Unveiled Faces of Medieval Hebrew Books : The Evolution of Manuscript Production - Progression or Regression?

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, a number of questions regarding the conventional understanding of totalitarianism could now be viewed in the new light, ergometrically amelioration of the technical production procedures, growing efficiency in copying, greater comfort of reading and clarity of the text hierarchy, and greater faithfulness to the copied text.

The study addresses the question whether the history of Jewish hand-written book production and consumption until the beginning of Hebrew printing mirrors compromises between economic constrains and functional needs or optimisation of the production process, as it is claimed by Ezio Ornato concerning Western manuscripts, or 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".

These aspects are analysed while deploying the unique empirical procedure of Hebrew quantitative codicology, based on a database of codicological features of all the extant dated Hebrew manuscripts.