Beginning locally and working globally, this subproject takes as a starting point the rare book collections in Toronto, and connects these texts, their makers and users, with historical and modern-day communities across the globe. The University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (Fisher Library) holds a unique collection of Jewish texts, including Cairo Geniza fragments, medieval manuscripts, and an extensive collection of rare printed books from Istanbul. Together with Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, the two collections include books from the Jewish diaspora that span every area of the Jewish diaspora: Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, and beyond. These collections shed light on the use of texts, the practices of scribes and printers, and the experiences of Jewish communities in their local contexts. Subproject activities include scientific imaging and testing of books and manuscript fragments, public and academic lectures, and community-centered events that seek to uncover stories of the production, use, and travels of Jewish books from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Global Judaica is led by Hidden Stories postdoctoral scholar Noam Sienna (U of T), a scholar of premodern book culture within Jewish diasporic communities across Africa and Eurasia (see his forthcoming publication, Jewish Books in North Africa Between the Early Modern and Modern Worlds). His Hidden Stories research focuses on the rare Hebrew books held in the Friedberg Collection of the Fisher Library, and through studies of provenance, production, and use, works to connect these books and their stories to those in other global collections. 

Key collaborators include Alexandra Gillespie (Hidden Stories / U of T) and J.D. Sargan (University of Georgia) conducting research on the early Hebrew printing of the Arba’ah Turim (a Halakhic legal treatise) by the Ibn Nahmias brothers in late fifteenth-century Istanbul, and Kara Ma (PhD Candidate, U of T) working on Bishop White’s collection of Hebrew texts and objects from Kaifeng, China, now at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. The Global Judaica subproject is coordinated by Hidden Stories Research Associate Melissa Moreton (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), and supported by Nadav Sharon, Jewish Studies Librarian and Judaica Curator at the Fisher Library. The research team works broadly across disciplines, connecting with scholars in a range of global institutions, to share research on the production, circulation, and use of Jewish books. These include Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, whose research on early Jewish manuscript culture is central to our work with Fisher Library Geniza fragments, and the “Footprints: Jewish Books through Time and Place” initiative, a digital humanities project based at Columbia University that maps the spread of knowledge in the global Jewish diaspora through the history of the Jewish book.