Neil Netanel's From Maimonides to Microsoft explores the concept of intellectual property in rabbinic thought through salient disputes in the history of the Hebrew and Yiddish book trade. As Netanel notes from the outset, “copyright” as it is understood in modern Western legal systems does not map perfectly onto Jewish material, and work is therefore required to apply legal concepts from one corpus onto the sources of another. In the centuries between the invention of the printing press and the Enlightenment, a system of royal privileges protected the rights of the publisher, rather than the author, who had invested significant capital in producing a book. In the eighteenth century, authors began to receive greater recognition, whether for their own economic role as producers (as in the Anglo-American context) or on account of a unique creative genius with which they endowed their creations (as on the Continent). Jewish copyright law, on the other hand, continued to derive largely from the laws of economic competition and markets, not the creativity of individual genius.

Netanel explores landmark episodes in a six-hundred-year history of the evolution of concepts that approximate copyright in Jewish legal sources. He moves from the earliest known Hebrew bans on unauthorized book production—awarded to Eliyahu Bakhur by the Jewish court in Rome in 1518—through rabbinic controversies over the intricacies of regulating the book market from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century, to a concluding chapter extending the discussion into twenty-first-century rabbinic courts in the State of Israel. Netanel does a yeoman's job of surveying the relevant secondary literature on the regulation of published matter since the inception of printing, alongside primary sources in the history of copyright, including rabbinic pronouncements of Jewish law that were printed in the front matter of books, codes of Jewish law, and rabbinic responsa. He offers due consideration to the relationship between rabbinic understandings of copyright and that of their ambient societies, noting points of borrowing and creative adaptation.

The history of law can be treated through a variety of methodological approaches. Law can be read as a source for exploring the impact of social and economic forces on governing norms, as a self-contained intellectual process, or as an effort by authoritative figures to shape and mold not just behavior but also culture itself. In a history of Halakhah, methodological questions become even more challenging, as in many Jewish communities the relationship between normative legislation and the enforcement and coercion of legal observance was somewhat more tenuous than in more conventional polities. Netanel takes recourse to different approaches to law as the book unfolds. In some of his chapters, he offers a close textual reading of legal principles, while in others he seeks to follow moments of legal dispute to enter into episodes in the history of the Jewish publication industry. There are great merits to this inclusive approach to a historical study of law, but it has its pitfalls as well, as the study sometimes seems like a fascinating collection of data without a concerted line of argumentation. Netanel's chapter on “Maharam of Padua versus Giustiniani” (chapter 3) is deeply satisfying in its explication of the lengthy ruling on the matter issued by Moses Isserles of Krakow regarding competition between two Venetian printers to publish Maimonides's Mishneh Torah. After such a careful unpacking, his survey of selected disputes between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (presented in chapters 6 through 8) feels somewhat thinner, and perhaps more descriptive than analytic.

A methodological tension between different kinds of historical questions also obtains in other portions of the book. In treating a colloquy between two leading rabbis, Mordekhai Banet and Moses Sofer, Netanel ably itemizes the positions of each rabbi without fully justifying the significance of such an extended discussion, a practice he repeats in his chapter on the Slavuta Talmud (chapter 7), when he provides “the Principle Arguments of Rabbinic Decisors.” These sources might have lent themselves to a more robust interpretation if they had been organized and presented to readers according to a set of conceptual coordinates, rather than as a list of rabbinic opinions serialized. In another instance, Netanel wisely notes the watershed changes in Jews’ autonomous corporate status as a crucial social and political context for changed circumstances, but he might also have explored more immediate intellectual contexts at work in these shifts in order to give greater heft to the history of the Jewish law of copyright as a changing intellectual category. A fuller approach to the intellectual-historical dimensions of copyright might have examined the ways in which changes to the political imaginary became manifest in rabbinic law, perhaps by recourse to synchronic comparisons with other copyright structures of the Russian Empire, or by examining discontinuities and changes from an earlier rabbinic past.

An orientation towards law's agency in shaping culture beyond its material reach might also have illuminated larger questions about nonsovereign autonomy and the changing power of the rabbinate. For example, nineteenth-century rabbinic texts lamented a diminution of rabbinic power in their own time and claimed a decline in the efficacy of printing bans. Netanel's well-marshaled evidence from those earlier periods, however, calls into question the existence of such efficacy in the era to which those later rabbis referred. Might we learn more about the nostalgic processes by which rabbis attempted to construct a useable past in the service of modern agendas? And for that earlier period, how did rabbis, in their discussion of copyright, labor to assert their regulatory capacities (and perhaps even their relevance entirely) in the face of social and economic forces over which they had little direct control? How did they use their endorsements of printed matter to harness their own standing to the diffusion of newly printed texts?

From Maimonides to Microsoft is both a contribution to the history of the book as well as to the history of Halakhah. Netanel has done an impressive job of collecting an interesting body of sources that reflect moments of competition, even if he occasionally maintains too tight a focus on the episodes in question, rather than their larger significance. His assembly of a large array of rabbinic attitudes towards economic competition in the print industry stands to promote further inquiry into the points of contact between intellectual and economic history, and between rabbinic texts and market forces. His engagement of the comparative study of copyright alongside Jewish legal thought and practice should encourage continued conversations about the contexts of Jewish cultural production in the past and present.