the european renaissance and the new world 377
from the dough, observing the laws of menstrual purity, pregnancy, child-
birth and visiting cemeteries, the observance of festivals, and the making
of candles for the synagogue. Many of these books were composed by
daughters of rabbis, such as Serl, daughter of the preacher Yaakov b.
Wolf Kranz, the famous ‘Maggid of Dubno’ befriended by the great Vilna
Gaon, whose authority will be discussed in the next chapter.
Ashkenazi men often read Ts’enah u‑ Re’enah, despite affecting to
despise it as women’s literature. Among Sephardim in western Europe
and Mediterranean countries, Me’am Loez, a Judaeo- Spanish commen-
tary on the Bible, played a similar role in later centuries in popularizing
religious ideas for both men and women. Begun by Yaakov Culi in Con-
stantinople in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Me’am Loez is
an amalgam of halakhah, midrash and kabbalah with legends, proverbs
and stories. Only the volume on Genesis was in print by Culi’s death in
1732, but the rest of his commentary on the Pentateuch was published
posthumously during the next half- century. In the course of the nine-
teenth century other scholars made their own contributions to what had
become a bestseller not least through the appeal of its engaging literary
style.^19
From the popularity of such books it is clear that the impact of print-
ing as an agent of religious change would be hard to overestimate.
Already in the sixteenth century the availability of printed copies of
the Babylonian Talmud began to encourage new approaches to study
in the academies, with intensive argument about each minute detail of
the text. The printing of halakhot began to spread norms and expecta-
tions far beyond any specific locality. As we shall see in the next chapter,
in the sixteenth century Jewish law was codified as never before.