The printing revolution, Miri Eliav-Feldon. The Broadcasting University Library, Gali IDF, Ministry of Defense-Publishing, 132 pages, NIS 42
Technology has a central place in Western culture in the broad, anthropological sense of culture, even though this culture itself, in the higher sense of culture, tends to ignore technology as an issue. Therefore, the appearance of a non-technical Hebrew book on technology, and more on the relationship between technology and culture, is a noteworthy event. Printing technology is such a link, because it is the most important means on which European high culture is based.
The book deals not with the history of the invention of the printing press or its technical details, but with its results and its influence on European culture, and also, albeit briefly, with the developments that preceded it and the conditions that paved the way for it. These conditions were, in the technical field, the availability of paper and ink and the development of metallurgy; In the economic field - the increase in demand for books (also hand-copied), and of course the alphabetic script. Without this detracting from its importance, it was probably an invention whose time had come.
The book begins with the invention of the alphabetic script, perhaps the real beginning of the communication revolution. To the generation that experienced their appearance, electronic and computer communications seem nothing less than a revolution. In my opinion, they are only the last stage (for now), the meaning of which cannot yet be fully known, in a long process. The invention of printing was a previous step in that process, and since it happened about 550 years ago, we can already see its results and effects.
And it turns out that the effects are many. First, printing became part of Europe's cultural renaissance. He did not create the Renaissance, but spread it and made it the foundation of modern Western culture. Printing also promoted the local spoken languages, the books written in which had a larger market, instead of Roman which was the language of culture until then. Until printing, there were no national languages, instead there were a large number of local dialects and languages in different regions. Printing resulted in one central dialect, which became the language of printing, taking over and becoming the national language in each country, at the expense of marginal dialects and languages, many of which have completely disappeared. At the same time, printing created the national libraries.
Printing is one of the causes of the spread of the knowledge of reading in Europe, and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture. Thus, printing created the political, reading and thinking person. Despite her uncomfortable feeling about what might be considered "improper Eurocentrism", the author sees a close causal connection between the pattern and the transformation of European society into a calling society and the European uniqueness, which is expressed in social, economic and cultural dynamism and dominance.
And as Miri Eliav-Feldon is good at telling the book, not all the effects were good. The book market was flooded with "junk" - not only crumbling paper and blurry printing, but also spoiled literature, bad poetry and nonsense and vanity. This garbage is common even today, as can be seen in any bookstore, and there is no shortage of it in the electronic media either. The author finds a merit in this, in that the printing preserved the popular views and beliefs of the past generations, a treasure for historians.
Worse than the garbage was the poison. Printing was one of the means for the spread of the witch craze that began to wash over Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, just a few decades after the invention of printing. The "Hammer of the Witches", first printed in 1486, was published in 100 years in 30 editions, in different languages, and spread, along with hundreds of other essays, the "knowledge" needed to identify a witch. About 100-50 people, mostly women, were executed for practicing witchcraft. The book does not mention, in this context, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and the anti-Semitic literature.
On the negative side will also be considered the disappearance of the techniques that preceded printing and became redundant - one of them is the technique of personal memory, examples of which can be found in the Passover Haggadah.
The different attitude towards the pattern in the great monotheistic religions is interesting. The pattern was created in Europe, which was then the Christian world. He was immediately involved in Martin Luther's reformation, and was one of the causes of its rapid spread. The opposition to printing, which arose in the Catholic Church at the beginning, was minimal and short-lived, although later the Church responded with a list of forbidden books (which still exists today). In Judaism, which attributes sanctity to Hebrew letters, a debate arose as to whether it is permissible to copy holy letters in this way, but the debate was quickly decided by the adoption of printing, with the exception of Torah books, tefillin and mezuzos, as we all know. This resulted in an extensive unification of my books
the sacred and the preservation of Hebrew. On the other hand, in Islam, which also attributes sanctity to writing, the Ottoman Sultan issued a ban on writing Arabic letters on a machine. It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that the printing name came into use in a European format, and according to Miri Eliav-Feldon, this is one of the reasons for the relative backwardness of the Islamic world.
I had two disappointments with the book. One is the inaccuracies in the history of the beginning of writing. First, the cuneiform script was not engraved on clay tablets, but was imprinted, by pressing the stylus, on a clay tablet or moist material. The tablets were dried after writing so that they would harden and the writing would be preserved, and only a minority of them were added to the pottery. Second, the Phoenicians used an alphabetic script and spread it, but they did not invent it. The alphabetic script was invented nearly four thousand years ago among a population speaking a Western Semitic language (a group that also includes Hebrew and Phoenician), hundreds of years before the appearance of the Phoenicians. This "proto-Canaanite" script was discovered, in Sinai and in the Land of Israel, and was identified already at the beginning of the twentieth century, and not "recently". Such errors, even if they are, as here, only on the fringes of the book's main theme, are unfortunate not only because they may mislead readers, but also because they may cast doubt on the credibility of the entire book.
The second disappointment is that the book is too careful not to go too far in attributing historical developments to the print. If the formation of the national language is from the results of printing, so is the nationality and the nation state. If literacy is one of the results of printing, so is education and enlightenment, if the political person is one of the results of printing, so is democracy.
But even so, Miri Eliav-Feldon shows how much the development of printing technology influenced the course of the history of Europe, and therefore of the world, more than any personality or move, political or military.
Dr. Yerah Tzur is a consultant for environmental management and environmental quality
