Fantastic Books and Where to Find Them: Isaiah Sonne and the Quest for Hebrew Books

• In Event: Early Modern Jewish Books in the Mediterranean

Abstract

The present paper proposes a case study on the collection of incunabula, early printed books and manuscripts belonged to the Jewish Galician scholar Isaiah Sonne (1887-1960), a major albeit almost forgotten representative of the so called “third generation” of the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars. While looking at the correspondence and booklists preserved in the “Isaiah Sonne Papers” at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, it is possible to understand clearly that the purchase, study and saving of manuscripts and old rare books was one of the scholar’s primary activities and interests. 
Through close examination of the materials already gathered there in 2016 as well as in Jerusalem at the Ben-Zvi Institute, at the National Library of Israel’s Archives Department and at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, I will reconstruct the network of intellectual exchanges between the scholar and his acquaintances (colleagues, librarians, bookdealers, etc.), investigating, more in general the spread of Jewish books in the Diaspora in relation to their cultural, epistemological and religious values and the movement and trade of Hebrew manuscripts and early modern printed books, in particular.

Author

• Martina Mampieri, Sapienza University of Rome/Harvard University