Digital Multi-layer Synopsis and Mystical Traditions of the Hebrew Alphabet according to the Kabbalistic Treatise Keter Shem Ṭov

Marcus Pöckelmann, Bill Rebiger, Jörg Ritter, Gerold Necker, Paul Molitor

Screenshot of a synopsis of six witnesses of Keter Shem Ṭov generated by LERA.

The Yerusha Project

Unifying our scattered heritage

The Yerusha Project is a digital humanities initiative of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe to create an online hub of information regarding European Jewish archival heritage.

Understanding and harnessing the digital turn is essential for anyone who studies, discusses, and disseminates knowledge about the heritage of any nation, culture, or religion. Therefore, it is vital for those who study and discuss Judaism and Jewish history. There are certain aspects of Jewish heritage that are particularly suitable to be explored via digital approaches, but let me mention here just one: its scattered nature. Jewish archival and tangible heritage is unprecedentedly scattered all around the world. Millions of pages of Jewish and Jewish-related documents written in dozens of languages lie in thousands of locations.

For the first time in history, the online environment enables us to unify this vast cultural heritage. A series of digital projects are built on this conviction. The Friedberg Genizah Project, YIVO’s Vilna Collections Project, the National Library of Israel’s Ktiv Project, and Sefaria are prime examples of outstanding endeavors whose goal is to gather and present on one online platform the pieces of a scattered culture. The Yerusha project is part of these efforts.

Methods and numbers

At this stage, we do not plan to digitise documents, but we collect and publish information regarding the archival collections. This is in the form of archival descriptions, which are texts describing the content of the material. Our researchers author these with a methodology based on the most acknowledged, international professional archival standards. We do not deliver the image of the actual document to the users’ screen, but we provide a plethora of detailed and precise information on the whereabouts and content of the records of his or her research interest.

We are well aware that a lot of work has been already done on mapping Jewish archival materials. We do not want to reinvent the wheel – we plan to incorporate these results, laid out in printed and digital finding aids and descriptions, into the database.

Yerusha is open to anyone with internet access and an interest in Jewish history. In practice, we expect that mainly academic researchers would use the portal. Our key aim has been to create a research tool for the scholarly community while remaining flexible and open to the needs of others. A typical Yerusha user logs into the database to look for information on a research topic the documents of which are scattered in many archives.

In the past years, Yerusha has implemented archival survey projects in close to 700 archives of 27 countries with the participation of 150 researchers and 26 institutions of academic excellence. The covered countries and regions stretch from Georgia and Western Siberia on the east to Ourense, Spain in the west. The northernmost archival collections covered by Yerusha are in Helsinki while the southernmost ones are in Crete, Greece. We are working in all types of holding institutions, from large state archives like the Belgian National Archives or the Hungarian National Archives to small Jewish community archives, for example in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Yerusha is not a closed project. In the coming months we will upload additional materials from Poland, Hungary, Finland, and Portugal, and next year we will extend our surveys to so-far unexplored collections across Europe.

Dr Gabor Kadar is the Director of the Yerusha Project

g.kadar@rothschildfoundation.eu

Figure 1:  Header of the the Yerusha Project portal

Key Documents of German-Jewish History

Dr Anna Menny, Project Leader and Coordinator of the Key Documents,
Institute for the History of the German Jews

Christopher Steinbiß, Student Assistant, Institute for the History of the German Jews

With more than 200 sources ranging from personal documents as letters and journals to three-dimensional models of historic synagogue buildings, the online source edition “Key Documents of German-Jewish history” presents a variety of material focused on Hamburg’s Jewish history from the early modern period to the present. The Hanseatic city is at the same time considered as a lens for larger developments as it stands for peculiarities within the developments in its 400-year long Jewish history, such as the living-together of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews. Hamburg’s Jewish history is considered in a national, transnational, and global context. Beyond their significance for local history, the sources are meant to “open doors” to understanding broader developments and questions in (German-)Jewish history. Edited and coordinated by the Institute for the History of the German Jews (Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, IGdJ), the edition first went online in September 2016. It has been funded by the DFG until January 2021.

As Hamburg’s Jewish heritage has been scattered all over the world due to migration and persecution, the source edition aims to digitally reconnect key components of this heritage. The online source edition provides its material in the form of a digital facsimile of the source accompanied by a transcript and an interpretive text. Users may navigate the website in a variety of ways. One can explore the different topics of Jewish history in Hamburg, ranging from demographics and social structures to religion and identity. Every thematic category is presented with an introductory article and a list showing relevant sources (Key Documents). Additionally, a map as well as a timeline are provided to navigate the collection. Besides the different ways of discovering sources, the Key documents also provide a multitude of advanced formats such as online exhibitions, dossiers, city tours, and materials for educators. The different formats aim to open new perspectives on important research questions and topics of (Hamburg’s) Jewish history and at the same time (re)arrange the source material in order to make larger contexts visible. The entire edition is bilingual and available in German as well as English.

By presenting previously little studied sources and putting familiar archival documents in new context and formats, new impulses for study and research are to be encouraged. The transcripts are tagged according to the Text Encoding Initiative based on the format TEI P5 (“Base Format” of the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA-Basisformat, DTABf)) in their basic structure (such as document type, pages, paragraphs, headlines) and annotated with norm data for names, places, organizations or historical epochs according to the Integrated Authority File (Gemeinsame Normdatei, GDN) or the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN). Special terms are explained by glossary entries. The transcripts themselves apply to the guidelines of a “documentary edition,” which means that they are presented as original and as exactly as possible. All sources are accompanied by interpretation texts which base their arguments directly on the sources and thus make larger questions comprehensible by means of a concrete example.

Additional information is given by linking to further online offers of the IGdJ or between different entries within the Key Documents edition as well as by the Linked Data Service and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek’s (DNB) Entityfacts service. Through SeeAlso-services dynamically connected content by third party providers such as biographical articles in the Allgemeine and Neue Deutsche Biografie (ADB/NDB) or relevant estates, manuscripts, and print publications catalogued by Kalliope and library networks can be tagged.

Considering different levels of knowledge and of in-depth analysis is all the more necessary since the target audience of the source edition consists of students, researchers, and teachers, as well as the interested public and high school students.

Almost all sources found in the edition can be downloaded for research and private purposes. Also, the institute provides its source code for other projects via Github.

Thanks to close cooperation between the publishers and the authors of the interpretation texts, no source is left uncontextualized. The plurality of authors with different interests and thematic emphases guarantees that new research trends and questions are reflected within the edition. The project is ever evolving and keen to grow the collection and improve user experience.

The Key Documents of German-Jewish History can be accessed by the following link: https://jewish-history-online.net/. For actual development and news, you can follow us on Twitter:  @keydocuments. Proposals for new contributions or requests for further information can be made via E-Mail: info@juedische-geschichte-online-net

Figure 1:  Header of the online edition “Key Documents of German-Jewish History”

Figure 2:  Digital presentation and tagging of the source material

Dutch Elite Jews, the Dutch Biography Portal and Nodegoat

Sietske van der Veen
PhD Candidate at the Huygens Institute and Utrecht University

The Dutch Biography Portal or BioPort, hosted by the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam, Netherlands, holds biographies from over 25 biographical dictionaries and datasets. Together, they contain information on more than 80,500 deceased prominent figures with a connection to the Netherlands or its former colonies. Among them are hundreds of Jews.

The Dutch Biography Portal homepage. Left: Jewish entrepreneur and politician Aron van Dam (1881-1942).

Although biographies collected by the Jewish Cultural Quarter used to be incorporated in BioPort (unfortunately, the current urls are dead), and the Jewish Biographical Dictionary will hopefully be a part of it in the near future, BioPort, in essence, is not the obvious source for looking at Jewish history. However, for my PhD project, in which I research how Jewish members of the Dutch elite seized novel opportunities and dealt with challenges with regard to integration between 1870 and 1940, the ‘prominence’ of Jews in BioPort makes them a suitable proxy for Dutch elite Jews during this period.

To be able to analyse the lives of around 730 individuals born between 1850 and 1920 in a systematic way, I use humanities tool Nodegoat, developed by LAB1100. Nodegoat is an online, free, object-oriented database tool that allows researchers to build their own data model and filter, visualise, and analyse information through networks, time and space. The tool has an accessible interface and very useful features that keep on being updated, such as a GIS-functionality and the possibility to download data in CSV, JSON, XML or ODT formats. LAB1100 offers excellent introductory workshops for Nodegoat, and a paid version of the tool is available for larger research teams in need of regular support. Its popularity is steadily increasing, and whereas Nodegoat is particularly appropriate for network analysis, I would also like to emphasise its efficiency in serving as a digital repository for large quantities of data – on people, but also on other entities (‘objects’ in Nodegoat), such as manuscripts, buildings or organisations.

Nodegoat serves as a modern sort of card index, enabling me to flip easily through my data and sort information quickly and accurately. In doing so, it is possible to see at a glance which (sometimes unexpected) topics deserve further inquiry. This is also very useful for my three case studies: Jewish women in the women’s movement, Jews in the Dutch East Indies and Jewish country house owners (in close collaboration with the Jewish Country Houses project). These case studies concern around 30 ‘BioPort people’ and their families each. With Nodegoat, I am able to discern patterns in the lives of large and diverse groups, without losing sight of these people as individual actors.

Visualisation in Nodegoat of Zionist organisations (red nodes) and their BioPort members (blue nodes).

Manually building a database involves having control over all devised dimensions and variables, and requires researchers to be as specific as possible in what they want to know. In my view, Nodegoat is well suited for qualitative studies that include quantitative elements, like my own project. Not only does the tool provide a worthwhile means to store, filter, analyse and visualise data, at the same time it offers possibilities to verify scholarly notions, in this case about Jewish social mobility and integration, in a fresh way.

Footprints in Frankfurt: Tracing the Circulation of Early Hebrew Books

Kerstin von der Krone
Head of Judaica Division, University Library Frankfurt am Main
(k.vonderkrone@ub.uni-frankfurt.de)

Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place (https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu) is a database project that documents information on the circulation of Jewish books. Established in 2014 by Michelle Chesner, Majorie Lehmann, Adam Shear and Joshua Teplinsky Footprints brings together Jewish Studies scholars and dedicated librarians with a shared interest in Book History and Digital Humanities.

Image information: Footprints record for פלאן אונד איינריכטונג איינר הייאראטש גזעללשאפט
(Plan und Einrichtung einer Heiratsgesellschaft), Berlin 1776, Call number: Jud. Germ. 765. 

Footprints database (https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/footprint/19594/)

The Footprints database records information on the circulation of individual copies of Jewish books from the inception of the printing press in the 15th century until ca. 1800. A footprint is defined (https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu/help/) as “a moment in time when we can place a book-copy in a particular place and/or with a particular person (an owner, a librarian, someone seeing the book, a giver, a subscriber, a censor [expurgator], etc.).“ Data is collected based on a defined set of evidence types and actors roles using controlled vocabularies. Footprint entries of a respective individual copy are linked to each other and to the work title.  The database integrates information from the Bibliography of the Hebrew Book (BHB, https://www.nli.org.il/en/research-and-teach/catalogs#hebrew). The BHB number serves as the permanent identifier. Footprints is an open source project (Github https://github.com/ccnmtl/footprints).

A key feature of the Footprints project are collaborations – with researchers and projects with shared interests in book history. In addition, Footprints has established collaborative projects with institutions that host significant collection of Jewish books. One of those projects Footprints in Frankfurt: Provenance of Early Hebraica in the University Library Frankfurt am Main aimed to survey Hebrew and Yiddish books from Frankfurt’s outstanding Judaica Division, the largest of its kind in Germany. Its significant historical holdings – manuscripts, incunabula, old prints – were gifted to the Stadtbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, the predecessor of the University Library, by Frankfurt Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From September 2019 to November 2020 Dr. Lucia Raspe as scholar in residence for Footprints in Frankfurt, supported by library staff, examined two distinct collections: the Hebrew Incunabula with 72 items and the Yiddish Prints prints collection with 626 items, and was able to identify and record more than 1.100 footprints. The project added a significant amount of data on Yiddish works and on footprint locations in German-speaking lands, including smaller places beyond the centers of Hebrew printing. Moreover, the collection of Yiddish Prints produced about 30 footprints from religious and literary works, most significantly Tze’ena uRe’ena Bibles and Yiddish prayer books, that give evidence of women as book owners and readers as well as benefactors. And finally, the project provided significant insights into the history of the Frankfurt collection, identifying former owners for about 60% of books surveyed. 

Adding new data with unique features something requires adjusting the database itself. Through Footprints in Frankfurt records on Yiddish works were to be added that are not listed in the BHB. Since creating the Footprints database the BHB number is used as the permanent identifier. An alternate identifier was needed and found in through the newly established Yiddish Union Catalogue of the National Library of Israel (https://merhav.nli.org.il/primo-explore/search?search_scope=ULY&vid=ULY&lang=en_US&offset=0&fromRedirectFilter=true).

With Footprints in Frankfurt the University Library aimed as well to enrich catalog data on its old Hebraica with information on provenance and circulation. At the beginning of the project librarians created a spreadsheet combining the Footprints data model with additional data fields, i.e. to record authority data following German standards (GND, https://gnd.network/Webs/gnd/EN) and add a controlled vocabulary for provenance information used in Frankfurt. As part of the project, catalogue records for more than 700 Hebraica were revised and if necessary corrected. Adding Footprints data to the catalogue, however, required an additional processing step. Data of all footprints related to an individual title had to be compiled into one singly entry which is added to the respective catalog record as provenance information (“Details zum Vorbesitz“). This data field was the most practical way to add footprints data in accordance with local cataloguing regulations. However, footprints data reaches beyond provenance information and includes a broader spectrum of evidence types on the circulation of Jewish books.

Librarians at the University Libraries Judaica Division will continue to document footprints as part of their cataloguing routine, and create additional records for the footprints database.