The Crown of Jerusalem

A Hebrew Bible was, in fact, first printed in Italy in 1488, by Yehoshua Shlomo, the head of the Soncino family of Jewish printers, about 40 years after the invention of the printing press, and 15 years after the first Hebrew books were published. The edition was composed of only 200-300 copies, and we know that the great scholar Johannes Reuchlin paid six gold coins for the copy he bought in Rome in 1492, at a time when the salary of a government clerk was about five gold coins a year.

The Hebrew books that had already been published included siddurim (prayer books), books of Jewish law like the Turim of Yakov Ben-Asher, and individual sections of the Bible, including the book of Psalms and the Pentateuch which Jews needed for everyday use - as well as books of the Prophets, and the five Megillot (scrolls) with translations and commentaries. Another two editions of the Hebrew Bible in a small format, which today we would call a pocketbook edition, were published in the 15th century, in a small, beautiful typeface by a nephew of Yehoshua Shlomo, the talented printer, Gershom Soncino.

We know of a few other copies of the Hebrew Bible printed in Spain, before the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. But after that - silence.

The bibliographer Eliezer Goldschmidt discussed this surprising fact in an article he wrote about the first printed editions of the Hebrew Bible, in which he rejected both the possibility that it had not been printed because of the complexity of the undertaking, or that because of the many manuscripts available, there was no need for a printed edition. As proof, he cites the rarity of Bible manuscripts from that period, which were carefully preserved for generations.

The assumption that perhaps the Jewish publishers wanted to spare themselves the debates - which continue to this day - as to the correct version of the Hebrew Bible (although they are gradually being consolidated into one agreed-upon version, as we will see below) is not convincing, the proof being that, in fact they did not avoid printing parts of it. The correct answer may be that until the Jewish people returned to the Land of Israel, the study of the Bible was secondary to the study of Oral Law among the Jews. (Even today, there is no regular study of the Bible itself in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas).

From 1500 until 1600, printing of the Hebrew Bible by Jews ceased, despite the fact that Jewish publishing houses were founded all over Europe, which published many books. On the other hand, Christian publishers engaged intensively in the publication of the Bible in Hebrew, employed Jewish assistants and artists, editors, typesetters and copy editors, who are often mentioned in the forewords to the book (as was customary in those days, when more respect was shown to print artists than today). And indeed, the work of the Christian printers was beautiful, and the editions of the Hebrew Bible which they printed were acceptable to the Jews. Maybe for this reason, the Jewish publishers had little incentive to take on the project of publishing the Bible, or as it was then called, "The Twenty-Four" (because it includes 24 books).

From the 17th century on, mainly in Amsterdam, which had replaced Venice as the printing capital of the Europe, as well as in publishing houses in the Ottoman Empire, the Bible was, in fact, published in Hebrew by Jewish printers, but these volumes cannot be compared to those of the Christian printers, in terms of editing and attractiveness.

Among the most important editions of the Hebrew Bible in the 16th century were: Mikraot Gedolot (the "Rabbinic Bible," which will be mentioned later), first printed in Venice in 1516-1517 by the outstanding publishing house founded by Daniel Bomberg; a version with a Latin translation published in Basel in 1536 by Sebastian Munster; a typographically superior version, printed in Paris in 1539-1540 by Robertus Stephanus (Estienne), in beautiful letters designed by the artist Le Bé; and the splendid "polyglot version," published by Arias Montanus at the publishing house of Christoforo Plantin in Antwerp in 1569-1572, funded by King Philip II of Spain.

Special mention should be made of Elias Hütter of Nuremberg, who toward the end of the 16th century, published his "Hollow Bible," so called because of his interesting experiment: in every word of his Bible, published in thick folio format, he emphasized the three letters of the Hebrew root in bold black letters, whereas the other letters were printed in "hollow" letters.

In addition, Hütter published a book in the same format, which he called Kubos, in which he "mapped" all the roots of the Hebrew words. The book contains 22 pages, each of them marked with one of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet; the page looks like a kind of acrostic, with 22 horizontal lines and 22 vertical ones. The intersections of the letters on the page indicate the two other letters of the root. This is not the usual family Bible, but was intended for Christian and Jewish scholars who wished to investigate the etymological sources and meanings of the words.

Also worthy of mention are the Bibles published by the Venetian publishers, Justinian, Bragadin and Di Gara. These were all republished in many editions, sometimes unchanged and sometimes in different versions.

The editions of the Bible best known to most Israelis are usually those published in Hebrew, by the English missionary bible societies, which flourished in the 19th century. These editions are not at all bad. The first ones were edited by the Jewish scholar, Meir Letteris (1800-1871), and were first published in London in 1852.

The work was continued for the English Bible Society by David Christian Ginsburg, a Jewish convert to Christianity, who settled in England and whose life's work was the editing of the Hebrew Bible according to the Mesorah (a series of rules for preserving the correct version of the script). The Bibles were often published as dual-language editions, with each page in Hebrew facing a page in the language of the country to which the book was intended.

These editions were published in more copies than any other book in the history of Hebrew publishing, and perhaps in the history of publishing in general. They were of high quality, in a handy format which was easy to read, on thin, strong paper, durable but lightweight, which came to be called "Bible paper," and were bound in strong, handsome bindings.

These editions became accepted by everyone, Jews as well as Christians, and the protests and bans issued occasionally against them by rabbis from the time they were first published until today, have been of no avail. They continued to be published in hundreds of editions, often in photo offset concealing their original sources.

A "scientific edition" of the Hebrew Bible, which for many years was considered most accurate, was published by the German scholars Kittel and Kahle in 1929-1937. This edition is considered very reliable by researchers of the Bible, among them the most highly regarded Jewish scholars,

Here it is relevant to give a short explanation of the problem that has always preoccupied publishers of the Hebrew Bible: Which is the accurate version? Because the book is sacred, its text must be agreed upon and accepted unconditionally, without any discrepancies among the various versions. Yet this is not the case. It is true that there are no discrepancies that change the basic meaning of the text. (Actually, there are a few exceptions to this rule, albeit in English; one is the so-called "Wicked Bible," published in England in the 16th century, in which the unfortunate printer altered the phrase "Thou shalt not commit adultery" to "Thou shalt commit adultery.")

However, there are differences between ancient Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible and, therefore, the same can be said about the printed editions based on these manuscripts. To enlightened readers, the recent attempts by some scholars to "find" hidden messages by combining letters in the Bible seem pathetic, at best.

What prevented wildly variant versions in the course of copying from one manuscript to another, and made it possible to preserve a virtually uniform version of the Bible, was the Mesorah which was passed on through the generations of scribes engaged in copying the Hebrew text.

Today, scholars agrees that the most accurate version of the Mesorah and the Bible was preserved by the Ben-Asher family, who were grammarians from Tiberias. However, even among the texts copied by members of this family, one can find variations in vocalization and cantillation marks, although they are very slight.

Aaron ben Moshe Ben-Asher was the proofreader and Mesorah authority according to whose instructions the Aleppo Codex (named for the city in Syria where it was kept for many years) was written in the 10th century. Today it is known as the Keter ("Crown") Aram Tzova. This copy of the Hebrew Bible is the text which Maimonides used when he wrote Hilkhot Sefer Torah ("the Laws of the Torah Scroll") in his book Mishneh Torah ("The book of Jewish law"), and thus gave the Aleppo Codex the seal of supreme and absolute authority.

Maimonides wrote, "The codex which we used in these works is the codex known in Egypt, which includes 24 books, which was in Jerusalem ... and was used for editing the books (of the Bible), and everyone relies on it, because it was edited by Ben-Asher, who studied it carefully for many years and edited it many times ... and I relied on it in the Torah Scroll which I wrote according to it."

The Codex was severely damaged in riots against the Jews of Aleppo in 1947, and it is missing about 200 pages, whose fate is unknown - these missing pages include most of the Pentateuch. Today, what is left of the Codex lies safely in the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem.

In addition, other manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, or parts of it, served as aids, including the second edition of Mikra'ot Gedolot, published by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1524-1525. This edition relied on a comparison of a large number of Sephardi (Spanish or Middle Eastern) manuscripts, which were considered more accurate than the Ashkenazi Northern and Western European manuscripts), and which were available to the publisher, Jacob ben Hayim Ibn Adonyahu.

This edition was for years considered the most accurate printed version of the Bible, and was accepted as such all over the Diaspora, although it is not without faults.

It is characteristic that with the reawakening of nationalist feelings among Jews in the 19th century, and even more so with the founding of the State of Israel, many people felt a desire to publish a "Jewish" Bible in Hebrew. In other words, they wanted a version that was edited and distilled according to the ancient version, which did not rely on the Chrisian Bibles.

Among those who engaged in this work were Prof. M.D. Cassuto, an Italian-born scholar of the Bible and of the Ancient Near East, who, together with Prof. A.S. Hartum and others, edited what was finally published in 1945 as the "Jerusalem Bible," which included various emendations to the Ginsburg Bible.

Other Jewish versions included: the Koren Bible, first published between 1959-1962; an edition edited by Aaron Dotan, lnown as the "Adi Bible" in 1976; an edition edited by Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, according to the version and methodology of the Aleppo Codex, which first appeared in 1977-1982; and an interesting experiment by Dr. Moshe Anat, who published a Bible in 1970 in a popular form - with punctuation and layout in the text that is largely understandable to the reader without additional commentaries.

The Koren edition, named after the printer and typographer Eliahu Koren, who published it as his life's work, excels in its accuracy, the beauty of its letters - which Koren designed especially for this purpose - and in its aesthetic typography. The first impression was published as a bibliophilic edition, on specially produced paper with characteristic watermarks, and is a model of good taste.

Now there is another Hebrew edition of the Bible, which was launched at the Jerusalem International Book Fair in April, 2001. This edition scrupulously follows the Aleppo Codex, according to the method of Rabbi Breuer, and it is more accurate than anything previously published, as evidenced by the fact that the Hebrew University in Jerusalem agreed to lend the edition its name. In order to emphasize its uniqueness, the new version is called Keter Yerushalayim ("The Crown of Jerusalem").

The Keter Yerushalayim is unique in that print artist Nahum Ben-Zvi, who initiated its publication, aspired to create a book which would not only contain the version closest to Keter Aram Tzova, but would also be as similar to it as possible in its typographic form.

And the format is indeed similar to that of the Aleppo Codex. It even imitates the arrangement of the text in three columns instead of one or two, as is usual in earlier publications. This three-column layout - which would not have been technically feasible without the use of a modern computer software programme - does not include some of the poems which which required a different arrangement. Here there is an experiment that is perhaps unprecedented: On the one hand, as a result of the three-column layout, the lines become short, and therefore the eye can take them in at a glance, with a top-to-bottom movement. On the other hand, there is a certain difficulty in drawing one's glance to the beginning of the paragraph.

Keter Yerushalayim is printed in a typeface designed especially for it by the most prolific designer of Hebrew lettering today, Zvi Narkis. The letters were designed in the Sephardi manner, with horizontal and vertical lines almost equal in thickness, as opposed to Ashkenazi letters, in which the horizontal lines are relatively thicker than the vertical ones. It was clearly inspired by the design of the letters used for the Keter Aram Tzova, which are characteristic of monumental manuscripts of its type and period.

The paper chosen is a cream Bible paper, and the text is printed in a somewhat greyish ink (some red and yellow were added to the black ink), with the intention of creating a sufficient, but not unduly harsh, contrast between text and background.

Especially praiseworthy is the binding, which is of a quality not seen here for a long time. The book is bound in silk-like cloth in a wine-red shade, which is pleasing both to the eye and to the fingers.

It is a pity that in such a carefully made book, the publisher did not follow the custom of publishers of previous generations, by listing in the colophon the names of all those involved in the publication of the book, the scholars responsible for the "software" - the paper and the cloth manufacturers, the printers and binders, etc. They are all worthy of honorable mention.