The Destruction and Preservation of Hebrew Books: New Sources and Methodologies for Studying Catholic Censorship and Other Forms of Dismemberment and Rescue of Hebrew Texts in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy

From Firenze University Press Journal: CROMOHS

Miriam Benfatto, Università di Bologna

Elena Lolli, University of Oxford

Certain aspects of the history of power are intertwined with the history of knowledge. The history of power also concerns the history of the most widespread vehicle of knowledge: the book. As a result, it involves the production, dissemination, and availability of books, but also their destruction and preservation. This is true in particular of the history of the Hebrew book, both in its printed form and as a manuscript. The Hebrew book is a container of ideas and a vehicle for knowledge, but it is also an artefact — in other words, an object with economic value. The aim of the international conference The Destruction and Preservation of Hebrew Books. New Sources and Methodologies for the Study of Catholic Censorship and Other Forms of Dismemberment and Rescue of Hebrew Texts in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy, held virtually on 15 November 2021, was to run the gamut of topics concerning the fascinating history and vicissitudes of the Hebrew book and its relationship to the Catholic world, in which it was produced, disseminated, controlled, censored, confiscated, and retained. This thematic section, which presents the conference proceedings, aims to describe a range of topics including the Catholic censorship and expurgation of Hebrew texts, books, and documents, their reuse in book bindings and notary files, and the way Digital Humanities allows usto retrieve otherwise-lost manuscripts or printed books. The methodology adopted here is aimed less at presenting a series of events and more at interpreting specific historical moments to shed new light on the socio-historical context in which they occurred. This approach will enable us to analyse the dialectic between events and protagonists and thus consider the development of censorship part of the institutionalisation of new measures of control over Hebrew texts in late medieval andearlymodern Italy. A further objective is to assess how Catholic censorship changed the possibility of producing or destroying culture through the creation, distribution, and destruction of Hebrew books in Italy. Hebrew and non-Hebrew books owned by Jews are considered here not only as objects, but as the protagonists of a particular interaction between readers, book owners, censors, and producers.The Italian Peninsula assumed a pivotal role in this context, having been the leading centre for Hebrew book production since the fifteenth century and remaining one of the most important centres of Jewish printing up to the eighteenth century. Almost half of the medieval Hebrew manuscripts have Italian provenance and were either copied in Italy or introduced in the Peninsula by immigrants. In Italy, the first Hebrew books were printed (Rashi’s commentary on the Pentateuch, Reggio Calabria, 1475) and trade in them developed; Hebrew texts also became standardised, often thanks to Hebrew publishing houses operated by Christians. The Catholic Church has a long history of altering and destroying Hebrew books, starting in the thirteenth century if not earlier. It was believed that banning Jewish texts would facilitate the conversion of Jews who were still ‘blinded’by their erroneous doctrines and superstitions. The regulation of Hebrew books was clearly associated with other anti-Jewish measures taken in the same period, such as ghettoization and attempts to bring about their conversion.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/cromohs-14239

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/article/view/14239