Early Medieval Book Culture

Material Traces of Medieval Jewish Life

It is books and documents that, most commonly, have endured to the present time, offering some material traces of Jewish life from the medieval period. Almost no Jewish written records remain, however, from between the second and ninth centuries CE. And there are, in fact, relatively few extant manuscripts written by Jews that date before the thirteenth century, which is also when the decorative ornamentation of manuscripts began to become popular. It is thus especially difficult to trace developments in the reading and writing habits of Jewish communities during the early medieval period. Still, some general outlines are clear. 

Papyrus, Parchment, and Paper

The very earliest medieval Jewish manuscripts, following late antique and Byzantine Jewish practice, were written on papyrus, but by the eleventh century, most manuscripts were being copied on parchment (made from processed animal skins). After the eleventh century in the Islamic world, however, paper replaced parchment for most writing uses, while parchment was preferred in Europe for at least a century longer.

Hebrew Scripts

Hebrew scripts from different Jewish communities reflected regional preferences, and identifiable types emerged: Ashkenazic, Italian, Spanish, Byzantine, Oriental, and Yemenite. Strikingly, between the tenth and eleventh centuries, some Karaite communities wrote their biblical codices in Arabic letters, although they used Hebrew vowels. For most nonbiblical texts, both Karaite and Rabbanite authors preferred to write in Arabic in Hebrew characters (Judeo-Arabic).

The Masoretic Bibles

The most important artistic development in book production from this period is exemplified by a group of Masoretic Bibles written between the early tenth and mid-eleventh centuries. 

These are codices rather than scrolls. Whereas scrolls consist of sheets of parchment sewn together into a long strip and then rolled horizontally or vertically, a codex has pages (leaves or folios). For a codex, a sheet of parchment or paper was folded in half or into fours (“quires”) and sewn down the middle; the quires were then bound together, often with a cover. Torah scrolls continued to be used in the synagogue for ritual purposes, while biblical codices functioned for personal or scholarly use. 

The structure, format, and ornamentation in these tenth-century Masoretic codices are already highly developed, evidently continuing a tradition thought to go back at least to the early eighth century.

Such Bibles, given their size and ornateness, would have been reserved for communities or even wealthy individuals. The names of their scribes, and sometimes of the patrons who commissioned them, along with dates and other helpful information about the production of the book, are sometimes noted in colophons, brief explanatory notes at the very end of manuscripts, although for many of these codices, we have only individual pages testifying to the existence of a full volume.