Studies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, ed. Borrás, Judit Tagarona and Badillos, Angel Sáenz (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999)Google Scholar, 1: 603 n. 102; and Stern, David, “The First Jewish Books and the Early History of Jewish Reading,” Jewish Quarterly Review 98 (2008): 163–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 195–99. For introductions to the work on medieval Hebrew manuscripts, see Beit-Arié's, MalachiHebrew Manuscripts of East and West: Towards a Comparative Codicology (London: The British Library, 1993)Google Scholar; and Sirat, Colette, Hebrew Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, trans. de Lange, N. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
15. For an example of a later rhetorical emphasis on oral transmission in the midst of a written culture, see Wolfson, Elliot, “Beyond the Spoken Word: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Medieval Jewish Mysticism,” in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, ed. Elman, Yaakov and Gershoni, Israel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 166–204Google Scholar.
16. See Fishman, Talya, “Rhineland Pietist Approaches to Prayer and the Textualization of Rabbinic Culture in Medieval Northern Europe,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 11 (2004): 313–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17. For an argument that the basic paradigms of the “history of the book” so often focused on print should be extended to the study of the Middle Ages, see Brantley, Jessica, “The Prehistory of the Book,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 632–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Armando Petrucci has partly paved the way; see his Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture, trans. Lappin, L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar.