Recently, I found myself in the enviable and exceedingly rare position of simultaneously possessing two copies of Tractate Eruvin from Daniel Bomberg’s monumental Venetian Talmud, printed in the first half of the sixteenth century. For any collector of Hebrew books, the acquisition of a single Bomberg volume is cause enough for quiet celebration. But Eruvin, of all tractates, casts a particular spell upon the bibliophile, especially one attuned to the history of Hebrew printing and the visual architecture of the Talmudic page.
Eruvin is not merely a legal tractate; it is a cartographic one. Its sugyot are saturated with geometry, spatial reasoning, and the precise delineation of Shabbat domains. Diagrams are not a pedagogical luxury here; they are indispensable. In contemporary editions, especially within Rashi’s commentary, diagrams proliferate: lechis and korahs demarcating a mavo, the squaring of cities, the plotting of the techum Shabbat. Without these visual aids, the text verges on the opaque, even for seasoned learners.
Yet the Bomberg Talmud, so often venerated as the typographical mother of all later editions, contains no printed diagrams whatsoever in Tractate Eruvin. Instead, it offers something far more revealing: deliberate blanks, conspicuous white spaces left for the owner to complete by hand. Indeed, throughout the entirety of the Bomberg Talmud, there is but a single printed diagram – on Sotah 43a, depicting the placement of five fruit-bearing trees. Everywhere else, the reader was expected to supply the visual component himself.
This was no historical inevitability. Earlier printings, most notably those of the Soncino family in Pesaro (c. 1510-1515), did include printed diagrams – features that Bomberg consciously declined to replicate. Only much later, beginning with the Talmud of Frankfurt an der Oder in the 1690s, and more decisively with the Amsterdam edition of 1714, were diagrams restored to their now-familiar place on the Talmudic page.
The consequences of Bomberg’s decision are profound. Owners dutifully filled in the blanks – some meticulously, others carelessly, and some not at all. As a result, no two surviving copies are quite alike. In both of the Bomberg Eruvin volumes before me, several diagrammatic spaces remain hauntingly empty, silent witnesses to an unrealized act of interpretation.
It is widely assumed that Rashi himself produced original drawings to accompany his commentary. But over the centuries, through repeated copying and the homogenizing force of print, those drawings have been flattened into the standardized diagrams we now take for granted. Manuscripts and early editions, however, tell a different story. They preserve a remarkable diversity of visual solutions to the same textual problem, reflecting competing understandings of Rashi’s spatial logic.
The privilege of comparing two Bomberg copies side by side brings this reality into sharp relief. One sees immediately that to understand Rashi on Eruvin, it is not enough to consult the “standard” diagram reproduced ad infinitum in modern printings. One must return to the manuscript tradition – to the living, breathing interplay between text and image that Rashi originally intended.
Those interested in pursuing this subject further would do well to consult Hakira, volume 16, the article “Diagrams in Rashi’s Commentary: A Case Study of Eruvin 56b,” by Eli Genauer.