Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin
Ben-Gurion University
Print Shops, Hebraists, Converts and the Shaping of Jewish Tradition
Hebrew publishing houses operating in Italy in the 16th century had a constitutive role in shaping and designing Hebrew literature for generations. The print shops, where the main transition stage of Jewish literature into print took place, were an exciting meeting place for people of different cultural and religious identities: Christian Hebraists, Jewish scholars and converts. The process of editing and publication was done in the framework of dialogue and dispute among them. Most of the print shops were owned by Christians, while converts, who participated in the printing activities as editors, proofreaders and censors, served as mediators and as carriers of the cultural encounter. The aim of this paper is to describe this encounter, in order to clarify major aspects associated with the transition of Hebrew literature to print (and consequently to "modernity").
As I will try to argue, from this context emerged simultaneously both the canonization of Hebrew tradition and the rise of new types of authority, and its subversion. I will try to emphasize the Hebraist dimension of this process, and the ways Hebraism served both in the construction of a common framework for both Jews and Christians, as well as the formation of an autonomous Jewish identity, dissociated from the medieval Christian-Jewish polemics. As such, the printing of Hebrew literature is a case study that may illuminate various aspects of the general aspects associated with the transition to print.