A 2023 gift from a downsizing library has led to a surprise-filled trove of Hebrew materials for the Libraries and an ambitious cataloguing project for a Northwestern senior.
The nearly 3,000-book gift was so full of rarities and delightful discoveries that when Jewish Studies associate Prof. Hanna Seltzer was invited to see it, she described the moment later with, “Every two minutes I would shout, ‘Oh my gosh!’”
In 2022, Barry Wimpfheimer, associate professor of Religious Studies, passed word to Northwestern Libraries that Hebrew College in Newton, Mass., was downsizing its library in preparation for relocating its campus.
Wimpfheimer had worked with the Hebrew College collection previously and “he knew it was exceptional and well curated,” said Jewish Studies librarian Geoff Morse. With Wimpfheimer’s help initiating the conversation, the Libraries were all too happy to receive the gift from the college’s Rae and Joseph Gann Library, Morse said.
The books arrived with some cataloging information already, but they needed more to make them all discoverable and available to the academic community. Since the previous selector for Hebraica (Hebrew language materials) retired in 2022, Northwestern Libraries needed to find a quick solution to accelerate the processing of the gift.
Enter Jonathan Mazor ’25, now a senior majoring in statistics and Jewish studies. After his 2023 hiring at the recommendation of a faculty member, Mazor got a crash course in cataloging. He has been working with the books one by one ever since: researching each title, recording its details and condition, summarizing its content, finding records — or lack thereof — in the worldwide catalogue database.
“A lot of these books are so obscure and so rare, sometimes no other library has a copy, or maybe they are only present in a private collection,” he said.
The results of his cataloguing have resulted in pleasant discoveries of rare material, especially ones with direct ties to the 18th and 19th century Haskalah movement, a period of philosophical and cultural self-examination among European Jews, Seltzer said. Books written in the time of this so-called Jewish Enlightenment also had an enormous influence on the modern iteration of the ancient language of Hebrew.
The title page of a translation and reimagining of “Robinson Crusoe” in Hebrew by David Zamośź
At a crowded March seminar hosted by the Libraries to raise awareness about these books, Seltzer shared her enthusiasm for many of the discoveries, such as a reimagined version of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, translated into Hebrew from German by Jewish author David Zamośź in the 1780s. According to Seltzer, Zamośź’s version exemplifies the evolution of modern Hebrew during the Haskalah, showing how translators grappled with the vocabulary of contemporary language by inventing new words in Hebrew to match.
Nowhere was this evolution more prominent than in a Hebrew translation of the 1843 novel Les Mystères de Paris. The original novel by Eugène Sue, published in 1843, was wildly popular adventure fiction about the Paris underworld. Kalman Schulman’s translation of the gritty and salacious-for-its-time novel is “revolutionary” in the history of modern Hebrew language and literature, Seltzer said.
“If you can take the Hebrew language and write about prostitution, you can write about anything,” she said.
That volume of Les Mystères is one of perhaps 2,000 known copies, she said. “This is why I screamed at the library,” she laughed.
The rich diversity of translated works brings its own challenges to the cataloguer tasked with describing a work, Mazor said.
“Sometimes when I see a translation, I have to ask, ‘Does the translation become its own work of literature?’” he said. “A lot of these writers took it upon themselves to not only to translate a work but also to improve it.”
After Mazor identifies particularly rare materials, they are sent to the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives. The rest will be shelved in the circulating collection.
As for Mazor, he’ll continue to work 10 hours a week at the Libraries until he graduates. There may be more cataloging work to go at that point, but at the very least he is content knowing he helped the library solve some mysteries — and some Mystères — about this trove.