This beautifully illustrated book considers the physical appearance of the Hebrew Bible as it has changed over time within the various communities of Judaism. Based on Stern's Samuel Stroum Lectures, The Jewish Bible reads clearly and makes a strong case for the intellectual value of observing and thinking about the form that books take as well as their contents. Its many color pictures are closely integrated with the text and allow readers to see the argument for themselves. (Although, as is the case in many other similar books, little thought has been given to conveying a sense of the size of objects, so that scraps of papyrus are reproduced without comment as if they were as large as the biggest parchment Torah scrolls.)

Stern begins his account with a survey of the Torah scroll as it has developed for the use of the synagogue from the Second Temple period until today, according to the different needs and aesthetic sensibilities of a variety of traditions of Judaism. He writes compellingly about the emergence of parchment as a medium for conveying the text and thinks hard about the differences produced by alternative methods of writing (pen or brush, for example) as well as by variations in ways of reading aloud. He is alert to the external appearance of the scroll, its storage and clothing, and brings out particularly well how this has been used as a means of religious expression across a range of communities in the Sephardic world.

Stern then turns to the textual history and representation of the Hebrew Bible in the manuscript tradition deriving from the Aleppo Codex. He considers the development of what later became known as the masorah, explaining the role in its genesis of ideological debates in communities influenced by Karaism, and the resulting implications for the form of the biblical text for Rabbanite users. He describes the importance of the manuscript tradition of the Sephardic world of North Africa and the western Mediterranean, showing the significance of both text and decoration in the heyday of Iberian Jewry. Distinguishing between codices for liturgical use and for private study, Stern sets out the variety of Sephardic and Ashkenazic scribal practices and the role of illustration, in particular in manuscripts produced for Jewish communities in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. His discussion of the influences on the material form of the Jewish Bible might, however, had paid more attention to the traditions of the Islamic book, not least in the development of decorative forms for the page. In this context, he might also have benefitted from thinking about the surviving evidence for the binding of books as well as for the writing of their texts.

Stern's account is particularly good at suggesting continuities in the material history of the Hebrew Bible. He thus builds on his discussion of the creation of manuscripts for scholarly use in his account of the transition of the Hebrew Bible into the world of print, as it took place in the context of Christian publishing houses in the first half of the sixteenth century. He explains how the editors of the first two rabbinic Bibles instantiated the masorah in the form as well as the content of their work. He thus shows how they preserved, in the appearance of the Hebrew Bible in print, traditions that derived from the medieval manuscript book and that have continued to influence the form of the book until the digital age. Again, Stern tries too hard at times to distinguish a particular Jewish tradition for more complex cultural interactions and transformations. The format of the commented or glossed text, which he associates particularly strongly with the books of late medieval Judaism, was also well known to Christian scholars in the context of the medieval university. It was a relatively late entrant in the printing history of editions of the Latin Vulgate Bible, with the production of versions of Nicholas of Lyra's biblical commentaries barely more than a generation before the editing of the first rabbinic Bible.

Stern's final topic is the development of the Jewish Bible in the age of print, from the late sixteenth century to the late twentieth century. In this context, he is alive to different traditions of lay readership and popular religion in various parts of the Ashkenazic and the Sephardic worlds. He discusses well, therefore, the development of the Esther scroll and its illustration in early modern Italian Jewry; the role of the Judeo-Arabic translation of Saʿadiah Gaon; and the importance of the Yiddish retellings of biblical stories in the Tsene-rene. Stern is alert to changes in the form of the book, whether as a result of the influence of modern scholarly techniques or of the rediscovery of ancient biblical manuscripts. His discussion of modern Israeli Bibles is particularly interesting.

Nevertheless, Stern's broader treatment of translation highlights some problematic assumptions that mar his book as a whole. Stern is keen to assert that the Hebrew Bible is a Jewish book (“the Jewish Bible”) and to argue that it is thus different in form, ways of reading, and presentation from other books, including the sacred books of other religious traditions. This argument becomes awkward when he turns to translations and versions of the Hebrew Bible edited by Christians, printed by Christians (for Jews as well as other Christians), and distributed through networks involving Christian producers (not least of type and paper), sellers, and buyers. Stern's assertion that “by definition, the Jewish Bible was the Bible in Hebrew (whereas the Christian Bible was a Bible in translation, either in Greek or in Latin)” (165) is not supported by what he excuses as the contingent growth of translation among Jewish communities in the early modern period. It misrepresents both the history of the Septuagint (as a Jewish as well as a Christian text) and of the targumim. It misunderstands the relationship not only of Christians and Jews but of Jews and Samaritans, Jews and Muslims, and indeed Jews and other Jews. It confuses the exchange between the writers of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and Christian scholars with whom they interacted by suggesting an unrealistically fixed attitude among both Christians and Jews to the cultural meaning of the Bible. Stern's otherwise innovative, enlightening, and entertaining discussion of the Bible as a culturally Jewish artifact did not require the invention of such an ideologically driven monolith.