How might one begin to think about the Jewish book in the modern era? The period is defined by unprecedented proliferation—not only of many new books, but also of an array of new kinds of books, as well as a plethora of new print and other communications technologies, new professions and institutions associated one way or another with books, and new text practices. This burgeoning volume of material, as well as the expansive range of possibilities for books and how they figure in Jewish life, demand that those who would study the place of the book in modern Jewish life (up to and including contemporary phenomena) would do well to begin with reconnaissance, casting the net wide and considering which larger issues this wealth of materials and practices suggests for further study. This survey not only yields an impressive roster of potential subjects of inquiry; the information itself suggests possibilities for understanding Jewish books and book practices as a defining feature of modern Jewish life.

To begin, consider new communications technologies, which are hallmarks of the modern age. Starting with the invention of lithography in 1796—the first major development in printing technology since Gutenberg's introduction of moveable type in the West ca. 1439—barely a decade has gone by without the advent of some new medium or technological innovation: the typewriter (1829), photography and telegraphy (both 1839), modern postal systems (starting in the 1840s), the facsimile (later, fax) machine (1843), the mimeograph and telephone (both in 1876), hot metal typesetting (1886), commercial sound recordings and silent motion pictures (both in the 1890s), photo-offset printing (1903), “talking” motion pictures and radio (1920s), mass-market paperback books (1930s), television and audiotape (1940s), videotape and photocopying (1960s), and, in recent decades, the microchip, personal computer, laser printer, CD-ROM, Internet, cell phone, iPod, e-book. All of these technologies have had an impact on book production and reading culture, some directly and others more obliquely but no less significantly. Beyond the innovative consequences of any one of these technologies, the cumulative impact of this cascade of new media shapes book culture by situating it in a constant evaluation of older communications technologies in relation to newer ones.Footnote ¹

No less transformative is the impact of new kinds of content in Jewish books. Most obvious is the advent of a secular literature, both belletristic and academic, identified as “Jewish.” This development not only entails a new corpus of material, but also engenders a whole set of new practices around these books: writing, publishing, selling, reading, collecting, inventorying, teaching, critiquing. This new print culture was understood at the time of its advent as central to the realization of modern Jewish culture. Thus, maskilim were distinguished as much by what they read—as well as where, when, and with whom—as by changes in their conduct or belief.Footnote ² Alongside books, newspapers and other serialized publications—journals, magazines, bulletins, annuals, almanacs, calendars—emerge as important new forms of print in Jewish life.Footnote ³ Even as they facilitate new reading practices, these various periodicals complement book culture (e.g., publishing reviews of books) and sometimes incorporate it (e.g., printing serialized novels in periodicals before these works appear in book form). These periodicals also have engendered a new Jewish profession—journalism—with a complicated relationship to the emerging concept of the “Jewish author.” Consider, for example, the many Jewish writers of prose and poetry for whom being a journalist constituted a “day job” and who sometimes even published their journalism under pseudonyms in the same publications in which their literary efforts appeared.Footnote ⁴

Modern Jewish scholarship similarly creates new kinds of writers and introduces new kinds of books into Jewish life. Of special interest are reference works—bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias—that model new ways of conceptualizing Jewish knowledge as well as providing new kinds of content. As modern Jewish scholarship engendered new notions of how Jews should be educated, new Jewish pedagogical materials have appeared, including the advent of Jewish children's literature.Footnote ⁵

Attending this expansion of secular Jewish books are new kinds of translations. Most notable are, first, works of world literature and scholarship rendered in modern Jewish languages (Hebrew, Judezmo, Yiddish), thereby redefining Jewish literacy in terms of traditional languages that were themselves being transformed by notions of modernity; second, translations of literary works originally written in these Jewish languages into other languages, which reconfigured the place of Jewish writing in world literature. At the same time, new print technologies and practices have enabled the proliferation of anti-Semitica (epitomized by the many translations and editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), making the collection and study of these works a subject of Jewish scholarship in itself. Such developments only further complicate the ongoing challenge of defining what constitutes a “Jewish book.”

This interpenetration of Jewish books and those of other cultures is emblematic of the modern Jewish integration into modern cultural and political mainstreams. With this integration has come increased regulation of published materials, in the form of state censorship and legislation governing copyright, plagiarism, obscenity, libel, and the like. These laws both restrict and protect the possibilities of Jewish books while situating them within national systems of authorship and publication. Conversely, Jewish books sometimes figure as potent symbols of Jewish ideas or of Jews themselves in modern political actions, notably in book bans and, during the Nazi era, book burnings that deliberately echoed medieval practice.

Recent technological innovations not only make books available in new forms (e.g., e-books) but also provide new kinds of engagement with the written word. Sound recordings of books (on records, tapes, CDs, MP3 files) disseminate texts as performances, as do film and broadcast adaptations. Digitized texts on CD-ROMs or on the Internet facilitate new possibilities for searching and cross-referencing these texts' contents. Blogs, wikis, open-source publishing, and other online platforms and social software enable new forms of collaborative writing and sharing of texts, as well as responding to them.

These transformations of the book as a discrete, physical object take place even as new institutions for housing and disseminating books and new reading practices continue to develop. The modern age is witness to the creation of modern lending libraries and the professionalization of librarians, including the specialty of Judaica librarianship. The innovations of marketing and advertising, as well as developments in printing and distribution systems, have transformed Jewish publishing houses and created another specialist: the Judaica editor.Footnote ⁶ Jewish booksellers' catalogs become resources in themselves, not only for potential customers of the moment, but also as vintage ephemera, for scholars of book practices of the past. The promotion of Jewish books in the modern age has prompted new relationships between book publishers and other Jewish community institutions, manifest in the establishment of Jewish Book Month, Jewish book fairs, as well as local book clubs and reading groups. Jewish literature has become a subject of study in the academy as well as a fixture of community education. A metaliterature of criticism, canon debates, readers' guides, “best book” lists, and so on, surrounds this ever-growing inventory of books and facilitates the modern institutionalization of Jewish reading practices. These activities, long realized in print and oral culture, now take place as well on the Internet and are informed by new facilities of searching, hyperlinking, and interactive social media.

Jewish book culture in the modern age engenders new epiphenomena, reflecting developments in Jewish book practices and other cultural arenas. There is an auxiliary material culture of Judaica bookplates, bookends, bookmarks, and the like, as well as the appearance of books in logos of Jewish institutions or, continuing a long-standing practice, as decorative motifs on tombstones to denote the grave of a learned Jew. Book design generally is transformed by new printing technologies (including the invention of the dust jacket for mass-produced hardcover books, beginning in the 1820s) and the new professions of graphic designers and illustrators. At the same time, the advent of the “art” book—including one-of-a-kind works by visual artists as well as limited runs of “deluxe” editions—provides opportunities for collaborations between modern Jewish artists and writers (epitomized by the work of Jews in the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s) in addition to major artists' illustrations of “classic” and sacred Jewish texts.Footnote ⁷ The growing interest in old Jewish books as collectibles has prompted a growth in the professional connoisseurship of antiquarian Jewish publications, introduced the conservator into Jewish book culture, and engendered the display of books in Jewish museums and other public venues.

The epiphenomena of the modern Jewish book extend to other cultural works inspired, one way or another, by individual books or by book culture more generally. Stage, film, and broadcast adaptations of Jewish books, sacred or secular, are perhaps the most obvious examples, but this category also includes works of visual art that represent Jewish books. These artworks range from Moritz Oppenheim's 1866 painting Sabbath Rest—which juxtaposes, in an eighteenth-century German Jewish ghetto genre scene, a traditional matriarch reading aloud to her family (presumably from the Tsene-rene) and a younger, “modern” Jewish woman, off in a room by herself, reading a novel—to Anselm Kiefer's Breaking of the Vessels (1990), inspired by the artist's interest in Kabbalah, a monumental sculpture of an oversized shelf of books, made out of sheets of lead, bursting with shards of glass. In popular culture, images of Jewish writers have been reproduced on postcards, medals, currency, or stamps, thereby situating authors as cultural heroes. Several museums and other cultural institutions (in addition to public libraries) center on one or more books: the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, opened in 1960, and visited by millions who have read her diary since its first publication in 1947; the Shrine of the Book, erected in 1965 in Jerusalem to house the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947; and the National Yiddish Book Center, which was established in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1980. Book culture has inspired the occasional work of performance or installation art. Recent examples include Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy's 2004 musical theater piece The Rosenbach Company, which dramatizes the history of the famous Philadelphia-based family of Jewish antiquarian book dealers and offers a meditation on the cultural practice of collecting; Babylon Poems, a 2007 installation by the Sala-manca group, media/performance artists based in Jerusalem, which translates a selection of familiar modern Hebrew poems from and then back to the original Hebrew through a series of fourteen different languages, using “Babylon” translation software; Playing God, Alan Berliner's media installation of 2009, in which the artist takes the 837 words that appear in the biblical creation story (using an English translation of the Hebrew Bible) and creates an interactive game in which the visitor is invited to play with a seemingly random reshuffling of these words on a row of seven video monitors.

Innovations in Jewish book culture are by no means limited to secular publications and practices. Jewish religious groups across the spectrum have availed themselves of innovations in print technologies and in some cases have pioneered new strategies in the production and promotion of Jewish books. A contemporary case in point is ArtScroll, the New York-based Orthodox publishing house, which has engendered new notions of religious practice through its extensive catalog of publications, especially translations of sacred texts used in study and worship.Footnote ⁸ The impact of ArtScroll follows a larger turn in Orthodox practice in the post-World War II era that places greater emphasis on the authority of print culture, superseding mimetic mastery of religious practice.Footnote ⁹

Modern innovations in book culture even have consequences for the oldest and most enduring of Jewish books: the Torah scroll. These innovations do not center on the text, whose reproduction by scribes on parchment, in keeping with ancient protocols, continues to materialize holy writ as a sacred object. Rather, new practices concern Torah scrolls as valuable material objects that sometimes have histories of contested provenance. In recent years, new technologies, such as laser scanning, have been employed to identify Torah scrolls in order to ensure their return to their proper owners in cases of theft. Torah scrolls that had been confiscated from European Jewish communities during World War II and subsequently were recovered have taken on powerful new symbolic value as objects of Holocaust remembrance, displayed in museums and synagogues in the United States and elsewhere far from their prewar homes.Footnote ¹⁰

One of the most venerable of Jewish book practices—Talmud study—has engendered a remarkable series of innovations by dint of the cascade of new media of the past century. These recent developments rest on a much longer history of practices centered on this core text of rabbinic Judaism. As scholars of the early modern period have noted, printed folios of the Talmud, first published in the late fifteenth century, expanded the engagement in rabbinic text study among Jewish boys and men throughout the Diaspora. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, photo-offset reproductions of the 1880–1886 “Vilna Romm Shas” not only canonized this edition as definitive but also presented scholars with a daf of unprecedented standardization in both content and form. (The value invested in fixing the format of the daf is implicit in the “pin test,” in which yeshiva students are challenged to identify the words through which a pin, stuck into a page of the Talmud at random, passes on subsequent pages, a skill that relies on memorization of the text as well as knowing its placement on the page.)Footnote ¹¹ The standardized daf also facilitated the institution of Daf Yomi—inaugurated by Rabbi Meir Shapiro at the First World Congress of the World Agudath Israel, held in Vienna in 1923—as an international practice that both promotes and regulates Talmud study within a modular rubric.

Other innovations facilitate access to the Talmud either for those who cannot read Hebrew and Aramaic or for those who do not attend a shiur or otherwise receive oral instruction in how to engage this elliptical text on their own: These include modern published translations of the Talmud (or selected tractates) into German, English, Russian, French, Yiddish, or Modern Hebrew; anthologies of talmudic aphorisms; and entry-level guidebooks explaining how to study the Talmud (including The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding the Talmud).Footnote ¹² In the post-World War II era, electronic media have enabled new forms of Talmud study: Radio broadcasts of Daf Hashavu'ah by Rabbi Mordechai Pinchas Teitz aired in New York on WEVD from 1953 until 1988; Dial-a-Daf, initiated by Rabbi Chaim Eliyahu Teitelbaum, began in the 1980s as did the reproduction of shiurim (including Teitz's broadcasts) on cassette tapes. Among the more provocative consequences of these innovations is the unprecedented, albeit vicarious, access now offered to Jewish women to the Orthodox shiur.Footnote ¹³

The advent of digitized versions of the Talmud in the 1990s, first on CD-ROM and more recently on DVD and the Internet, presents new opportunities for scholarly engagement with this text as well as new challenges. The ability to cross-reference the Talmud's extensive text using a search engine tests the long-standing centrality of memorization to talmudic erudition. Indeed, publishers of this and other canonical Jewish religious texts in digitized, searchable form often tout their wares as providing something akin to instant expertise. DBS International Corporation, publishers of Torah Treasures, promotes its product as “an entire wall-to-wall library” of sacred texts on “two small disks” that are “designed for maximum ease of use and efficiency by even the most novice of users! … The user-friendly interface will appeal to all and transform previously tedious searching and page flipping into a fun journey of exploration!”Footnote ¹⁴

Having the Talmud in a digitized, searchable format will certain change how the text is taught and studied, but aspects of its traditional pedagogy will doubtless endure. Note, for example, that whereas earlier digital versions of the Talmud did not reproduce the formatting of the printed page, more recent versions preserve the “tsuras hadaf.” DVDaf, published by Judaica software company Dafka Corporation, uses digital technology to “blend a visual image of the standard Talmud page with English, Hebrew, or Yiddish audio lessons for every page to provide a truly unparalleled learning experience. Click any part of the page, and you are instantly whisked to a ‘virtual’ classroom, as you hear the voice of an experienced Talmud teacher explaining that section.” This tool also provides “hyperlinks to all references cited by the Ein Mishpat, as well as all references cited in the Gemara, Rashi and Tosafos” and includes a “Daf Yomi calendar … for your Palm Pilot.”Footnote ¹⁵ As venerable modes of engaging the Talmud are integrated with new technologies, study of this text is reconceived as adventure.

The Talmud is now also available in searchable form on the Internet, in the original Hebrew/Aramaic and in English translation. (In the latter form, it has frequently turned up, through Internet searches, on an anti-Semitic Web site, to the consternation of Jewish scholars—an unanticipated consequence of this new facility.)Footnote ¹⁶ The Internet also provides access to downloadable daf yomi shiurim and online ḥevrutot convened via e-mail, instant messaging, or Skype. Talmud classes are even offered for avatars in the virtual environment of Second Life.Footnote ¹⁷ These innovations have the potential to transform the social practices around Talmud study further, even while striving to maintain established approaches to the text.Footnote ¹⁸

The future of the book—currently a subject of intense debate among publishers, authors, scholars, and readers—has never been more urgent a concern. The expanding interest in studying book culture and text practices responds, in part, to the pressing demand that we question long-held assumptions about the place of books in our lives. The scope of these assumptions is vast, extending to concerns about changes in human cognition, cultural literacy, economies of information, and the social practices of communication, among other issues. Recent developments driving the debate over the future of the book may sometimes seem to pose daunting challenges to the long-standing centrality of books to Jewish studies; these developments also provide rich opportunities for further study that will prove strategic to understanding Jewish life, looking to the past as well as the future.