Works in Judaica Library Science and Judaica
Librarianship

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The History of Judaica Libraries. This volume traces Judaica collections from the ancient near east and antiquity to the post-modern present.  While this book Considers ancient libraries and archives in ancient near east to in Ur in Chaldea, Egypt, Mari in Syria, Ashur in Assyria, Ashurbanipal's library in Ninevah, and the Alexandrian Library- the glory of the ancient world its focus is reconstructing what textual collections existed from antiquity to the present of Hebrew and related Jewish languages. For example the historian Josephus mentions that there was an archive of Yichusin (geneological records) on Har Habayit in Jerusalem because the priestly families of Kohanim and Levites were required to document their lineage in order to serve in the ma'amadot (24 rotations 2x a year to serve in the beit HaMikdash). By excavating talmudic and other rabbinic mentions of textual collections for example in MS Kiddushin, Yevamot, Sanhedrin David detective sleuth's to demonstrate the nature of megilot atika in ancient Israel up through the time of the zugot. A key chapter includes the types of texts not only copied but authored in the scriptorium of the Dead Sea Scroll Essence community as learned from Dr. Rabbi Yosef Baumgarten, David's teacher, who was an expert on the halakhic aspect of the DSS long before Dr. Lawrence Schiffman. The book traces textual collection through the tannaim, amoraim, savorim, geonim, rishonim (with rich flowering of private collections of ms in spiritual renaissance of Provance in southern France, Gerona in Spain, and elsewhere such as the medieval medical center in Montpellier France), up to the ahronim. David draws on primary texts from the Cairo Geniza to illuminated such collections. Emphasis documents how the history of early and late medieval Jewish textual collections  illustrate the important interplay between torah she'bal peh and oral transmission of the oral law. Consideration is given how the Talmud itself forbids halakhah to be written down and proposes that during times of crisis when esoteric traditions risk being lost to oblivion great rabbis must break the law in order to save the law in order that the ideas in those texts not be forgotten.  Ergo the mishna was written down in 210 by Rabbi Yehudah Nasi, the Bavli by Rava around 450 CE, the commentaries of Rashi during the first Crusade, and the tosaphot by Rabbi Shmuel Dampieres during the later Crusades. Rambam (1135-1204) specifically mentions that he wrote down esoteric wisdom of the ma'aseh ha merkvah and ma'aseh bereshit that he likens to metaphysics and physics respectively, in order that these esoteric teachings not be forgotten in a time of crisis. Then David further demonstrates the explosion of written textual ms collections in the Renaissance for instance In Italy where Jews were allowed to attend medical school in Padua if qualified by knowing not only Hebrew and Aramaic but ancient Greek and Latin, etc. which allowed Renaissance scholars to discover ancient Greek and Latin scientific works in the original languages instead of medieval Judeo-arabic translations. Focus is spent constructing not only what texts were archived in these ancient, medieval and Renaissance collections but the classification systems that were employed to organize texts as well as who-what-where-when of the context of textual collections in Jewish history. Obviously the invention of the printing press further led to even greater explosion of the size of textual collections as we see from the enlightenment libraries and the libraries of Jewish texts in the 19th and 20th centuries in major centers such as Budapest, Hungary ; Paris (Bibliotheque nationale); Germany (staats bibliotheque); England (Bodelain library etc), Italy (the Vatican and elswhere), Leningrad Russia (the Saltykov Library with the Firkovitch colletion & and the Guenzberg collection in Moscow). Large libraries would buy and accession large private collections that scholars like Moritz Steinschneider (catalogued large collections in Germany, Austria, and Bavaria as well as the Bodelian in Britain), Umberto Cassuto (the jewish collections in Italy), Alexander Marx (JTSA);  Gershom Scholem (Hebrew University in Jerusalem) etc would build up in collection development and catalogue etc. David also includes a section of Judaica collections and libraries even in the ghettos of the Holcoaust which despit the abject famine, disease of typus, and unbearable living conditions jews still read and studied. David considers the miraculous ways in which texts that were buried surfaced many centuries later such as the dead sea scrolls largely buried in Qumran caves to the Oneg Shabbos Ringelbaum group of historians, sociologists, journalists, poets, and philosophers who buried documentation of the life of the ghetto in Warsaw and Vilna, to Rabbi Efraim Oshrei who buried in cement bags later recovered his legal decisions regarding questions Jews asked in the Kovno ghetto whereby Oshry has access to large collections of rabbinic works he was asked to organize that were stolen from Jews, etc.In the final sections david considers the life of the text in the digital age and database construction where texts are said to live in the cloud and the economic, cultural, social and political revolutionary changes in democratizing knoledge this may cause.