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.Footnote ¹

The coming of the Internet and electronic books has increased the saliency and frequency of such discussions. Recent years have seen increasing discussion about fundamental changes in the nature of the “book” and of reading practices. Our sense that we may be living through a revolution in reading practices, driven by technological change, has led to scholarly and popular interest in the history of the book. While studies of previous episodes of changes in reading and writing practices help us to illuminate our own situation, the experience of living through changes in technology helps historians rethink the past as well.

Issues of textual transmission and bibliography have been fundamental to modern Jewish studies since the nineteenth century, but until recently these studies have generally been seen as philological tools toward “establishing the text” or bibliographical tools for locating texts to serve as evidence in historical or literary study. However, as the general field of the history of the book and reading has taken off in recent decades, the study of the history of Jewish books (or “material texts” more broadly) has attracted increasing attention from scholars in various disciplines across Jewish studies.

In the last decade, we have seen increasing institutional efforts within the framework of academic Jewish studies. For a number of years, the Center for Religion and Media at New York University has sponsored a working group on Jews and media.Footnote ² Since 2003, the Jewish Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania has sponsored a series of annual “master class” workshops on Jewish book history;Footnote ³ and in 2005–2006, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies devoted a year of study to the topic;Footnote ⁴ a new journal on the Jewish book, Quntres, has been founded recently under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary; the venerable Alei Sefer has been revived at Bar-Ilan University;Footnote ⁵ and conferences and panels on the topic have multiplied in recent years.Footnote ⁶

Despite these institutional efforts to advance the field and the recent growth of publications especially on the impact of print in early modern Jewish culture,Footnote ⁷ many questions remain about the role of books and reading in Jewish history and about the effects of technological change on Jewish culture. During the academic year 2009–2010, the Center for Jewish History in New York gathered a small number of scholars, at various career stages, working on different periods in Jewish history and representing a range of methodologies and disciplines, to convene a Working Group on the History of the Jewish Book. The first task was to consider the “state of the field”—or even more fundamentally, the definition of the “field”—in order to lay out an agenda of questions and topics for discussion. To that end, we invited Lawrence Schiffman, Yaacob Dweck, and Jeffrey Shandler to present brief remarks at the opening meeting of the group in October 2009. The essays that follow represent only slightly edited versions of those talks.Footnote ⁸

Taken together, the three essays suggest a rough outline of issues for consideration of the “Jewish book” across different periods and historical contexts. Looking at three distinct periods in Jewish history—the late Second Temple period (Schiffman), the early modern age (Dweck), and the modern and contemporary period (Shandler)—all three essays focus on questions of authorship, publication, dissemination, and readership.Footnote ⁹ While none of the authors here invokes this model or adheres strictly to it, Robert Darnton's concept of the “communications circuit” remains a useful heuristic or framing device for understanding the travels of a text in material form from author to reader.Footnote ¹⁰ With attention to storage and collection, our authors also consider the transmission of material texts over time, addressing a central concern of those who noted the relatively synchronic nature of Darnton's model.Footnote ¹¹ And all three essays respond to Dweck's suggestion that the history of the book not only tells us something about the use of material texts but also serves as an avenue toward discussion of broader historiographical concerns. The new model of book history does not rigidly mark separations between bibliography, philology, and literary analysis. An understanding of the dynamics of print in the production of the Shulḥan ’arukh tells us something about the intellectual and religious history of early modern Jews; we understand the content of the Dead Sea Scrolls better for understanding the scribal practices that created them; and we can appreciate the significance of the emergence of new forms of Jewish literary activity in the modern world more clearly by appreciating both the medium and the message.

Conversely, we can clearly see some of the challenges for scholars who want to make use of book history in their methodological toolkit. Both Shandler and Dweck emphasize the transformative nature of new technologies in making information more widely accessible and with new forms of “content” found in the new media.Footnote ¹² Of course, in both the early modern and the contemporary cases, we must also try to distinguish between the results of technology and the results of other factors (demographic, political, social, or intellectual). In many cases, the two cannot be easily separated.

In the case of the writers and users of the Dead Sea Scrolls, technological change is not a major issue, although the conceptualization of the proper kind of technology for writing (encompassing questions of writing surface, ink, and format) are of concern to some in the Second Temple period and in the rabbinic literature that emerged later. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that change in the technology of publication only matters from Gutenberg forward. While the medieval handwritten book is not addressed in this forum, a scholarly consensus has emerged that the transition from scroll to codex had a transformative impact in late antiquity in the West.Footnote ¹³ The full impact of this transition on Jewish culture has not been comprehensively studied, although we do know a great deal about the codicological aspects of medieval Hebrew manuscript books, thanks to the work of Malachi Beit-Arié, Collette Sirat, and others.Footnote ¹⁴

Schiffman's survey of the different attitudes toward orality and writing by different Jewish groups in late antiquity reminds us that a full picture of Jewish literary culture in any period must attend not only to the reality of scribal practices and/or practices of oral transmission but also to the ideological framing of what a text—specifically, an authoritative text—is. As Schiffman points out, by the beginning of the medieval period, the rabbinic emphasis on “oral Torah” was primarily an ideological framework rather than an accurate description of the material form of canonical literature.Footnote ¹⁵ The “textualization of rabbinic culture” (as Talya Fishman puts it) in the Middle Ages certainly needs further study.Footnote ¹⁶ Despite a lack of major technological changes in the material forms of Jewish books from approximately the eighth century to the fifteenth, the medievalist is well positioned to consider the processes of writing, publication, dissemination, and reception that Schiffman notes in antiquity and that Dweck and Shandler note in modernity.Footnote ¹⁷

Finally, a word about the rubric Jewish book. All three essays either implicitly or explicitly raise the question of what a “Jewish” book is. Is it a book with a Jewish author? An intended Jewish reader? A book written in Hebrew or in a vernacular in Hebrew script? Or is it a book with “Jewish content”? Can the same text (e.g., the Bible) be “Jewish” in some contexts and not in others? Certainly we can dismiss some such questions as semantic quibbling, and get on with the practical business of historical and literary scholarship. However, a careful consideration of the dynamics of such definitions and interactions in different historical contexts points out some of the ways that book history can illuminate larger historiographical questions. If we reframe the question from “what is a Jewish book” to what can we learn about perceptions and views of given historical actors in their categorization of particular material texts, we open up a more nuanced historical analysis, attuned more carefully to the complex dynamic interplay of text and context in any given time and place. We hope that that the three essays here offer food for thought and useful suggestions for agenda-setting for this complex and dynamic field of scholarly inquiry.