Minhag Italia, Digital Approaches to Jewish Print Cultures: Nineteenth-Century Italian Prayer Books - The 18th World Congress of Jewish Studies

In this paper, I am going to present the main traits of my ongoing research project called “Minhag Italia”.

The aim of this project is to carry out a digital and conceptual analysis of nineteenth-century Italian prayer books, with the purpose of utilizing them as objects of historical inquiry. The tools I am using to carry out this analysis consist of an inventory and scanning of these prayer books, in order to enable a transcription with HTR software. This transcription will allow a more detailed digital textual analysis.

Prayer books encompass every aspect of Jewish life, from every day prayers to the special occasions of the High Holidays. For this reason, they are the most frequently printed book in Judaism. In spite of their prominence, they have received little academic attention, as they have been considered as stable factors, whose dynamics would be unworthy of analyses. Indeed, it is true that prayer books maintained a certain uniformity in time, but the small changes of the different editions can actually represent substantial changes in the political and cultural (self)perception of a specific Jewry, in a specific place and time. The digital analysis is used to single out and address exactly these variations. Interpreting the results of the digital analysis will be my task as scholar of Jewish Intellectual History.

For the transcription method, I have opted for eScriptorium, an online platform that uses the HTR software Kraken. This presents three advantages. 1) Being programmed for hand-written texts, it can reach an even higher reliability when applied to printed texts. 2) It can be applied to right-to-left languages very well, including Hebrew. 3) Users have already shared some tested models applied to Hebrew texts, which I could partly re-use.

At the conference, I will be able to present my approach and will be particularly looking forward to further suggestions and methodological advice from experts in the field.