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When Jewish Printing was Young

June 12 2015

In People of the Book, Akiva Aaronson tells the story of Hebrew religious literature in the era of the printed word. Gil Student writes in his review:

Printing was developed in Germany, but Jews [there] were excluded from the industry by the local guilds. However, when the technology made its way to Italy, Spain, and Portugal, Hebrew printing exploded. [During the] first 50 years of printing, from 1450 to 1500, . . .there were 29 active Hebrew printing shops, [constituting] nearly one-fifth of all known printers at the time. With a literate and learned population, the Jewish community enjoyed a high demand for affordable books.

Each printer had to carve out his own letters—what we call fonts today—but regional characteristics can be easily seen. Ashkenazi printers used more square letters and Sephardi printers used rounder letters, each following the practice of scribes. Hebrew vowels proved a unique challenge; additional metal type had to be included for each [consonant-vowel combination]. Numbering of pages appeared in the early 1500s—the first Hebrew book with page numbers was the 1509 Constantinople edition of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah.

Read more at Jewish Action

More about: Books, German Jewry, History & Ideas, Maimonides, Renaissance, Sephardim

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic