Notes: notes field

The advent of print in the mid-fifteenth century brought with it a major cultural change from the period of manuscripts. The printing press could make multiple copies of any given work available in a relatively short period of time and at a cheaper price than a scribe could ever have done. Jews quickly learned the importance of this new technology and by the late fifteenth-century, many classic works of Jewish scholarship, including the Hebrew Bible and portions of the Babylonian Talmud with commentaries, had been published. However, it was only when printing was combined with the vernacular that full possibilities of the press were realized. The Seder mizvot nashim, or The Order of Women's Commandments, was an early attempt to use printing and the vernacular to educate Jewish women about their religious obligations, particularly the three commandments that from at least mishnaic times had been specifically connected to women: (1) the taking of a piece of dough before baking bread and some types of cakes (hallah; see (2) the lighting of lights on the eve of the Sabbath and festivals, and (3) observing the various rules of ritual purity during and after periods of uterine bleeding. Written in Yiddish by Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and first published in Cracow in 1577, the book tried not only to teach the law to women but to convince them of the importance of proper observance. As such it was both a law book and a homiletical work of sorts. A comparison with legal works published during the period, such as Rabbi Jacob ben Asher's Four Columns (Araba`ah Turim) and Rabbi Joseph Caro's Shulhan`aruk, highlights some of the differences in approach between legal codes written for rabbis and students of Jewish law and a text that expected no specialized knowledge of its readers.

↑ Back to top