Sixteenth-century jewish internal censorship of hebrew books

While Christian censorship of Hebrew books in the sixteenth century has received considerable scholarly attention, both after the opening of the Vatican archives in 18811 and, more recently, the opening of the Archive of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in 1998,2 Jewish censorship of Hebrew prints, exercised by Jewish rabbinic or lay authorities, has rarely received attention.3 Although researchers have explored the participation of Jewish scholars in the process of Christian expurgation,4 very little is known about Jewish censorship. The lack of archival documentation is the main cause for the state of knowledge in the field, but no one has attempted to check systematically the Hebrew prints for traces of Jewish censorship. This article will attempt to do so on the basis of the literary evidence and the examination of some Hebrew prints printed in the second part of the sixteenth century. The paper addresses four major questions: (1) Was there any Jewish censorship in Italy performed to force contemporary authors or entrepreneurs either to abide by certain rules or to conform to halakhic norms or a widely accepted theology? (2) Were the Jewish public and its leadership engaged in avoiding or erasing heretical views or improper issues from Hebrew prints? (3) Was there a mechanism of control operated or activated by rabbis or by community leaders to examine the prints, before or after print, from the Jewish point of view? (4) Could it be that the Christian printers and their Jewish editors and correctors interfered in the text, eliminated sentences, erased expressions, or even extracted sections to accommodate the text to certain Jewish demands or requirements, in the same manner as they acted to satisfy the Christian authorities by avoiding anti- Christian positions?.