It's well known that the Jews are 'The People of the Book'. Our book, the Bible, became a fundamental part of Western civilization. Throughout our wanderings through the generations we generated libraries of books and transported libraries of books from place to place. (a joke: 'If we were expelled from our homes so often and had to transport our libraries, why did we make our book so big?') Our tradition of 'bookish-ness' surely goes back to our ancient days with tablets and scrolls. We truly are the People of the Book.

Part of the journey to the modern book was the long era before the printing press, during which writing codices and manuscripts was the norm. Codices are ‘book-like' collections of pages made from paper or parchment, leaves stacked together and bound. A manuscript is any work written by hand, regardless of its format. All codes are manuscripts because they are handwritten. There are thousands of manuscripts in collections around the world.

We can say that from the days of Moses until the printing press of the late 15th century, all Jewish literature was in scroll, manuscript or codex format. This means that a vast library of manuscript-based literature is available to scholars. Most manuscripts are just text, but others are considered masterpieces of art. Not only did expert scholars and scribes work on these volumes, but talented artists were also hired to illuminate and illustrate some of them.

Libraries and institutions worldwide have huge collections of Jewish and Hebrew manuscripts available to the public.

You don't need to read Hebrew to appreciate the time, effort, money, and talent that went into creating these masterpieces.

Here are some examples:

The Sarajevo Haggadah

The Rothschild Miscellany

The Kennicott Bible

The Washington Haggadah

The Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project

Manuscripts in the Vatican

Ketubah Collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America

Haggadah Collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America

Enjoy!