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Fragment of a Talmudic tractate, Berakhot, printed by Gershom Soncino in Pesaro, Italy. The Soncino tractates are remarkable for the quality of their text and their physical attractiveness. Gershom, the most important of the prominent Soncino family of pioneer Hebrew printers, issued books in several locations in Italy, among them Pesaro. It is little known - most bibliographies do not record two editions - that Gershom printed Berakhot twice in Pesaro. Habermann and Adler note this edition as c. 1511 and Friedberg as c. 1507. However, Moses Marx writes in the Annals (his unpublished notebooks), that there were not one but two editions of Berakhot. Both editions are extremely rare, and the rarity of this edition can be seen from the fact that the c. 1511 Berakhot in the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary is incomplete. Manzoni notes the uniqueness of the only known fragment, found in the Turin Library, of Berakhot, writing, "11 solo frammento noto di questa edizione" which he dates as 1510.
The two Pesaro editions of Berakhot are dissimilar, and both wary from the incunabulum edition. Among the differences between the two Pesaro editions are that in the 1511 edition, the chapter names on the top of the pages are small, the Hadran at the end of a chapter is the same size as the text, and, in some cases, is not on a line separate from the beginning of the next chapter. The first word of a chapter is the same size as the remainder of the text and is only separated from the text by a space. In contrast, in the 1517 edition, a larger font is employed for the chapter headings, the Hadrans appear in large letters at the end of a page - the same size as the text in the middle of a page - and the first words of a new chapter are in large type on a separate line. Both editions lack foliation. Both Pesaro editions are typographically superior to the incunabulum Berakhot. Here, in contrast to the incunabula tractates, lines are not completed by the addition of letters from the following line.
Although current foliation does not follow the Soncino tractates but rather that of the later Bomberg Talmud, the Soncinos established the layout of the Talmudic page, with their inclusion and arrangement of Rashi and Tosafot. Since Gershom printed a majority of the treatises comprising a complete Talmud edition, he not only selected the Tosafot for the tractates that he printed, but also determined which Tosafot would be printed in future editions of the Talmud. E. E. Urbach, author of The Tosaphists (p. 29-30), notes that in general ''the Venetian printers copied from the Soncino editions. . . . Since then, the Tosafot have been printed in numerous printed editions of the Talmud without serious modification."
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Reference Description |
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Habermann, "Benei Soncino" in Perukim beToledot ha-Madpisim ha-Ivrim, p. 60 n. 41; Heller, Printing the Talmud pp. 103, 120-21; Manzoni, Annali Tipografici dei Soncino (Bologna, 1883), p. 242; Vinograd, Pesaro 16
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