From Gutenberg to Zlotowitz

A genuine revolution in Jewish publishing and Jewish study has unfolded before our eyes.

Revolutionaries come in different stripes and play different roles. There are the militants, the fighters, for good and for evil — the American Patriots and the Russian Bolsheviks. There are the intellectuals, people whose ideas turn the world around, from the likes of Aristotle and John Locke to Albert Einstein. There are the artists, after whose works our vision is forever changed — the likes of Michelangelo and Mondrian.

Then there are the inventors, the discoverers, starting with perhaps the most influential revolutionary of them all, the long-lost anonymous inventor of the wheel. Perhaps the most notable inventors of the 20th century were the Wright Brothers with their first, primitive, daring flying machine.

For the advancement of civilization and the democratization of learning, it is difficult to think of a more repercussive discoverer than Johannes Gutenberg, (ca. 1398-1468), who invented the printing press in 1440. Almost instantly, he liberated literacy from the elites and publishing from handwriting. He exponentially stimulated authorship and readership.

One might nominate Steve Jobs (1955-2011) as his truly revolutionary successor. Jobs’ computer, first marketed in 1976, had the same effects as Gutenberg’s movable type, except on an incomparably grander scale.

The Jewish world has its own revolutionaries.We begin, of course, with Moses, who was a threefold revolutionary: a militant, fighting the wars of the ancient Israelites; an intellectual, delivering the Torah; and a religious master, the most important in human history. A few stops along the way bring us to Rashi, whose line-by-line commentary on the Torah and the Talmud opened up the world of Torah to the masses. While manuscripts in the parallel Christian universe were fairly circumscribed to monasteries and similarly elitist locales, the manuscripts of Rashi-elucidated sacred scriptures were widely copied, sought and studied — and burned by the anti-Semites of the day. Those pyres of thousands of handwritten copies of Talmud highlight the Jewish passion for Torah study enabled by Rashi.

Western civilization and Jewish civilization intersect in Gutenberg.  When he showed how to print 42 lines at once, he facilitated the vast expansion of not only Christian and secular publishing, but also Jewish publishing. Though it is a bold claim to make, we believe the evidence shows that no one advanced Jewish study more extensively in the more than 550 years since Gutenberg than the late Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz (1943-2017).

He printed his first book, a commentary on the Scroll of Esther, as an act of piety — a memorial tribute to a friend who died young — in 1976. No one was more surprised than Zlotowitz when it sold 20,000 copies. He decided to go into the publishing of Judaica and founded Artscroll and later Mesorah Publications.

Suffice to say: By a factor of no one knows precisely how many — a factor of 100? a factor of 5,000? — more Jews across the denominational and the unaffiliated spectrum study Talmud today than at any previous time in Jewish history due to the translation and elucidation of the Talmud by Artscroll. It was an unprecedented act of clarity, scholarship and bibliography.

Suffice to say: The Artscroll prayerbook, even limited as it is to an Orthodox liturgy, has sold more than one million copies, dwarfing any other similar publication.

Suffice to say: Artscroll has stimulated significant imitators. There are now alternative, enhanced, newly translated, artistically rendered volumes of Torah and Talmud and virtually every type of work that Artscroll has published. It is no longer possible for a Jewish publisher of prayerbooks and other sacred works to contemplate a mere quality translation between two plain covers. Suffice to say: Zlotowitz has irreversibly raised the bar — qualitatively and quantitatively.

He was relentless. With the entirely unexpected success of the Artscroll prayerbook, for example, no one was suggesting a translation of the Talmud. But Zlotowitz plowed forward, raising millions of dollars and assembling teams of scholars and editors. To streamline costs and ensure quality, he founded his own printing house and bindery. When that was well underway, he said: Do it in Hebrew. When that was underway, he said: Do it in French. When the Babylonian Talmud was completed, he was already busy at work on the Jerusalem Talmud.

Not to mention, he oversaw the publication of literally thousands of works on all Jewish sacred scriptures (not just the Scroll of Esther), on Jewish thought, Jewish history, Jewish personalities, stories, plus Jewish children’s books — the list goes on.

Zlotowitz was a revolutionary with a twist. He combined Gutenberg and Jobs. Under Zlotowitz’s vision, the computer did not supplant the book, but was put in service of it. Part of what catapulted Artscroll was its ability to produce a book far more quickly than competitors; Zlotowitz early on saw the power of computers. He mastered them. He used them to advance and disseminate the printed page. He believed in the book and made it a staple of the Jewish home as never before, even as Artscroll Talmud is now available in a sophisticated digital format.

Directly, through all the projects he initiated and saw to completion together with his longtime partner Rabbi Nosson Scherman, and indirectly through all of the other projects Artscroll stimulated by way of imitation or the “jealousy of the scholars” (kin’at soferim), Meir Zlotowitz revolutionized Jewish publishing and Jewish study in a way not seen since Johannes Gutenberg. Before our very eyes was a revolutionary. May he rest in peace.

Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News