Rabbinic Agency in the Age of Print: Manuscript, Print, and the Epistemology of Crisis

Abstract This article reconsiders the Ḥatam Sofer’s attitude toward print, arguing that it reflects a historically specific response to a crisis of rabbinic authority and transmission. Instead of approaching print as a neutral technological development, the article shows how Sofer employed the contrast between manuscript and print as a symbolic language for expressing substantive views on authority, loss, and an idealized past in which Torah knowledge was guardedly transmitted and evaluated. His nostalgic portrayal of the manuscript age—historically inaccurate yet rhetorically effective—served to imagine an idealized world of learning governed by rabbinic judgment, restraint, and ordered transmission. Drawing on responsa, letters, and biographical contexts, the article demonstrates that Sofer’s reflections on print are closely tied to his self-identification as a teacher rather than an “author”—a distinctive model of rabbinic authority inherited from his own teacher, Rabbi Natan Adler. In this paradigm, manuscript culture persists not only as a material practice in the age of print but as a symbolic framework through which Sofer asserted authority, expressed anxiety, and shaped his scholarly persona. Viewed through the prism of rabbinic agency, the article reconceives standard approaches in the history of the book and shows how concepts internal to rabbinic culture—such as Torah study undertaken for its own sake ( lishmah ) and innovative interpretation ( ḥiddush )—actively shaped modes of knowledge production rather than merely reflecting broader, universal patterns.