The printed Talmud: Bomberg's edition and the pagination that has held for five centuries

Before printing, every Talmud manuscript was its own: its own hand, its own order, its own slips. There was no way to cite a place in the Talmud so that a man in another country would find it at once.

Printing of the Talmud began before Bomberg. From 1484 the Soncino family printed single tractates — Berakhot, Beitzah, Megillah and others; earlier still there were Spanish and Portuguese printers of whom only fragments survive. But no one had a complete Talmud.

Daniel Bomberg, a Christian from Antwerp working in Venice, received a privilege from Pope Leo X in 1518 and in 1520–1523 printed the whole Talmud — twelve volumes. In 1523 he also issued the Jerusalem Talmud, and in 1524–25 the Mikraot Gedolot edited by Jacob ben Chaim ibn Adoniyah, the book by which the Bible with commentaries is printed to this day.

Two things must not be confused. The arrangement of the page — text in the middle, Rashi on the inner margin, Tosafot on the outer — was devised by the Soncinos, and Bomberg took it over. But the **foliation** is his, and it proved eternal: the Vilna Shas, Steinsaltz, Schottenstein and Koren all kept it. For five hundred years citations have worked without translation — and Daf Yomi, begun in 1923, is possible only because the whole world studies the same folio on the same day.

Printing had its other side. In 1553 the Talmud was burned in Rome on the Campo de' Fiori and in Venice; printing moved east, to Lublin and Salonica. The Basel edition of 1578–81 appeared censored: the tractate Avodah Zarah omitted entire, the words goy and notzri replaced. Some of those substitutions remain in later editions still.