The Publishing Practice and Reading Culture of Moravian Jews in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
The Publishing Practice and Reading Culture of Moravian Jews in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Summary/Abstract: To date, the output of the only Hebrew printing press in Moravia has been only partially investigated. The Neumann family workshop, which was later purchased by Josef Rossmann, operated in Brno and briefly in Mikulov between 1753 and 1803. Gradually, the profile of its production changed significantly. In the 1750s and 1760s, it published mainly liturgical works and religious-legal literature in Hebrew. From the 1780s onwards, however, it increased the proportion of other genres, which were published in Yiddish or Jüdischdeutsch, in addition to Hebrew. These genres are the focus of this paper. This type of literature consisted of ethical, philosophical, educational and historiographical writings, biographies, practical manuals, and folklore. They were mostly original works, to a lesser extent translations from German. By taking a comparative approach, this paper also seeks to find out the extent to which the printed works for the Jewish minority in Moravia were similar to or different from those for the Christian majority. It also describes the publishing strategy of the Brno Hebrew printing press.

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