Unveiled Faces of Medieval Hebrew Books

This study examines five different aspects of the production of medieval Hebrew manuscripts while attempting to check whether the manuscripts reflect a clear historical process of progress and rationalization, amelioration of the technical production procedures, growing efficiency in copying, greater comfort of reading, clarity of the text hierarchy, and greater faithfulness to the copied text. The study addresses the question whether the history of Jewish handwritten book production and consumption until the beginning of Hebrew printing mirrors a compromise between economic constrains and functional needs or the optimization of the production process, as it is claimed by Ezio Ornato concerning Western manuscripts, or instead, whether it is possible to discern the dominant impact of interests other than economic or functional in the history of the fabrication of Hebrew books, such as the esthetical and the "rhetorical" interests. These aspects are analyzed by deploying the unique empirical procedure of Hebrew quantitative codicology, based on a database of codicological features of all the extant dated Hebrew manuscripts.