Malachi BEIT-ARIÉ, Jérusalem Owing to the circumstances of medieval publication, Jewish texts written in the Hebrew script were also disseminated at various stages of their creation and revision, and their authors were usually prevented from controlling what happened to them much more than Christian authors were, because of the individual nature of Hebrew book production. Like the absence of any scriptoral authority over the development of Hebrew scripts, the production of the Hebrew books and the transmission of Jewish texts and their dissemination were not subject to any authoritative initiative or supervision, in sharp contrast to ecclesiastical and political control over the development of scripts, book production and text transmission in the Graeco-Latin world. Reproduction and distribution of texts were never institutionalized in Jewish societies, but were carried out by individual private initiative, to a large extent by learned people or scholars who themselves copied the books they wished to study or use. Encouraged by authors to correct their own mistakes, and being aware of the unavoidable corruption of texts by the unconscious mechanics of copying, later copyists certainly did not view copying as mechanical reproduction, but as a critical editorial operation involving emendation, collation of different exemplars and even the incorporation of external relevant material and the copyist's own opinion. It seems that the copyist's main goal was to establish what Kantorowicz defines as a 'richtige', right, version, as opposed an 'echte', authentic, one. Consequently, many of the Hebrew manuscripts, at least those produced since the middle of the thirteenth century, present texts not only corrupted by the accumulation of involuntary copying errors, but also distorted by editorial or even redactional reconstruction, by contamination from different exemplars and versions, and by the deliberate integration of related texts. Therefore, many principles and pratices of classical and genealogical textual criticism are not applicable to Hebrew manuscripts, not only because many of these represent horizontal rather than vertical transmission and so provide us with open recensions, but also because their texts may have been affected by the intervention of learned copyists. Thus, despite common notion, medieval verbal texts were not fixed once they were written down. Chirographic and visual texts were as flexible as oral ones.