Footprints at the Fisher Library

In early June, Footprints brought together a group of scholars and graduate students at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for the latest installment of our ongoing series of paleography workshops and Footprints work. This year’s workshop was sponsored by the Fisher Library as part of their annual Fisher Summer Seminar Series, an ongoing series of hands-on workshops using their collections. For two days, the group received instruction on Ashkenazic and Sephardi/Mizrahi scripts and time to work in small groups on deciphering handwritten inscriptions in printed books in the Fisher’s collection.

This paleography workshop series reflects the commitment on the part of the Footprints co-project directors to training a cohort of scholars in the diverse paleographic traditions used by Jewish communities around the world. Professor Edward Fram of Ben Gurion University of the Negev and Dr. Noam Sienna, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, returned to the project to share their rare expertise. As exemplars of outstanding pedagogy, Professor Fram and Dr. Sienna equipped every participant with the tools to decipher even the most challenging scripts. Chaya Juni, a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, embraced what she described as “the human elements that made her think about her own handwriting,” and noted how much she had learned in such a short time. Albert Yang, a graduate student at the same university, reflected on one of Footprints’ most valuable aspects: its reliance on scholarly collaboration. The participants also heard from Jessica Lockhart and Stephanie J. Lahey of the Old Books New Science Lab at the University of Toronto, who spoke about multispectral imaging and its impacts for provenance research.

Participants left the workshop eager to use their new skills on local collections in Montreal, Cleveland, New York, Washington DC, and Jerusalem. Feedback focused on the importance of collaboration to this work, as well as excitement about the uncovering of previously hidden histories. Footprints has already published a post citing some of the findings by one group following their training, and more will be posted in the coming weeks. 

The Footprints co-directors, Marjorie Lehman (Jewish Theological Seminary), Michelle Margolis (Columbia University), Adam Shear (University of Pittsburgh), and Joshua Teplitsky (University of Pennsylvania) are indebted to Nadav Sharon, the Jewish Studies Librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for his outstanding work in organizing this workshop, along with David Fernandez, head of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Fisher Library. We are thankful for the support of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto, the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, the Hidden Stories Project of the University of Toronto, the University of Toronto Hillel, and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

We are likewise grateful to the great book collectors of the 20th century, Nancy and Albert D. Friedberg and Sarah and Rabbi Abraham Aron Price, who amassed incredible collections of Hebrew books and made them available for public use at the Fisher Rare Book Library.

Footprints co-directors thank all of our participants–Nathan Diena, Elaine Gold, Rachel Greenblatt, Jacquelyn Clements, Chaya Juni, David Lavenda, Louis (Chaim) Meiselman, Natalie Oeltgen, Jane Rothstein, Hannah Srour-Zackon, Patrick J. Stevens, David A. Wacks,  Dalia Wolfson, Albert Yang, and Erez Zobary–for their passionate commitment to the Footprints project and for inputting their data into the database.