Michelle Margolis: How the Talmud Went from Parchment to Pixels

Transcripts are produced by Sofer.ai and lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections. 

Dovid Bashevkin: I am so excited to be here today with Michelle Margolis, who is the librarian at Columbia University, and you specifically are in charge of the Judaic collection at Columbia?

Michelle Margolis: Yeah, I’m responsible for everything Jewish, I say, from Genesis 1:1 until this morning.

Dovid Bashevkin: Genesis 1:1 until this morning.

Michelle Margolis: Although even that is complicated.

Dovid Bashevkin: So we’re going through, as part of Talmud Daily, this tour of the entirety of the Talmud, and before we even get to the actual substance of the Talmud itself, we really need to begin with the story of the printing of the Talmud.

The Talmud is kind of unique in a way, and I’m sure you’ll be able to talk about this, that it existed for many years, like many works, before printing. So I wanted to kind of begin by talking about, what is the transition like from manuscript and manuscript writing into an actual like volume that is now become like a printed book that now we buy in a store? That first transition from manuscript to print, what effect does that have on really the formation of the book itself?

Michelle Margolis: You might even want to start earlier. Before there was dissemination of manuscripts, there was orality. Text was disseminated orally.

Knowledge was disseminated earlier. That changed around the millennium, so around 1000, and following that, with manuscripts. But manuscripts are a time-consuming, labor-intensive, expensive process to make. Before the introduction of paper into the West, which didn’t happen until sort of the 11th, 12th century, if you wanted to write anything, you needed a piece of parchment, which involved, you know, a long process of, you know, slaughtering an animal, getting the skin, processing it, and—

Dovid Bashevkin: People always forget that there’s animals involved.

Michelle Margolis: Yes, yes. One of my favorite quotes is from Malachi Beit-Arie, who pioneered the study of Hebrew manuscripts sort of as a science. He used to introduce his students to manuscripts by putting a manuscript on the table, a manuscript codex, what we would call a book today, and say, “What is this?” And people would try to give good answers, you know, “It’s a text, it’s a concept, it’s a code.” And he would say, “This is a flock of sheep.” Which sort of puts it into perspective. When I bring out for students parchment manuscript on what’s called uterine vellum, this is from an aborted animal because its skin is softer.

It’s just a world that we don’t think about today. So parchment is really expensive to make. Paper is much less expensive, but it exists in the Islamic world a little bit later coming to the West. I can’t remember offhand which church figure it was that said, “Oh, the Jews, they use those, you know, rag paper or whatever that is.

It’s terrible stuff.” So the Jews came to it a little bit earlier. It allowed easier production of texts. But if you still If you think about it, if you would write the book that’s on your shelf right now by hand, it would take you quite a long time. And if you did it as a professional scribe so that other people could actually read it, it would take you even longer.

And so manuscripts existed, books existed up to the 15th century when we have the introduction of movable type into the West, but they were scarce. A hundred manuscripts was a very extensive library of a very rich person, and it’s something we don’t even think about today.

Dovid Bashevkin: We go to To have a hundred manuscripts is like that’s a jaw-dropping library.

Michelle Margolis: It’s a huge library.

You know, we go to the airport and buy a paperback that we then throw away when we finish reading, you know, at the end of the flight.

Dovid Bashevkin: Or leave it in that little folder in the in the seat in front of you on the airplane.

Michelle Margolis: Yeah. So we don’t really have a concept of how scarce books were because they were expensive and time-consuming to make. And of course that goes for any text, but the Talmud is something that’s that’s integral to Judaism.

When Jews would want to study the Talmud, they would need multiple manuscripts. They needed the manuscript of that tractate that they were studying, they needed a manuscript for every single commentary that they were studying, and it ended up being a lot of books.

Dovid Bashevkin: And it could be a small fortune.

Michelle Margolis: A small fortune, exactly.

So you have maybe in a town, if you have a yeshivah in a particular town, maybe there are people who have been able to gather manuscripts from different places, but nobody had a set of Shas on their shelves. That was incomprehensible. It’s just much harder to do unless you’re in a specific place with enough people who have those texts. But you also have this oral piece, so there are people who who are incredibly learned and also have those texts sort of in their head.

So then what happens is with print, print is this amazing thing where you can produce many books at scale. The first dated printed tractate that we have, and it’s only one tractate at a time, is produced in 1484. And like so many of the early printed Hebrew books, the first printed book, I should say, book in Hebrew was produced in the late 1460s, early 1470s in Rome, but the printers, if you read their texts, at the end of the volume they would write, “I, the printer, finished…” this book on this date, in this year, in this place.” They would give sort of it’s it’s like what would would be on the title page, but there weren’t title pages yet. They’re so excited! They write, “It’s miraculous.” So many people called it so many of the printers called it out as miraculous.

There wasn’t a word for printing. They used the word kotev to write, they used lots of other words until finally the word defus was coined.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s the Hebrew word for publishing, printing? For printing.

Michelle Margolis: And that was coined by one of these printer based on a mishnaic term, and defus is a term in the Mishnah, yeah.

Dovid Bashevkin: I did not know that. Well, we needed a new word to describe It was something different.

Michelle Margolis: They said it’s the writing of many words without quills. There’s one colophon, so this this paragraph at the end of the book that the printer uses is called a colophon, and at the end of the text it says how how Devorah the prophetess would have been amazed if she could see how all of these works are produced.

And I think because she had a song that she sang at the end of of her victory, and so it’s like she would be moved, you know, to poetry, which in many cases these these printers were. They literally wrote poetry about the texts.

Dovid Bashevkin: If printing begins, you know, more or less, you know, the Gutenberg Bible is in the 1450s, is it unusual that so soon after, this small minority community called the Jewish people are so well-represented in the printing world that we already in the 1480s are starting to get Hebrew Jewish books?

Michelle Margolis: 1460s and ’70s.

Dovid Bashevkin: 1460s and ’70s? Like that seems like really, what, like of all the things that we need to print in the world right now, like I would have guessed the Jews are in the back of the line.

Like we have the whole Christian world and everything they want to print. How did we get so involved in printing that we have in the 1460s already, we have Jewish books?

Michelle Margolis: Jews need books to survive, right? So the books are are integral to Jewish existence. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks talks about the books as sort of the post-Temple era way that the Jews survived as a people. And so this technology, literally the printers in Rome were taught by the former colleagues of Gutenberg who came from Mainz to Rome, and we see that those books are laid out in basically the same way that these these Christian Roman printers were producing the books.

One thing to remember about Jewish culture as opposed to Christian culture at the time is that in Christianity at the time, the people who were literate were the clergy or maybe university students, were the elites. So they were studying, they could afford to buy those parchment books that I was talking about earlier. In Judaism, not everybody is literate, I’m not going to make that claim, but everybody has this importance of study sort of baked in. That’s really critical, and that’s where you have this desire almost immediately.

It’s also not something that that’s that’s that hard to do. It seems like it’s a, I mean, a printing press is a giant piece of furniture, kind of bulky, but as long as you have the the matrices, the iron pieces from which type is made, that fits in like a shoebox. It’s a small piece of, you know, a bunch of metal, and you can also take it with you. So it’s something that’s portable.

And we see with the printers, the first printer in Lisbon was a Jewish printer. He printed both Hebrew and non-Hebrew texts. But Jews immediately saw that this was really important. There’s printing in Spain before the Jews are expelled.

They’re doing it right away, and then if they get kicked out of where they are living, they bring their—they just take, pick up the type, they don’t take the whole big printing press.

Dovid Bashevkin: But the little types of each letter.

Michelle Margolis: And they need the Hebrew letters. The little types, that’s what’s expensive. Yeah, that’s what’s hard to make.

But once you have it, you take it with you, you cut down a tree, you make another frame for the printing press, and you can do it again. And we see it over and over. There’s very short-lived press in in North Africa in the early 16th century. That’s printers from Spain who fled with their type.

The first printing in the Ottoman Empire is a Arba’ah Turim, which is a classic sort of legal text, a Jewish text that’s produced by refugees fleeing Spain.

Dovid Bashevkin: Wow.

Michelle Margolis: Jews are printing, but also they’re taking that knowledge with them. So Gutenberg’s knowledge was it was hidden.

It was secret knowledge. Nobody else was allowed to know about it, for a reason, because once you know about it, it’s really lucrative. You can produce 300 to 1,000 books in one run. Suddenly it’s it’s really important, and so once that secret got out, the Jews were like they ran with it.

I mean, literally, sometimes they ran with their type. It just sort of makes sense. I mean, the “people of the book” trope is, yeah.

Dovid Bashevkin: Once that that secret of the trade was disseminated—once it was—

Michelle Margolis: Open, yeah.

Dovid Bashevkin: So let let me ask you, starting with the printing of the Talmud, the first printing of the Talmud was when and who undertook that printing?

Michelle Margolis: So the first dated Talmud that we have is from 1484, and that’s the Soncino press. So Joshua Solomon was the grandfather, the sort of person who started that press. The Soncino press actually moved. Again, Jews were sometimes allowed to live in places and sometimes not.

There were, it’s very important to say, presses that produced Talmuds in Spain. We have only fragments, unfortunately, of most of those, because the Jews fled and owning a Talmud was enough for the Inquisition to come knocking on your door. So we don’t have a lot of detail about those Talmuds that were produced in Spain. We have estimates on dates, but current consensus is that the 1484 Soncino Talmud is the first one.

Dovid Bashevkin: And Soncino never finished printing the entire Talmud?

Michelle Margolis: No. Again, it’s expensive, it’s a huge undertaking. So what they did was, when you think about a page of Talmud today, so you have the main text of the Talmud in the center, and then you have these two major commentaries on either side, Rashi and and the Tosafists. In order to create that, somebody had to lay it out.

So when you look at the text of Talmud, you have the text, and then somewhere near the text on the side is going to be the relevant commentary. But it takes, I think of it as kind of an algorithm to be able to make sure that the length of your commentary, the width of the gloss— So much trickier! —in order to lay it out on the page so that your commentary is still on the same page as the original text, that’s a huge, that requires real graphic skills.

Dovid Bashevkin: Correct. It’s more complicated even than a newspaper because the commentaries are connected to the central text.

Michelle Margolis: They have to sync.

Dovid Bashevkin: So you’re constantly, I’m thinking about like like the layout when we were doing yearbooks, like it’s it’s really This stuff is incredibly tricky. You’re juggling a central text plus at least two commentaries on either side, Rashi and the Tosafists.

Michelle Margolis: And at that point it’s just two, there’s nothing else on the page, just the two commentaries.

Dovid Bashevkin: So did did he give up? Did he go bankrupt?

Michelle Margolis: No, it was just expensive and he was traveling. So his grandson writes in a 1534 volume that he produces, he writes sort of the whole history of the press, and he blames other printers. He he’s very mad at Daniel Bomberg, who will produce the entirety of the Talmud. He’s a small operation, he’s not super wealthy, and he’s constantly moving.

So if you look at the Soncino imprints, he starts off in Soncino, which is that’s why it’s his last name, he lives in this town. He actually was German, his family had fled Germany and and they called themselves Soncino in gratitude for whoever the the ruler of was that allowed them to live there. And actually, the the printer’s mark for their press is it looks like a particular tower that’s in that that town. But then he had to move, and it’s not always clear why.

Sometimes it’s because there’s competition, sometimes it’s because the circumstances for Jews in a particular town aren’t that great, and he ends up in Constantinople because there’s no Christian persecution of Jews under Islamic Ottoman Empire. He’s got a lot going on where he can’t just produce it at the same time. But there’s research that has just come out in the last year by Yakov Mayer, who’s an incredible scholar. He wrote a book on the printing of the Yerushalmi Talmud, but he has done some really incredible work specifically on the Soncino Talmuds and why he produced what he produced.

And in short, there’s a video of him explaining this and I encourage people to watch it because it’s so clear and he’s done really good research there. What he found is that Soncino was producing two tractates at a time specifically for the Padua yeshivah. He was producing textbooks essentially for a particular yeshivah that was studying two tractates per what we call a zman, so that the period of like a semester— A semester. —he was producing what they were studying that semester.

And so that’s why he was producing what he was producing at that time. It’s, again, incredible research. So he’s producing it for a specific reason. He didn’t say, “I want to produce the whole Talmud.” He said, “I’m a printer and there’s a need in this particular institution, and so I’m going to serve that.”

Dovid Bashevkin: And financially that mitigates a lot of the risk if you have specific buyers that you are selling to.

Michelle Margolis: Exactly. So Soncino starts the project, is kind of known as the first dated printing, even though shout-out to Spain, they were involved as well, but we really only have fragments.

Dovid Bashevkin: But his his grandson, you mentioned Soncino’s grandson is upset at this person, Daniel Bomberg. Who is Daniel Bomberg? Is he even Jewish? And why on earth would he undertake to print the entirety of the Talmud?

Michelle Margolis: So Daniel Bomberg is a fascinating figure.

He’s originally from Antwerp. He is Christian, he’s most certainly not Jewish. He lives in Venice. He’s very wealthy, which is part of why he can do this.

He hires a team of editors and typesetters and scholars and all sorts of people with Jewish knowledge. So there are Jews working in his shop. One converts to Christianity, it’s complicated. There’s an article by Angelo Piattelli where he found that Daniel Bomberg actually negotiated a law where Jews who worked in his shop didn’t have to wear the yellow badge that Jews in Venice had to wear, because he wanted them to get to work safely.

And so he had enough power and influence to be able to do that.

Dovid Bashevkin: Wow.

Michelle Margolis: There’s no Jewish printing of Hebrew in Venice, even though in the 16th century Venice becomes a very important center for Hebrew printing. It’s this series of Christian printers.

To be printing with Hebrew type, and he gets—

Dovid Bashevkin: Approval from who?

Michelle Margolis: I can’t remember if it was the Pope or the Doge, so if it was from the Christian government, but he has to get approval to be printing. He gets an exclusive right to print in Hebrew. And so he sets up this massive operation. He has multiple printing presses.

So think of it as a shop where he’s producing these works. And he actually is leaning on Soncino a little bit. So for what Soncino already laid out, he’s sort of copying that work, but he goes and he looks for manuscripts. So he has Talmud manuscripts, he has Rashi commentary manuscripts, he has manuscripts of the Tosafists.

And his editors decide, okay if we have a discrepancy in a manuscript, we’re going to put in Codex A rather than Codex B. We’re going to put in this text. And so they’re essentially setting down what we know as the Talmud to this day. There are some changes.

Dovid Bashevkin: For all generations kind of the foundational text of the Talmud that we associate with like the text of the Talmud as this fixed thing was really kind of fixed in time more or less by Bomberg. And any kind of emendation or changes are really reactions to that kind of setting down, not in stone, but in print.

Michelle Margolis: In iron, one might say.

Dovid Bashevkin: In iron, by by Daniel Bomberg.

And what year is this? This isn’t that long after—

Michelle Margolis: So he produces his first Talmud is 1519 he starts, and it goes through I think 22 or 23. And he produces either three or four editions. There’s a whole discussion among scholars as to whether the third and the fourth edition were the same edition, but that’s a little technical. So he’s churning them out.

Within just a few years, he’s producing this massive series of works, and that’s because he has the means to do so.

Dovid Bashevkin: I miss the day where the ultimate flex of wealth—

Michelle Margolis: Was producing—

Dovid Bashevkin: A Talmud producing books of Talmud. Yeah, that, I miss that a little bit. We should bring that back.

But but that’s still a flex to sponsor Talmuds. That’s still considered, which is kind of similar in a in a way like the patrons. So Bomberg’s Talmud, it does well in the market.

Michelle Margolis: It does very well.

A couple of things happen. So in the 1550s there’s a whole dispute between two printers that ends up going to the Pope, which leads to a thorough investigation of Jewish texts, and the banning and burning of the Talmud. And so wagon loads of Talmud are burnt in Rome, and that’s sort of the end of printing the Talmud in Italy under the Pope. And so printing, production of the Talmud has to move elsewhere.

So you have all of these books that are produced, and then circumstances change requiring things to change. So after the burning of the Talmud, there’s a whole discussion, really throughout the 16th century, there’s an earlier discussion as well, over whether Hebrew books should be allowed to be printed at all. Really, they shut the whole thing down. Right, from the Christian perspective.

Just shut it down. There’s too much heresy, there’s too much supposed anti-Christian texts, so it shouldn’t be printed at all. The compromise that they come to is that, no, you can produce Jewish books, but we’re going to have inquisitors who review every single book, and if there’s any problem with those books, they will either be destroyed or we’ll fix it, we’ll cross out the offensive texts.

Dovid Bashevkin: I mean literally you can sometimes find books where like—

Michelle Margolis: Where it’s crossed out.

Dovid Bashevkin: And it’s like, looks like like had I crossed it out with like a heavy—

Michelle Margolis: Thick—it’s a thick, yeah, yeah.

Dovid Bashevkin: Black, like—

Michelle Margolis: Often the ink has faded and so it’s more like a highlighter, which is kind of ironic.

Dovid Bashevkin: Yeah.

Michelle Margolis: But yeah, and the Talmud is completely banned.

So the Index of Prohibited Books, which is produced by the Church, includes the Talmud and all of its commentaries. And that’s where you have a work like Ein Ya’akov, which is produced with just the aggadata, so just the stories, not the legal text of the Talmud, and this is so that Jews can legally own something that will sort of get you to the Talmud.

Dovid Bashevkin: But it doesn’t have like the official designation of the Talmud itself. So they had collections that would basically take passages, the classical stories and—

Michelle Margolis: Exactly.

Dovid Bashevkin: The less legalistic parts, what we’ll call aggadata, and print as a separate book with this classic work called Ein Ya’akov, which is coming out around, that’s in the—

Michelle Margolis: It’s a little bit later, shortly, a couple a couple of decades later. I want to say the 1570s, but 60s or 70s, yeah. Right afterwards. Because Jews in Italy still want to study Talmud.

This is the thing about Jews and their books. You can take them away, but you can’t take them away.

Dovid Bashevkin: Well, one of the things that we’ve learned is that the best way to get Jews to want to study books is banning them.

Michelle Margolis: That Well, I think that’s everybody, right? I mean, that’s Yeah.

Dovid Bashevkin: Once it’s on the forbidden list, you know, that—

Michelle Margolis: This is so—I just saw I just saw a picture somebody wrote, if only my book could get banned so that it could be in the front of the library for Banned Books Week.

Dovid Bashevkin: Exactly.

Michelle Margolis: You know, and actually some people use the Index of Prohibited Books as sort of a reading list. It’s a great way to find all of the scandalous books that the church doesn’t want you to read.

Dovid Bashevkin: So, going forward after Bomberg, and they shut down printing, what’s the next great effort in printing the Talmud?

Michelle Margolis: So there are a number of Talmuds that continue to be produced over time. There’s Amsterdam, there’s Sulzbach, there’re various places they’re printing the Talmud. They’re basically following what Bomberg laid out with some changes. I always love to show my students in the tractate Sanhedrin, there’s a significant portion that was actually removed after this because it discusses Jesus.

And if you look at a Bomberg Talmud, there’s sort of a thick paragraph at the bottom of the page. If you look at a modern printed Talmud even, there’s just blank space. It’s blank space that is telling you that there’s something missing here and you should go find it. They didn’t reset the type to clean up that to like to justify the space.

Dovid Bashevkin: You can see that the page is missing—

Michelle Margolis: You see that it’s missing something.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s very near and dear to my heart because my first introduction to Talmud was that my grandfather, who was an early American-born trained rabbi, he had the volume, it used to be printed separately, now you can find it even in the Talmud, of all of the excised passages of the Talmud called the Chesronot HaShas. He showed me, because he knew as a young kid it’s like very exciting and mysterious, and he showed me that page. Said, “Do you notice anything different?” And you see how much is missing on that page.

Let me just ask you, when we open up a modern Talmud, a lot of attention is paid to the pagination. Yes. We reference the Talmud based on the page that it is on. So somebody might say, you know, tractate Berachot 3b, which would mean the third page on the second side, you know, what we would call gimel amud bet.

Is that pagination from Bomberg, more or less?

Michelle Margolis: So more or less. It is paginated There again, there are slight changes that have happened over the course of the Talmud. The Talmud that we use now, and we can talk about this in a few minutes, is based on It’s called the Vilna Shas. So it’s based on the Romm press in Vilna.

That’s sort of the standard that most Talmuds today follow. But again, it’s such a big effort to reset all of that type, to relay out all of that to fit a new page, that really, not before Bomberg, it almost goes back to Soncino. Soncino again didn’t produce an entire Talmud, so you can’t say that about every tractate. But there are there are a lot of similarities throughout.

If somebody’s looking for a particular page, and Soncino didn’t number his pages, it’s not exact, but you can you can pretty much find that text that you’re looking at in 2026 in a book that was produced in the 15th century.

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s remarkable. Soncino kind of develops like the general style of the layout. Yeah.

Bomberg finishes the entire Talmud and basically kind of solidifies born is the pagination that we still work with today, more or less. There might be some tractates where they’re slightly different. And then let’s let’s talk briefly about this Vilna printing of the Talmud, where if you go into a bookstore in 2026, again, it’s not the exact same layout, but really that layout was more or less fixed with the Vilna printing of the Talmud. When is this? Who’s printing it? What additions did they make, and how did this become like the standard-bearer of the Talmudic page?

Michelle Margolis: So this is a fascinating story.

There’s a book that just came out in Hebrew by Motti Zalkin on the Romm Press. And this was a press in Vilnius in the latter half of the 19th century. It was originally by I don’t even know his name, Mr. Romm. But Mr. Romm died, and his wife, Devorah, took over the press.

And she basically made the press into a modern industry. The printing complex, I will say, took up a city block. It was huge. She was looking at cutting-edge technology, so she brought in when there was a new kind of press that was produced in Germany, she not only bought many of those presses, but also hired many experts from Germany to come and train her staff to use it.

And then other printers in Vilnius came to her operation in order to learn how to use this new press.

Dovid Bashevkin: Wow.

Michelle Margolis: So she was a major figure in printing, not only in Vilnius, but for Jewish printing more broadly. For a talk I once gave, I put together a whole bunch of newspaper articles when she died in the Jewish press, because she was seen as this woman who really disseminated Torah, Jewish texts—really—

In her lifetime, by producing all of these. One tidbit, and much of this is just what I’ve learned from Motti Zalkin and his team, she was a businesswoman. She invented the idea of the chosson Shas. So the idea that you buy a groom an entire set of Talmud for his wedding as a wedding gift, this was a business operation.

She’s like, “This is a great idea.”

Dovid Bashevkin: I’m going to fall out of my chair. I did not know this. So she kind of marketed.

Michelle Margolis: So she marketed it.

Yeah. So she produced a text that was clear, that was beautiful, that included, and she’s, obviously she’s not making all the decisions, she has really good editors and scholars that are working for her.

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s like It’s like the It’s like De Beers, the diamond companies, they marketed when you get engaged you should give a diamond. Exactly.

Michelle Margolis: Exactly. So she doesn’t own diamond mines, she has a printing press, and she says, you know what would be a beautiful gift.

Dovid Bashevkin: And to this day I didn’t get a choson Shas, ’cause I was already building my own that I learned, but I got I got a choson Tur Shulchan Aruch.

Michelle Margolis: Yeah, to give a volume of something scholarly, you know, a really important Jewish text.

Dovid Bashevkin: That is so, so Let me ask you one question before we talk about some of the additions. It’s not just shocking, it’s really interesting that not only did she have such a hand in printing, and the printing of Jewish books and kind of the fixing of the entire Talmud, I’m curious if she ever addresses, or maybe it’s just my modern eyes, the gender component within Jewish learning, meaning No.

Michelle Margolis: No. Just no.

Dovid Bashevkin: Never touches it?

Michelle Margolis: No. We think in 20th in 21st century terms. You know, it’s an interesting thing, because the classic example that’s always brought is what they call the feminist siddur, which is a 15th century siddur produced in Italy. There are at least two copies of it, one at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and one at the National Library of Israel.

Dovid Bashevkin: There’s no way it was called the feminist—

Michelle Margolis: siddur—in the 15th. It was not called that then, but the prayer blessing God for making me according to His will, which is the woman’s version of—

Dovid Bashevkin: The morning blessing.

Michelle Margolis: Of the morning blessing, the the man’s version is “Thank you for making me a man”, and in standard Orthodox prayer books today it says “Thank you for making me according to His will” for a woman. In these two prayer books, it says “Thank you for making me a woman and not a man”.

Dovid Bashevkin: Oh, wow.

Okay.

Michelle Margolis: So would I call that proto-feminism? You know, it’s hard to say. Feminism is a very distinctive, sort of modern creation. It’s hard to sort of impose that.

Mhm, sure. There are a lot of things that we would call feminist today that existed. There were women scribes who wrote Jewish legal works. They weren’t writing, they were copying Jewish legal works.

Dovid Bashevkin: Correct, they were writing the—

Michelle Margolis: Manuscripts, the printing in the medieval period, and women were involved in printing in particular from the beginning.

The very first woman to print at a press is Estellina Conat, who is a Jewish woman printing alongside her husband, Avraham, in Mantua, and then onward, we have so many examples of women who were involved in presses. And part of it is that women have smaller fingers, and that when you’re trying to set type, you need very careful hands, but also this this was something that that women were very were very involved in. You see women in the press across the centuries, and so it wasn’t unusual. You often see widows in the press, because the way that a press operated is that the only way you could get a press is if you inherited one, if you weren’t independently wealthy and could, you know, hire your own typesetters, yeah.

Sure. Buy one. You couldn’t buy one. You usually inherited one, or your husband died.

Dovid Bashevkin: Right, ’cause it’s not like they’re like you didn’t go to the printer store.

Michelle Margolis: Right, you can’t—you can’t buy—

Dovid Bashevkin: You have to build this massive—

Michelle Margolis: You need a somebody who can work with iron to make those those type forms, you need It’s a huge operation. And again, Daniel Bomberg was really rich, and so he could do that, and actually the people who continued printing in Hebrew type after he died was his son-in-law. I mean, literally he inherited the press.

That was, certainly in the early modern period, how people got presses, and so you have many cases where the printer is almanat, so the widow of so-and-so. We don’t always know their names. They’re just the widow of so-and-so.

Dovid Bashevkin: And there was no I mean I guess I was coming from a place, you know, sometimes, and maybe it’s more modern, you know, women might obscure their their gender when they’re publishing a book, you know, because they want they want, right, like J.K.

Michelle Margolis: Rowling—when she first—Victorian period, I mean—

Dovid Bashevkin: We have this in the 19th century, yeah.

Yeah, correct, exactly. That did not exist at all? This was always known, this Talmud was like this was produced by the almanah, the Widow Romm?

Michelle Margolis: Yeah, it’s just sort of normal. This is this is how it is. She’s a widow, she needs to make money somehow, she has this she inherited this press, so of course she’s going to do it.

She happened to be an an outstanding businesswoman, and so was incredibly successful. She also did different sizes.

Dovid Bashevkin: Oh, she did?

Michelle Margolis: So she invented that, you know, you might need a really big one if you’re sitting and studying in a yeshivah, but you might want something a little smaller and easier—

Dovid Bashevkin: Like—for the travel. Yeah, yeah.

That is really, really interesting. And this becomes kind of the standard. She adds in, is that in the Vilna Talmud, some of the more like glosses and emendations around the side that begin accumulating, but a lot of kind of the standard people who are on the side of the Talmud right—

Michelle Margolis: It happens before, but she adds a lot more. So something like the Masoret Ha-Shas, so when a when the Talmud cites something from the Bible, it’s on the side.

That was added as early as Sulzbach, probably earlier, so at least 100, 150 years earlier. Okay.

Dovid Bashevkin: Do you know if what what her her specific additions were, did she have any What she added?

Michelle Margolis: Yeah. Well, so I know because I work at Columbia, and Columbia has part of Yaakov Emden’s library, but not his Talmuds, because they were acquired in the lot that was sold to Temple Emanu-El, and ultimately ended up at Columbia.

His Talmuds were included there with his annotations, but Devorah Romm or somebody from her press heard about it and bought the entire—

Dovid Bashevkin: Nuh-uh.

Michelle Margolis: —set, and that’s why you have Rabbi Yaakov Emden’s commentaries included there. I think they’re in the back, if I’m not mistaken.

Dovid Bashevkin: That’s a—that’s a really interesting—yeah—

Michelle Margolis: They’re now at—

Dovid Bashevkin: The National Library of Israel.

Dovid Bashevkin: Meaning Columbia does not have, meaning you famously have the a lot of the works from the library of Rav Yaakov Emden, who’s this major, major scholar, famous for a host of reasons. I remember we’ve done videos in Columbia, and you don’t have his Talmud, because his Talmud got bought by—

Michelle Margolis: Got scooped.

Dovid Bashevkin: By the Romm family.

Michelle Margolis: Yep, yep, it was the same time.

The The The collection was initially put up for sale in 1868. It wasn’t bought until 1872, and so in the interim, I think that’s when it was.

Dovid Bashevkin: It surprises me that they were selling that there was a market for Rav Yaakov Emden’s library back then. Oh, for sure.

For sure. In the In the late 1800s, people were buying lots.

Michelle Margolis: Absolutely. People were buying rare books.

There’s a wonderful dissertation that was done by a woman named Anna de Vilda in Amsterdam on the sale of Jewish libraries at auction in Amsterdam from the 17th century through the 19th. And so, there were these major libraries that were being sold. People were buying them.

Dovid Bashevkin: And I’m just curious, this is is a little off-field, but I’m just curious.

When they were buying it, were they excited because Rav Yaakov Emden had really important and rare books, or were they excited because, “We want the books that were owned by Rav Yaakov Emden”?

Michelle Margolis: So, to this specific acquisition, this was bought by Temple Emanu-El, the Reform congregation in New York City, which at the time was actually looking to create a seminary. And so, they were looking—this was a huge collection of Jewish books—

Dovid Bashevkin: The standards. Yeah.

Michelle Margolis: Of sort of standard Jewish books, including some incredibly rare books, and so they were buying it as a scholarly collection.

Was it Yaakov Emden particularly that caught their eye? Probably not. It was that there were a lot of incredible books in that collection. And so, they said, “Okay, this would be a perfect library for our new seminary,” which didn’t end up being successful, and then they ended up giving it to Columbia.

Dovid Bashevkin: It’s very, very interesting.

Dovid Bashevkin: But it was less—nowadays, a lot of what drives the—at least the market auctions—

Michelle Margolis: The other markets, yeah.

Dovid Bashevkin: Is the is the celebrity, is the person, is the—it’s a little bit has changed. But that that brought us to the Vilna Talmud, and that became kind of the standard. Printing didn’t end then, and we have kind of one or two major editions afterwards.

I’m curious if you have anything to say about like the modern printing of what we have fast-forward another, basically another 100 years, and we’re now in the world of—

Michelle Margolis: There’s so many really interesting things that have happened. And because there’s this perception in certain parts of the Jewish world that the the Talmud, the page of the Talmud, the daf, you know, Moses brought it down, and that’s what it looked like, even though if you look at the history, the text is very, very ancient. The actual layout of the text is only about, you know, 500 or 600 years old.

Dovid Bashevkin: But we’ve become very attached.

Michelle Margolis: We’re very attached to it, and this is where we see the Koren Talmud, for instance, which is a translated It includes translation and explanation, which does not go according to sort of that traditional text, as opposed to the Schottenstein Talmud, which was produced, which even though it includes an additional explanation, so there are many pages for one daf, it includes that daf as the facing page on every page, so that you’re still looking at that standard set text as you study it.

Dovid Bashevkin: Is it unusual, the Jewish attachment or connection to the layout of the Talmud page? Because there was a significant controversy, you mentioned the Koren, that that when when Steinsaltz, when Rav Adin Steinsaltz first published that, I think later editions they actually changed it back, but when it was first published, it it broke away from this classical layout—

Michelle Margolis: Yeah.

Dovid Bashevkin: You know, which was set down most recently but in the Vilna edition. It’s not that old.

Michelle Margolis: Well, I mean, it is I would give it the 500 years.

Dovid Bashevkin: But sure, but yeah, it basically goes back to Soncino and Bomberg. But my question is, is that unique to the Jewish people? Are there other books where the attachment develops not to the words or even the ideas, but to the very layout?

Michelle Margolis: It’s an interesting question. I mean, I don’t know enough about other cultures to say for sure only Jews do this.

But if you think about something like the Masorah, which is this this commentary on the text of the Bible, on the literally on the letters and the cantillation marks and and the voweling of the Bible that was produced really in the 10th, 11th century, it’s a similar kind of just attachment to text. Every piece of this text, even if it’s not the concept within the text, but just the letters themselves, Have importance within Judaism. It’s different, but I think there can be a comparison made to how a Torah scroll has to be written in a very specific way, has to be chanted in a very specific way. There are certain things that just, you know, we’ve always do this, done this, we continue to do it, and this is how we maintain our tradition.

Now, what really blew things out of the water was Sefaria. Sefaria made a conscious decision not to include the main text of the Talmud, and they got a tremendous amount of pushback. What they were doing was, just like Daniel Bomberg or Joshua Soncino brought the Talmud into a print age, they were bringing the Talmud into a digital age. And so their creativity allowed it to be studied in a different way, so that it’s all linked data.

You can click on something and it opens up all hyperlinked—

Dovid Bashevkin: And connected, but in order to do so, we—they needed to almost graduate from even the world of print layout.

Michelle Margolis: They had to move away. I mean, as somebody who’s worked with digital projects a little bit, this is sort of the line between the the good and the great in digital projects. The original sort of digital books were literally just copies of printed books, just on the screen, that you can read on your computer.

If you still have endnotes, and I still have to scroll down to page 765 in order to see the endnote, that’s not a digital book! But if you hyperlink it, I don’t care where the endnotes are, because I can just click that that dot. And that’s essentially what what Sefaria is doing. They were saying, “This is digital. We’re going to move it into a digital space.” And so it looks different.

Now, the fact of the matter is that scholarship happens differently. I often quote a friend of mine who who says that when he wakes up in the morning, he reads The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, he does the Wordle, and he does the daf. And, you know, I think that people who spend all day studying the Talmud would find that very offensive or would would have difficulty with it. You’re not killing yourself over it.

You’re not sitting and having a scholarly, like, deep dive into the text. And there is there is something to be said for that, you know, to actually spend the time to read it in the original language, to grapple with various understandings of it. That’s a certain kind of scholarship. Whereas if I get, like, the the note of the day, you know, and it’s one sentence, with this this this project that you’re doing, which is really exposing Talmud to many, many people who wouldn’t otherwise see it.

Dovid Bashevkin: No, but I love this point that you’re making, because I think it highlights the two poles that you can’t totally have both. There’s the like this classical world of Talmud study, Gemara learning, where the word that we sometimes use, it’s a Yiddish word, it is horeving. You’re you’re you’re crouched over it. It’s almost like you’re you’re you’re you might sweat over it.

But I actually love the New York Times, Wordle, Daf Yomi crowd also, because that is, you know, the language that I would use, and I saw this once in an article in Tablet where somebody was writing about what chavruta study has meant to them, and they said, “It has become the metronome of my daily life.” It almost becomes the beat and the rhythm that you live with. It might not be Yeah, exactly. That’s what I think the beauty of the innovation of Daf Yomi has brought, of whether it’s a full daf, or whether it’s a 10-minute, or whether it’s the daily thought, or it’s right out I I do Wordle at midnight. It’s the So so I do It’s the last thing I do.

Yeah. But in the morning, to have that routine, whether it’s the morning, at night, or in the afternoon, that daily touchpoint It’s true. Yeah, yeah. I think there’s a sweetness to that.

Michelle Margolis: And and there’s something about I mean, the concept of Daf Yomi was created a hundred years ago, and the idea was that people were too busy to sit and do that depth of study, but they still need Judaism in their lives and Judaism as embodied through texts. And so studying a daf every day makes sure that you you get through it, you have that touchpoint, you’re aware of something. My my son was just bar mitzvah, and he for his bar mitzvah, he decided he wanted to learn all of Mishnayot, which so the Mishnah is much smaller, but he started when he was nine or 10. Wow.

And now when he’s studying Talmud, he’s at least touched He has a lot. so many of those concepts when he was studying Mishnah that he he has sort of a leg up in understanding it as he continues with his studies. You know, having a a whole picture gives you something much larger. And actually in the Talmud, there’s a whole debate over what is more important: what they call Sinai or oker harim.

Dovid Bashevkin: Exactly. Is knowing all the information more important, what’s known as Sinai, the mountain, or oker harim having the analytical, conceptual depth?

Michelle Margolis: The depth. Yeah. And as a librarian, I say this all the time, I don’t know everything, I have to know how to find out about pretty much everything.

And so I’m very much a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, and I love that. Like I dip into lots of different things. There are very few things that I would say that I’m deeply expert in. That’s my job, is to know a little about a lot of things.

Dovid Bashevkin: I cannot thank you enough for this kind of tour of, what was that, a thousand years, from manuscripts, you know, that were originally what is this, this is a flock of sheep, all the way down to this is really pixels on a screen. It’s really such an incredible story. If you will indulge me, we always end our Talmud Daily interviews with a brief Talmud questionnaire. No—I’ll do my best—

Michelle Margolis: But I’m not great at this.

Dovid Bashevkin: Who would you consider your primary teacher, the person who introduced you to Talmud, or kind of the in-depth study of text?

Michelle Margolis: So many people. It’s a really, really hard question, actually. You know, the the person who taught me alef-bet, it’s all over the place. I’m constantly still learning, so I’m going to give you a non-answer and say all my teachers.

Dovid Bashevkin: I love a non-answer. Here’s a little bit of a tougher one. How how would you introduce the Talmud? How would you explain what it is, and how would you kind of introduce it to somebody, because I’m sure it’s something that you’ve that you’ve done as a librarian.

Michelle Margolis: So I love the explanation of sort of a study hall made written.

And so you have all of these discussions, and and the concept of oral law, oral scholarship is sort of loud. It’s a lot of people talking. And when you look at the Talmud, you have a concept, and then you have all these people who are just sort of coming in and adding their thoughts. And they’re like, “Well, maybe it’s this way.

Maybe it’s this way. Here’s this idea. No, that’s a terrible idea,” and interactions. And to me, it’s like a what I think of as a Jewish study hall made written, but from hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

Dovid Bashevkin: I love that idea. When I sometimes miss the study hall or the time in the Talmud, and I and I and I don’t have the attention to actually study Talmud, you know what I sometimes do? I’ll open up a Talmud class, but on multiple tabs, different Talmud classes, perfect, and all the voices are together playing at once. Do you have a favorite tractate of Talmud?

Michelle Margolis: No. No, I think each one, I mean, they’re so different.

It’s hard to say like one is is the favorite.

Dovid Bashevkin: Do you have a favorite story of the Talmud?

Michelle Margolis: It’ll depend on the moment. The story with Beruriah is is quite interesting. So she was the wife of Rabbi Meir, very, very learned, and then this the rabbis sort of get together to sort of prove that learning is not always great.

Maybe the ending is not what people would want it to be, but it’s certainly an interesting topic for discussion.

Dovid Bashevkin: Final question: If you were to make an elevator pitch for why in 2026 study of Talmud and these Jewish texts is still important, it’s still relevant, what would your elevator pitch be?

Michelle Margolis: Well, apparently, it’s needed for AI, if you look at Twit-, certain social media. So, actually when Dean Ball, who’s a who’s in AI, somebody deep into AI, posted, I think on on X, something about how the study of Talmud is really important for understanding AI, Zohar Atkins gave sort of a possible answer as to why. He said we’re we’re like studying Talmudically how this person’s comment resonates.

He went through the way that Talmud is studied, which is really interesting. That it requires a source, everything has to go back to the text, that you bring in liminal ideas so that you can, you know, thoroughly reject them if they’re bad or actually include them if they’re good. It’s sort of a way of embracing all possibilities of knowledge before coming to an answer. And it’s an answer, it’s not the answer.

And so this is a way of understanding how people do scholarship. Very little is black and white. You see that very clearly in the Talmud.

Dovid Bashevkin: I cannot thank you enough.

It is always a pleasure to be able to sit. Michelle Margolis, thank you so much for joining us today.

Michelle Margolis: It was a pleasure.