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Supported by the Henry Schwartzman Endowed Faculty Seminar Fund
What is a Jewish book? How has it evolved from antiquity to the present? Join us to explore how Jewish ideas have been transmitted over the centuries—from oral traditions to handwritten manuscripts, from printed books to computer code.
Joseph A. Skloot, professor of modern Jewish intellectual history at Hebrew Union College in New York, will examine the vast history of Jewish texts and tackle key questions, such as what makes a work holy or canonical. He will offer a behind-the-scenes look at a Hebrew print shop in sixteenth-century Bologna, Italy, and also reflect on twenty-first century initiatives such as Sefaria.org, an online library that houses 3,000 years of Jewish texts. This talk will also share stunning images from Hebrew Union College’s collection of early Hebrew books.
Cosponsored by the Rutgers Initiative for the Book
Joseph A. Skloot is Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual History at Hebrew Union College in New York. A scholar of Jewish culture and religious thought in the early-modern and modern periods, his work explores the history of Hebrew books, Jewish-Christian relations, the development of Jewish law, and Reform Jewish theology. His first book, First Impressions: Sefer Ḥasidim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing (Brandeis University Press, 2023), addresses the ways in which sixteenth-century Hebrew printers (both Jewish and Christian) transformed a heterogeneous corpus of manuscripts into a canonical book. Skloot is currently at work on two projects: a biography of three generations of the ibn Yahya family, exiles from Portugal who became leaders of the sixteenth-century Italian Jewish community; and a study of the ways that technologies of printing and digitization have influenced how Jewish thinkers understand what it means to be a human being and a Jew.
Tractate Berakhot (Venice, 1519); Used with permission of HUC-JIR Klau Library.