This project aims to explore volumes of Oriental, Hebraic and rabbinic texts that crossed the Atlantic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were available as reading materials in institutional and private libraries. Though hidden in plain sight, recognition of these libraries of “Christian rabbinism” - that is, Christian interest in post-Biblical Jewish history and in comparative Semitic scholarship, and its arrival in the Western Hemisphere - requires a shift of attention that now has become possible thanks to a new generation of research on the subject.
The first Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah project initiative took as its subject the dispersed corpus of Isaac Leeser's correspondence, the entire run of the Occident, and his publications.
Robert Singerman's Digital Judaica Americana II authoritatively chronicles American Jewish book production from the 17th century to the beginning of the twentieth century. This site serves as an update to Singerman's first edition of Judaica Americana, issued in 1990 in two volumes. With an additional ~3,000 additional entries, the revised total now consists of a still expanding sum of approximately 9,600 entries. Taken as a whole, Singerman’s bibliography provides extensive and verified documentation of American Jewish communal activity and growth before 1901.
The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica, donated to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries in 2012 by the Kaplans, and growing each year, teaches us about the everyday lives, families, communal institutions, religious organizations, voluntary associations, businesses, and political circumstances of Jewish life throughout the western hemisphere over four centuries. It also provides a unique window into the changing character of colonial and early American life and culture in the United States. It documents changing perceptions and experiences of new worlds of space and time, not only from the perspective of its Jewish citizens but also in the context of the larger societies in which they have lived. The collection, in short, is more than the sum of its parts. It is the constellation of unlimited potential connections among its many pieces from the time of colonial settlement in the sixteenth century into the era of mass migration at the end of the 19th century.
The second Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah project initiative took as its subject the corpus of Sabato Morais' correspondence, lectures, sermons, and other writings.
The Early Modern Workshop (the EMW) This website presents a collection of primary sources dealing with different aspects of early modern Jewish history.
The Zucker Holy Land Travel Manuscript takes us on a tour through the Holy Land as it was known, geographically understood at the end of the 17th century.