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This is an important book, one that makes us reflect on past conclusions. It inspires us to ask what constitutes modernization, and what are the antecedents of Jewish-Christian reciprocity in a post-emancipation world. Its specific theme is whether censorship is an indicator of cultural transformation, if not also a generating force; the author himself is ambivalent about the latter interpretation.
The book opens with a discussion of the thirteenth-century burning of the Talmud and subsequent censorship. It presses on to the problems of censors and consistency from the late fifteenth century onward, and it describes the roles of printers, editors, and (principally convert) censors as they worked together in the print shop, identifying some of the most important censors. It notes the hurdles that censorship is said to have sought to overcome, talks of humanism and Hebraism as factors in censorial work, and measures the input of Jews in the act of censorship. There is a long chapter on the Sefer ha-zikkuk and the standards it set, and an attempt to link censorship with overall cultural change among Jews, even with respect to present-day Jewish historical writing. Theoretical observations about reading and its effects introduce the whole and accompany every argument.
The question is whether the book's central thesis holds. Did censors create an "autonomous Jewish space" based on a body of "permitted" Hebrew literature, which, in turn, became the grist of modern Jewish reading, shaping a "modern Jewish consciousness" more tolerant of Christianity, which Jewish historians have also projected back onto the Jewish medieval past? (197). Did the censored products of the printing press in Italy's limited arena affect Jewish thinkers outside the peninsula, in Western Europe and beyond? (The book refers directly, and fleetingly, to echoes only in the Ottoman Empire.) The answers are not always easy to find; this is a book full of interjected reflections and ruminations, which interrupt even the lengthy discussion of Domenico Gerosolomitano's Sefer ha-zikkuk, where detail and narrative are so needed.
The fundamental difficulty in determining its impact, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin--who is scrupulously forthright--admits openly, is that censorship was inconsistent. There may have been rules, but violations and inconsistencies were constant, and the censors were unqualified, as I myself...