Introduction

From the day that Israel was exiled, from the day After these things: (After what?) Raba said after “[Israel] was carried away from their own land” (cf. the Holy One, blessed be He, created a healing for II Kings 17:23) “and Jacob had scarcely gone out the (future) blow. For Resh Lakish said the Holy from” (Genesis 27:30) the field of his possession. He One, blessed be He, does not smite Israel unless had one “inheritance for the remnant” (Judges 21:17) He has created a healing for them beforehand. from all of the good things “as when they were reared ( 13b)2 by Him” (Esther 2:20). One measure “to revive the heart of the despondent” (Isaiah 57:15), that is, “the The —an encyclopedic work containing biblical Torah that Moses commanded us, the inheritance exegesis, laws, customs, history, philosophy, parables, and of the congregation of Jacob” (Deuteronomy 33:4), much more—has been the sine qua non of Jewish life “that which is left from the kodshim” (holy things), since its redaction (based on a much older body of oral the holy things of the Temple on the top of “the law) approximately fifteen hundred years ago. This edi- mountain which God desired for his abode” (Psalms tion of Printing the Talmud continues the discussion of 68:17). “He makes a way in the sea, and a path in the the history and varied circumstances of the publication mighty waters” (Isaiah 43:16), to pass with an oared of the Talmud that I described in earlier volumes. This fleet, to stand “in the land of the living” (Psalms volume, comprised of twenty-two chapters plus this intro- 116:9), “this is the sea of the Talmud, great and wide” duction, describes in an expansive and discursive manner (cf. Psalms 104:25), The Babylonian Talmud, a mix- the various editions of the Talmud and the locations in ture of fire and water, set upon the earth, its head which they were printed. It includes detailed background in the heavens, “the tree of knowledge and the tree information with a discussion of related issues. of life, good for food and pleasant to the sight” (cf. The publication of such a large and multifaceted Genesis 2:9) and pleasing to the eyes (cf. Genesis 3:6) work is in and of itself a complex and difficult undertak- and it is called Torah in fact and initially, the Torah is ing. In the first part of this introduction I provide a brief for us “the way where we may walk” (Jeremiah 42:3). overview of early editions of the Talmud and a general dis- It teaches man the way of knowledge, the way of the cussion of how I approach the subject. The introduction Lord, to love Him and to cleave to Him, “for from it then addresses the physical production of the Talmud, we take to serve the Lord” (Exodus 10:26).1 including: (1) the printing-press and the contemporary hand-press; (2) the size of a press-run; (3) the physi- The closing of the Meisels’s press represents the end of the cal appearance of books and examples of standard and beginning of the printing of the Talmud. All of the pub- deluxe editions of a Talmud; (4) elaborate title pages, with lishers, printing houses, and locations famous for their examples of copper-plate pages; (5) two-color printing Talmud editions are now silent. Spain and Portugal have and pressmarks; and (6) explanatory diagrams. closed their doors to the Jews. Venice, a mere shadow of Following the discussion of the physical production of its former greatness, has forbidden publishers to print the the Talmud, I provide overviews of: (1) approbations and Talmud. The Sephardi presses have waned, and the Pol- censorship and (2) the book’s contents, describing the ish presses have been ravaged by the turmoil besetting various chapters that encompass, in addition to the Baby- Poland. lonian Talmud, the , minor tractates, A new era in printing the Talmud has now begun, how- and translations by Christian-Hebraists. ever. The mantle has passed to the northern and western The first dated Talmudic tractate——was parts of Europe, where Immanuel Benveniste began print- printed in 1483/84 in the town of Soncino by Joshua ing the first Amsterdam edition of the Babylonian Talmud Solomon Soncino. The publication of the tractate Bet- in 1644, proving the Talmudic dictum: zah quickly followed the publication of Berakhot. In the ensuing decades, Soncino, and in even greater numbers,

1 David Sklower and Naphtali Zevi ben Moses David Hochmavitz, 2 Marvin J. Heller, Printing the Talmud: A History of the Earliest Printed “Introduction” to the Dyhernfurth Talmud (1816–21). Editions of the Talmud (Brooklyn, 1992), 396.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004376731_002 2 Introduction his nephew Gershom Soncino, issued additional trac- Printing the Talmud: A History of the Individual Treatises tates. Attractively set, these tractates were printed with Printed from 1700 to 1750 (hereafter Individual Treatises).4 the Talmudic text in the middle of the page in square let- Work on the current volume, Printing the Talmud: ters. ’s commentary appeared in the inner margin Complete Editions, Tractates, and Other Works and the next to the binding, and Tosafot appeared in the outer Associated Presses from the Mid-17th Century through the margin of the page, both in semi-cursive script in a rab- 18th Century, was begun almost immediately after the binic font. This arrangement became the standard format completion of Printing the Talmud: A History of the Earli- for subsequent editions of the Talmud. The actual folia- est Printed Editions of the Talmud, but for various reasons, tion of our Talmud editions, however, comes from the I postponed work on this volume for several decades while editio princeps of the first Bomberg Talmud (1519/20–23). I completed other books and projects. The only exception is Berakhot, which follows the second Several caveats are appropriate here. Some of the Bomberg Talmud (sixty-four leaves for the text) rather material in this book, particularly in the Introduction, than the first Bomberg Berakhot (sixty-eight leaves for the repeats—albeit in altered and in some instances expanded text), in contrast to the Soncino Berakhot (one hundred form—background discussions from my earlier books and text pages).3 articles. I repeat to provide a more complete picture of the In the next century and a half both individual Talmu- period covered here, as well as to enable a standalone work, dic tractates and complete editions of the Talmud were although this book is closely related to previous works. printed in Spain and Portugal, Fez, Venice, Sabbioneta, I also discuss a few individual tractates that were begun as Basel, Cracow, Lublin, Salonika, Constantinople, and part of a complete Talmud where the printer’s intent was Kuru Tsheshme. Expulsion of the Jews (from Spain and to print a complete Talmud and because those tractates Portugal), censorship and outright prohibition (in Italy), fell outside the scope of Individual Treatises. and the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648–49 (tah-ve-tat) A serious quandary existed concerning the entries in in Poland resulted in the closure of these seventeenth- Individual Treatises, namely, whether to include volumes century presses. Although the presses in Salonika and that were not individual tractates nor a complete Talmud Constantinople did continue to publish individual trac- set, for example, a volume from the Jerusalem Talmud that tates, the decline of those presses resulted in a diminished consists of a seder (order). I addressed this by including number of published tractates and no complete editions three orders: (1) Seder Zera’im and tractate (1710, of the Talmud. Amsterdam) published by Moses Dias; (2) Seder Mo’ed However, consistent with Resh Lakish’s observation, (Dessau, 1743) published by Elijah (Elia) ben Moses Ben- before the last of these early presses published its final jamin Wulff with the commentary Korban ha-Edah by R. Talmud, a new press had taken the mantle, publishing David ben Naphtali Hirsch Fraenkel; and (3) the tractates a complete edition of the Talmud. This press, fittingly from Seder Mo’ed, Seder , and Seder (Con- enough, was located in Amsterdam, which was replacing stantinople, 1749) with the commentary Sedeh Yehoshua Venice as the leading center of Hebrew printing. by R. Joshua Raphael ben Israel Benveniste.5 This volume concerns itself with the new presses that I resolved the quandary by including a chapter, origi- took up the fallen mantle and began to publish tractates, nally entitled “Other Editions of the Jerusalem Talmud—a as individual treatises and as complete editions, of the Summary,” which recapitulates in a somewhat briefer Talmud. In addition to the partial and complete editions manner the material described in several chapters in addressed in this book, a significant number of trac- the earlier work. Because of new material relating to tates—not part, nor intended to be part, of a complete several editions of the Jerusalem Talmud, particularly Talmud—were published, both for the requirements of to Massekhet Shekalim, not included in the earlier work, students and for others. As many as 120 individual treatises I changed the title of Chapter 19 to “Other Editions of the were published in the first five decades of the eighteenth Jerusalem Talmud.” century. I describe these individual tractates in my

4 Marvin J. Heller, Printing the Talmud: A History of the Individual Treatises Printed from 1700 to 1750 (Leiden, 1999). 3 Concerning the development of the Talmudic page, see Marvin J. 5 Apart from these orders of the Jerusalem Talmud, several volumes Heller, “Designing the Talmud: The Origins of the Printed Talmudic of tractates from that Talmud are included in Individual Treatises, Page,” Tradition 29, no. 3 (1995): 40–51, reprinted in Studies in the that is, and Bava Metzia (Offenbach, 1725) and Bava Making of the Early Hebrew Book (Leiden/Boston, 2008), 92–105. Kamma, Bava Metzia, and (Frankfurt on the Main, 1742).