With this moralizing story, which is one of the earliest references to bookbinding in the Ashkenazic milieu, the early thirteenth-century pietist work Sefer Ḥasidim (The Book of the Pious) emphasized the importance of binding books. He appeared to someone in a dream and told him: “When I saw books that were becoming worn out, I did not have them bound in boards, and that is why I have been taken out of my tomb and beaten.” 5 Once a righteous man was taken out of his tomb who proceeded to beat him. The last section of this article considers the rebinding of Hebrew codices in Christian book collections, juxtaposing Christian approaches to Hebrew books with those of Ashkenazic book owners. A reassessment of these findings provides several new observations relating to Jewish bookbinding in this period and indicates areas of further research. To reveal the processes behind Jewish bookbinding practices, the craftsmen involved, and the products of their endeavor, two complementary kinds of evidence are examined in the present article: the five earliest extant examples of the bindings of Ashkenazic manuscripts that may provide evidence of the work of Jewish binders, and the primary written sources that contextualize and supplement the evidence presented by the bindings. Yet, some hints on who bound Ashkenazic manuscripts can be found in the manuscripts themselves, as is discussed below. 4 The uncertainty of such attributions indicates a larger problem: Jewish and Christian binders seem to have shared the same methods of work so that identifying the binders or their religious affiliation is usually impossible on the basis of the technique or style. As a result, any evaluation of the scope of extant medieval bindings on Ashkenazic codices, produced by either Jews or Christians, is unfeasible in this stage.Īdditionally, between one and more than thirty-two bindings, mainly on Christian codices, were attributed to the fifteenth-century Jewish binder Meir Yaffe of Ulm. 3 Their focus was on the luxurious examples of the bookbinding craft, leaving simple, undecorated bindings largely unattended. 2 With regard to Ashkenaz (central Europe), scholars have attributed the production of around fifteen bindings to Jewish anonymous craftsmanship. Our knowledge about the medieval bindings of Hebrew manuscripts is extremely limited, however, as most medieval codices were rebound later. The purpose of the bindings was much more than just to protect the pages of a text bindings often reflected the status and function of a book. 1 The technique, materials, and artistic style of bindings varied greatly across time and space, producing diverse forms ranging from limp covers for small codices, which were often intended for private use, to massive, luxuriously decorated bindings made of leather on wooden boards, which were associated with the manuscripts’ public functions and wealthy patrons. At the beginning of the medieval period, Jews’ adoption of the codex as their main book form made bindings integral to Jewish book culture. U nlike jars that were used in the ancient world to protect scrolls from damage and loss, bindings as we know them today were a product of making books in the form of a codex, a design that developed in the first few centuries of Christianity.
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