Hrdinové a oběti bez ničemů. Mor v raně novověké Praze

19219

Old Texts and New Media: Jewish Books on the Move and a Case for Collaboration

Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place is a database and research project designed to trace books-in-motion. It brings together acts of careful individual research with large-scale quantification and mapping: using inscriptions, owner’s marks, and catalogues of copies of early Jewish printed books. The project is a cooperative endeavor of four project directors, both faculty and librarian, from different institutions each representing different fields of Jewish Studies. With the technical expertise of partners at a university-based center for teaching and learning, a mix of paid and volunteer student, post-doctoral, and library based researchers, the project directors have created a database that is transforming the way research on the history of the book is done. The chapter will address collaboration in three aspects: between project directors; between the project and its contributors (individual and institutional, public and private); and between contributors and users. The chapter argues for a new model of iterative projects that relies in part on networked collaboration rather than only on operations in concert by a small, bounded group

The End of Jewish Democracy in 18th Century Prague

One intriguing register for considering continuities and changes in Jewish life in the early eighteenth century is the constitution of the autonomous Jewish community, or kehillah. This institution of Jewish self-government was formed at the nexus of the imposition of governments, on the one hand, and Jewish collective investment in the legitimacy and utility of this form of association, on the other.. Although Jewish communal leadership appears to have been determined by elections in the earlier centuries of this period, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an increasing trend towards permanent ruling oligarchies can be discerned. A standing patriciate is in evidence in Frankfurt by the 1620s, and Prague, while it maintained a contentious partisan structure throughout the seventeenth century, succumbed to a permanent oligarchy in 1703. The following document represents the decisive moment (on November 10, 1703), when Emperor Leopold decreed an end to Jewish democracy in Prague, and replaced it with a standing governing body. Of particular note are a number of salient themes, including the relationship between royal/imperial fiat and Jewish self-government, the function of the kehilla as a tax-farming entity as the critical basis for its legitimacy in the eyes of the state, royal awareness of factionalism and strife among Jews, and, subtly but importantly, efforts by the Habsburg monarchy to bring Jewish administration into line with other denizens of the realm

Fluid Boundaries: Rivers and the Jewish Communities of Early Modern Ashkenaz

In this discussion we explore an aspect of space that is often overlooked in studies of Jewish life in the early modern period: the interactions between Jews and the natural world. Our session will focus around Jewish engagement with rivers, and how waterways shaped the spatial dimensions of daily life. In European settlements across the continent rivers bisect cities and towns, and were arteries of commerce, trade, and travel. Waterways also connected settlements, were a site of contact for non-elite Jews, and, as a force of nature, impacted the lives of Jewish and Christian neighbors. Rivers could be used as a resource for cleanliness and hygiene, but they also posed danger to residents during periods of excessive rain and flooding. The various rivers that we will discuss were both within and beyond human civilization. They were also a subject of legal conundra. Our discussion will revolve around three sources from Central Europe that examine the ways in which thinking with rivers can lead us to explore not only the human-made spaces of a landscape, but also the natural elements at their outer limits. Each source is from a different genre, yet each one highlights how a consideration of rivers enriches our understandings of Jewish and Christian spaces. One, drawn from custom literature, explores the topography of flooding and the experiences of rising water levels; another, drawn from the archives of Prague, explores class and religion from the perspective of state administration, and a third, from halakhic literature, demonstrates how rivers connected and divided urban and rural communities. Each source sheds light on an aspect of the experience of environment and the role of space in Jewish life, and together offer a portrait of the place of water as a zone of physical and cultural interaction

Footprints: A New Approach to (Jewish) Book History

This article describes and analyzes the methods of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place, a digital humanities contribution to book history. Footprints collects and aggregates information about the movement of copies of Hebrew books and books of Judaica in other languages printed in the early modern period (roughly corresponding to the hand-press era) and follows evidence of their movement into the twenty-first century. It stores this information in a relational database in which users can run specific queries and delivers the results in a number of visual representations for analysis and interpretation. Footprints undertakes two concurrent and more open-ended aims: (1) the on-going assemblage of a dataset about post-print mobility based on evidence other than the printed text (e.g. marginalia, catalog records, archival letters, other printed texts); and (2) the creation and iterative refining of a scholarly instrument to analyze the dataset through computational methods and modes of representation

Footprints: A New Approach to (Jewish) Book HIstory

This article describes and analyzes the methods of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place, a digital humanities contribution to book history. Footprints collects and aggregates information about the movement of copies of Hebrew books and books of Judaica in other languages printed in the early modern period (roughly corresponding to the hand-press era) and follows evidence of their movement into the twenty-first century. It stores this information in a relational database in which users can run specific queries and delivers the results in a number of visual representations for analysis and interpretation. Footprints undertakes two concurrent and more open-ended aims: (1) the on-going assemblage of a dataset about post-print mobility based on evidence other than the printed text (e.g. marginalia, catalog records, archival letters, other printed texts); and (2) the creation and iterative refining of a scholarly instrument to analyze the dataset through computational methods and modes of representation

Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place--Data 2021.06.01

This dataset comes from Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place. Data includes provenance data (names, dates, locations) related to editions (title, publication date, publication place, standard identifier) of specific works (title, author) and related notes. The hierarchy for the dataset is composed of "footprints" which are found in "copies" of "imprints" of "literary works," with "footprint being the most specific data point and "literary work" being the most general. Wherever possible, the standard identifier for imprints is the Bibliography of the Hebrew Book. Downloaded on June 1, 2021