Jerusalem Post: Project underway to digitalize Hebrew books from Italian-Jewish history. “A project was launched to create a bilingual Italian-Hebrew database of 35,000 volumes, covering Italian-Jewish life from the sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth century.”
San Diego Jewish World: Museum of the Hebrew Language planned in Jerusalem. “The museum will supplement the [Academy of the Hebrew Language]’s ongoing activities of writing a historical dictionary of Hebrew, covering the language’s development from approximately the 12th Century BCE, and also serving as an Internet resource for people who want to know how a word from a foreign language can be translated into Hebrew. Questions may be asked of the Academy’s volunteer experts via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.”
Anash: Newest Kehos Books Online for All. “Over the past few months, HebrewBooks.org has been uploading hundreds of the newest Kehos seforim to their online database, including those just published for the first time.”
BuzzFeed News: Israel Election: Twitter Suspended Dozens Of Hebrew-Language Accounts Run By A Strange Chinese Religious Sect. “Twitter has suspended dozens of suspicious Hebrew-language accounts run by a controversial Chinese religious group ahead of Israel’s national elections, BuzzFeed News has learned. It’s at least the second such suspension in the run-up to the elections, but the company is saying little about what actions it took or why. Nor is it clear what the religious group’s goals were before Twitter’s enforcement actions.”
British Library: Download Hebrew Manuscripts for free, in partnership with BL Labs. “We are delighted to announce that five more downloadable datasets containing a total of 139 digitised Hebrew Manuscripts have just been published online here, bringing the total number of Hebrew datasets to 22, and 723 manuscripts. These manuscripts were digitised as part of The Polonsky Foundation Catalogue of Digitised Hebrew Manuscripts (2013-2016), and we are able to provide them to download and reuse as part of the British Library Labs project (BL Labs).”
British Library: The Judeo-Persian manuscript collection in the British Library. “The newly launched Judeo-Persian collection guide is an important and valuable addition to the British Library’s repertoire of Middle Eastern on-line resources, that have been made accessible to increasing numbers of researchers and users worldwide. Additionally, as part of our on-going Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project, we have already digitised 34 Judeo-Persian manuscripts and will continue to do more in the months ahead.”
Penn Today: Reclaiming a fragmented history . “Harnessing the power of human cooperation, digital humanities scholars at Penn Libraries are orchestrating an epic effort to sort and transcribe handwriting on thousands of documents discarded hundreds of years ago. Through an innovative new website built by the Penn team in collaboration with Zooniverse, an online platform for crowdsourced research, citizen scholars can help analyze the digitized texts, which are written in five Hebrew and three Arabic scripts, some of them exceedingly rare.”
Times of Israel: British Library publishes treasure trove of Hebrew manuscripts. “The British Library last week published a new website showcasing 1,300 Hebrew manuscripts, ranging from ancient Torah scrolls and prayer books to philosophical, theological and scientific works. The new site is the library’s first bilingual online collection, allowing users to search for scans of the manuscripts in Hebrew and English.” If this is ringing a bell it’s because I mentioned it in March when the first 100 manuscripts went up. Now it’s a lot bigger…
National Library of Israel: Historic Moment: The Günzburg Collection Made Public to the Jewish World. “An historic agreement will be signed in Jerusalem on 7 November 2017 between the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, the Russian State Library in Moscow, and the Moscow-based Peri Foundation regarding the future of the Günzburg Collection, which includes some of the most important Hebrew manuscripts and books in the world. Through the generous support of the Peri Foundation, 2,000 manuscripts and thousands of books in the collection will be digitized, making these significant works accessible online to both institutions as well as to the general public.”
New-to-me: Israel National News: Epic quest to document ‘miracle’ of Hebrew language. “Called the Historical Dictionary Project at Israel’s Academy of the Hebrew Language, it will serve as an invaluable resource for scholars, writers and linguists. But it will also act as an anchor for Hebrew, the ancient language revived in spoken form in the 19th century after some 1,700 years. Work completed so far is already available to the public online.” More information about the project is available at http://en.hebrew-academy.org.il/historical-dictionary-project/ .
The British Library has completed phase I of its Hebrew manuscript digitization project. “This phase has taken 3 years, 435,307 image captures and 37TB of storage space, an incredible achievement by a dedicated team of conservators (including a specialist textile conservator), photographers, cataloguers and quality control officers, with expert support from Lead Curator Ilana Tahan, and enriching digital scholarship including the creation of our website and 3D models.”
The British Library is entering the homestretch of its Hebrew Manuscript digitizing project. “Our followers and readers will be delighted to learn that over 760 Hebrew manuscripts have now been uploaded to the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts. Generously funded by The Polonsky Foundation, the Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project aims at digitising and providing free on-line access to well over 1250 Hebrew handwritten books from the Library’s collection. The project, which began in 2013 is due for completion in June 2016, when the full complement of manuscripts will be available to a global audience.”
The full run of the Jewish Book Annual — 1942 to 1999 — is now available as a digital archive. “Published by the Jewish Book Council, or JBC, from 1942 through 1999, Jewish Book Annual was for many decades a trilingual journal, with distinct sections in English, Hebrew and Yiddish that included a review of the previous year in Jewish literature, a complete bibliography in fiction, nonfiction and children’s books, and essays on important figures and events on the Jewish literary scene.” I went and took a look and browsed through the first issues. It appears to be free.
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