“Although I have seen but a few pages…” Reputation and Patronage in Approbations to Jewish Books

• In Event: Reading Formulaic Texts from Early Modern Ashkenaz: Three Case Studies in Law and Economics

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, criticism mounted against the proliferation of rabbinic book approbations as at best ineffectual, often exploitative, and worse still as leading the righteous astray. Even members of the rabbinic establishment decried the over-use of approbations as dulling an important tool of rabbinic control over the print market. Indeed, by the eighteenth century, the production of rabbinic approbations was a veritable cottage industry, with many rabbis issuing upwards of fifty such documents during their careers despite not having read the books in question. As a result, book approbations are often dismissed by historians as pro forma documents, issued in haste and offering little in the way of an honest or rigorous evaluation of the contents of a book. Modern historians have often adapted the conceptual frames of eighteenth-century critics, limiting their perspective to a correlation between approbation and the content of the book it ostensibly approved. And yet, there is reason to examine the meanings of the institution of approbations within the wider cultural complexities of book production and dissemination in the early modern period, especially in light of advances in the study of the book as shaped by both technological and social forces. This paper argues that approbations are an instrument of patronage and were used to persuade a buying-and-reading public of an author’s credibility via an extension of the reputational credit of the approbator. The multilateral relationships between enterprising authors, rabbis, and printers meant that the issuance of an approbation by a rabbinic authority depended not strictly upon content or commerce, but also upon the personality of the author and, more significantly, the standing of other approbators who had already agreed to lend their name to the book. Situating approbations within a heuristic of trust and reputation will undoubtedly reveal new details or perspectives on the culture of print in the Jewish world and on the uses (and abuses) of rabbinic authority in its regulation.

author

• Joshua Z. Teplitsky, Stony Brook University