Library Exhibitions from the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

The subject of travel and its complex range of practices and representations has provoked intense scholarly interest in recent years. Historically, Jewish travel has taken on many forms and is documented in a wide array of primary sources: medieval Jewish merchant records; legends of the Wandering Jew; travel itineraries, real and imagined; accounts of pilgrims to the Holy Land; early sixteenth-century Hebrew manuscript reports of the discovery of America. Notably, the subject of Jewish virtual travel by photograph or postal exchange, through journalistic reportage, motion picture footage, postcard images of the exotic as well as contemporary tourism to Israel also has attracted scholarly attention. What cultural and ideological work is performed by these texts and what kinds of images of self and other are generated through them? These are some of the complex themes and challenges that the 2011-12 Katz Fellows addressed, a sampling of which are on display in this year's web exhibit.

"Taking Turns" takes as its starting point the idea of converts and conversion - an unstable subject, in the double sense of a topic very much in need of definition, and a model of individual and group life that does not presume a fixed or univocal "identity." Through the study of conversion, our understanding of the very meaning of "Judaic," "Christian," and "Islamic" identities has been complicated and even transformed.

HAS RELIGION DISAPPEARED or been banished from the public sphere, as some adepts of classic secularization theory once thought it might? Both anecdotal and empirical evidence point quite decisively to the opposite conclusion. Indeed, religion appears to be more resurgent and present in the public square today than at any time in the modern age. And yet, to deny that religion has not been transformed by its encounter with the modern public sphere, state, and economic order would be foolhardy. The Fellows of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies during the 2009-10 year devoted themselves to studying the complex interplay and often permeable boundary between the religious and the secular in modern Jewish history.

JEWISH ECONOMIC HISTORY is both understudied and overrated. This paradox is not hard to explain: Jews' historically disproportionate role in commerce and finance has been a source of embarrassed silence for some scholars and eager exaggeration for others, largely depending on one's attitude to capitalism and readiness to associate it prominently with Jews. The Katz Center devoted the past year to this complex subject of "Jews, Commerce, and Culture." The emphasis on "commerce" aimed to defuse apologetics by confronting the most controversial feature of the Jews' economic past head on. Here the overarching question was whether and how commerce can serve as a useful category for linking local Jewish communities and events across a wide geographical and chronological expanse. At the same time, the prominence in the title given to "culture" was meant to underscore the truth that economics is not solely materialist and quantitative in nature but is rather an integral part of the larger fabric of Jewish religion and folkways.

WHEN ISLAM appeared in the Near East in the mid-seventh century CE, this new monotheistic faith was not only a spiritual movement, but also a political power. Soon after its emergence, Islam changed the map of the entire Mediterranean basin and beyond - as far as the gates of India. The most prominent Jewish communities in the early Middle Ages lived under Muslim rule. Politically and legally they were treated as a minority, as were the Christians, who in the first centuries of Islam actually constituted a numerical majority in many areas. Soon after being integrated politically into the realm of Islam most of these Jewish communities gradually integrated into the Arabic culture. Within this broad framework evolved Judeo-Arabic culture. The period between the 7th and the 11th century could be justly defined as formative for both societies – the Muslim one was actually shaped in this period, and the presence of the majority of Jewish population worldwide under Islam modified Jewish life profoundly.

THE HISTORY OF MATERIAL TEXTS, from wax tablets and parchment scrolls to flat screen laptops and DVDs, has entered the academic mainstream over the last half-century. How have the materiality and formatting of texts from antiquity to the present shaped authorship, transmission, reception, and interpretation? How have the business of Jewish book production and the market forces of book consumption affected Jewish life and culture? How have the visual art and design of Jewish books shaped reading habits, legibility, recollection, and signification? How have cultures of Jewish reading changed over time, creating new forms of social experience and testing communal authority as well as gender boundaries? What has been the fate of Jewish books, libraries, book producers, publishers, and readers, under conditions of censorship and persecution? During the 2005-06 academic year, the Fellows at CAJS explored the Jewish book as an historical agent in Jewish culture and as a medium of exchange within the larger cultures in which Jews have lived. Their work drew upon a variety of inter-disciplinary perspectives, with the aim of uniting scholars working in the traditional fields of Jewish studies with scholars of the history of the book.

BOOK PRODUCTION is a business as well as a craft, a trade and an art form. Since the invention of moveable type in the fifteenth century, Jews as well as non-Jews have been engaged in the printing and sale of a surprisingly diverse array of editions of Judaica. This exhibition offers a small sampling of that vast panoply of creativity, based on the University of Pennsylvania’s distinguished library collections at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and at the Walter and Lenore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The materials selected highlight not only the production but also the consumption side of the business of the Jewish book: who bought and sold printed Judaica. In this exhibit, you will see in particular how these precious books came to be part of Penn’s library collections. Each item label explains from whom books were purchased or who donated specific treasures, and otherwise documents how Penn continues to develop one of world’s largest and most important Judaica collections.

The Fall Of 2003 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first major English-language dictionary of rabbinic literature: A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli, and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature … With an Index of Scriptural Quotations, compiled by Marcus Jastrow, a Philadelphia rabbi and a University of Pennsylvania honorary Doctor of Literature. Jastrow dedicated his dictionary to his wife Bertha Wolfsohn, with whom he had seven children, including their son Morris Jastrow, one of the founders of Religious Studies in the United States, professor of ancient Semitic languages and Penn’s University Librarian from 1898 until his death in 1921. Marcus Jastrow died in Germantown, Pennsylvania on October 13, 1903. This exhibit at Penn fittingly celebrates the anniversary of Jastrow’s dictionary and honors the centenary of its creator for his contributions to the distinguished tradition of rabbinic learning and lexicography.

JEWISH LITERATURE IN THE MODERN AGE reflects enormous diversity. On the one hand, there are literatures in Jewish languages, principally Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino. On the other, there are Jewish literatures in Russian, German, French, Arabic, English and many other vernacular languages. American Jewish literature, while belonging to the latter category, seems to delimit a sphere of its own reflecting, especially in recent decades, the "difference" of American Jewry. We examined with great interest how in each of these cases the choice of the linguistic medium determines the intended audience and in turn affects the message about Jewish identity and culture. In all instances, we saw literature as a site of intense struggle around the question of Jewishness and modernity in which all the resources of the linguistic imagination were called into play to negotiate the passage from traditional society to contemporary life. What, then, is Jewish literature? Is it one or many? Are there viable criteria for determining what lies within and without the bounds of Jewish literature? These questions, perhaps in the end unanswerable, do not cease to engage us.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between the way religious traditions instruct people to live their lives and the way people go about living them? This tension is explored in this exhibit by scholars of Jewish history and anthropology. Their dynamic approaches to the study of Jewish culture(s) challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries and demonstrate the diversity of Jewish life across time and space. These scholars also challenge assumptions about a normative Judaism and thus their research reveals the multiplicity of Jewish lives and traditions. Among the examples presented here are Jewish mystical and magical practices, Sephardic saint veneration, Karaite and Rabbinic rituals, as well as contemporary expressions of Jewish life through Renewal or Nationalism.

EASTERN EUROPE WAS HOME to the greatest living reservoir of Jewish civilization in the world for over three centuries. From among the ranks of East European Jews emerged many of the key religious, intellectual, artistic, and political currents that shaped Jewish life across the modern period. Over the course of the last two decades, the historic Jewish communities that once covered the broad swathe of territory between the Baltic and the Black Seas have moved to the center of the study of the modern Jewish experience. Fueled by unprecedented access to long-hidden archival riches in the former Soviet bloc, a new generation of scholars has carved out fresh questions and new arenas of inquiry.

JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM are all peoples of "the book," that is, Scripture believed to be the revealed word of God. What defines each of these religious cultures, however, is not only their common heritage in the Biblical past but the distinctive traditions that each of them has developed for interpreting the Bible and what they believed to be its message and meaning. Indeed, it is the different ways in which they have interpreted the Bible that have decisively shaped the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And all too often, perhaps, their different understandings of the Bible have also determined and complicated the tangled relations of these religious communities with each other.

JEWISH ARTISTS have been respected contributors to modern music, film, theater, and visual art, and their activities encompass high art, mass media, and popular culture forms. But what is "Jewish Art?" Any art produced by Jews? Any art with Jewish content? Is there a distinctive Jewish style? Most of these questions presume standards set by conventional cultural histories, which despite universalizing goals, define the arts in national terms. Does that mean, then, that Jewish art is exclusively made in Israel, the modern Jewish state, or does it also describe art made by Jews in the Diaspora?

CHRISTIAN HEBRAISM was an offshoot of Renaissance humanism whose devotees--biblical scholars, theologians, lawyers, physicians, scientists, philosophers, and teachers in Latin schools--borrowed and adapted texts, literary forms, and ideas from Jewish scholarship and tradition to meet Christian cultural and religious needs. Intellectual and cultural exchange did occur between Jew and Christian during the Middle Ages, but paled by comparison with what occurred between 1450 and 1750. Encounters between cultures can be fruitful, but also very painful. Certainly Christian Hebraism had such effects both upon European Jewry, and upon western tradition.

THE TRANSMISSION OF JUDAISM has always been heavily dependent on written texts as well as the oral traditions surrounding them. One way to examine this process is by analyzing the various formats of Jewish texts in order to try to understand how they may have been read. At two points in history the Jewish book has undergone fundamental transformations from scroll to codex in the eighth and ninth centuries, and from manuscript to print in the early modern period. It is this latter transformation that this exhibit will examine by focusing on the impact of printing on the format of the Jewish book and, by extension, on the Jewish cultural and religious experience.

Historians of general European culture have noted the importance of the printed book for the dissemination of knowledge to a wider audience and for shaping the ways in which texts were read and ideas were digested. In the study of Jewish culture, several scholars have noted the broad impact of printing, but this recognition has not stimulated an extensive analysis of this phenomenon. The study of the book has been primarily focused on subjects such as manuscript illumination and paleography, bio-bibliographical studies of Hebrew printers, and the censorship of Hebrew books. However, the question of the impact of printing on the transmission of Jewish culture is a major lacuna in the scholarly literature. We cannot hope to fill this gap in the scholarship concerning the history of the Jewish book in this exhibit. We do wish, however, to pose some basic questions: what effects did the printing press have on the transmission of Jewish culture and on a Jew's understanding of his (or her) tradition? How, in other words, did printing change Jewish texts and the use of these texts?

• This catalogue is available for review in the CAJS Library with the call number Z6605.H4K63 1996
• The catalogue is also available in PDF (5Mb) form as well as HTML.

CLASSICAL JEWISH LITERATURE is replete with references to the nobility of books and, by tradition, books are treated as special treasured objects. When they grew old or frayed, it was deemed irrelevant to throw them out. Old books were either carefully placed in a genizah (synagogue storeroom) or were respectfully interred. Rabbinic literature enjoins Jews to lend books to others, obligates Jewish communities to build libraries, and gives meticulous instructions on the binding, airing, care and preservation of books and manuscripts. Medieval Jewish literature encourages the Jew to make books his companion, to let bookshelves be his gardens: to bask in their beauty, gather their fruit, pluck their roses and take their spices and myrrh.

Yet, these very books, upon which Jews lavished so much love and reverence, became the objects of wanton hatred throughout the centuries. As far back as Maccabean times (175-163 B.C.E.), the Scrolls of the Torah were ripped to pieces and burned by the Syrian Greeks. Except for the attitudes of Christian Hebraists, Jewish books were the object of Christian attack throughout the Middle Ages. They were subjected to frequent censorship and periodic burnings. From 1242, when twenty four cartloads of Rabbinic manuscripts were burned in Paris, down to our own days, when the Nazi Holocaust decimated European Jewry together with its vast libraries, countless Hebrew books were destroyed and many important works were lost. Only a few precious manuscripts and incunabula (books printed before the year 1501) have survived. This sense of irretrievable loss gives special meaning to the assiduous efforts of institutions to collect and preserve the rare Judaica and Hebraica which have survived over the millennia, as the torch of Jewish learning was passed from one center to another, during the long wanderings of the Jewish people.

It is with these thoughts in mind, that we cordially invite you to experience a sampling of these Judaic treasures which constitute the true monuments of Jewish history.

• This catalogue is available for review in the library with the call number Z6605.H4V8 1994