Andrea Jelínková – The Publishing Practice and Reading Culture of Moravian Jews 33 Andrea Jelínková THE PUBLISHING PRACTICE AND READING CULTURE OF MORAVIAN JEWS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 1 Aside from Isaac Prostitz’s workshop in Prostějov (Prossnitz), which was active for a short while between 1602 and 1605, the only long-lasting printing press for Hebrew books in Moravia operated in Brno (Brünn) and briefly in Mikulov (Nikolsburg) under the management initially of the Neumann family and sub- sequently of Joseph Rossmann. In the fifty years of the existence of this print- ing press, between 1753 and 1803, it published over a hundred editions. Brno and Mikulov thus became one of the few places in the then Habsburg Monarchy where material was printed in the Hebrew script. 2 While liturgical and halakhic output predominated among the Hebrew works that were printed in Moravia in the 1750s and 1760s, the printing press also published other literary genres and subject areas from the 1780s onwards, including ones that had not appeared be- fore. It is precisely these other printed works that are the focus of this paper. I will set out a typology of the works printed in Moravia, excluding liturgical, halakhic and biblical texts, 3 and will highlight the spectrum of genres and subject matter, as well as the range of publishers. I will compare these printed products with the literature published by other printers in the period under study, which was aimed at the majority society. I will try to ascertain how specific the literature for the Jewish minority was, and whether it was similar to, or different from, works that were intended for the majority society. On the basis of this analysis, I will present the mode of printing and publishing used by the Moravian Hebrew printing press, as well as its success or lack thereof. The aim of this paper is to examine the products of the Moravian Hebrew print- ing press and to gain an insight into the hitherto unexplored relationship between publishing practice or strategy and the reading abilities of Moravian Jews. There 1) My thanks to Iveta Cermanová, Olga Sixtová and Pavel Sládek for their comments and discussion. This study was supported by Grant SVV 2600557 realized at the Charles University, Faculty of Arts. 2) Texts were printed in Hebrew only in Prague, where the oldest continuously operating workshop was founded in 1512, and from the 1770s also in Żółkiew (Zhowkva), Lwów (Lemberg, Lviv) and Vienna. On Prague, see Olga Sixtová, ‘Jewish Printers and Printing Presses in Prague 1512–1670 (1672)’, in: Olga Sixtová, ed., Hebrew Printing in Bohemia and Moravia, Praha 2012, pp. 33–74 and other studies in this collective monograph. On Hebrew printing in Vienna, see below. 3) I do not deal here with liturgical, halakhic or biblical texts, as these traditional genres of Hebrew literature are firmly defined and, apart from a few exceptions (specifically language), their typology does not change in the context of Moravian production.