Early Example of Modern Jewish Scholarship Digitized

by ROBERTA NEWMAN

The core of YIVO’s rare book collections once belonged to the world-famous Strashun Library in Vilna (today, Vilnius, Lithuania). This library was looted by the Nazis, but remnants survived and were brought to YIVO in New York after the war. Other Strashun Library books came to light in Vilnius in the late 1980s and are now being digitized as part of this project.

Matthias (Matisyahu) Strashun (1817-1885) was an important book collector, who amassed about 6,000 books over the course of his lifetime.  He bequeathed his collection to the Vilna Jewish community, which used it as the basis for a public Jewish library, which soon became one of the great Jewish libraries of Europe.

Most of the books in Strashun’s private collection were in Hebrew and the collection contains many rare rabbinical works and other religious books. But Strashun himself was a maskil, an adherent of the Haskalah, a movement that promoted modernization and reform of Jewish communal and intellectual life. As such, his library also contained secular Hebrew works.  

This book, Ha-Paliṭ (The Remnant) is from the collection of the public Strashun Library. It’s a catalogue of eighty valuable Hebrew manuscripts in the possession of the well-known Hebrew printer Mordecai Bisliches (1786-1851). The catalog was compiled by Leopold Zunz (Yom Tov Lippmann, 1794-1886), a leading founder of the German movement Wissenschaft des Judentums, the first expression of modern Jewish scholarship. The volume was published in Berlin in 1850 by Bisliches and includes notes and examples of Jewish literature by the noted Russian-French Jewish scholar Senior Sachs (Shneur Zaks, 1816-1892).  

Like many of the rare books in YIVO’s collection, Ha-Paliṭ contains stamps and inscriptions that attest to the other hands it passed through before ending up in the YIVO Library in New York. In addition to the stamp identifying it as being from the public Strashun Library, the book also bears the stamp (left) of Shemu’el Yosef Fuenn (1818-1890), a leading member of the Vilna Haskalah , whose library was acquired by the Strashun Library. 

Roberta Newman is YIVO’s Director of Digital Initiatives.