Sunday, January 3, 2021

The Censoring of Censorship - 1864 Talmud Advertisement

 Censorship in Hebrew Books in the 19th century was rather commonplace, with the offending reasons causing a text to be removed varying greatly.

Hamagid was the first Hebrew language weekly newspaper, appearing from 1856 to 1903. Though published in East Prussia (Germany), it's intended readership was Russian and Eastern-European Jews. In an 1864 Issue of the Hebrew Newspaper Hamagid I just acquired, I found an interesting case of censorship, removing a portion of a text. The text that was removed had a strip of tar placed over the words, completely obliterating the text, a practice associated with the Russian Censors. The offending text was part of an advertisement for a new Talmud edition, which stated that this edition was approved by the censors of Russian/Poland. Apparently it was offending to the censors to approve a text that states that they approved the text, so they had the related paragraph removed.





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