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People of the Book

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Product Review (submitted on January 13, 2015):

WINCHESTER, California — Communicating orally is an endowment of nature through such organs as the lips, teeth, and tongue; reading is humanity’s gift to itself through the invention of a written alphabet. One theory, proposed by Archeologist Orly Goldwasser, says that Egyptian overseers, during the second millennium BCE, constructed a rudimentary set of sounds and associated symbols in order to communicate with the numerous foreign miners and construction workers who spoke a polyglot of languages. Compared to a picture-based language, such as hieroglyphs, which contains thousands of symbols, learning to read a relatively short phonic-based alphabet, coded in one’s own native tongue, becomes so much easier, as does learning to write the alphabet and structure words.

Everyone we meet in the Book of Genesis imparts information through speech, no one writes! In Genesis, people assign special names to places, but none post a written sign, such as in Genesis 32:31. Jacob has wrestled with God and the Bible records, “And Jacob called the name of the place peniel.” He does not compose a sign saying something like, “I have seen God’s face here, yet I am still alive.”

The first time that the Hebrew Bible uses some form of the word “write” is in the Book of Exodus, after the battle with the Amalekites. At battle’s conclusion, the Bible does not state that “Moses called this place ‘Victory over Amalak.’” Rather, the Bible documents the following: “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Write these events for commemoration in a sefer [modern translation book, but here used as a testimonial document written on parchment or clay] and tell Joshua that I will surely blot out the recollection of Amalak from the face of the earth’” (Ex. 17:14). The battle with Amalak happened almost immediately after the Exodus, about 1446 BCE, according to Jewish tradition. It is certainly possible that the Hebrews as slaves, speaking a non-Egyptian language, learned to read through a phonics-based alphabet, then carried that knowledge into Canaan. Additionally, this date certainly fits within Goldwasser’s timeline.

A scribal profession is born with the invention of writing and this professional class existed for millennia, with its demise occurring only after the invention of moveable type and the printing press. Jewish scribes produce manuscripts, Jewish printers create books. It is at this point, the invention of the printing press and the production of Jewish books, that Akiva Aaronson, author of People of the Book, begins his story of the early adoption of and the continuous reliance on the printing press by Jewish authors.

In the introductory section, Aaronson gives a brief overview of the invention: Johannes Gutenberg first employed moveable type in the art of printing about 1439, which led to the publication of the first printed Bible in 1455. Printing spread rapidly from Germany to England, where William Caxton opened a print shop in 1476. In Germany, Aaronson informs us, Jews were denied the possibility of learning the printing trade due to Germany’s strong guild system. However, when the practice moved southward into Italy, then Portugal and Spain, Hebrew printing began in earnest. The adoption was so rapid, that during the first fifty years of printing nearly twenty percent of the known printing houses were owned by Jews.

Jewish publishing from the sixteenth century onward, which Aaronson presents in section two of the People of the Book, correlates with the freedoms the Jews gained and lost in various countries around the world. The very first printed book, published in Reggio di Calabria, Italy, by Avraham ben Garton, was Rashi’s commentary on the Torah, in 1475. In the same year, Arba’ah Turim by Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher (known as Tur) was printed in Piove di Sacco, Italy by Meshullam Cuzi.

The following century saw Jewish printing houses develop in numerous places, including the Ottoman Empire, Palestine, and Central and Northeast Europe. During the seventeenth century Amsterdam became an important center for Jewish printing, along with Germany, Poland, and Russia. Aaronson describes the output of the Hebrew presses of such Dutch printers as Menashe Ben Israel and Yosef Attias, and tells the history of the Hebrew presses in the cities of Frankfurt-Am-Main and Sulzbach in Germany. Poland rose to prominence with the development of the Chassidic and Yeshiva movements, and Aaronson details how the demand for Jewish books made Zolkiew a center for Jewish publishing.

The industrial revolution occurred during the eighteenth century, impacting on the printing industry with inventions such as metal replacing wood for construction of the press and the incorporation of steam power. During the nineteenth century, “the center of Hebrew printing shifted more and more to eastern Europe, the heartland of Ashkenazi Jewry. The output of eastern European Hebrew presses eventually far surpassed those of western Europe.” In People of the Book, Aaronson describes Jewish publications in cities like Vilna and Warsaw in Poland, Vienna and Prague in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Bagdad under the Ottomans.

Aaronson also notes that Hebrew printing resumed during the nineteenth century in the Land of Israel as a result of emigration to Tzefat (Safed), in the Galilee, during the early nineteenth century by students of such notable rabbis as the Ba’al Shem Tov and the Vilna Gaon. The first book printed there, a siddur, appeared in 1832. A year later came a Chumash and two editions of the Book of Psalms. With immigration to the United States by Eastern European Jews beginning in the late nineteenth century, America became the center of Hebrew printing during the twentieth century. It is not just place that Aaronson considers in this section, he also chronicles the impact of World Wars I and II and the Holocaust on Jewish printing.

The fourth and final section, which highlights Jewish printing through vignettes of notable rabbis and scholars begins with Rabbi Shalom Ibn Aderes, a thirteenth century Spanish scholar, known as the Rashba, and ends with Rabbi Yosef Shaul Nathanson, an important nineteenth century rabbi from Lemberg, in Galicia. Also included in the section is the publication history of the Haggadah, one of the most published books in the history of Jewish printing, with about five thousand editions.

The story of the censorship of Jewish books and the persecution of their authors by the Catholic Church and in later times, the Nazis, is detailed in Section Four, as are the applications of Jewish law (halakhah) to printed religious material. These issues include whether or not printed documents, like the Torah scroll, mezuzah, and get are “kosher,” or must they be written by hand to be religiously acceptable? Can the moveable type forming God’s name be disassembled? To what extent does the copyright extend to Jewish holy books?

Aaronson has written a clear, concise, and detailed history of the Jewish people’s love affair with printed texts. People of the Book, an oversized, hard covered, magnificently illustrated book, is as worthy of taking an honored place on the coffee table as it is in a personal library.


Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. Your comments may be posted in the box below or you may contact the reviewer directly at fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.