>> From the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:03 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:23 >> Well, good afternoon and welcome to the African and Middle East Division of the Library of Congress. I'm Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the division, and I'm delighted to see you all here today for this very special presentation with Dr. Yoel Finkelman, the Judaic curator at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. As most of you already know, our division is made up of three sections. The African, the Middle East, and the Hebraic sections. We're responsible for materials from 78 different countries in the Near East, Central Asia, the Caucuses, as well as from the entire continent of Africa, North and Sub-Saharan. And, we are very active in acquiring and developing our collections, briefing our visitors coming from all the countries of the region, organizing programs, symposia, workshops. We also invite scholars and experts who have researched and done work in our areas of responsibility to share with us their insights and their findings, so that all of us attending and participating in the programs leave enriched with new information and a better understanding of what the cultures and the societies are about. We are particularly happy to welcome Dr. Finkelman today, because he's a librarian and shares similar interests with members of our Hebraic section. His presentation today, entitled from "Bomberg to Beit Midrash" discusses Hebrew printing in Venice, a topic that complements one that was discussed last month at the Low Library Symposium, and we have members of the Low Library here to commemorate 500 years since the founding of the Jewish ghetto Venice. But, to tell you more our very own Sharon Horowitz, a senior reference librarian here, in the Hebraic section we introduce Dr. Finkelman and the program after which you will be invited to see a wonderful display of rare book related to the presentation. So, Sharon, and thank you. >> Thank you Mary Jane, good afternoon. On behalf of the Hebraic section let me add my welcome to you all to the African and Middle Eastern Division meeting room. Thank you for joining us. As you heard I'm Sharon Horowitz, a reference librarian in the Hebraic section. The Hebraic section marks its beginnings in 1912, with the receipt of 10,000 Hebrew books and pamphlets whose purchase was made possible by a gift from New York philanthropist Jacob Schiff. From those humble beginnings, our collections have grown to around 250,000 items in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Persian, and other Hebraic script languages, and also includes an important collection of books in the languages of Ethiopia, Amharic to Grenya Angez [phonetic]. The section's holdings are particularly strong in the areas of Bible and rabbinic, Hebrew language and literature, responsa and Jewish history. Two of our missions in this division are to publicize our collections and to bring people into the library. One way we do that is by holding lectures and having programs such as this one that we are hosting here today. I'd like to call your attention to the beautiful display of books from the Hebraic section, printed in 16th century Venice. The display and informative checklist were prepared by my colleague Dr. Ann Brenner [assumed spelling]. Please allot time to look at these books before you leave. Each book is numbered, and the numbers correspond to a number in the checklist, and so you can follow along by yourselves and see these beautiful things. The number one book is closest to the entrance of the reading room. Today we are very fortunate to have as our speaker Dr. Yoel Finkelman. Dr. Finkelman is the curator of the Judaic collection at the National Library of Israel where he is responsible for the acquisition of new and rare items, digitization projects, and collection development. One item of business before I turn the podium over. This event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcasting. There will be a formal question and answer period after the lecture at which the audience is encouraged to ask questions and give comments. Please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded and later broadcast as part of this event. By participating in the question and answer period you are consenting to the library's possible reproduction and transmission of your remarks. And, now please join me in welcoming Dr. Yoel Finkelmann. ^M00:05:19 [ Applause ] ^M00:05:25 ^M00:05:28 >> Thank you. Is this clear? >> Yeah. >> Okay, first, I want to begin with thanks of my own, in particular to Dr. Ann Brenner, who's work in making this event possible is important. And, in particular for her work on the exhibit in the back of the hall. The Talmud has rather unpleasant things to say about people who stand in the presence of their teachers and issue determinant conclusions on matters of law. And, fortunately, our topic is not actually about matters of law, otherwise it would be very uncomfortable speaking about 16th century Italian-Hebrew printing in Dr. Brenner's presence, because I feel like an amateur in the presence of an expert. In addition, I wanted to thank Sharon Horowitz and Gale Shirazi [assumed spelling] who really put an enormous amount of effort to make my visit here, both for this lecture and for some professional meetings, possible. Finally, I want to say that I remember visiting the Library of Congress as a little kid on a family vacation to Washington, and coming from a family of bookworms and -- and nerds it was naturally on our agenda. And, speaking here as an adult in a much more official capacity is really genuinely an honor. It's -- it's really a trip to be here, if I can be a little less formal. I want to talk about a topic that's really very close to my heart and comes from the fact that deep down I think I'm basically the Yeshiva boy and that my attachment to Jewish texts and my attachment to rabbinic learning was founded in the Beit Midrash. And, like many people who spent time in the Beit Midrash, you get used to these big tomes of the Talmud, of the Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish law, of the tour and another important code of Jewish law. [Inaudible] a Jewish law, and you can kind of take these things for granted, and in practice, if we think -- well, also as a kind of naïve Yeshiva student, you take this for granted, you get used to it. You also are not aware, at least I wasn't, of the way in which the physical materials, what we might call in more broad terms the technology of printing, affects directly what it is that students do with one another. What is the encounter of the learner, of the student, of the participant in this learning process? What is the encounter of that person with the text, with the knowledge that is embodied in that text, with fellow students? And, as we'll see later on, with longer arcs of history and transnational groups whose identity and religious practice has formed by these texts. And, as I've gotten older, I've gotten a little prospective on that, and I'm hoping that what we can work on in the next few minutes is to talk about how early 16th century, particularly in Venice, was a major stopping point for the development of how rabbinic learning has happened through the ages. Not that it doesn't have a prehistory and not that there weren't developments afterwards. Finally, I should talk about -- mention that I'm talking about a certain subset of rabbinic texts. The overwhelming majority of Hebrew printings do not follow some of the patterns we're going to talk about. But, some of the most critical, seminal, concrete works that cemented rabbinic self-understanding do fit into some of the patterns we're going to talk about. I'm going to start with something a little bit inter -- actually anachronistic. And, this was a -- New York's Time put up a really fascinating article on -- on noise -- sound and its relationship to architecture, and we're going to hope that this cooperates. Right now, it's not cooperating. So, while we're at it we'll skip over to a video of a contemporary Beit Midrash. Do we have any sound here? ^M00:09:55 ^M00:10:00 Here we go. Contemporary Beit Midrash, a small Beit Midrash, and it is a noisy and loud place. We don't have to watch the entire seven minutes of this video. This is a small suburban environment -- a small suburban environment, the North Miami Beach Kollel. In Florida you get a sense of noise, books piled up on one another, people in conversation. The learning occurs through this kind of conversation. Now, if we go back -- let me see if I can get that New York Times thing to appear again. Here we go. This is a kind of sound scape of the reading room in the New York Public Library, and what the New York Times wants to get across is that despite the fact that librarians are famous for their "Be quiet." In fact, there's a great deal of noise, conveniently the cart is from the Jewish division, so it ties right into what we're doing. And, there's actually an enormous amount of ambient noise in what is supposed to be a quiet environment. These are two entirely different conceptions of what the look and feel of a study hall is supposed to be like. In the New York Times case, silence is punctuated by noise that you would hardly notice, unless you were sensitive to it, which the New York Times article gives us the ability to do. And, the Beit Midrash -- and this is a small Beit Midrash. If you go into the Beit Midrash, let's say in the Near Yeshiva Shiva in Jerusalem or the Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey, probably the two largest Yeshiva's in the world today. The Lakewood Yeshiva at the moment has between 7000 and 8000 students, the size of a small university and probably has more students than were in Eastern European yeshivas in all of Eastern Europe at any given moment. You just -- it's just cacophony it's just noise, and without being overtly anachronistic, although just being a little bit anachronistic, I want to claim that this is linked to some of the decisions that were made in the 16th century in terms of printing of rabbinic texts. I've shown these pictures. Most of the items that we're going to talk about are going to come from the collection of the National Library. We don't have a great collection of glossed Christian sources. So, these are kind of -- had I been a little more put together I could've taken them from the Library of Congress collection, but these are basically items that I've kind of picked up from the internet. These are early glossed Christian Bibles and manuscript in early printing, and if you would show this to any traditional yeshiva boy, the first they'd say is, "Why is there a page of Talmud written in Latin characters?" And, in fact, this is kind of the core of what I want to try to talk about is this notion of a central text in the middle surrounded by apparatus or surrounded by commentary or what has become more popular term is peritext. But, I don't like peritext in this context as a term, because sometimes it's really difficult to figure out what's the text and what's the peritext, what's central and what's not. And, in fact, this has become -- what's unique in these rabbinic printings is not necessarily the layout per se. What's unique is that this layout became central and was maintained for centuries well after these kinds of glossed Christian bibles and polyglot bibles and works of canon law kind of dropped out of fashion. A lawyer friend of mine, when I was discussing this with him, told me that there are some basic works of contemporary law that work with similar kinds of apparatuses -- apparati [phonetic] in -- in law school, but he didn't send me any example, so I don't have them here. Now, in fact, if we start looking at the Jewish sources where I feel much more comfortable talking, the kind of standard form in manuscript versions, even of glosses, of commentaries, is going to be in manuscript form -- a manuscript of the commentary itself. Let me take a step back and -- and introduce what we're talking about. In traditional rabbinic study, whether we're talking about the Bible or whether we're talking about the Talmud or whether we're talking about codes, you have a central text. The text is canonical. It's canonical not only in the sense that it is part of this larger collection of works that are deemed holy, but it is canonical in that it had -- has a particular sacred status that can often be defined in very clear and unambiguous, sometimes legal terms. So, the Bible is authoritative in the Jewish tradition as the literal word of god, and while, in fact, Jewish practices often quite removed from what the bible describes based on layers and layers of rabbinic interpretation, its status as canonical is defined as the almost -- the constitutional -- as the deepest layer of the authoritative text. The Talmud is -- even the Talmud itself is layered. The previous early stratum called the Mishnah and the later stratum, also in two versions the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, which is itself a commentary on the Mishnah. But, both of these have very formal status. The Mishnah, is authoritative. The later Rabbis -- the Rabbis identified as Amu Raheem [phonetic] the authors of the later Talmud, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, do not as a matter of formal rule argue with the Mishnah. They interpret the Mishnah. They often interpret the Mishnah so creatively as to be in practice legislating anew, but formally a leader authority does not argue with an earlier authority. After the closing of the Babylonian Talmud, for all intents and purposes later authorities do not argue with the Talmud. They interpret the Talmud, and they interpret the Talmud, and therefore determine matters of law. At some point, we'll talk a little bit later about this, [inaudible] which he quite explicitly states he wants to be the final word -- he wants this to be the authoritative voice of what everybody has to follow. And, the collective Jewish community with the exception of a certain subgroup of the Ammonite Jewish community essentially ignores him, while the Shulchan Aruch, the 16th century code of Jewish law, gains for itself this status -- formal status of authority. Now, what happens with these works of canon is naturally they are ambiguous, because all texts are ambiguous, but in particular the Talmud -- the Bible is ambiguous, because isn't terribly concise. And, the Talmud is ambiguous, because it telegraphs all kinds of information and is virtually incomprehensible on its own without some kind of commentary. And, later codes by virtue of shrinking much larger material -- much more expansive material into a bottom line leave out all kinds of details. So, here we have ambiguous texts that are formerly authoritative and part of the canon, and they give rise to commentary. Now, what do you do with these commentaries? How do you visualize them? How does the student see them? How do you lay them out on the page? How do you present them to the student? Now, like all printing endeavors it's some combination of finances, technology, and culture. How much can we afford? What are we capable to do? What does the technology enable us to do, and culturally, what matters to us, and how does it matter to us? Chicken and egg problems here are going to become complicated, but let's look at this, essentially a random example. Fifteenth century Italian manuscript of [inaudible] the Pentateuch, Rashi [assumed spelling] the most important mediaeval commentator, probably the most important Jewish commentator ever -- his commentary both on the Bible and on the Talmud are absolutely indispensable. And, for all intents and purposes, certainly in the case of the Talmud, less so in the case of the Bible, but for all intents and purposes, if the Talmud is ever printed, it is certainly printed with Rashi's commentary. If the Bible is printed, it is also. If it's printed with any apparatus at all, it's with Rashi's commentary, but here we have simply Rashi's commentary without the text upon which it is commenting. Why? Because, manuscripts are too expensive to waste time and space on anything else, and a patron who is ordering a manuscript copy of Rashi's commentary on something presumably already owns a -- a copy of the text upon which Rashi is commenting. Or, at the very least knows that text by heart or assumes that the scholar is going to know that text by heart. So, let's save a lot of money and a lot of resources by simply treating the commentary as if it is a separate volume. But, of course, Rashi's commentary on the bible cannot be read cover to cover. It can't be done, because it's really a series of short paragraphs that are comments on a particular word or a particular biblical verse, and there is no obvious connection between one line and the other. It can only be read as a line by line commentary on the Bible. And, therefore, this book on its own is virtually useless without either knowing the biblical text by heart or having a manuscript copy of it. Even more dramatically is Rashi's commentary on the Talmud. Here, also a 15th century manuscript. ^M00:20:05 Rashi's commentary after its publication or after its appearance became absolutely indispensable. And -- and [inaudible] has argued completely convincingly that Rashi's commentary made it possible for people to study Talmud independently by filling in all kinds of gaps and understanding what's going on. Here, too, we have simply the commentary. It is useless without the Talmud, but the Talmud is not presented here. Again, let's save some money. If we move to the incunable period, here we have psalms with Radak, Rabbi David Kimchi's commentary, an extremely important commentary here from 1477. And, here we get to play a little bit. Notice the page layout. We have the text of the Psalms themselves in block square letters, and we have the commentary in, what we would call today, a different font. What's the text and what's the power text, right? The Psalms here are not the text. The text is Kimchi's commentary, and the psalms are there to enable you to study Kimhi's commentary, because this is a lousy way to present the text of the psalms themselves, because if I wanted to recite psalms as a ritual kind of prayer or if I wanted to study psalms as part of biblical poetry, this is a terrible way to do it, because one psalm of seven or eight verses or 15 verses is going to be laid out on three or four pages. And, I have to skip stuff in the middle to read the text of the psalm. The -- the text of the verse is there to enable me to study the commentary of Kimchi. Now, we move forward to something that starts to look a little bit more like the page layout of a standard Talmudic text today. Here, a Spanish -- Pentateuch -- commentaries of Rashi and the ancient Aramaic translation of Onkelos beginning to lay out in columns. Looks a little bit more like a polyglot Bible as well, with the text of the Bible in the middle with -- with the vowel markings. And, here, we start to see a more interesting interplay between the texts that are laid out. So, that's a kind of transition. Now, we move forward into Venice in the sixteenth century, and we start to see things that are more complicated. Now, part of what's going on here, as we start to see these kinds of texts, is that printing enables lowering of prices. Printing enables much more of an ability to plan in advance how you want to lay out these texts, so that you can fit on a page something quite this complicated. There were attempts to do things like this in manuscript, but they weren't able to include quite as much as what's going to be included here, and you have a market that is interested. Here, we're looking at the second edition of Bomberg's -- Daniel Bomberg's "Mikraot Gedolot" a rabbinic Bible. Certainly will be celebrating next year the -- the 500th anniversary of the first rabbinic Bible in 1517, and a copy of the first rabbinic Bible, the first Mikraot Gedolot is in the exhibit space in the back. And, it's in the top five of the most important printing events in the history of the Hebrew book. We're using the second edition, because the second edition is the one focused more on Jewish readers than the first edition, which was more focused -- again, this is a matter of degree, not a matter of kind, but more focused on Christian readership. And, here what we have -- I don't know, can you see my -- the arrow? Okay, we have the text of the Bible. We have the Aramaic -- ancient Aramaic translation, the commentary of Rashi, indispensable. The commentary of the Spanish mediaeval exergy Eben Ezra, and as well the Masoretic notes. The Masoretic notes which had outside of a small circle of kind of OCD people who were really concerned with the exact spelling of every last word in the Masoretic edition of the bible had largely fallen into day to day disuse by a typical reader. But, in the Mikraot Gedolot in Bomberg's rabbinic bible they were absolutely critical, because one of the most important influences of this publication is that it really set the fixed Masoretic text from then on. But, I'm less interested in the history of the text -- the Masoretic text of the bible itself and more interested in what we've got going on here, which is a primary text laid out in the middle, multiple commentaries laid out around, and what is also going to become critical -- we'll see more examples. The commentaries are aware of each other. That is to say Rashi on this side of the page comments on the Bible. Eben Ezra comments on the Bible, but also explicitly makes reference to Rashi's previous commentary. So, we have on the page a conversation, a three-way conversation that's going on. Another example -- we can kind of multiply these examples, and we see the way -- Alfasi, the great north African -- the -- who's -- who's [inaudible] -- who's work kind of summarizing and condensing the Talmud into its bottom line, was often studied as the primary. There was a while when people were not quite sure whether the Talmud was going to become the most important Jewish rabbinic text or Alfasi's was going to become the major core of study. And, here, too, we get -- we get the central text in the middle, [inaudible] Eben Habib commentary on Alfasi, also from Bomberg. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about Talmud, because Talmud is in many ways the core -- observant Jews today are certainly much more Jews of the Talmud than they are of the Bible. So, here we have a 1482 incunable edition from Spain, [inaudible] Kiddushin. Nope -- spelling error there. It should say Kiddushin, not Kiddush. And, here, again, you see this kind of multiple text on the page. It's clear that the Talmud is the core text. Rashi's commentary on the outside, but the standard page of Talmud, which we'll get to later on, had not yet formed. But, as we move forward, some [inaudible] Talmud, we also have a volume of that in the exhibit. Fifteen -- this is a 1510 edition. He begins including not only the Talmud in the middle of the page, but Rashi and the commentary of the Tosephists, the Ashkenazi commentaries on the Talmud. Now, let's just skip ahead to one more page before we talk a little bit about what's going on here in these Talmuds. Another typo, it should say 1520. This is a Bomberg edition. Bomberg -- Daniel Bomberg, the printer -- Venice printer is particularly important, probably the most important printing of the Talmud because he was the first to print the complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud. And, in addition to that, he also made -- well, he did two things that became absolutely critical in the future of the Talmud. The first is that he paginated all the pages. Not simply paginated them for his particular edition, but he was very conscious about setting a fixed pagination for the entire Talmud. Only he could do it because he's the first one to ever print the entire thing. And, he was conscious of this, and instead of simply being able to reference a page of Talmud, the third chapter of -- of [inaudible] Kiddushin, he would be able to identify a much smaller body of text. And, you could enable cross referencing much more easily. He was very conscious of this, and in fact, in further printings of commentaries and codes he would insert page numbers, references to his own edition of the Talmud, creating a kind of monopoly. It's like, you know, buying Windows and getting it packaged with -- with Internet Explorer, except -- this little bit, I guess, also anachronistic now, that unlike your web browser, you can pick whatever web browser you want. But, he essentially was able to create a kind of dependence on his edition of the Talmud by printing later editions with references to his own edition. So -- so that was one thing that he did. The other thing that he did was that he chose a particular edition of the commentary of the Tosephists to put together with the commentary of Rashi. ^M00:30:00 And, he had to edit a little bit, and he had to cut things down to get it to fit on the page. And, whether he made a good decision about which manuscript of the Tosephists to use is a matter of some debate. But, it hardly mattered because once he included that edition of the Tosephists commentary on the page it became the edition of the Tosephists commentary. Now, we can start talking a little bit about the content and talk about what's going on in his choice of commentaries. First of all, Rashi and the Tosephists, despite the fact that they're both Ashkenazi, they're both French-German world of thought as opposed to the Spanish and north African traditions of interpretation, they actually in kind represent polar extremes of how to go about commenting on the Talmud. The Talmud is a complicated, dense, obtuse, telegraphic text. It is virtually incomprehensible, certainly today, without the commentary of Rashi, who fills in gaps, explains what -- questions what cryptic lines means, fills in background information, and the like. His goal is simply to enable you to read the page. Well, simply -- that's not really fair because he was such a master of commentary that in the process of teaching you how to simply read the page and make sense of the conversation, he's actually solving all kinds of problems you weren't even aware of. And, one of the things that good rabbinic scholars have to train themselves to do is to then go back to the text of the Talmud and pretend they hadn't read Rashi, because how would another commentary read this without already having superimposed upon me Rashi's assumptions. Now, the Tosephists are worlds apart. They did something remarkable, and they said the Mishnah, the earlier stratum of the Talmud, is a fairly straightforward text. The Talmud comes along and complicates it by assuming, rightly or wrongly, that the Mishnah is a coherent and unified text that doesn't contradict itself. And, the Talmud comes along and says -- a later stratum and says the earlier stratum of the Mishnah -- let's search -- hunt high and low for contradictions and try to solve those contradictions. The Tosephists do the same thing to the Talmud. They assume that the Talmud itself, and here at least historically speaking, they're almost certainly wrong, the Tosephists assume, let's do to the Talmud what the Talmud did to the Mishnah. Let's assume that the Talmud itself -- the Babylonian Talmud is itself incoherent text devoid of any contradictions. Let's look high and low for any imaginable contradiction between any passage in the Talmud and do all kinds of creative interpretation to solve that. The result is a reworking of the Talmud, sometimes a reinterpretation, sometimes an interpretation that is radically different than what appears to be on the page. The rule appears to apply across the board. This is the law. It turns out it's only on Tuesday afternoon double headers with a lefty pitcher. Those are the kinds of things that the Tosephists will do. And, so what you get on the page are not only the text of the Talmud itself, the simple straightforward commentary of Rashi, but the Tosephists that open up this world of analysis and hyperlink -- I'm not the first one to notice this parallel -- the hyperlink -- the Talmud to itself and create this dialog. Now, so look what happens in kind of an image on the page is we get the Talmud, which itself branches out and create conversations of the two commentators. And, again we get to two commentators talking, not quite with each other, because the standard opening line of a paragraph of commentary by the Tosephists is perush akuntras [phonetic], which to oversimplify a little bit, means this is Rashi's interpretation of the Talmudic passage, that is inevitably followed up with vikasha [phonetic]. That's a problem. It doesn't work, because if you interpret this passage in the Talmud the way Rashi wants you to, you're going to create a contradiction with another passage in an entirely different volume that you didn't even remember. Now, that's remarkable, probably Rashi would have said in response. I'm not trying to solve a problem over there. I'm just trying to tell you how to read the page over here in the simplest possible way. Again, this is setting it up a little bit more dichotomous than it actually is. But, you create this three-way conversation on the page. Let's stop for second and think about the experience of the student who opens up this page. What are -- we're going to put on our teacher hats for a second. And, I'll skip ahead a little bit to a contemporary work of academic scholarship, but let's make explicit -- the implicit assumptions that are here on the page. The first is, that there is a central text. The central text is the text of the Talmud with the earlier stratum of the Mishnah and the later strata of the Talmud itself. That text is authoritative. It is in the center. It gets the nice woodcut letters at the top. We're not exclusively for holy texts, but they certainly give it a certain kind of weight. That text is central and authoritative. Secondly, that text is not transparent. You have to do some work to understand it. But, the work that you have to do to understand it is going to be colored by equally canonical commentaries. You are not alone in this endeavor of interpreting the Talmud. You are working within an established canon of commentaries. Third, the commentaries themselves are in conversation with one other. They are explicitly in conversation with one another. They are creating this larger conversation. And, fourth, it is the job of the student sitting with the book to put all of this together. That, I think, is the single most important educational philosophy implication of this type of page layout. It is -- is this my next slide? It's not. But, let me go ahead of myself a second. Here, is where Torskey's [assumed spelling] introduction to the Code of Maimonides [phonetic], shows in largely random because the previous slide, which we haven't gotten to yet, is of Maimonides Code. What is his assumption? I mean, it doesn't have to be Professor Torskey. It could be any other work of contemporary academic scholarship laid out with the text on the top and footnotes are peritext on the bottom. The assumption is that there is this older canon of literature, that the Code of Maimonides is a text worth understanding, but that it is the task of the scholar to do the interpretive work for you. Now, granted, he is not an absolute authority, despite what many professors sometimes think. He has a responsibility to you as the reader to give you the footnotes in the apparatus so that you can go back to the original sources and double check and see if you find his interpretation compelling. But, ultimately, he is doing the synthesis. It is the job of the author of the academic monograph to do the synthesis for you, as opposed to, if we go back previously to our page here where the assumption is that it is the job of the student to do the interpretive work him, or increasingly, herself. Now, what happens in the just -- Justinian Talmud is in addition to the Talmud, Rashi, and the Tosephists, we get two other tools. We get a set of explicit hyperlinks of explicit footnotes that cross reference to the Talmud to a set of other works. First of all, it cross references the Talmud to itself. Sometimes the Talmud has passages that appear more or less in identical, or at the very least similar versions, in several different places. So, if you're learning the passage here, if you're studying the passage here, you want to know how that same passage appears, if it's in the same text or what context it's embedded in in another track date. It cross references the Talmud to the Biblical verses so that if you're studying and there's a reference to a verse, you can go back to the original verse and look it up. And, finally and most importantly, and these are the two arrows that are headed out, the amishbat [phonetic], which cross references the Talmud to codes of Jewish law, particularly for our purposes, Maimonides Code and the Tor [inaudible] Ruch, the two other major code -- well, the two other -- there's also [inaudible], the large book of commandments, which due to various reasons of intellectual history doesn't maintain its same status over the course of the -- of the centuries. And, then you not only have this kind of triangle of primary text, commentaries, and conversation with other -- in -- in conversation with the student. You have all of that in conversation with several other volumes, all of which can be laid out in an almost identical fashion. And, then the whole thing becomes incestuous and impossible, especially since you might have a reference to Maimonides Code, and you might have a reference to Joseph Karo's [assumed spelling] Shulchan Aruch. And, lo and behold, at least in later editions of Maimonides Code, who is one of the major commentators on Maimonides Code, the same Joseph Karo who authored the Shulchan Aruch. ^M00:40:24 In other words, the thing explodes exponentially. You don't have a linear growth in the amount of possible commentaries and super-commentaries. You have an exponential growth, and you have this kind of intricate web of possible connections between different volumes, each of which has its own intricate rabbinic page layout. Just for the sake of the curiosity, 1616 crack out edition of the Talmud reappears with only the Talmud and Rashi, but that is the exception that proves the rule. Since Bomberg, every single edition with -- I know of three. No, I know of two exceptions. Every single edition -- printed edition of the Talmud afterwards builds on Bombergs adds perhaps. But, basically uses Bombergs format and page layout. Similar kind of thing going on in the two infamous editions of Maimonides Mishnah Torah, Maimonides Code of Law from 1551. Justinian and Bragadeen [assumed spelling]. Not only are these extremely beautiful volumes, at least from my personal subjective perspective. I think the Justinian Maimonides Mishnah Torah is perhaps the beautiful Hebrew printed book ever. But, that's just my personal subjective reaction to it. And, the absolute tragedy that was created by these two competing simultaneous Venice editions of the Mishnah Torah -- basically the chief rabbi of Paduah [phonetic] had written a commentary on Maimonides Code and wanted to get it published. Justinian refused. Bragadeen agreed. It was one of the first publications that his publishing house published. When Justinian heard that there was a competer opening up, he quickly grabbed parts of that commentary and quickly issued his own version. This got [inaudible] and Bogen [assumed spelling] of Paduah very upset. He created a hullabaloo [phonetic], turned to Rabbi Moses Isserles of Crackow, the most important rabbinic decider of the day, and said, "You have to issue a -- a decree that nobody can buy the new competing edition," which Rabbi Isserles did. And, the two Christian printers eventually turned to the Pope and said, "You figure this out." And, he said, "Well, let's take a look at what's written in all this rabbinic stuff." And, that eventually led to the burning of the Talmud and other important rabbinic books in 1553. So, you have a kind of sharp contrast between the beauty of these printed volumes and the tragedy that ensued as a result of them. But, also you see the same kind of page layout, in some ways even more elaborate, as well as some of the interpretive hyperlink apparatus along the commentaries. Just, you know, the -- the two other major editions, which I don't really have time to go through the whole history of their printing. But, the Fortureem [phonetic] and the Shulchan Aruch, two major codes of Jewish law that were originally printed also in a single text in one volume, gradually developed much more elaborate apparatuses. As well, here we have two editions before kind of the transition between just the text of the core and the surrounding commentary. So, we talk a little bit about how the educational philosophy of -- of contemporary academic scholarship is somewhat different. I want to talk about two other interesting things that are going on here. The first is that another thing that the Bomberg edition of the Talmud did was to include, in addition to the page itself, several commentaries printed independently in the back. He included Maimonides Commentary of the Mishnah. He included the commentary of the Rush Rabino Asher [phonetic], the Spanish commentator. And, so he's kind of expanding -- it may not be on the page itself, but they're still there in the volume. But, I want to point to one thing in his inclusion of Maimonides Commentary of the Mishnah, that involved not publishing Maimonides Commentary of the Mishnah. But, by publishing a translation into Hebrew of Maimonides Commentary of the Mishnah, which was originally published in Judeo -- or -- printed in a -- appeared in manuscript in Judeo-Arabic, which was the vernacular at the time that Maimonides was writing, or the place -- time and place that Maimonides was writing. So, some of this just kind of create this dialog, to create this conversation on the page and in the volume and with the students. Part of that involves reworking -- doing some work with the original texts in order to enable them to be part of this conversation, because in Venice there were -- or the publications were not meant for sale exclusively in Venice. Far from it. But, the European student -- rabbinic student was no longer fluent in Judeo-Arabic, and needed this edition in Hebrew in order to bring Maimonides Commentary on the Mishnah into the conversation. And, what is perhaps even more interesting if we go backwards to the Mishnah Torah is that this layout of the Mishnah Torah is explicitly and unquestionably in absolute violation of the author's intention. Maimonides said explicitly in his introduction to the code, "I want this to be the final word. People waste an enormous amount of time with this convoluted text called the Talmud." There is something enormously subversive and pretty arrogant about what Maimonides thought he was doing. But, given his conception of how information is organized, and the Talmud's conception of how information is organized -- the Talmud, information is chaotic. It -- it's created in conversation. It's like having an argument over Thanksgiving dinner about politics. Beside that being a terrible idea and studying the Talmud is a good idea. But -- but the -- the -- you start on one thing, and you think you're talking about this that and the other. And, then it turns out you're talking about something else, because somebody -- you said, you know, how much you appreciate this candidate. And, somebody said that makes you an idiot. And, then you're talking about gun control, and then you're talking about the economy, and then you're talking about whatever. And -- and that's how the Talmud organizes information. And, Maimonides organizes information systematically. Point one, point two, point three, definition of terms, implications of those definitions of terms. And, Maimonides was trying to undercut. And, who wins in these editions? In these editions that we're looking at, these 16th century edition, the Talmud wins. I mean, Maimonides wins also, because he becomes part of the canon. But, his core conception of how information is to be transmitted and discussed and organizes loses in the face of the Talmud. The Talmud emerges victorious. It's not organized. It's too complicated to be organized. You can only understand this text and this idea and this definition of a term by echoing out all the other definitions and bringing in another text that's tangentially related. And, you have to bring in all these other people and make a big mess. It's explicitly against -- and the -- against Maimonides wishes, and what these printers are doing is forcing Maimonides to become part of the Talmudic tradition of how interpretation and in how conversation and how study occurs. I also want to look -- this is a lousy picture. And, we can go off on kind of the history of printing any of these books and see how this page layout plays out. This is a 20th century edition of the Mikraot Gedolot of the rabbinic Bible, published by Mossad Harafkok [phonetic]. The semi-academic printing house in Jerusalem and the -- it's a lousy picture, but you have the text of the Bible over here, the text of the [inaudible] translation into Aramaic, which very few people understand today. The text, various medieval commentaries. We could talk a lot about which commentaries get in and which commentaries get out. For the 20th century, late-20th century reader, mystical interpretations are out. Shot-oriented, simple reading interpretations are in. But, we also get -- you can barely see them here on this bad -- but some of the academic apparatus at the bottom. They want to make sure they have good manuscript -- I mean, every -- history of printing, they also cared a great deal about getting good manuscripts. But, here there's going to be footnotes, there's going to be explicit conversation about which manuscripts they used, what the proper reading is, and the like. So, you end up getting -- this tradition carries over into the 20th and 21st century. We could talk about -- I'm running way over time. So, look what ends up happening. Two more final points. What you get is on a single volume, blue are the time periods of the people on the page of the Talmud, the Mishnah in the third century, the second of 200, and the Jerusalem Talmud, the Babylonian Talmud, Rashi's commentary over the course of history. The history -- the conversation is not only happening on the page, it's happening across time. And, if you add the red boxes, are the people to whom -- the books to whom -- which are referenced by the Amishbat, by the other -- by the hyperlinks, by the footnotes in the margins. So, you end up getting across time conversation. And, you also end up getting a transnational conversation because you can map where are these people are from. And, where they're writing, and you end up having a conversation between numerous people who are either present on the text or immediately referenced to -- to the text. So, I'm over time but I want to summarize by saying, if we go back to our original video. The Beit Midrash is populated by people in conversation, loud. And, part of that is this notion of dialogic reading in which the student is responsible for putting together, making synthesis out of this chaotic conversation that is across generations and transnational. And, 16th century Venice is a central location for the creation of that. Chicken and egg questions, did the print create this? Yeah, sometimes Bomberg's choice of this edition of the Tosephists made that the authoritative edition of the Tosephists. But, he couldn't have published an edition of the Talmud without Rashi, because that was already established as the text. So, chicken and egg questions are interesting. Thank you. ^M00:51:55 [ Applause ] ^M00:52:00 We have about three minutes for questions. ^M00:52:03 ^M00:52:07 Yeah, go ahead. >> Thank you very much. I sort of walked in to [inaudible]. It's like [inaudible]. >> Yes. Correct. ^M00:52:19 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:52:23 Yes, correct. There's this whole--. ^M00:52:25 >> --[Inaudible] and the remarkable fact that so many of them are [inaudible]. Do you have any sense of where that knowledge comes from and how that happened? >> Other than -- I don't want to say anything absolute, but the Christian printer, Bomberg, who hires and works with Jews or converts to Christianity who were Jewish and were rabbinic scholars, or in the course of their work converted to Christianity. Since some of this is in the air, some of it is, you know, the fact that Venice is such a central location for the transmission of -- of -- of goods, but therefore also information. And, he hired people who really cared about this stuff. It was really a very small group of people. >> Where did they [inaudible]? How did [inaudible] who'd know [inaudible]? >> Well, the Ashkenazi Jewish culture in the early Middle Ages per capita was the most prolific rabbinic -- I mean, they were tiny Jewish communities that produced per capita enormous amounts of rabbinic scholarship. So, that -- then that begs the question, but--. ^M00:53:49 ^M00:53:53 --Yeah? >> Thank you very much. I -- I wanted to ask you a question on two of the pictures that show [inaudible] Aramaic text. What is the relevance of this Aramaic text? Why is it [inaudible]? >> Okay, the Aramaic commentary, the -- or the translation of [inaudible] is an ancient Aramaic commentary that was written and came into use when Aramaic was the vernacular. It already in the Talmud it's referred to as having a certain canonical status. And, the -- there is even a law that requires -- a law that is largely kept in the breach, of reading every week a portion of the Bible twice and once that particular translation. It's a really great way of learning Aramaic if you don't know Aramaic, to study the Bible that way. But, it largely feel into disuse once Aramaic fell into disuse, but it was -- it was part of the canon. And, it's also in interesting interpretation. It's a trans -- it's -- it's an important stage and move in rabbinic Judaism away from strict anthropomorphism. The Bible the is very anthropomorphic and this translation tries to limit the anthropomorphism. But, it's part of the canon. It's almost as if--. >> --It's only [inaudible]. >> It's not -- I mean, every translation is a commentary, but it doesn't include overt, extra commentary. ^M00:55:21 ^M00:55:26 Yeah? >> The [inaudible] to hire experts, he has to know who is that [inaudible] Bomberg to manage it. He has to know how to make decisions and [inaudible] Bomberg is a Christian, and I would assume he's not [inaudible]. How does he manage? >> He -- he's not a Talmudic scholar, but he is a humanist. And, Renaissance Italy is a place where, I mean, the first edition of the rabbinic Bible is -- is -- is much, again, it's not a matter of kind. It's a matter of degree. But, as -- is -- is with a very Christian spin. It's meant to appeal to Christian readers. And, there is a group of -- increasingly growing group of Christian people who read Hebrew or are interested in the Talmud who have certain basic knowledge. I don't know what Daniel Bomberg's own level of Hebrew reading and -- somebody else knows. >> He's supposed to be [inaudible]. >> Yeah. ^M00:56:30 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M00:56:32 Okay, so -- so, you know, he knew enough to know who to talk to, and he cared a lot. I mean, he was a business man. He wanted to make money. But, he understood that -- that you have to create a good product for a knowledgeable audience. You know, he wanted to brand himself as the Harvard University Press and not as, you know, the fly by night Amazon, you know, print on demand. And, he was a good business man. He -- he knew what he -- how he wanted to brand himself. ^M00:57:10 ^M00:57:14 >> Okay. >> Okay, thank you very, very much. >> You're welcome. Thank you all. >> I really appreciate it. And, again, please do take a look at the exhibit which Dr. Brenner has -- has put together, because it's a really fantastic overview -- get a real sense of what 16th century Hebrew printing in Venice looked like. ^M00:57:34 ^M00:57:38 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E00:57:43