How to do things with words in a digital key: the Minhag Amsterdam project

• In Event: Who’s Afraid of Numbers? Jewish Studies and the Prospects of Digital Humanities

Abstract

Prayer books are a fundamental yet often neglected part of the Jewish library. Being the product of many denominations, regions and centuries, the corpus encompasses a plethora of traditions, innovations and variations. To further complicate research it is scattered over numerous holdings. As part of the everyday entourage of Jewish religious life, the items are often deemed of limited value and overlooked by owners, collectors and librarians. Simultaneously they contain priceless information on Jewish religious culture past and present, to be studied diachronically and synchronically through a variety of disciplines, viz. history of religion, book history, history of material culture, cultural anthropology, history of scholarship and political history.
Together with various Amsterdam partners, the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies is currently developing a project that aims to instigate and facilitate such research. The ultimate aims of the overall project (Minhag Europa) are: (1) to make publically accessible all Jewish religious manuals printed in Europe since the beginning of print up to the present; (2) to create a digital infrastructure and computational tools that will allow for systematic comparative analysis of the material, and which can be adapted to other corpora; (3) to launch a public history project on religious manuals in the Jewish home.
In this session I would like to introduce the Minhag Amsterdam pilot that is currently under construction, from its technical and operational details and dilemmas down to — hopefully — its broader historiographical implications.

Author

• Irene Zwiep, Irene Zwiep