Daily Podcasts Video Research

The Great Jewish Manuscript Sell-Off

JL;DR SUMMARY David Sclar discusses the problematic decision by cultural institutions, like the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), to sell rare Hebrew manuscripts and historical documents due to financial pressures. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

JL;DR members get full summaries of all articles in the archive, including this one. Donate & start reading »

Tags

Jewish Theological SeminaryAcademic IntegrityCultural HeritageScholarly ResearchManuscriptsPreservationHistorical DocumentsFinancial PressuresLuzzattoLibrary Collections

Places mentioned

New York, United States
"Built as an essential arm of the seminary itself, it became, by scope, depth, and ambition, the greatest Judaica collection ever assembled."
Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
"As Dave Yost, the attorney general of Ohio, who intervened to prevent Hebrew Union College from selling rare materials, stated, These sacred texts were entrusted to Hebrew Union with the promise that they would be preserved for the benefit of scholars and researchers worldwide."
Israel
"The collection of Luzzatto letters once housed in the JTS Library date from the 1720s and 1730s. Sent to and from disparate towns throughout northern Italy and beyond, they were meticulously consolidated in the 18th century."
Tiberias, Central District, Israel
"One would be hard-pressed to state that the Hebrew travel ledger, compiled by a rabbi from Tiberias who had toured Jewish communities in Europe some two centuries earlier, fell outside the bounds of the librarys mission."
Padua, Italy
"Immortalized by Hayim Nahman Bialik in the essay Ha-bahur mi-Padova (The Young Man From Padua), Luzzatto was later regarded as a formative figure in modern Hebrew literature and as an influence on thinkers as different as Moses Mendelssohn, Israel Baal Shem Tov, and the Lithuanian rabbinic ethicist Israel Salanter."
Hameln, Lower Saxony, Germany
"Glikl of Hameln set down her memoir not as literature but as a record of a world that could not be trusted to endure."
Vilnius, Vilnius County, Lithuania
"And in the 1940s, when the Nazis set out to murder Jews and erase longstanding contributions, the Paper Brigade in Vilna rescued books and manuscripts from destruction, Cecil Roth kept writing history amid the German blitz, and, at JTS itself, Saul Lieberman produced the influential Greek in Roman Palestine."

Support this source

This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 75707
Cairo Source ID 10
Retrieved 2026-02-19 05:31:40 UTC
Curated 2026-02-19 08:31:05 UTC