Date/Time
Date(s) - 24 Sep 2012
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, 2nd floor Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us this Monday, September 24, for the next meeting of the
weekly Workshop in the History of Material Texts. We will meet, as usual,
at 5:15pm in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, which is
located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the
elevators.
This week, we welcome *Bernard Cooperman*, who will be speaking on “The
Zohar – and a Bit of Hebrew Grammar On the Side: The Business of Hebrew
Printing in the Italian Renaissance”. He writes:
*”The bitter controversy over the printing of the Zohar in the middle of
the sixteenth century is well known and has drawn much scholarly attention.
A wide range of motives—from the ideological to the venal—have been
assigned to the various parties involved. The printing has been connected
to great cultural shifts in Judaism as well as to the conversionist
ambitions of the Catholic Church. This paper begins from the too-easily
overlooked fact that the printed Zohar was a material object whose
appearance in print depended upon the same mechanical, editorial, and
commercial considerations that applied to all other books.*
* *
*”In this paper, I continue a number of my own earlier explorations on the
rabbinical and publishing career of R. Isaac de Lattes and add to the cast
of characters involved in producing the printed Zohar. I am trying to
understand the social and economic **contexts within which several of the
central figures in the debate operated, and thus to situate their
rhetorical positions with regard to publishing the Zohar. Moving from the
“practical” to the cultural, I seek to build on the well-established link
between the study of Hebrew grammar and of the biblical text on the one
hand, and the attitude towards kabbalah among both Jewish and Christian
scholars in this period. In this way I hope to continue the work of
historians of the book who root broad cultural change in material realities.
*
* *
*”The paper draws upon two types of material: paratexts in which Hebrew
publishers outlined their goals in producing their books, and manuscript
collections of responsa by rabbis who competed with each other in the
communities of central Italy in the mid-sixteenth century.”*
*Bernard Dov Cooperman *is Louis L. Kaplan Associate Professor of Jewish
History at the University of Maryland, where he has also served as Director
of the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies. He has
published extensively on Jewish communities, especially in urban early
modern Italy, and has just had accepted for publication his new book, *From
Pisa to Livorno: Ethnicity and Social Conflict in an Early Modern Jewish
Community*.