Halakhah Study Group 033

2:
With the advent of printing late in the 15th century printed copies of the Torah became available in ever-growing numbers. The first dated Hebrew book in print that we know of was Rashi's commentary on the Torah, which was published in Reggio di Calabria, Italy, in 1475. These books do not qualify for the public reading of the Torah: they do not fulfill the requirements mentioned in the previous paragraph. It would seem that before the advent of the printed text there were available handwritten copies of individual books of the Torah. Even if such copies were handwritten by a qualified scribe on parchment in the traditional manner with the traditional equipment they still do not qualify for the public reading of the Torah because they do not contain the complete text of the Torah.

3:
The first five books of the bible together as one unit constitute the text of a Sefer Torah, a Torah scroll. (These five books were accepted as sacred literature at a national convention held in Jerusalem in the year 444 BCE, under the aegis of Ezra and Nehemiah. Only later were what are now called the books of the prophets added, and it was not until the first century CE that the contents of the hagiographa were finalized.) In scholarly parlance the books of the Torah collectively became known as 'the Pentateuch', which is a term derived from two Greek words which mean 'Five Books'. The Hebrew term for each of the books which constitute the Torah is Ĥumash, which basically indicates 'one of five'.

4:
In the note which he added to Karo's original text Rabbi Moshe Isserles adds that "in a place where there is a Sefer Torah but there is no cantor who knows the correct melody by heart I have seen a custom whereby the cantor reads from a ĥumash and the honoree reads after him from a valid Sefer Torah". Such a procedure is acceptable because the actual text is being read publicly (by the honoree) from a valid Torah scroll; it is considered that he is being prompted, as it were, by the cantor reading from a ĥumash. (Nowadays in such a situation the roles are reversed: it is the cantor who reads from the Torah while being prompted by someone whispering from a ĥumash, with the honoree standing beside the cantor as is customary.)

5:
There must have been widespread attempts to read publicly from such ĥumashim in the middle ages, because Isserles quotes ten different medieval luminaries to back up his rule that ĥumashim may not be used. However, from the seventeenth century onwards we find poskim dealing with a cognate problem: what to do when the congregation does not have a valid Torah Scroll available. The answer to this problem is summarized by Rabbi Israel Me'ir Kagan in his monumental commentary on Shulĥan Arukh Oraĥ Ĥayyim, Mishnah Berurah: