Moses Zacuto’s Letters, Online and in Print

As part of the DFG-funded project “The Corpus of R. Moses Zacuto’s Correspondence and Lexica of Holy Names: Editions, Tools, and Database”, the letters of Rabbi Moses Zacuto (ca. 1610–1697) will be published as both a digital and a printed edition. The Corpus of Moses Zacuto’s Correspondence includes both private and official missives belonging to different genres and gives special consideration of his halakhic texts in the form of responsa. Once the digital platform is complete, a variety of digital tools will facilitate research on scholars, topics, and ties between different locations.

Elaborating on the paper “The Best of Both Worlds: Creating a New Edition of Moses Zacuto’s Letters in Print and Online” by Maximilian de Molière and Vladislav Slepoy, the proposed poster will showcase the digital infrastructure, the workflow, and tools used to realize the project. First, the metadata of each letter is collected in an Airtable database, enabling researchers to systematically compare and locate letters from different manuscripts with each other. Once this stage is complete, the metadata are converted into the TEI-XML for further processing. Different text versions of letters are collated algorithmically and form the basis for both the printed and digital editions.

The printed edition is generated through XSLT-scripts which transform the XML data into LaTeX and then into a PDF file. For the digital platform TEI-Publisher is used which is customized to the demands of our project. Different textual versions of the letters can be displayed in parallel, enabling researchers to quickly identify the major stages in the transmission history of Zacuto’s correspondence. Extensive commentaries will elucidate the contents of the correspondence. And information on the text witnesses, other metadata and permanent links will ensure that scholars can work with a reliable resource. Moreover, the digital edition will highlight persons, places, citations, and other notable entities and link to comprehensive index entries. This feature will allow recognizing patterns and connections within the letter corpus for the first time.

We hope that the methods showcased in this poster will encourage others to produce digital editions of Jewish texts.