ABSTRACT
The concept of genizah dates back to Jewish Antiquity. The two main terms and conditions that had to be met by something that was to be stored in a genizah according to Talmudic law thus are: it had to be a handwritten piece of script and it had to contain at least one of God's names. The invention of the printing press and its adaptation in Jewish circles in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries posed some difficult questions for rabbinic authorities of the time as to how the aura of holiness was to be applied to printed scripts as well. Johannes Gutenberg's fifteenth-century invention of printing with movable type had dramatic impact on all aspects of European society. Jews had relied heavily on the diffusion of written texts to facilitate the transmission of Jewish culture. The Talmudic notion of a specifically holy aura of the word was not diminished by the invention of the printing press.
