First Impressions

In 1538, a partnership of Jewish silk makers in Bologna issued Sefer Hasidim, a collection of rituals, tales, and religious teaching that had developed mainly in medieval Franco-Germany. The publishers were of Italian and Spanish descent. Over the next four centuries, this printed book helped shape Ashkenazi culture and, more broadly, Jewish life.

Joseph A. Skloot's study examines sixteenth-century Hebrew printing, a period when many foundational works of ancient and medieval Jewish literature first reached Jewish and non-Jewish readers. He argues that printers did more than copy existing manuscripts. They reworked those texts as they reproduced them. By comparing the first two printed editions of Sefer Hasidim, he traces this process across Catholic Bologna, Protestant Basel, and the Jewish heartland of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Skloot's larger purpose is to show that books once assumed to be fixed and timeless were actually shaped by specific people in specific circumstances. Their final form reflected human choices, accident, and the readers their makers had in mind.