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"From one end of the Earth […] unto the other end of the Earth": Changing perceptions of the world in late-nineteenth-century Jewish journalism

Mon, December 17, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cambridge 2

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, new and improved communication and transportation technologies expanded what was seen as "the known world". This was not caused by new geographical knowledge but rather a growing relevance of distant parts of the earth. This was especially true for the interconnected Jewish world, which readily utilized steam boats, railway lines, postal carriages and telegraphs, to communicate between remote and faraway communities. Accordingly, many late-nineteenth-century Jewish journals describe their readership, authorship and content as global rather than local. The exact definition of "globalness" in the eyes of these journals is not revealed. Nevertheless, this illusive concept, which rarely refers to the whole world, is meaningful since it mixes contemporary perceptions of geography, culture, race, and politics.
This paper explores the changing perceptions of the geographical world as reflected by contemporary Jewish media. Recent digitization of nineteenth century Jewish journals, such as the Jerusalem-based Ha-Me'asef and the central-European Ha-Tsfira, enables a deeper understanding and analysis of the dynamic Jewish view of the world through the use of computer-based visualizations. Digital tools, such as Geographic Information Systems and Network Visualization are applied in order to make sense of the hidden data. However, as this paper will show, digital tools, maps and networks are only a first step towards a historical interpretation as the latter requires a closer and in-depth reading of the computer-based-results and their contextualized meanings.

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