Public Lecture: Joshua Teplitsky: “Copyists, Collectors, and Curators: Stocking the Rabbinic Bookshelf”

Thursday, March 10, 202212:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST

Standing between writers and readers is an often-overlooked ecosystem of printers, editors, and publishers: brokers who make decisions about the form and even content of the texts that spring from the pen of the scholar before they reach the eyes of a reading public. In the case of Jewish legal texts that achieved canonical status over centuries, a special role belongs not only to the printers, but to the preservers of texts before they are published: manuscript copyists, collectors, and curators. In this session we will look at some texts that were written in the Middle Ages but not widely distributed until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and see how their stories are embedded in the objects and people that carried them forward. Attention to the processes by which classical medieval writings entered into the early modern and modern curriculum will invite us into thinking about historical contingencies and the importance of the material text in the making of canons. 

About the “Canon in Context” Series

Stepping back and squinting at the major works of the Jewish legal canon dotted across history, many of them appear…puzzling. Centuries of tradition treat the Mishnah, Talmud, and other texts as settled law and as contributions to rabbinic thought. But in their own times, they were outliers. Each one diverged remarkably in form and content from the Jewish writings of their time and place. So how did they get that way, and how did they become canon?

This series explores the historical context of halakhic compilations and codes: who composed them, what were they trying to achieve, and why did they choose the format and the topics they chose? Set aside what you think you know, and encounter these texts in the worlds of their creation.  


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Eyal Levinson (February 15, 2022). Public Lecture: Joshua Teplitsky: “Copyists, Collectors, and Curators: Stocking the Rabbinic Bookshelf” medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved April 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rhl0


About Eyal Levinson

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hebrew University in the ERC project, Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe, directed by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten. I completed my PhD in the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University under the direction of Prof. Baumgarten. I research youth, men fatherhood and masculinities in medieval Ashkenaz, and I interweave Jewish-Ashkenazic medieval historiography with gender and masculinity studies. I hold a BA, Summa Cum Laude, in Jewish Studies and Religion from Brooklyn College, and an MA with honors in Gender Studies from Bar Ilan University. My MA thesis is titled: The Conceptualization of the Yetzer and the Male Body in the Masculine Sexual Discourse in Sefer Hasidim. I am also a graduate of The Israel Democracy Institute’s program, "Human Rights and Judaism" (2012-2015) and in 2006 I received a rabbinical ordination from “Aleph: Alliance of Jewish Renewal”. My book, Youth in Medieval Ashkenaz (tentative name), is scheduled to be publish in Feb. 2022 by The Zalman Shazar Center and Leo Baeck Institute of Jerusalem.