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Noam Sienna, "Jewish Books in North Africa: Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds" (Indiana UP, 2025)
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A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello, everybody, and welcome to a new episode on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Jalim Gutfah. Today I'm thrilled to host Noam Sienna, who is a scholar of Jewish culture in the medieval and early modern Islamic worlds. Siena is currently the Jerome and Loren Areste Visiting Scholar in Jewish Book Arts at the Bilner center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers, where he collaborate with the Rutgers Initiative for the Book and the Scarlet Letter Press to integrate Jewish studies and hands on book history. In today's episode, we will talk about Noam's book, Jewish Books in North Africa between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds, which appeared in Jena University Press in 2025. Noam received the 2025 Book Award from the Middle East Librarians association for this book. So double congratulations on publishing the book and on this award.
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C
Thank you.
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B
Welcome to the show. We're so excited to talk to you today.
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C
Yay. Thank you. Me too.
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B
So tell us who you are and how you got to this project. Actually, I want to jump to the conclusion of your book in which you talk about your family history. So I wonder if you could take us back in time to your interest in book and how it's shaped this project over the years.
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C
Sure. So, as I say, in the book itself, I come from a very bookish family, a family where books were always very important, starting with my great grandfather, father, who was a printer and a teacher, and then his daughter, my grandmother, who was also bookish, and her children, my father and his brothers, who were all calligraphers and paper makers and book binders and interested in, in writing and reading books in many different capacities, but especially Jewish books. And of course, my mother, who was a rabbi growing up. There were always a lot of books in. And I always knew that books were not just things that you read, but also things that people made with their hands and. Or at least at one point had made with their hands. And so I, I was always interested in calligraphy and manuscripts and scribal work even before I went to college, even from, as a, as a kid. And then as I became interested in Jewish history and particularly Jewish history in the Islamic world, my interests started to overlap and, and coalesce into a more focused study on Jewish book history in the Islamic world. And I had taken in my master's program at the University of Toronto, I participated in the book history and print culture program and took a number of courses there in book history and manuscript studies. And then in my doctoral program at the University of Minnesota, I took more courses in, in book history and, and started reading more broadly in the field. And there's a lot of, a lot of great work being done and, and has been done in the last few decades, generally in book history, about materiality, about tracing networks of movement, about understanding production processes and distribution processes, in the study of the book, in following readers and following individual book copies. And that has started to come into Jewish studies. I think there's a lot more that, that it could. That it could do. And particularly in the field of Sephardic studies or in the study of, of Jewish life in the Islamic world, I saw that there was really a need to address books as, as material objects and as social objects, not just the content of books. Been. You know, there has been a lot of scholarship on writers, on rabbinic, you know, figures, on intellectuals, on the contents of their books in, in the medieval world, in the early modern Islamic world, but the books themselves. How they got produced, how they moved around, how people encountered them was still missing. So that's where the project started.
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B
So I wonder if you can unpack this a little bit in terms of the methodology. So can you reflect maybe more on the specific methodologies from the historiography of book history that you have mobilized in this study. And conversely, you write in the introduction that you're trying to really put into conversation Sephardic history and book history. So conversely, what does this study that really focuses on Sephardic history help us understand about books in general that could be relevant for scholars in the fields of. In the field of book history.
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C
Great. Yeah. And that's. I mean, that's basically my goal in this book is to say to scholars of book history, there's something interesting here in the field of Sephardic studies, and vice versa, to scholars in the field of Sephardic studies and Jewish studies more broadly, that there's something interesting in the field of Jewish history. So from book history, I really am inspired by the work of scholars who think about the book as a nexus of human relationships and of social processes. That books. And whether we're talking about manuscript books or printed books, that books come into being through their embeddedness in social communities and that they move along networks that are also produced by those communities, and that we can see some of those movements and networks by paying close attention to the physical objects themselves. The books, the type, the paper, the bindings, the annotations, the signs of use. You know, all of these pieces of evidence are clues to how this book came into being and how it was used. And that's, you know, there are scholars like Natalie Zeman Davis, like Leslie Howsom, Roger Chartier, are thinking about bibliography, critical bibliography, or social bibliography, to really think about how can we get to a place that. That really encompasses the overlap of the book as an intellectual product, the book as a physical product, and the book as a social, relational product. So that's the methodology that, again, as I said, has been for several decades now, really growing in the field of book history, but hasn't yet really taken root in the field of Jewish studies, vice versa. I think that also the field of book history has grown out of early modern, for the most part, medieval and early modern European studies. Right. Most of the. The. In the last 50 years, you know, the. The main scholars of book history have. Have been drawn to book history from Shakespeare, from, you know, biblical studies, from Milton, from, you know, European modern, early modern European intellectual history or cultural history in French or German. So, so those are the contexts that have been really deeply explored. And Jewish books are interesting because they in some ways conform to the models that have been established in book history more generally for European books. But in other ways, they really break the mold. So one. One example that I talk about in the book is in North Africa, for example, for most of the early modern period, you have no local printing Industry there, there's no, there, there are one or two exceptions that I talk about, but for the most part, from the 16th until the end of the 19th century, there are no printing presses operating anywhere in North Africa. And, and so in some ways you have a society that is, doesn't really have access to print in the same way. And so this is a society that is still writing manuscripts, reading in manuscripts, circulating books and manuscripts. And that's true. And yet printed books are circulating in these communities and are also even being produced by these communities at a, at a rate that is far beyond what might be expected from the European model, which divides, you know, print and non print into these more exclusive categories. Like there are print literate societies in the early modern period, and then there are, you know, places that don't have access to print. And in those places they really don't engage with printed books at all. And yet here in, in Morocco or in Tunisia, Jews are printing books in other places and bringing them back to North Africa. They're importing printed books from other places and circulating them and reading them. They're copying printed books into manuscript, script, form. So there's this incredible variety of interactions that really don't, that are really unique to Jewish society. It's not true for Islamic society and it's not true for European Christian society for the most part. So I, I'm, what I hope to present in this book is to, to book historians an example of the kinds of unique features that we can see when we expand our gaze outside of Europe, outside of Christian society, when we, we use the same tools, we use the same methodologies, but when we start looking at a different context, we are seeing different ways of relating to the book. I think that really expands our understanding of the early modern world generally. So because, you know, there's, there's overlap and there's interaction, but we're centering the story in, in, in a different, in a different space.
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B
Thank you. That is incredibly useful and insightful. So that actually brings up a question about geography. I wonder if you could expand a little bit on the geographic scope of the study, because as you said, it is in some ways very transnational. But I think what you do really beautifully in the book is showing the complex interplay between the very local and the transnational. And also you mentioned, you know, Christian, European. But what's so interesting is like, especially in Jewish history, we tend to divide the Jewish world between, you know, the Ashkenazi sphere and the Sephardic sphere. And they are seen as, you know, Separate from each other, I think, at the very least in the, in the popular imagination. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the places that you actually look at and how they related to each other, how people, books, ideas migrated around this broad geographic space that you sketch out in the book. And also if you could reflect on whether this geography change in the periods that you study, because you talk about this transition from the early modern to the modern period. So how does the geography change as the decades progress?
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C
Okay, so the first thing I'll say is this book is really rooted in what I'll call the Maghreb North Africa, which for my purposes encompasses the Jewish communities of present day Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. There are overlaps with the Jewish communities in Libya, which is sometimes in some respects part of North Africa. In this context, I, I felt there were too many differences and distinctions, that it didn't really make sense to be included and, you know, you have to draw the line somewhere. So, so it really, this is really a story about the sort of Western, you know, northwestern edge of the Maghreb of North Africa. Jewish communities in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, which again share many features and people often move back and forth across these borders, but which also have some different features, especially in the modern period, as they have different, very different experiences of French colonialism. Right. Algeria with a full colonial occupation starting in 1830 and then absorbed into the French system entirely. Tunisia as much later in 1881, and then Morocco as a protectorate with a kind of a different status in the 20th century. So because they each have these different experiences, the modern period really, you see, start to see some distinctions. But even in the early modern period, so you have the Maghreb, you have the Jewish communities of North Africa. But I also am interested in following Maghribi Jews as they move with books to other places. So there are, there are two main chapters in the middle of the book which focus on Jews from the Maghreb working in collaboration with European printing houses to bring books to print. Livorno being the center, the Italian city of Livorno being a central place, but also Amsterdam. Also places in, in other places in Northern Europe, in Central Europe, other places in Italy and also in Ottoman, in the Ottoman Empire. They also. There's also a back and forth relationship, especially between Ottoman Palestine, where you have very strong connections between North African Jews in North Africa and these diaspora communities of North Africans living especially in Jerusalem. There's a Maghrebi community in Jerusalem already in the 18th century that people are moving back and forth. There are Rabbinic emissaries. There are yeshivot that have ties from Ottoman Palestine, ties to, you know, founding rabbis from Morocco. So there's a lot of back and forth in that direction and of course back and forth to Livorno, where there's another very significant North African diaspora, Maqrobi diaspora in Livorno again starting already in the, in the 18th century. So that's, that's kind of the scope, geographic scope. The other geography that enters into the story at the beginning is Sephard, the Iberian Peninsula, which has a kind of a ghostly presence in this story because it's the origin of many of the great rabbinic families of North Africa, especially Morocco, trace their lineage back to medieval Sephard, to medieval Iberia. And these megurashim, the exiles, have an identity that develops in North Africa that is, as you said, it's, it's very local, but it also has this, this constant awareness of having come from somewhere else and having ties both to that place where they came from. Which in the, in the realm of books relates to the continued presence of medieval Iberian books, especially manuscripts. There are many, and I talk about this in the first chapter, there are many medieval Sephardi manuscripts from Spain and from Portugal from the even 12th, you know, 13th, 14th centuries that are kept and preserved in Sephardi families in North Africa for hundreds of years. And they're read and they're used and they're, they're commented on. And many of them have this, you know, status as being really precious heritage objects that tie these families back to their origins in medieval Spain and mark these communities as with the prestige of being descendants of the, you know, elite of the Sephardi diaspora. So even though they're not really physically going back to, to Iberia, there, there is still this relationship to, to Sephardi books. And of course they're also tied to other Sephardi communities. And we see that again when you think about printing and you think about how, how people are, are moving. For example, you know, if you have a manuscript and you want to get it printed in the, in the, let's say in the 18th century, you know, your first stop is going to be your, your Sephardi, you know, co religionists in other places. And we can trace this. For example, I discuss the, the story of Meir Crescas, who's an Algerian Jew, Sephardi Algerian Jew in the mid 18th century, who goes to print a book. And we can trace through his, the different haskamot that he receives, the different approbations that he receives for his book we can follow him. He, he goes from Algeria to Tunis, from Tunis and to Istanbul, From Istanbul to Livorno, from Livorno to Pisa, from Pisa to I think he then goes over to Bayonne, to Bordeaux, to Hamburg and then to London and then to Amsterdam. And from, and Amsterdam he prints, he prints the book. But in all of these places he is connecting with other Sephardi communities, even if they're long removed. Right. The Sephardi community in, in Bordeaux, for example, in the 18th century has very little to do materially with the so called Sephardi communities in, in Algeria. Right. They're, they're, they're only, you know, they don't speak the same language, they don't dress the same way, they don't have the same, you know, histories other than the fact that they both descend from the Jews of medieval Iberia. But that connection is strong enough at least in the 18th century to really tie these communities together. By the end of the 18th century and the turn of the 19th century, that really starts to shift that, that kind of pan Sephardic diaspora really narrow, has narrowed into much more local spheres. And that's, that's where we see the North African Jewish community really focusing in, either in, in local printing initiatives in North Africa itself or with Livorno, where, as I said, there's a very significant North African diaspora. So that, you know, that narrowing of, of, of the, of the transnational really starts to happen, I would say, in the 19th century, sorry, in the first half of the 19th century, in parallel with other, with other ways that this is happening. What's interesting is that while that's happening in terms of networks of connection in one respect, there's also a sense in which those networks are actually expanding to a, to a broader degree because of the rise of a series of Jewish, let's call them like Jewish universalist ideologies in the Ashkenazi world, right in the, in the middle of the 19th century, second half of the 19th century, you start to see these kind of global Jewish programs that are about regenerating global Jewry and connecting global Jewish communities, you know, and so, you know, the Haskalah is part of this, right, this kind of raising up a Jewish national consciousness that Jews belong to a single nation no matter where they are, whether they're in Morocco or Russia or France. If they're Jews, they belong to the Jewish nation. So they, they are connected in some way. And so what you start to see and, and this comes to the rise in the second part of my book, the Second half of my book is you start to see North African Jewish intellectuals, writers who are engaging with their colleagues and, and co religionists in Eastern Europe, even in, in very Ashkenazi, in like the heartlands of the Ashkenazi world, far into the Russian Empire. Right. It's, it's, it's astounding to me that, you know, people are, you know, I think about like the mail system, like, you know, people are sending letters. I have, you know, examples of, of correspondence between, you know, intellectuals living in Tunis who are writing letters to, you know, Ashkenazi scholars of the Haskalah who are living in Vilna or who are living in, in Berlin or who are living in, you know, in the Russian Empire. So, so, you know, there, there is a kind of a global Jewish world that is emerging in which these figures are now both consuming and contributing to. Although for the most part it's, it's, it's more of a one direction, like they're taking in a lot of material. They're reading newspapers that are published in Europe, they're reading books that are published in Europe. I don't know to what extent Jewish intellectuals in Europe are really reading or thinking or interested in what's happening in North Africa. I think not so much, but, but certainly from the North African side there's this, there's this expanded world. And we can see this. For example, in, in, in my final chapter, I'm talking about libraries and I compare two libraries, both of which were assembled by Moroccan rabbis in the city of Fez. So they're, they're, they're in the same local context. One was assembled over the course of the first half of the 18th century, one was assembled in the second half of the 19th century. And what you can see, one of the things that you can see when you compare these libraries is that the first library, the, the Abensur family library, most of its books, you really see the centrality of the Sephardi diaspora because most of its books are books that are either produced in North Africa or they're produced by North African scholars but printed in these Sephardi centers in Europe, in Luverne or Amsterdam. And then only a very small portion of these books are really coming from outside of the Sephardi world. Versus when you look at the, this other library, which is the Serfati Library in the 19th century, he is reading Hebrew textbooks of history and biology and science that are published in Vilna and that are published in Berlin and that are published in Warsaw. And he's reading you know, Hebrew newspapers. He's reading Hamelitz, he's reading Hamagid, he's reading Hatsfira. You know, he's. He is really engaged in an intellectual sphere that is connecting him to the Ashkenazi world, into Eastern Europe to a degree that really was not true in even just like a century earlier. So that's, that's a shift. There's this simultaneous narrowing but also expanding at the same time. The kind of a communal narrowing, but an individual expanding of horizons. I would say that.
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B
Thank you for this fabulous answer. Which actually brings two questions that are connected.
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C
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B
The first one is about library. I actually, I want to ask you about library, so I'm glad you brought it up. I love this photo on page three of the book of Rabbi Moshe Sibon in his library where you like the intensity of his gaze. Yeah, you just, you can feel like the really the social, emotional value of the books that you mentioned earlier in the conversation. So the question about libraries was clearly these were important for the individuals who owned them, but what was the broader communal significance of those libraries? Were there places that members of the community would come to? Would they function like public libraries today? But you know, they were in the hands of Gibbon family. So that's the first question. And the second question has to do with archives, because what you traced in our conversation is that this multi layered processes of modernization that affected book circulation and ultimately also the formation of archives. And I presume that a lot of the materials that you sought to write this study was archives. Right. So how do the physical archives that host those documents, what do they say about this story that you've traced so far and what was lost, so to speak, in the transition from those family libraries to say, archives in Israel? What is the hidden cost of this transition? I wonder if you could reflect a little bit on this and how much, how much this was something you had in mind when you were seeking those manuscripts in libraries in Israel and also elsewhere in the world.
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C
Absolutely, yeah. So first let me say about libraries. You know, I use the word library with some trepidation. Because a library, as you say, a library can be a lot of different things. And when you say library today, people have a certain picture of the kind of, of of thing we're talking about, that they picture an institution that it is multi generational, that it is accessible to the public, that it exists for a certain kind of, you know, purpose of, you know, sharing books among readers. So that. That's not quite true for what we see in North Africa. We don't really have public libraries in, in the sense that anybody can walk in and take a book off the shelf. There are some book collections which we could term communal libraries. These are book collections that are held, for example, in Yeshivot or in synagogues that are owned either by the yeshiva or in some cases actually owned communally to some degree. And that. And that function really as communal resources. But mostly what I'm talking about, and those are, those are. There are some examples of those, but they're not super common mostly, and they're mostly pretty small. What I'm talking about, the library collections that I'm interested in are what I would call and what I call in the book, semi public libraries. They are privately owned. So they are owned by individuals and families. So the Abensur family has a library, a book collection which sort of is inherited. Each subsequent member of the family can add to the collection. Sometimes books get sold out of the collection, but they're sort of responsible for maintaining the family library. We do have a few examples, at least one example that I can think of, where we know that there was a book collection which had a scholar who was appointed to be in charge of the collection, who was not the owner or the, the. The inheritor of a collection. And that's really, we could term a librarian. Like that's someone who really was, you know, a professional book custodian. But there's that those are very few. Mostly what we're talking about are semi private collections. They're owned privately and they're made accessible at the discretion of the owner. So who is coming to these libraries? First of all, we have to say that with almost no exceptions, we're talking about a male audience. Women, Jewish women in North Africa were, at least until the middle of the 19th century, not prioritized in terms of an education in literacy. They were generally not taught to read. Again with one or two exceptional cases. They were not taught to read. They were certainly not taught to write. And if they did know how to read, they could read the prayer book, they could read you know, the letters, they were not literate in the Hebrew language per se, and they were excluded from the world of elite Jewish learning that these book collections represented. These are books for scholars, you know, of, of halachic reference works, of biblical commentaries of response. You know, they're not invited into that world. And also there are men who are not invited into that world because this is an elite intellectual elite with a very high level of education. You know, these. So this is not a working class library. This is not a library for a carpenter who's had a long day at work, who can come in and sit and, you know, read some, you know, humorous folk tales. Right. This is a, this is like a reference library. And, and so the, the, that's why it's, I, I would say it's semi public because it's, it's really aimed at a very particular class of people who are really a, a small minority. But that being said, within that group, right, within the scholarly rabbinic male elite, then yes, these are collections where we know that people are coming, they're consulting, they're reading, they're having conversations, they're looking for books. There are, there are, you know, there's correspondence about, you know, can you check in your library and see if you have a copy of this book or that book? Because I really would like to see it. And, and we have at least in, in some examples, or I don't have many of them, but I have it at least a few examples of lending records where I can see, oh, books are being, are moving sort of in and out of the collection. So there's like lists where you have the person's name and what book they borrowed, and then when they borrow it, it's crossed off, or I guess when they return it, it's crossed off. I mean, we can see that, okay, books are, are circulating in this respect. But, but again, the audience of these books is really a rabbinic male elite, let's say. And that's not, you know, this is, this is not unique to North Africa. This would be true in many places across the Jewish world, certainly in, in the early modern period. So, so that takes me actually to the question of, of, of archives because one of the things that, that I found actually particularly frustrating in researching this book was the degree to which I was piecing together things that had been scattered and, and not, not preserved all in, in one place. So when I was interested in writing about libraries, for example, my first thought was, oh, what I should do is to try to find a library that's been preserved in some collection that I could analyze the books in some way. And I was thinking in the model of my colleague Joshua Teplitsky's wonderful book, Prince of the Press, which analyzes the library of Rabbi David Oppenheim from Prague, right? And what Teplitzky was able to do was, you know, this book collection is now preserved at the Bodleian Library. So he was able to go to the Bodleian. He could look at the books, he could see. He could do a full catalog. He could see, you know, when each book was purchased and what Rabbi Oppenheim wrote in the margins, et cetera, et cetera. I looked for years. I reached out to different scholars. I reached out to colleagues in France and in Israel and in North Africa to try to find was there some library that has been preserved, even mostly intact, from an identifiable North African figure from the 18th or 19th century? And the answer was no, I could not find one. The closest that I came was the library, one of the two libraries that I talk about, the Serfati family library, or really Avner Yisrael Tsarfati's library. He. He had this book collection, and after he died in 18, I believe in 1884, and after his death, the books were passed on to his son and then his grandson. And we know that the library was consulted as a resource by scholars of Sephardic history in the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, even into the 1930s. We still hear about the library preserved in situ in Fez as a scholarly resource by the 19. There's a sort of a gap. I don't know what happened to it in the 1940s and 50s. By the 1960s, the majority of the Jewish community of Morocco was on its way out. They were dispersing. Some of them had moved to France, some of them had moved to Israel. And in the late 1960s, two members of the Sarfati family went back to Fez. They. The library had been basically abandoned, and some of it had been, you know, the shelves had fallen down and the books had gotten damaged. And, you know, people had come in and taken some books away to sell or whatever. So they salvaged the remainder of the books, what they could salvage, and they brought them back, and then they. Some of the books were divided up among the family members. The bulk of the books were given to Bar Ilan University Library in Israel. However, and I say this with respect there, I. I do not. I don't impugn the judgment of the librarians at the time. But what happened was the Bar Ilan University Library at the time, you know, wasn't particularly interested in preserving the history of this collection as a collection. So they accessioned the books as books into their general collection. So they, they had a copy, you know, so one of the Tsarfati books was, whatever it was, let's say the Shulchana Ruch. So they just cataloged Shulchanaru and they put it on the shelf next to all their other copies of the Shulchana Ruch. And then in the 1980s and 90s, as they were trying to shrink the collection and get rid of books that weren't being used, they said, well, nobody's checked this book out. And so they actually started deaccessioning books, including books that I've now found at, at auction sites, online, at used bookstores in Israel. I have, and I own at least three books that have the stamp of the Tsarfatti Library and a library stamp from Bar Ilan University Library and a deaccession stamp from Bar Ilan, meaning these books were in the Serfati Library. They were brought to Israel in the 60s and 70s. They were given to Bar Ilan, they were deaccessioned from Bar Ilan, and now they're floating around on the market. So that library is dispersed in, in that sense. So, so that's a, that's an archival issue for me because I'm now trying to reconstruct. I'm not interested in each individual copy of the book per se. What I'm interested in is understand the collection as a whole. Right. How did, how did all of these books come together in 19th century Morocco? What did this collection look like when Sarfati was using it? How was he using it? What were some of the range of different kinds of books that he was owning? I want to get like a big data kind of view here. And I tried my best, and I think I managed to get some degree of. Of overview. But because we actually have a handwritten catalog that Serfati wrote of his library. So I know the titles. I know the list of all the titles of the books that he had. But. But the library itself is sort of is. Is vanished. And again, that. That library catalog is something that happens to be in, in an archive in Israel. And some of these books are in other archives in other places. And, you know, there's. There, there. There was a real dispersal of material largely due to the events of the mid 20th century and the ways in which North African Jewish communities were, let's say, deracinated from their belonging in North Africa and their, their, their migrations and, and dislocations to Europe and North America and Israel. The circumstances of those dislocations which have been studied by, you know, many other scholars were not really conducive to large scale archival projects, you know, preservation projects and meaning in, in where they landed in Marseilles or in Maabara camp in Israel or in Montreal. And on the other end, of course, North African libraries, you know, libraries in, in, in, in Morocco, in Tunis, Algeria. You know, we're not really in a space to be thinking about Jewish heritage as an important, you know, collection priority for you know, now of course, now some of them are starting to get interested and I've actually just recently been in conversation with some colleagues working in Tunis with the National Library of Tunis, which actually is now very interested in, and has some material, Judeo Arabic material that they, that they collected in the, in the early 20th century and over the course of the 20th century. But, but, but it's very haphazard and so that was one of the frustrating aspects of, of researching this book is that, you know, the books themselves are sort of scattered haphazardly and the archival material of, of the surrounding documentation. So you know, letters, you know, personal papers, things like that, you know, on, on a, on a, on a haphazard basis on, on a totally, you know, incidental basis. There happens to be, you know, one exceptional collection of 18th and 19th century Moroccan correspondence housed at the University of Alberta of all places for, for, you know, whatever course of, of history happened to, to bring that particular collection there. You know, that's where it is. And so I found some material there, but it, it, it sort of stands alone because it's companion pieces like the other half of the conversation didn't get archived anywhere else. And you know, so there are these little collections. There's, you know, Yale, Yale University has a collect manuscript material, correspondence. And so I, I tried to piece together, you know, from, from, from, from what I could find. The last thing I'll say about working with archives and again, I, I say this with deep, deep love and respect for my colleagues who are working in libraries and archives and, and, and of course this book would not be written, let me just say this book would not have been written without the collaboration of librarians and archivists who are essential in, in all fields, but certainly in this field in thinking through this material. And at the same time there's a real skill issue in working with Sephardi material and especially North African Material which is that Jewish studies librarians and archivists at the best of times are pressed for time and, you know, cannot really be devoting, you know, cataloging time to really deep research on these materials. And when you're dealing with Sephardi manuscript materials, which are often written in a, a script that is very difficult to decipher if you don't, if you haven't had paleographic training and if you don't have familiarity with context and, and place names and family names. And so, you know, for, for scholars, right. For, for scholars on my end who are relying on catalog descriptions, right, to see, you know, do I need to take a research trip to Yale? Well, let me see what manuscripts they have. You know, the Yale collection is actually well described because they brought scholars to describe the collection. But, but, you know, there are other collections in other universities which just don't have the level of collection description that would enable scholars to find the material they're looking for, simply because it is just too big of a lift. It's too big of an ask for. For librarians and archivists who don't have the, the training to do it. But scholars who, who can't, who could do it, don't know about it because we, you know, and so, I mean, there's, you know, so many examples of things that I found where, you know, the catalog description had, you know, just to give you an example, you know, Judeo Arabic is written in Hebrew characters, right? Like Yiddish or Hebrew or anything else. However, when catalogers, again, with no disrespect, you know, catalogers often have to Romanize titles to put it into a catalog record. So if it's in Hebrew, you can use the Library of Congress Romanization standard scheme for how to transliterate Hebrew. And even for Yiddish, there is a standard Romanization scheme, but there is no standard Romanization scheme for Judeo Arabic. And catalogers, you know, there are how we should. We can't expect catalogers to have a working knowledge of Judeo Arabic. But what ends up happening then is, is, you know, Judeo Arabic books have their titles transliterated as if their titles are in Hebrew. And, and it, and it creates just a complete mess and makes things impossible to find and, you know, are really lacking proper accessibility. So, you know, that's something that I, you know, of course, I've tried to work with librarians and archivists to improve descriptions of their collections, and we've made a lot of strides in that area, but there's so, so, so much more material that's out there, that is. That is uncatalogued or waiting to be properly described, that I'm sure that future scholars will have many more riches to work with. I don't pretend that my book is anything other than a very preliminary introduction to the topic that really deserves much more ongoing research.
- [46:19]
B
Actually, I think it's important to talk about language. And I'm glad you brought up Judeo Arabic, because I think that does answer also partially the previous question I asked you about the demise of those family libraries because, of course, there are the trials and tribulations of migration, but I think also the fact that Judeo Arabic in most families stopped to be the main language of conversation. So what was a living object? Those manuscripts in Judeo Arabic, I think they ceased to hold that value as people shifted to other languages in the modern era. So like French in North Africa, for instance. So I think that's a big part of the story. There's so much to cover. But I think one important question I really wanted to ask before the end of our conversation was about all the other people. We don't usually think about when we think about books, which is the people who are writing and producing the books. So we've talked about readers a lot in this conversation. But one thing that I really loved in the book was your emphasis on a wide range of actors. So I wonder if you could help us think about, you know, who these actors are and what labor did they actually contribute to both the production and circulation of these books in both the early modern and modern periods.
- [47:39]
C
It's really important to me, and that's really one of the driving factors in my work is to try to think about the broadest, you know, encompassing of all of the hands that this book passed through. And. And I'm sorry to say that that most of the hands that it passed through are really undocumented. We. We know, you know, for any given book, we often know the most about its writer. And sometimes, you know, if it's a published book about its publisher, the. The person who owned the publishing house, but the people who actually worked in the publishing house are. Are, you know, much less well documented. I'll give you one example which goes back to what we were just talking about in terms of handwriting, right? Paleography, the. The North African cursive handwriting. The Hebrew script of North Africa is very, very difficult to read if you. If you haven't been trained to read it. Of course, once you know how to read it, it's not that difficult, but it's. If for unfamiliar eyes, it can be quite intimidating. And that was true even in the early modern period. So we have a number of descriptions of North African Jews who have manuscripts in European publishing houses where the publisher says, boy, I wish I could publish this, but nobody can read it. And there's one fellow that we know of, he's sort of unusually well documented. He was a very interesting kind of wandering mystic kabbalist named Moshe Adrei, or Edrehi, E D R E H I Moshe Edrehi. And he was from Morocco originally, but he sort of wandered across North Africa and then through Italy and then Amsterdam, and then made his way eventually to London and then eventually to. To Ottoman Palestine, where he died. And while he was in both Amsterdam and in London, he ended up working in the print industry as a corrector. And so the job of a corrector, kind of like an editor in a printing house, is as the sheets come off the press after the first. Right there you have a manuscript. The manuscript is set in type, and then you do a first proof. You do like a first pull. And then the corrector compares the first printed sheet with the original authorized manuscript copy and goes through word by word to check are there any typos, are there any mistakes? And so Moshe Esrai says, you know, I found myself working as a. As a corrector in this printing house. He says, I happened to be in. In. In Amsterdam when a group, another group of Moroccan Jews came with a manuscript of Peyutim. They wanted to print a book of putim of the. The. The great Moroccan paitan, David Hassin. And. And it felt, he said, the labor fell on me alone because I alone could read the script of this manuscript, for it is the script of my homeland. So here he is, a Moroccan Jew living. He's been living now for decades in Europe. But he has this embodied knowledge of this local material skill, which is reading the handwriting of this manuscript that puts him into service in this printing industry to translate, kind of figuratively translate, this book from a Moroccan manuscript where it really can only be read by Moroccans into a printed book, which can then become a global Jewish product. I mean, I don't know how many people outside of Morocco bought, you know, a book of Putin by David Haseen. But in theory, at least, and, you know, for other books that were, you know, more widely distributed, you know, this book then gets translated through his. So he's like this mediating figure who is. Is. Is pulling the book from its local context into this global context. But. But I. I wish I Knew more. I wish I knew more about the scribes, the artists. I, I have a discussion earlier in the book of Decorated Manuscripts. We know so little about the artists who decorated these manuscripts and what they were thinking and what their training was. We know that scribes began their. So many of the scribes of these manuscripts are teenagers, even, even children, you know, 13 years old, 14 years old, who are, who are writing books. You know, what was that labor? You know, what, what did it inculcate in them? I'm interested that for a number of people, we know that, that working as a scribe, working as a, as a clerk, you know, copying manuscripts was, was often like a first stepping stone toward a rabbinic career or toward a career as a community leader, right? That, that there's something about the, the labor of copying these books that, that, that, you know, stays with them and, and really, you know, gets them into, and I know this from my own experience making books that it really gets you into working with the text. It gets you really into the, the physicality of, of the words. And, and you know, we have these descriptions of people writing. You know, they're, they're sitting by candlelight, they're staying up late, they're, they're, you know, writing page after page or they're laboring in the print house, which is a very difficult, you know, it's noisy and it's loud and it's crowded and it's very fast paced. But, but, but this labor really meant something to them. And, and it's, and it's, it's work that, you know, it, it's labor that brought something into the world. And, and, and that something was a book which had such significance, right. That books have this deep emotional significance. It's, it's not, you know, as important as it is to produce, you know, a piece of furniture or a piece of clothing. There's something about producing a book that carries this extra symbolic weight that, that really drives people to take this work seriously. So the labor is, is really central in my view.
- [53:42]
B
Noam, I so appreciate this because in closing, I wanted to actually bring up a source that you mentioned in your, in your book that I really conveys the emotional importance of these books. And it's on page 19 when you write about the Spanish kabbalist Avraham Saba, who had to abandon in manuscripts in Iberia. So in that first chapter you talk about books that were both taken from Iberia to North Africa after the expulsion, but also books that had to be left behind. So I wanted to read this source, if you don't mind, just because it really conveys exactly what you were talking about. So you wrote. And so this is after the expulsion from Iberia in the late 15th century. I went in fearful panic and dug into a great olive tree which had large roots in the ground. I buried there my three books which I had composed. For these. I mourn and wail and weep day and night. After six months, we were taken by boat to our zillah and there we entered the lands of Islam. I stayed in Ksar Alt Bir and the holy community there dressed me and tended to all my needs. I stayed there a long while, ill and distressed in my heart, weeping over my children and the books I abandoned, and especially those books of my own writing. I was so moved by this. And it really. And you have many similar examples of really, the role that those books play not only as a basis for text, but really material objects that carried a lot of symbolism and Internet intergenerational meaning and trauma. And yes, it's really an exceptional book. And I think, as you described, it required really building so many different types of skills over the years to really bring this story together. So, really, a heartfelt mazel tov on this excellent book. In closing, I wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit about your current project, because I hear you have interesting things going on in your life.
- [55:45]
C
I do, and that's. It's actually great, what you just read from Avraham Saba, because that's actually the segue into my next project. So Saba, you know, the story that you read, Saba, you know, buries his books under this olive tree outside of Lisbon, and then, as he says, he crosses the Strait of Gibraltar in a boat and enters the land of Islam. And he starts in North Africa, and then he actually makes his way to the Ottoman Empire. And that moment is now the starting point for me of this transition of the Sephardi exiles at the end of the 15th century who leave behind Iberia and enter the lands of Islam. They enter the Islamic world, and particularly in the Ottoman Empire, they actually reconstruct something of what they left behind in Iberia. The books that they left behind in Iberia, they actually reconstruct now anew in their new homes in an Islamic context. And that's. So my new project that I've been working on now for. For about two years is a study of the Sephardi community In the early 16th century in the Ottoman Empire and their bookmaking and in particular, their printing. And I'm this is a micro history. So it's focused on one particular family that owned a. A printing house in Istanbul in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, from 1493 until 1530. So this is a printing press that is started immediately after the expulsion from Spain. Right. 1493. The year after they've left Spain, they're already sitting in Constantinople, setting up their press, and they print books for. For just about four decades, for about 30, 35 years. And all kinds of books. The books they print are diverse. They print big books, they print small books. They print books in Hebrew, they print books in Judeo Spanish, they print illustrated books. They print reference books. They print the Hebrew Bible, they print the Talmud, they print rabbinic commentaries, they print halacha, they print midrash, they print, you know, folk tales. They print, you know, practical manuals on kosher slaughter and on, you know, calculating the calendar. And it's, it's a fascinating, fascinating press. And it's also fascinating to me because these are also Ottoman books. These are books that are also being created. And, and. And then go back here to our conversation about material labor. This is a. These are books that are being physically created in an Ottoman Islamic context. So there are wood blocks, for example, that they use, that they carve in Istanbul to give the books a kind of Ottoman aesthetic to them. But the type that they're using is type that's being cast from molds that they brought with them from Spain. But the paper that they're printing on is paper that they're actually importing from Italy, from Venice, but they're buying it in the market in, in Istanbul. So these books materially are. Are hybrid products that are. They are Sephardi books. They are books that express the legacy of medieval Iberia and through which the Sephardi community in the Ottoman world is trying to reconstitute itself. They're also books that are part of a Mediterranean network that connects Iberia and North Africa and Italy and the Ottoman Empire. And they're also local Ottoman books. So that's. I'm, I, I'm, I'm. I'm. I'm knee deep, maybe at this point, elbows deep in thinking about Ottoman Jewish printing in the 16th century. It's a tremendous amount of fun, and I can't wait to see where this project takes me.
- [59:40]
B
That's right. So hopefully we'll have you back in a few years to discuss book number two.
- [59:45]
C
Yeah, a few years maybe, but fingers crossed.
- [59:49]
B
Noan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It was truly a joy to discuss this book with you, and I thank our listeners for joining us and listening to this conversation. So have a great day, everyone.