THIS SYMPOSIUM HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL 2022.
All times are Eastern Daylight Time (GMT-5). There are separate registration links for each day of the symposium.
For more speaker biographies, sponsor and organizer information, please see the speaker and sponsors page.
Tuesday June 1, 2021 | Collections & Institutions
POSTPONED
9:15–9:30 | Opening
Marina Rustow | Why a Symposium on A. S. Yahuda?
9:30–11:00 | The Book Trade
Chair: Raquel Ukeles
Garrett Davidson | Notes on the Origins of the Princeton Yahuda Collection and its Acquisition
This paper, part of a larger work on the history of the Princeton University Collection of Islamic Manuscripts, began when I was a Friends of the Princeton University Library Research Fellow. As I was surveying the hadith manuscripts in the collection I found myself fascinated by the question of the origins of the collections and how they came to live there. Based on the archival sources held at Princeton, the National Library of Israel and elsewhere, this paper studies A.S. Yahuda as a collector examining his methods and tracing the most recent trajectories of the manuscripts in the collection and its arrival at Princeton.
Allyson Gonzalez | Provenance at the Limits of Cultural Pluralism, or, How to Act Like an Intermediary: Professor A.S. Yahuda and the International Trade of Manuscripts, Rare Books, and Objects
The Jerusalem-born scholar Abraham S. Yahuda (1877-1951) helped to shape the international trade of manuscripts, rare books, and objects during the first half of the twentieth century. This talk examines Yahuda’s role as an important intermediary in the circulation of these objects, while pointing to a broader culture of trading between scholars, academic institutions, and private and national repositories. Through an up-close study of several of Yahuda’s major transactions, this talk offers a picture of how the scholar created flexible networks for moving objects across borders during a period of modern European and American imperialism. At the same time, it also points to the impact of interconnected relations between scholars and major buyers across decades.
Dagmar Riedel | Codependency in Codicology: Descriptive Cataloguing and the Book Trade Abstract to come
11:30–13:00 | The Collections and Their Shape (1)
Chair: Deborah Schlein
Stephen Greenberg | A.S. Yahuda and the Army Medical Library: Life During Wartime
In 1940, with Europe already at war and the United States just beginning preparations for its inevitable entry into that conflict, the U.S. Army Medical Library (predecessor of the current National Library of Medicine) found the time and money to purchase from Abraham Yahuda a collection of 63 volumes containing 130 titles. This purchase is the bedrock of the NLM collection of Arabic and Persian medical manuscripts. The presentation will provide a historical context for both the library and the purchase, and explore how, with war looming for the library, it was able to commit almost a quarter of its acquisitions budget for the fiscal year 1940–41 to the Yahuda purchase.
Evyn Kropf | Agent and Architect: Yahuda’s Role in Developing the Islamic Manuscripts Collection at the University of Michigan
In the summer of 1925 while still based in Heidelberg, Abraham Shalom Yahuda offered to the British Museum a collection of more than 230 Arabic, Turkish and Persian manuscripts belonging to his brother — Isaac Benjamin Shlomo Ezekiel Yahuda, a dealer of books and manuscripts who had for many years supplied institutions and individuals (notably Ignaz Goldziher) from his base in Cairo. Though the Museum had been acquiring from the Yahuda brothers for years, on this occasion they declined the purchase and a colleague there brought the offer to the attention of University of Michigan professor Francis Wiley Kelsey — a respected classicist and archaeologist who was actively expanding the university’s holdings in antiquities, papyri and manuscripts. A.S. Yahuda redirected his offer to Kelsey and the resulting acquisition further defined the core of what would become the University’s Islamic Manuscripts Collection. A.S. Yahuda would go on to even more actively and successfully gather and place notable manuscripts in many other institutions and private collections, independent of his brother’s agency. In turn, the manuscripts of the Yahuda purchase would remain among the most significant preserved at Michigan. Reflecting on the nature and extent of A.S. Yahuda’s manuscript sourcing and dealing in the mid-1920’s, this paper explores his approach to negotiating the acquisition and establishing the significance of the collection of manuscripts placed at Michigan — as fashioned with respect to the collecting interests of the Museum and University, as recognized by the University’s representatives, and as demonstrated in subsequent decades of teaching and study.
Stefan Litt | The Non-Islamic Components of A. S. Yahuda’s Collection at the National Library of Israel
A. S. Yahuda’s strong focus on collecting Islamic manuscripts eclipses, to some extent, his other significant fields of interest. His bequest at the National Library of Israel comprises one-of-a-kind materials that Yahuda amassed during his lifetime or purchased on specific occasions. Most prominent are the collections of Isaac Newton’s theological papers, more than 1,000 documents from the Napoleonic era, about 260 Hebrew manuscripts, about 40 Christian manuscripts and historical documents, and a small number of rare Western and Hebrew incunables. Many of these items form the core of the special collections within the Humanities Collection at the National Library. The lecture will shed light on selected items and on their acquisition history.
Wednesday June 2, 2021 | Libraries & Translocations
POSTPONED
9:30-11:00 | The Collections and Their Shape (2)
Chair: Luke Yarbrough
Yusuf al-Uzbeki | نفائسالمخطوطاتالعربيةمنمجموعةيهوداالمقدسية – Treasures of the Arabic Manuscripts from the Yahuda Collections in Jerusalem
The total number of Arabic manuscripts that remained in Yahuda’s possession before his death amounted to 1134. He donated them to the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem (now the National Library of Israel), along with rare publications and various documents, his archive of his writings, and his scientific and literary papers. The number of titles in the manuscripts is about three thousand. This paper will detail them as follows: 10% are in Persian, Turkish and Caucasian languages. Nearly 400 manuscripts are not mentioned by Brockelmann. About a third of the books were written between the third and tenth centuries AH. A good number of them are distinguished by features such as being unique manuscripts or copied close to the date of their authors. Finally, there are more than 100 luxury Qurʾāns.
Ofir Haim | Provenance of the Safavid and Qajar Manuscripts in the Yahuda Collections at the NLI and Princeton
Among the numerous manuscripts preserved in the Yahuda collections at the National Library of Israel and Princeton University, a substantial portion appears to have been produced in Safavid and Qajar Iran. Written in Arabic and Persian, these manuscripts belong to a wide array of genres, notably Qurʾanic sciences, Shiʿite worship and poetry. Due to the lack of any record indicating the provenance of these manuscripts, it remains unclear how Yahuda gained access to these manuscripts. In this paper, I present several case studies regarding the history of these manuscripts and their possible geographical distribution. Particular attention is paid to notes, seals and marginalia in the manuscripts. Moreover, through Yahuda’s personal archive, I attempt to trace his contacts who were involved in the acquisition of these manuscripts. Based on these findings, I suggest the last location of the manuscripts before being sold to Yahuda.
Torsten Wollina | Phantom of the Library: The Yahuda Collection in Heidelberg
Why has the Yahuda collection in Heidelberg gone under the radar for the last eighty years? In the second half of the 1920s, Yahuda was involved in several bulk sales of manuscripts, e.g., to the University of Michigan Library and the Chester Beatty Library. Those sales are well attested from correspondence, archival sources and references to Yahuda in the manuscripts’ reference numbers. This is not the case for his Heidelberg collection. In this talk, I will make the case that there is a Yahuda collection in the University Library in Heidelberg by tracing my own encounter with it through the library’s catalogue, and will then assess its size based on an accession list, accession numbers in manuscripts and bibliographical annotations specific to Yahuda manuscripts found, e.g., in the University of Michigan Library. Second, I will offer some preliminary hypotheses as to why Heidelberg, of all German libraries, has a Yahuda collection, and why it remains unknown. In this section, I will rely on Yahuda’s correspondence (or lack thereof) and draw connections between his activities in the manuscript trade and his scholarly undertakings.
11:30–13:00 | Translocations
Chair: Marina Rustow
Boris Liebrenz | Abraham Yahuda and the Globalisation of the Middle Eastern Manuscript Market
“The manuscript business of Abraham Yahuda could be framed as part of a long tradition through which thousands of volumes from the Middle East ended up in western European and North American libraries. Since the seventeenth century, travelers, consuls, merchants, soldiers, and scholars were able to assemble significant collections of such artefacts. The question of where, through whose agency, or by what means they acquired their libraries is the subject of much recent scrutiny and not always easy to answer.
And yet, when looking at his predecessors, one thing immediately stands out: there was hardly anyone even remotely as successful as Abraham Yahuda. Which begs the fundamental question of how he was able to amass such unparalleled treasures.
An analysis of manuscript notes is unlikely to bring any concrete results in this regard, but reveals general trends in the local and trans-regional book markets. Expectedly, the Yahuda section of Princeton’s Garrett collection reveals many overlaps with the books collected by earlier dealers. At the same time, it will be argued that his activities mark a new stage in how manuscripts were collected in both the Middle East as well as Western Europe and North America.
This talk will build on the cataloguing of provenance data for some of the major European collectors of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman manuscripts up to the nineteenth century. Based on this source material, it will explore what sets Yahuda’s collecting apart from that of earlier periods and where he reflects trends in the manuscript market of the broader region.
Stefan Schorch | ‘A Well-Educated Occidental’: Some Insights into the Intellectual Background of A. Sh. Yahuda’s Dealing with Samaritan Manuscripts
Although a few Samaritan manuscripts came into European collections already in the seventeenth century, it was not before the 1870s that some libraries outside the Samaritan community were able to create collections large and multifarious enough to provide a representative overview of Samaritan literature. Starting in the early nineteenth century, A. Sh. Yahuda became a key figure as a dealer of Samaritan manuscripts. The presentation will provide a general conspectus of his activities in this regard, together with an analysis of their historical context and intellectual background.
Konrad Hirschler | A Case Study of Manuscript Translocations: A. S. Yahuda and the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Collection
This paper takes the example of a corpus of manuscripts that had a stable trajectory from the late medieval period to the early 20th century in order to discuss A. S. Yahuda’s role on the manuscript market. The Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Collection was endowed in Damascus in the late Mamluk period and is today the largest extant corpus of medieval manuscripts in the Syrian National Library. In contrast to other medieval collections, the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Collection has thus had an outstandingly stable trajectory. Yet, there are several manuscripts that have left the original corpus over the centuries and became part of library collections around the world. These translocated manuscripts took a different trajectory from manuscripts of other medieval collections in the region; most notably, these translocations occurred relatively late. Among them is a highly visible cluster that goes back to the trading activities of one individual, A. S. Yahuda, which is today in the National Library of Israel, Princeton University Library and the Chester Beatty Library. This cluster raises the question why A. S. Yahuda played such a salient role in this specific case.
13:30–15:00 Roundtable: The Yahuda Project
Moya Carey, Evyn Kropf, Sam Thrope, Torsten Wollina | Facilitator: Marina Rustow
Thursday June 3, 2021 | People & Networks
POSTPONED
9:00–11:00 | Correspondence
Chair: Evyn Kropf
Moya Carey | “Am offered Cufic house”: Sales, Swaps and Codewords in A.S. Yahuda’s exchanges with A. Chester Beatty In April 1927, T. W. Arnold (Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental Studies) introduced Abraham Shalom Yahuda to the Irish-American mining magnate and collector Alfred Chester Beatty (1875–1968). Over the following decade, Yahuda would sell Beatty over 1,000 Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew and Syriac manuscripts, as well as early printed books. The two friends also swapped and gifted manuscripts from their respective collections. These had usually been sourced from private library collections across Syria, Palestine and Egypt, such as the important early Umayyad Qurʾān (CB Is 1404), bought directly from an “old noble family” in Fuʿah (northeast of Idlib, in Syria): “am offered Cufic house,” Yahuda wrote to Beatty in March 1928, using their preferred codeword, “house,” to refer to the Qurʾan manuscript. In 1950, Beatty departed London for Dublin, and on his death in 1968, his extensive collection of Asian and European art transferred to the people of Ireland. This paper will review the Beatty-Yahuda relationship via the Chester Beatty archive correspondence for the years 1927–28.
Ahmed El Shamsy | Fitting In/Passing As: Selling Arabic Books and the Economy of Respectability The many complex and interlocking elements of A. S. Yahuda’s identity included a dual professional role: he was not only an Orientalist scholar but also a businessman who bought and sold Arabic books, especially manuscripts. In his private and public writings, Yahuda displays a keen awareness of the tension between his self-presentation as a Western scholar and his active involvement in the lucrative manuscript trade. His attempts to keep these two facets of his identity separate have led to curious splits in the way he is perceived in contemporary scholarship, depending on the aspects of his life under examination.
Yuval Evri | Return to the Jewish Eastern Essence: Snapshot into Avraham Shalom Yahuda’s Intellectual World through One Letter from His Personal Archive Avraham Shalom Yahuda and his older cousin David Yellin remained in correspondence for decades, from the day Yahuda left to study in Germany in 1896 until Yellin’s death in 1941. Yahuda and Yellin’s personal archives contain copies of hundreds of letters exchanged over the course of the years. My paper will focus on one letter sent by Yahuda from his home in Germany to David Yellin in Jerusalem in the twilight of 1899, three years after the young Yahuda emigrated from Jerusalem to Europe and began his studies at the universities of Germany. Relocating from Jerusalem to Germany back then was no simple matter for a young man, who had to leave his community and familiar surroundings and move to an almost totally alien environment, and this much is clear from Yahuda’s own writings. In this letter Yahuda levels fierce criticism at the “Russian maskilim,” centering on an encounter between new representations and labels of identities and cultures, of “Europeanness” and “Sephardiness,”. It also captures an important moment in Yahuda and Yellin’s personal history and in the history of ethnic relations between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.
Rana Mikati | Sibling Rivalry: The French Correspondence Between the Yahuda Brothers This paper examines the correspondence between A. S. Yahuda and his older brother Isaac Ezekiel Yahuda (1863–1941). The letters between the two brothers, written in French, span the last years of World War I. In addition to revealing the tense and worsening relationship between the two brothers, these letters illuminate Isaac’s struggle to keep his business in Cairo and the family’s in Jerusalem afloat during the war years. Deeply personal, this correspondence also opens a window unto the Yahuda brothers’ communal and international entanglements.
11:30–13:00 | Networks
Chair: Garrett Davidson
Celeste Gianni | Looter or Lover of Learning? The Case of Paul Sbath’s Collection and the Manuscript Trade in the Middle East at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century This paper looks at the transactions, local actors and logistics involved in the sale of Middle Eastern manuscript collections at the beginning of the twentieth century. It focuses on the sale of the manuscript collection of the Syrian Catholic priest Paul Sbath (Aleppo, 1887–1945), regarded by some as one of the most controversial collectors of the twentieth century due to the mysterious circumstances in which he obtained and consolidated his library of 1,325 manuscripts that he partly sold to the Vatican library in 1927. Sbath’s deal with the Vatican is a good example for understanding the wider world of manuscripts in which Yahuda was also active. Through a close study of the negotiations around the acquisition of Sbath’s manuscripts by the Vatican and the protagonists involved in the transaction, the paper discusses Sbath’s conflicting roles as both manuscript dealer and scholar willing to preserve and promote the Arab Christian heritage through his work as editor and cataloguer of manuscripts between Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Cairo in the period 1911–45.
Ali Gibran Siddiqui | Abraham Yahuda’s Indian Acquisitions in the Princeton Persian Collection In 1942, the Princeton University Library, after lengthy negotiations with the noted scholar and manuscript collector Abraham S. Yahuda, purchased 5000 rare Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts for a sum of $ 65,000. While negotiating for a suitable price, Yahuda stressed that he had collected these rare works, many of which were parts of private libraries, in cities that were significant centers of Islamicate literary and documentary cultures including those in India. By attempting to trace the journey of Yahuda’s Indian manuscripts through a study of relevant colophons, waqf notes, ownership stamps, signatures, and Yahuda’s personal correspondence, this paper will raise important questions about the origins, provenance, and modes of acquisition of these works.
Ricardo Muñoz Solla | On Abraham S. Yahuda’s Dealing Networks in Spain: The Case Study of the Palomares Collection This paper will briefly give some notes about the dealing networks that Yahuda developed during his stay in Spain. Among other examples of acquiring original manuscripts and epigraphic evidence about Jewish and converso history based on his Spanish correspondence, I will focus my attention on the opportunity he had to adquire the inquisitorial collection of Francisco Palomares.
13:30–15:00 Roundtable: Next Steps
Facilitators: Will Noel and Raquel Ukeles