The Transformations in the Culture of Reading among Lithuanian Jews in the 2nd Half of the 19th Century to the 1st half of the 20th Century

• In Event: New Approaches to Cultural Identity Research: Changing Self-Perception of Lithuanian Jewish and Karaite Communities in the Process of Emancipation

Abstract

The presentation is dealing with the changes in the culture of reading within the Jewish community of Vilnius and Lithuania during the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th century that were crucial in forming its unique communal identity. It analyzes the transformation of the readers’ audience with regard to gender and age, in the supply of reading materials and the means of their distribution, from printing houses to libraries to educational system. There were several periods of critical importance for those changes: the third decade of the 19th century when Lithuania became a center of Jewish Enlightenment – Haskalah movement in Russian Empire, and the inter-war period when the community undergone yet more radical modernization. The presentation analyzes the processes and the phenomena of the transformation and concludes with a notion of the extreme versatility in readers’ tastes and needs, as well as in means of satisfying them, that the community reached on the eve of its annihilation during the Nazi occupation.
The presentation is based largely on the research of the Judaica collection of printed and manuscript documents at the National Library of Lithuania, a big part of which was only discovered recently and has been only minimally presented in scholarly works.

Author

• Lara Lempert, National Library of Lithuania (Lithuania)