Michelle Margolis: How the Talmud Went from Parchment to Pixels

In this episode of Talmud Daily: Voices, Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin speaks with Michelle Margolis, the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies at Columbia University, about the remarkable story of how the Talmud became the book we recognize today.

For much of Jewish history, owning a complete Talmud was nearly unimaginable. Before printing, books were painstakingly copied by hand onto expensive parchment or paper. A student might need separate manuscripts for the Talmud, Rashi, the Tosafists, and other commentaries—assuming those texts were available at all. The invention of movable type transformed not only how Jews accessed their sacred texts, but the texts themselves.

Michelle traces that transformation from the earliest printed tractates of the Soncino family to Daniel Bomberg’s monumental 16th-century edition, which helped establish the layout and pagination that still shape Talmud study today. She also explores the extraordinary story of Devorah Romm, whose 19th-century Vilna printing house produced the edition that became the foundation of the modern Vilna Shas.

But the history of the Talmudic page is also a history of Jewish adaptation. Manuscript became print; print survived censorship and burning; the crowded page eventually became pixels on Sefaria. Each technological shift changed how Jews encountered the Talmud while preserving something remarkably continuous.

Together, Dovid and Michelle explore what happens when a living oral tradition becomes a manuscript, a manuscript becomes a printed page, and a printed page becomes a screen—and why, after centuries of technological change, Jews remain so deeply attached to the shape of the Talmud itself.

Michelle Margolis is the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Michelle holds an MLIS from Long Island University and an MA in Hebrew and Judaic Studies from New York University. She was the 2022-2024 President of the Association of Jewish Libraries and has served in various executive positions in the organization since 2010. Michelle is also a co-convener of the International Forum on Judaica Provenance. She has published on the history of the Jewish book and Jewish Libraries, and digital scholarship in Jewish Studies, and has served on multiple advisory boards in the field of Jewish Studies and Judaica Librarianship. Most recently, she co-edited Jewish Studies in the Digital Age (De Gruyter, 2022).