Efrankel's blog
Efrankel | 06/02/2009
Welcome to the last of a series of five blog posts that pose the question, How did the Rabbis invent Web 2.0 before its time? To understand what’s now happening with online Jewish texts, it’s useful to look back at the history of the Jewish book.
The first Jewish texts were written on parchment scrolls, inscribed by hand. Sometime in Late Antiquity (2nd-4th century C.E.), a transitional technology called the codex emerged, an early hybrid format which consisted of hand-written leaves of parchment bound and sewn between two thin wooden covers. The oldest surviving Jewish codex is the 10th century Aleppo Codex, a Hebrew Bible written by the scribe Aaron Ben Asher in the Galilee. Over the next few centuries, other codexes–hand-written Bibles, haggadahs, and prayer books–appeared throughout Europe and North Africa, each a one-of-a-kind work of art.
Everything changed when Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450. Not surprisingly, the first book printed on this press was the Christian Bible. In the Jewish community, the first printed books were the Babylonian Talmud and the Rabbinic Bible.
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Efrankel | 05/21/2009
In our last post on the topic of how the Rabbis invented Web 2.0 before its time, we learned that the major innovation that grounded the Jewish people through Diaspora was the use of prooftexts to connect ideas and values to the Written Law. Rabbis continued responding to scripture, creating a new genre of literature, known as the Mishnah, meaning “to repeat” or “to review” (from “sheni,” meaning “two.” Enter the binary Torah, written and oral.)
Building upon the written Torah, the Mishnah set forth specific laws regulating ritual and civil life. But many of these issues were already remote from a Jew’s daily life. There was no longer a Temple for sacrifices, or an independent judiciary governing civil law, or priests (kohanim) enforcing laws of ritual purity. So why did the Rabbis spend over a century compiling a rulebook for so many obsolete practices?
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Efrankel | 05/20/2009
Part 2 in a series of 5 blog posts answering the question,
“How did the ancient Rabbis invent Web 2.0 before its time?”
Jewish culture has not always been based on written texts. Stories, family genealogies, law codes, poems, songs, and laments have been memorized and then recited aloud by people who served as “human books,” similar to the outlaw characters in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
But this kind of oral culture cannot be sustained in exile. When people are uprooted from their land, subjugated by a host culture, or stripped of their stabilizing institutions, they can end up losing their identity and way of life.
When the Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by Rome in 70 C.E., sending most of the Jewish population into slavery and exile, millions of Jews assimilated into the Roman Empire and vanished. What remained was only a remnant of Judaism.
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Efrankel | 05/18/2009
The Jewish people have always been at the forefront of innovation, especially when it comes to communication and information technology. It’s not surprising that Muhammed named us “the People of the Book.” Of course, the book he was referring to was the book, that is, the Bible.
But here’s the paradox: On the one hand, Jews have been innovators; on the other hand, we’ve prided ourselves on being faithful to the past, to our ancient texts, especially, the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.
It’s precisely this tension between stability and change, between preserving old texts and arguing with them, that has made Jewish textual culture so dynamic—and so strikingly modern.
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Efrankel | 12/22/2008
On March 28-29, 2009, the annual BibleTech Conference will take place in Seattle, providing an opportunity for “publishers, programmers, webmasters, educators, bloggers and anyone interested in using technology to improve Bible study…to explore the intersection of Bible study and technology.”
I will be one of the presenters at the two-day conference and will be presenting a session entitled:
How the Ancient Rabbis Invented Web 2.0 Before Its Time
Here’s the description:
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Efrankel | 07/18/2008
This year, 2008, marks the 120th anniversary of the founding of The Jewish Publication Society, making the Society the oldest non-profit Jewish publisher in North America. JPS is also the only non-partisan, multi-denominational, non-profit publisher of Jewish books in English in the world. We have had a glorious history, producing significant Jewish books for the broad spectrum of the Jewish community—and for a much wider audience as well. And we have every intention of carrying on this tradition far into the future.
However, something has changed. Book publishing is now an industry in turmoil. The internet has challenged the way that publishers acquire, produce, market, and distribute books. Books themselves find themselves competing for attention, especially from young people. People nowadays learn and amuse themselves in many ways—e-books, audio books, movies, TV, distance learning, video games. A printed volume between two covers is no longer a slam-dunk for a leisure activity of choice.
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