their work, but readership. A larger audience could be gained by assigning authorship to a famous person. This happened regularly throughout the ancient world even among the early Greeks as in the Iliad and Odyssey.
2. Jubilees, Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. Books of Adam and Eve, The Assumption of Moses , and many others. Some have survived only in fragments
or are known only by title.
3. The tractate Berakhot initiates a discussion of the worship service. Instead of beginning with an outline of the service as we might expect, it starts with a question which presupposes a good bit of earlier development and continues with the presentation of ideas new and old..
4. Discussions about authorship abound.
5 The Zohar remains the most widely read book of Jewish mysticism; it is presented as a commentary on the Torah and so was especially attractive as it could be studied during the annual reading cycle.
6. We see a similar phenomenon in 18" century opera in which segments of the plot as well as music were often lifted from other pieces and placed elsewhere without attribution and created a pastiche; some of these pieces became very successful. This practice was widely accepted and not considered wrong.
7 The popularity and wide distribution of the Shulhan A rukh rested to a large
degree on the invention to movable type. It rapidly became the standard guide to
8 A large number of printing houses were set up in Naples , Rome as well as northern Italian cities. Each sought and received a monopoly through their local government or in the case of Hebrew books through the rabbinic authorities of the Jewish community. A good list of printers may be found in the Jewish Encyclopedia(New York , 1940). It has been augmented by later monographs.