The A.S. Yahuda Project is a collaborative venture of the libraries and museums that acquired manuscripts, documents and objects from the collector and dealer Abraham Shalom Yahuda.
Between 1922 and his death in 1951, Yahuda sold or donated materials to libraries in Europe, the United States and Palestine. Our team has to date identified seven collections that contain Yahuda materials:
- The Chester Beatty (Dublin)
- The National Library of Israel (Jerusalem)
- The National Library of Medicine (Washington, DC)
- Princeton University Library
- The University of Heidelberg Library
- The University of Michigan Library
- The University of Pennsylvania Library
The A.S. Yahuda project has four goals:
- Tracing the rich and multi-layered history of books and knowledge in the Islamic world.
- Sleuthing out the sources of modern collections of manuscripts (in this case, in Arabic).
- Understanding the technique, approach and work of collectors and brokers of manuscripts and other rare materials, starting with the especially prolific and well-documented activities of A. S. Yahuda.
- Developing a model for collaboration across holding institutions — including linked web portals, parallel digitization efforts and digital interoperability.
Knowledge traveled in the premodern Islamic world. People traveled in pursuit of knowledge. Scholars copied and exchanged books. Private and semi-private libraries evolved. As their owners and custodians deacquisitioned materials, collectors and dealers found new quarry to hunt. To know how knowledge and books traveled, we must first understand how the books made it into their current collections, and to do that, research is a first step.
Website created by Emma Sarconi, Princeton University