The censorship of Hebrew books has a long and interesting history, though the methods and motives for the censorship was not always the same. Censorship in Russia of Jewish books began in the late 18th century. In its early days, the censorship was often haphazard and unprofessional, as censors lacked employees who could read and understand both Yiddish and Hebrew. The first Jews to be tasked as censors in Russia were employed in 1797 in Riga, though things were rather lax until decades later. In 1827, with the Haskalah raising its wings throughout Europe, a maskil named Wolf Tugenhold was appointed censor of all Jewish language publications, and based himself in Vilna. His brother, Jakub, was the censor in Warsaw.
Things took a drastic turn for the worse in 1835, when the owners of the Shapira printing press in Slavita were arrested and the press was forcibly closed by the government. The owners, the Shapira brothers, were accused of murdering an employee who allegedly denounced them for publishing uncensored books. In the following years, many of the censors were apostates who had a knowledge of Hebrew and generally were not friends of the Jews or Judaism.
Originally the censors focused on religious works, particularly Kabbalastic and chasidic works. However, with time, they took on a political bent as well, promoting ideas favorable to the government and eliminating any words of opposition that were suspected in any of the printed works. The general oppression resulted in innovative ways of avoiding the censor in both the books being printed, as well as the books being imported, which fell under the same rules. Books were regularly printed with false title pages, stating one city of printing, outside of the censors’ jurisdiction, with the actual printing taking place elsewhere. Another method was to back-date the publications to decades prior, before the censorship rules applied or as a way to defer the responsibility, claiming that it was printed decades earlier.
An important early work that I recently acquired had a rather unusual method within. Four volumes of Mikraot Gedolot published in Amsterdam between the years 1724-1728, the “Kehillot Moshe” edition contains an astounding 36 different commentaries on Tanach. On the title pages of the volumes, someone had removed the censorship approval stamp from other books, which have been approved by the censor, and carefully re-attached it to the title pages of the Mikraot Gedolot. An untrained eye would not notice the difference, and it appears to the casual observer as having been inspected and stamped by the censor. Only now, centuries later, with the different paper between the stamp and its surroundings can you see the difference in aging between them, making it a bit more observable.
