Acceso usuarios
Joshua A. Fishman
In the early nineteenth century a widely practiced form of digraphia, functionally dierentiating between two type-fonts, began to fall apart in Eastern Europe. This dierentiation had existed from the very beginnings of Hebrew print in Western and Central Europe in the mid-®fteenth century. One of these fonts, variously refered to as ``square type'' or ``Assyrian writing,'' was generally reserved for materia sancta per se (the Pentateuch, other books of the Bible, the Talmud, and the Prayer Books for weekday or Sabbath and holiday services). Except for the ancient Judeo-Aramaic translation-of the Pentateuch (Onkelos), often considered to be co-holy with the Hebrew original, all other translations into PostExilic Jewish vernaculars and all rabbinic responsa dealing with questions of halakhic interpretation were printed in the font known as ``Rashi writing.'' This font was named after the outstanding eleventh-century German/French commentator whose manuscript ``hand'' became the prototype for all subsequent Rabbinic and Jewish vernacular publications, whether in Hebrew, Ladino/Judezmo or Yiddish. In sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, a version of ``Rashi writing'' became intimately associated with Yiddish as the vehicle of a sizable and a popular literature translating and commenting upon Holy Writ. Only when a large number of small printing establishments arose in Poland, White Russia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine specializing solely in mass-market chap-books and inexpensive editions of all holy books did a wholesale transition to just one type face, the square letters, occur for both Yiddish and Holy Writ per se. Rashi-type scripts remained (and linger on, in part, to this very day) for Rashi per se, some Rabbinic Responsa, and some publications in Ladino/Judezmo or other Jewish vernaculars. The result is that those populations exposed only to various types of modern secular Jewish education, whether in Yiddish or in Hebrew, lack any familiarity whatsoever with the Rashi script in any of its variations. Even the revival of Ladino/Judezmo publication, now ongoing, is beginning to utilize the ``square letters.'' A formerly widespread and long-followed digraphic practice has thus virtually come to an end in the late twentieth century.
