{"id":4329,"date":"2024-06-17T13:18:53","date_gmt":"2024-06-17T13:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/?p=4329"},"modified":"2024-06-20T20:08:26","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T20:08:26","slug":"gershom-soncino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/2024\/06\/17\/gershom-soncino\/","title":{"rendered":"The Political Economy of Classification: Jewish Bibliographers Write about Gershom Soncino"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 17, 2024
\nBy Ishai Mishory, 2023-24\u00a0Center for Jewish History Lapidus Graduate Fellow<\/h3>\n

The Political Economy of Classification: Jewish Bibliographers Write about Gershom Soncino<\/h2>\n

What constitutes \u201cJewish knowledge\u201d? Who decides what is a \u201cJewish\u201d versus a \u201cNon-Jewish\u201d book or title? Should the decision be based on subject matter (a.k.a, “Rabbinic material”), or maybe on language (Yiddish and Hebrew, presumably \u2013 but not Italian)? On the identity of a book\u2019s writer? Maybe its editor, its readers, or its printer?<\/p>\n

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Gershom Soncino\/Hieronymus Soncinus, Introductio ad litteras hebraicas \/ Mavo \u2018al otiyot \u2018ivriyot (Pesaro: Gershom ben Moshe Soncino, 1510 [5270\u20135271]). Biblioteca Federiciana, Fano. Photo \u00a9 Biblioteca Federiciana (by the author).<\/figcaption><\/figure>When I set out to produce a critical bibliography of titles printed by Renaissance-era Jewish printer, humanist, and editor Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino, active in the late 15th<\/sup> and early 16th<\/sup> centuries in Italy and the Ottoman Empire, I found myself continually confronting choices made by \u201cJewish bibliographers\u201d: writers \u2013 mostly German \u2013 working not in the early modern period but in fact in the 19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup> centuries, scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums <\/em>movement, who offered a taxonomy and an overview of the sum total of \u201cJewish knowledge,\u201d of what used to be called \u201cJewish book lore.\u201d As a discourse developed under those 19th<\/sup>-century ideals determining what “science” consists of, bibliography was concerned with such hard measurables as format, type, edition, and exact author attribution. But by grouping together similar titles and making taxonomical decisions about what was \u201callowed in\u201d and what was not, its different practitioners in fact strove to produce a coherent body of text that would constitute a sum total of all \u201cJewish material.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Soncino-Bl\u00e4tter: Beitr\u00e4ge zur Kunde des j\u00fcdischen Buches, vol. 1 (Berlin: Soncino-Gesellschaft der Freunde des Ju\u0308dischen Buches e.V., 1925). Detail: magazine frontispiece. Goethe Universit\u00e4t, Frankfurt am Main digital scan. Photo \u00a9 Universit\u00e4tsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Frankfurt am Main.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Examining these choices not simply as so much scientific list-making but as a literary discourse<\/em> reveals the personalities and proclivities of the different writers as constituting different possible images of the Jewish past, and of Jewish identity itself. Rather than simply reflecting an already-extant body of \u201cJewish material,\u201d the inclusions and, perhaps most importantly omissions <\/em>practiced by these writers and librarians \u2013 from Moritz Moritz Steinschneider (1816\u20131907), an erudite scholar of large swaths of Jewish (and indeed, human) history to practitioners of much more specialized purviews, like Russian-born Rapha\u2018el Nathan (Nata) Rabinovitch (1835\u20131888), in his case the printing history of the Talmud \u2013 arguably constituted <\/em>it. For instance, while some of them chose to work with different “national” Jewish languages, supplying historical credence to competing (Hebrew\/Yiddish) national-linguistic projects, others focused on specific genres, often occluding competing material. It has taken recent scholarship into Jewish literatures from the early modern period, for example, to address books produced in that period \u2013 often in vernacular languages, read by women, exhibiting \u2018low\u2019 literary quality or accompanied by robust illustrations. The mostly-German Jewish bibliographers knew of their existence but deemed them unworthy.<\/p>\n

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Buovo dantona novamente ristampato et correpto (Pesaro: Hieronymus Soncino, December 20th, 1511). Biblioteca comunale, Treviso (Borgo Cavour). Frontispiece. Photos \u00a9 Biblioteca comunale, Treviso.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Much hangs on a critical take on \u201cJewish bibliography\u201d when dealing with the experiences of Italian and Ottoman early modern Jews. Is a book including woodcut illustrations of the Life of Christ to be deemed \u201cJewish\u201d if its printer were a devout Jewish man? What about the same printer dealing with Latin humanist material? Alternately, did the Jews of Renaissance Italy read and enjoy those illustrated tales of chivalric derring-do so wildly popular at the time in their original vernacular, or did they have to wait for that literature to be “Judaized” for their benefit? The archive offers some surprising answers, but they demand a move beyond Rabbinics-centered, essentializing, nationalist-linguistic readings to a more creative, generous. and expansive view of Jewish identity and history.<\/p>\n

<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 17, 2024 By Ishai Mishory, 2023-24\u00a0Center for Jewish History Lapidus Graduate Fellow The Political Economy of Classification: Jewish Bibliographers Write about Gershom Soncino What constitutes \u201cJewish knowledge\u201d? Who decides what is a \u201cJewish\u201d versus a \u201cNon-Jewish\u201d book or title? Should the decision be based on subject matter (a.k.a, “Rabbinic material”), or maybe on language (Yiddish and Hebrew, presumably \u2013 but not Italian)? On…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1294,1296,1295],"class_list":["post-4329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-post","tag-bibliography","tag-gershom-soncino","tag-jewish-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4329"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4520,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4329\/revisions\/4520"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cjh.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}