Reply To: taanit notzrim

HaLeivi, I agree that a lot of censorship was post-printing. Before that, burning was the main way to deal with offending books.

But those who copied books were in charge. Non-Hebrew books, like Josephus, were at mercy of Christian scribes who would put what they prefer into text. With Chumash, we have a system of copying reliably, but I don’t think it was applied to gemoras. There are a lot of places that are later amended, mixing up R Akiva and R Eliezer, etc [I am not completely sure if this is due to scribe errors or early printers converting manual texts into print]. And possibly scribes would amend something that totally did not make sense to them.

> It was self censored. We took out the �offending� passages

Was it always the case? I know that Vatican maintained a list of forbidden books and they probably used their own censors to review them. And, again, do we have Sephardi editions?