The advantage to working in a collection such as Columbia's, with its very deep and diverse resources, is that new and interesting materials pop up almost daily. A couple of months ago, I received a phone call that someone wanted to come and look at our Spinoza autograph. Columbia is home to the Oko-Gebhardt Spinoza […]
Tag: Rare_Books
Lecture: “Defining a Field: Jewish Books in the Age of Print”
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY BOOK HISTORY COLLOQUIUM: SPRING 2012 All programs are in Room 523, Butler Library, on the Columbia campus. Start time is 6:00 PM. For more information about the Book History Colloquium, please contact Karla Nielsen (kn2300@columbia.edu) April 19, 2012 Emile Schrijver (University of Amsterdam) "Defining a Field: Jewish Books in the Age of Print" […]
Staying on top of research: Rambi feeds and Google Reader
With so much work being published in so many different forums in today’s world, it is hard to know when relevant research is published. Enter a match made in heaven: RAMBI feeds and Google Reader! RAMBI, discussed earlier here, is a catalog of articles and chapters in the field of Jewish Studies. RAMBI allows scholars […]
General Grant and the Jews: The Election of 1868 and the Origins of Jewish Politics in the United States
Please join us for the very first Norman E. Alexander Lecture in Jewish Studies on October 3. Jonathan Sarna was named the "Official Historian" of the 350th Anniversary of Jews in America, and we are very excited to be hosting him at Columbia. We are very grateful for the generous gift of the Norman E. […]
“New” old books at CUL
While Columbia’s collection of Jewish Studies materials in its Rare Book and Manuscript Library is already extensive, we are still actively collecting "new" materials for our collection. Two recent purchases were made with the help of the Rabbi Nathan Stern fund for Semitic Studies: 1) A manuscript "Commonplace book" from America, c.1825, which includes "the […]
New Resource: Thesaurus of the Hebrew Book
I am pleased to announce that Columbia University Libraries has recently purchased the Vinograd Thesaurus of the Hebrew Book. This database, available only on DVD, is a very-much updated version of the print edition (located in Butler Reference: R016.4924 V56). This searchable database lists of all books printed in Hebrew characters from 1468-1948 (including Hebrew, […]
Hebrew mss @ CUL: Notes on Incunabula
The word manuscript comes from a combination of two Latin words (manu, meaning "hand"; and script, meaning "writing"). In the literal definition of the word, a manuscript is anything written by hand (as opposed to printed). The manuscript you see in this post would not be found as part of our "Hebrew manuscript collection," but […]
New Database: Bibliography of the Hebrew Book
I am very pleased to announce the addition of a new database to Columbia's Jewish Studies collection, the Bibliography of the Hebrew Book. This exceptional resource is a detailed database of approximately 90% of the books printed in Hebrew letters between 1470 and 1960 (Ladino and Judeo-Arabic books are all included; Yiddish books are not […]