“One Should Always Write His Name in His Book”: The Material Context of Book Collecting among Medieval Ashkenazi Jews

Books lay at the foundation of Jewish culture, providing a body of knowledge and experience applicable to all areas of Jewish life. In the absence of public or institutional book repositories, like university and monastic libraries that we find among Christians, the encounter of medieval Jews with this vast body of knowledge commonly took place in Jewish homes. However, the questions of who actually owned books and how many volumes were found in an average Jewish private book collection have been not systematically studied. The same uncertainty holds true for the composition and functions of Jewish book collections and the ways they were created, organized, and maintained.

Building on a premise that important facets of Jewish book culture remain hidden when books are studied individually, this paper examines Ashkenazi manuscripts in the context of the book collections from which they derived and highlights the collections’ material dimensions. To do so, the paper analyses a range of evidence found in Ashkenazi book lists (only one of which has been hitherto published), Christian protocols of confiscations of Jewish property, rabbinic sources, and manuscripts that were found in Ashkenazi homes in the Middle Ages. Rather than approaching the book collecting from the more common perspective of literary content, this paper aims to explore how the books as objects were circulated, personalized, stored, and handled by their owners.