362 A History of Judaism
the balance of power within Europe from the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury. In the Mediterranean world the Italian cities lost their dominance
under pressure from the Spanish Habsburgs to the west and the Otto-
man Turks to the east; by the early seventeenth century, the Turks held
the eastern Mediterranean, leaving Spain in control of the rest. The
greatest power and prosperity accrued to the Atlantic powers Spain,
Portugal, England and the Dutch Republic, joined belatedly by France
in the second half of the seventeenth century during the reign of Louis
XIV, whose prosperity was symbolized in the vast palace of Versailles.
This was a connected world within which many Jews moved, setting
up new congregations in the midst of existing communities and trans-
planting long- cherished local traditions to new locations. The Sephardi
diaspora from Spain and Portugal was to settle not just in the lands
around the Mediterranean and in northern Europe but in the Americas.
In eastern Europe steady migration from Germany to Poland from the
thirteenth century was much increased during the wars of religion in
central Europe of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The
effects of transplantation were mixed, sometimes encouraging those
exiled from their homeland to emphasize their difference from the sur-
rounding Jewish society in which they found themselves, sometimes
generating a mixture of traditions through intermarriage and other
forms of social contact. The former tendency was seen in the adoption
of Yiddish, a dialect of German, by Ashkenazi Jews in Poland, setting
them apart from the local population. The latter tendency, towards
greater uniformity, was promoted by the early adoption by European
Jews of printing of religious books, enabling a wider and more rapid
geographical dissemination of religious ideas than in the medieval
period, as well as a comparative democratization of study through the
availability of texts to Jews outside the scholarly rabbinic elite.
Rashi’s commentary on the Pentateuch was already in print in 1475,
and the first complete printing of the Babylonian Talmud was com-
pleted by the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1523 with
the approval of Pope Leo X, making talmudic study easier, particularly
with Rashi’s commentary printed in the margins of the talmudic text.
Printed prayer books became widely available, so that prayer leaders
were liable to be called up short by the congregation if they deviated
from the words on the page. Hebrew printing in the first half of the
sixteenth century was concentrated particularly in Italy, where Gershon
Soncino produced the first printed Hebrew Bible, but there were presses
in Constantinople and Salonica as well, and also increasingly during the