Jewish manuscripts written in Hebrew scripts in the period after the introduction of print in different regions across Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa are aplenty. But how to read and interpret them as historical objects?
Recent years have witnessed a considerable increase of interest in Jewish manuscripts produced after ca. 1500. In the common imagination, printing press have seemingly emerged to eliminate manuscript as a means of transmitting knowledge and information. Within this narrative—one that has European perspective in its centre—manuscripts have been recognised either as relevant objects of study pertaining to the Middle Ages, or as merely preliminary phase of the publication process in the periods after the invention of print. To a certain degree a division into the time before and after the invention of the printing press lingers in the scholarly world, too. Our website is designed to set the first steps toward a comprehensive study of postmedieval* Hebrew palaeography and codicology by offering short but wide-ranging tutorials and study exercises alongside articles that survey the most common (and teachable) features of Jewish manuscripts made during the first age of print. Thus, we will analyse various categories of early modern writings and scribal techniques of different geo-cultural contexts of manuscripts production and use, including professionally copied exemplars, liturgical, kabbalistic and magical excerpts, texts copied for personal use, recipes, students’ notes and records, marginalia, etc. As works on this online resource progresses, our aim will be to explore continuous interplays between manuscript and printed media in the postmedieval Jewish text production.
Recent studies have nuanced the idea of the “print revolution” and its consequences and have demonstrated that manuscript production, in the Western world and beyond, did not cease post-1500 in the European context, and has much more complicated chronology beyond Europe.[1] The continued existence of manuscript alongside print in variously defined early modern and modern times has been studied for specific literary genres, functional contexts, and forms of manuscripts, but a broader study of, and especially a historical research tool-kit pertaining to Jewish manuscript cultures in the age of print have not been yet provided for students and scholars of the post-medieval periods.
Palaeography and codicology offer readers in early modern manuscripts essential tools to assess postmedieval Jewish manuscripts as material texts—objects that necessitate historical inquiry both to the physical and to the textual aspect of any given book and document. Our site presents the major Hebrew script families—Ashkenazi, Provençal, Sephardi/Eastern, Italian, Byzantine, and Yemenite, with their subcategories and mixtures (e. g. Italo-Ashkenazi; Italo-Sephardi; Maghrebi; etc.) and styles (square, semi-cursive, cursive)—in use by Jewish scribes in the period between the 16th to the 18th century. Here, we introduce examples taken from a variety of currently accessible digital manuscript collections. These examples allow us to examine how, and which types of texts, were produced and reproduced in writing. We pay close attention to the materials and processes of making of the handwritten text, from the design of codices in their entirety to the design of individual pages, and handwritten marks and texts inscribed within printed books.
Our first point of focus is the textual genre of recipe and the material genre of recipe books. See here for a general introduction to these genres. The subsections are divided into teachable features of manuscripts, transcription exercises based on excerpts of handwritten texts and text editions, and detailed palaeographical and codicological descriptions of particular manuscript items.
This online resource grew out of the project “Hebrew Manuscripts in the Early Modern World”, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation. We hope you will enjoy reading and interacting with the materials gathered on this site. If you would like to contribute or offer feedback, please do get in touch with the team!
[1] See, e.g., P. Stallybrass, ‘“Little Jobs”: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution’, in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. S. Alcorn Baron, E. N. Lindquist and E. F. Shevlin (Amherst 2007), pp. 315–341.