A Historically-Informed Approach for the Digital Future of Non-Western Collection Catalogues

Catalogues have been a staple library feature for the last several centuries, which make them a curious document of a particular place and time. The form and content of a catalogue can provide insights into the social norms and scholarly interests of the era in which it was created. Since cataloguing is done by people—librarians or professionals in specific fields—it can never be a neutral act, and can be influenced by institutional inclinations or even personal biases. This can have layered ethical implications, particularly when considering ‘foreign’ collections kept and catalogued by Western cultural heritage institutions. Recent scholarship on the matter has begun to ask: who, historically, has been considered the authority in these matters? Who was left out of the conversation? And how would it be best to tackle these issues in the future?

In this paper,1 I shall discuss some of the published catalogues of Leiden University Library’s (UBL) Hebrew manuscripts collection (HMC) throughout the last four centuries, and how they show that the depth, scope, and accuracy of catalogue descriptions stand in direct relation to the cataloguer’s level of understanding regarding the materials at hand. I shall focus in particular on the 1858 catalogue, written by Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider, as well as on my own experience during my internship within the HMC’s digitization project. Through these examples, I hope to make the case for the scholarly and moral imperative to cooperate with the ‘originating communities’ of non-western items in ongoing and future cataloguing and digitization projects.

A Brief Overview of Library Cataloguing

The history of library classification is dominated by innumerable tensions: between ideas, the ordering of knowledge, the activities of authors and publishers, accessions policies, fortunes and practices, and the sheer physical demands of finding space for books on shelves.2

The form, content, production method and intended function of the library catalogue have all continuously changed throughout the last few centuries.3 Before the Renaissance and the advent of print, the library ‘catalogue’ took the form of handwritten shelf-lists, used by librarians for stock inspection. Before long, however, it needed to also serve as a finding device for readers.4 By the Baroque Era,5 as printing became increasingly accessible, libraries dealt with books in ‘quantities such had never before been encountered’,6 making it impossible for library visitors to find the right volume by simply browsing a topic’s designated shelf. As new scholarly fields developed in the wake of the Enlightenment and printing continued to dominate, libraries also increasingly tended to separate between printed items—books and journals—as tools to facilitate study, and handwritten manuscripts as historic objects whose materiality itself was worth studying.7

The increasing complexity of library organization in the nineteenth century pushed librarians to take on the ‘heroic feat’ of ‘prising the catalogue apart from the shelf-list’,8 and organize by topic and alphabetical order as opposed to functioning as a shelf map.9 Catalogues became increasingly complex, splintering into countless volumes, categories and sub-categories;10 they were now also expected to provide students and researchers with a complete introduction into the topics of the collections they describe.11 The field of librarianship became increasingly professionalized: librarians were more likely to primarily engage with big-picture organization, and enlist subject experts to expand catalogue descriptions.

The concept of ‘subject librarianship’ seems straightforward: the better a scholar is acquainted with a certain topic, the better they can tend to a specific collection and contextualize it for others. For ‘foreign’ collections kept at Western cultural heritage institutions, the identity of subject experts can sometimes be a painful point of contention;12 historically, non-western items, or texts written in non-Latin scripts, have been collected, studied, displayed, and catalogued with limited to no input from their ‘originating communities’.13 While modern academia is, at least on its face, a non-discriminatory environment which encourages participation from all cultures and nationalities, the process of cataloguing is iterative—with each new attempt, cataloguers must reckon with the decisions made by previous generations, and decide whether to build upon them, in part or in whole, or eschew them entirely. As a result, even the most sanitized modern catalogue might still carry the weight of centuries of Orientalist or colonialist writings.

‘Where’ is Hebrew? The Collection’s Early Days

Hebrew texts and manuscripts, and the Hebrew language in general, straddle a uniquely peculiar place in the history of Western European academia. At times, they were seen as inherently connected to European and Western culture—a Protestant pathway to achieving ‘doctrinal certainty’ through sola scriptura,14 and one of the Humanist ‘pivots of civilization’ alongside Greek and Latin.15 At other points, the Hebrew language—and the Jews who used it—were seen as distinctly ‘Oriental’, foreign interlopers. Christian Hebraists wanted to avoid ‘corrupted’ Jewish glosses and interpretation and ‘free Christians from the need of Jewish teachers of Hebrew,’16 eventually publishing grammars and dictionaries for self-study.17 Humanists who studied the ancient world and classical philology, hoping to scientifically explain etymology,18 grouped languages into categories and forever aligned Hebrew with other Semitic languages of the Near East.19 Keeping in mind the changing position of Hebrew in Western scholarship—which cannot be separated from the attitude of European society toward Jews—is crucial to an analysis of the HMC’s catalogues throughout the centuries.

Petrus Bertius (1565-1629), Flemish historian and theologist, created the UBL’s first printed catalogue, the Nomenclator, published in 1595. Organized as a shelf-catalogue that reflected the library’s physical organization according to the classical division of knowledge,20 it shows that the library had few Hebrew items at the time, which were included in the ‘Theology’ category. After Leiden scholar Josephus Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) bequeathed his library to the UBL, Hebrew books became more commonly connected to the Oriental collections through association: around a third of Scaliger’s Oriental collection entailed Hebrew items.21

In 1612, UBL librarian Daniel Heinsius (1580-1655), published an updated catalogue of the entirety of the library’s inventory. Heinsius considered Scaliger’s legacy as the UBL’s most important Oriental holding; considering himself the ‘ultimate keeper’ of this collection, he believed that ‘he, and no one else, was to compile the catalogue.’22 Unfortunately, being neither an Arabist nor a Hebraist, Heinsius had a difficult time describing the titles of Scaliger’s Oriental bequest; though it is possible he received some help from fellow scholars, the titles were all ultimately given only in Latin translation (with no Hebrew script or transliteration), and many are incomplete or inaccurate.23

Leiden’s HMC as we imagine it today really came into its own in 1669, when nearly a thousand Oriental items, including around three hundred in Hebrew, were donated to the UBL from the bequest of Levinus Warner (1618-1665).24 Friedrich Spanheim the Younger (1632-1701), a scholar of theology, became the UBL’s librarian in 1672, a time when the collection had become ‘so diverse that it was no longer possible for one person to keep track of it’;25 cataloguing the Warner bequest was achieved through the combined efforts of several different scholars.26 The 1674 Catalogue improves greatly upon its predecessors when it comes to cataloguing the Hebrew collection items;27 Spanheim evidently ‘attempted to enrich the descriptions of the books with new and relevant information’28 (see fig. 1, below).

Figure 1: Comparison of catalogue entries (Or. 4723 [Scal. 6])
The 1623 Heinsius Catalogue (p. 127)	The 1674 Catalogue (p. 276)
The 1674 catalogue adds new information and bibliographic details: Title in Hebrew script, Latin translation of title, author name, language and language of origin, translator name, material, and shelfmark.

The following catalogue, published in 1716, was edited by Carolus Schaaf (d. 1729), reader of Hebrew and other Oriental languages, and Johannes Heyman (1667-1737), professor of Oriental languages.29 Despite being well within the realm of expertise of these cataloguers, the Hebrew manuscript descriptions remained generally unchanged. Some of the few changes or additions included the addition of transliterations to Hebrew titles, supplementing the existing Latin titles and the Hebrew-script titles added in 1674. From a modern perspective, many of these transliterations were not ideal; in figure 2, below, for example, the transliteration of כתר מלכות as Keſer malchus, as opposed to Keter malchut, betrays the cataloguer’s studied but unnatural over-adherence to the technicalities of nikud,30 possibly as described in a (Christian Hebraist) grammar book. It is, in my opinion, a kind of error that would not have been made by a Jewish scholar.

Figure 2: Comparison of catalogue entry for a printed book
The 1674 Catalogue (p. 258)	The 1716 Catalogue (p. 313)

A Changing Tide: Steinschneider and the 1858 Catalogue

The ‘long’ nineteenth century saw the continued popularization of scholarly journals, published at great frequency by learned societies and academies;31 The heart of the library collection, particularly in the scientific fields, shifted from ‘the rare and extraordinary’ to the regular and ‘serial’.32 The study of manuscripts did not cease in this scholarly transition, but it did change in nature: this era saw a rising interest in the materiality of manuscripts. No longer mere carriers of text, manuscripts were now seen as complex objects, artefacts of cultural and historical worth, that could be analyzed and studied for their own sake.33

Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907) was a pioneer of this type of research; throughout his career, the ‘father of Hebrew bibliography’ published over 1400 books, papers, and manuscript catalogues.34 He was the first to compile a comprehensive review of Jewish literature,35 conducted pioneering translation research, 36 and published hundreds of articles concerning ‘library history, booklore, philology and cultural history’.37 In the early 1850s, the UBL commissioned Steinschneider to re-write its Hebrew manuscripts catalogue.38 There is no doubt that Steinschneider’s considerable talent and breadth of knowledge of Jewish book history made him the right scholar for the job—he was, in fact, undertaking a similar project for Oxford’s Bodleian library at the time39—however, I believe that the fact that he himself was Jewish is also an important aspect to consider.

Steinschneider was born into a world that was changing rapidly. In the late eighteenth century, bolstered by the values of the Enlightenment, the Jewish intellectual movement of Haskala advocated supplementing traditional Talmudic and Biblical studies with secular education and the study of European languages,40 in hope of improving the social and economic position of the Jews and integrate in European life after centuries of segregation and discrimination. As a young intellectual of the second Haskala generation, the Morovian-born scholar received both Jewish and secular education from an early age, and dedicated himself to the study of languages, Oriental and Hebrew literature, and bibliography.41 He became one of the early proponents of Wissenschaft des Judentums, or ‘the Science of Judaism’,42 a Berlin-based movement that set out to study Jewish literature in an academic rather than theological manner ‘by subjecting it to criticism and modern methods of research’ aligned with European standards.43

Steinschneider’s 1858 Leiden HMC Catalogue is much more than a reference tool—it is a study companion, going above and beyond the utilitarian bibliographic content of previous catalogues. It serves as an impressive specimen of the new catalogues of this era, which were expected to be a complete overview of a particular field or language.44 Steinschneider’s remarkably detailed entries expand on nearly every catalogued item, and incorporate ‘a wealth of information’ whenever available.45 He itemized the contents of codicological units and created a numbering system that is still mostly in use to this day. He shares his insights on the quality and legibility of the manuscript, and draws attention to ‘variant readings’, where the form or content of the same texts appear otherwise in manuscripts of other libraries.46 He also mentions which other texts and authors a manuscript references, and vice versa.47 In addition, he includes biographic information on the author, internal chapter divisions, references to relevant contemporary scholarly texts, and much more.48

Figure 3: Comparison of catalogue entries for Or. 4752 [Warn. 14]
1716 Catalogue (p. 409)	1858 Catalogue (pp. 39-40)

Part of the reason this catalogue improves so significantly on that of his predecessors is that Steinschneider was an expert in the languages, topics, and historical contexts of the manuscripts he discusses. He was incredibly well-versed in Jewish literature and medieval philosophy, as opposed to previous bibliographers, who, learned as they might have been, ‘were not scholars’ of those fields, and ‘apparently did not read the philosophic books they catalogued’.49 Steinschneider could read Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, among other languages, and as such could easily read the texts he catalogued;50 he was also able to point out and correct the mistakes of past cataloguers, of whom he is quite critical, writing in his preface that they were likely ‘neither sufficiently instructed in general literature, nor knew enough Hebrew to fulfil their very difficult task’.51

Steinschneider’s catalogue was the most extensive inspection of Leiden’s HMC conducted up to that point—a title it kept for much longer than it reasonably should have. Witkam’s Oriental Collections Inventories, published in the early 2000s (!),52 were the first time the collection’s catalogue was meaningfully revised and translated from Latin to English.53 Steinschneider’s Leiden project ‘redefined the nature and purpose of Hebrew manuscript catalogues’ to the extent that scholars Harvey and Fontain argue it created a ‘new literary genre’.54 Considering the astounding leap the 1858 catalogue displays compared to its predecessors, it’s easy to see why it remained so influential for so long.

This catalogue serves, in my eyes, as unequivocal proof that collections can significantly benefit from the involvement of scholars who are not only experts in certain topics and languages, but also have personal ties to it—a connection that can provide unmatched insights. We must also remember that this precious repository of knowledge, which has supported scholarship for over 150 years, could have very well never existed due to systematic prejudice; in 1836, on account of being a Jew, Steinschneider was refused entry to the Vienna Oriental Academy and barred from viewing the Hebrew books and manuscripts in the Imperial Library.55 At Leiden University, though Theodor W.J. Juynboll (1802-1861), the curator of the Oriental collection, commissioned Steinschneider to catalogue the HMC, he was still displeased that the rise in interest in Hebrew studies, especially by German Jewry, resulted in ‘even those with no business to do so… daring to publish Hebrew works’.56 He suspected that the publication of the 1858 catalogue would lead to an increase in Hebrew manuscript lending requests by a Jewish readership that was ‘learned but non-academic’, and appealed to university directors, as a precaution, to allow him to be more discerning and restrictive regarding lending requests.57 Any progress, any acceptance of disenfranchised sections of society ‘from outside the academic world’ as ‘cultural stakeholders’ in library collections,58 could be so easily undermined by the ubiquitous normality of exclusion—whether it appears as policy in the 19^th century, or as an innocent oversight today.

A Digital Path Forward

The digital revolution has created two different yet linked expectations from libraries: they should provide both online information about library holdings, and, ideally, direct online access to those holdings. In the twenty-first century, a convenient online catalogue is considered a cornerstone of any well-organized library, not only for locating its many physical books but also due to the increased prominence of digital-first material. Libraries began explicitly prioritizing budgeting for digital editions of books and journals;59 in turn, modern scholars, students and administrators ‘assume that all materials have been, or ultimately will be, converted to a digital format’, including rare manuscripts, documents and other special collection items.60

Increasingly technologically feasible yet still arduous and costly, more and more libraries and other cultural heritage institutions have been embarking on Special Collection digitization projects throughout the last decade or so. Of course, the mere availability of digitized resources does not automatically guarantee their usability; digitized books and manuscripts must also be ‘well described, organized, and promoted to ensure they are visible and readily accessible’.61 Often this required the transition of bibliographic data from old print catalogues to online versions, which risks perpetuating old inaccuracies; the temporally patchworked nature of library catalogues means that decisions made by past cataloguers usually stick around unless an active effort is made to correct them. This is a particular problem for ‘foreign’ materials, whose content, language and script a cataloguer might be unfamiliar with—and whose bibliographical inaccuracies they might have a hard time noticing.

Just as the HMC was immensely enriched by hiring Steinschneider, a Jewish scholar, to write the 1858 catalogue, I believe that any cultural heritage institution aiming to digitize its collections or improve its metadata would benefit greatly from actively seeking the involvement of native speakers and members of the relevant languages and cultures. In this respect, I speak from experience: I spent several months in an internship at the UBL, participating in their project to digitize the HMC, a collaboration with the National Library of Israel’s Ktiv project.62 I reviewed and corrected catalogue entries, standardized title romanizations and name spellings, enhanced the existing information with missing details from past catalogues,63 and added Hebrew-language translations for key details to facilitate better search.

While working, I managed to correct many transliteration inaccuracies which had crept into manuscript descriptions—as well as some resulting mistranslations—that a non-Hebrew speaker would likely not notice. For example, the title for Or. 4763:10, as it appears in Witkam’s Inventory and on the UBL’s Online Catalogue, was transliterated as Sefer ha-Eser. Reversing the title into Hebrew script would likely result in ספר העשר—grammatically odd, but roughly meaning ‘the book of ten’. However, Witkam’s English translation of the title is ‘the Book of treasures’.64 I concluded that the discrepancy was likely the result of a lack of nikud in the manuscript; עשר could be read as עֶשֶר (eser = ten) or as עֹשֶר (osher = wealth). After consulting other resources to confirm my suspicion, I was able to correct the title’s romanization to Sefer ha-Osher.

When Hebrew manuscripts are catalogued without sufficient understanding of their language and context, the result can sometimes be poor or lacking—or, on occasion, disrespectful and harmful. The same can be said for many other ‘foreign’ languages or cultural groups. Whether by policy or circumstance, people from often-marginalized ‘originating communities’65 have been barred, sometimes literally, from accessing pieces of their cultural heritage. It is therefore my conclusion that going forward, the cultural heritage sector has a moral and scholarly duty: to harness the collaborative tools of the digital age, use them to engage members of those communities, and re-evaluate past narratives and cataloguing norms and as part of the digitization process. This will give them a chance to not only rectify historic injustices, but to enrich our world with knowledge, courtesy of the people who know—and care—most about it.

Bibliography

Leiden Catalogues (in chronological order)

Bertius, Petrus, Nomenclator avtorvm omnivm, quorum libri vel manuscripti, vel typis expressi exstant in Bibliotheca Academiæ Lvgdvno-Batavæ (Lvgdvni Batavorvm [Leiden]: Franciscum Raphelengium, 1595). (UBL 1408 I 57) <http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:359978> Heinsius, Daniel, Catalogvs librorvm bibliothecæ lvgdvnensis (Leiden: UBL, 1612). (UBL 1408 I 59) <http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:359907>

Spanheim, Friedrich, Catalogus bibliothecæ publicæ lvgdvno-batavæ noviter recognitus Accessit Incomparabilis thesaurus librorum orientalium, præcipue mss (Lugdunum Batavorum [Leiden]: Johannis Elsevirii, 1674). (UBL 1408 I 62) <http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:359671>

Leiden University Libraries, Catalogus librorum tam impressorum quam manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Publicae Universitatis Lugduno-Batavae (Lugduni apud Batavos [Leiden]: Petri vander Aa, 1716). (UBL DOUSA 80 1020: 1) <http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:290399>

Steinschneider, Moritz, Catalogus Codicum Hebraeorum Bibliothecae Academiae Lugduno-Batavae (Leiden: Brill, 1858). (UBL OOSHSS A 23) <http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:113179>

Heide, Albert van der, Hebrew Manuscripts of Leiden University Library (Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden, 1977). (UBL PALEOG 217) <http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:101077>

Witkam, Jan Just, Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts in Leiden University Library, 25 vols. (Leiden: Ter Lugt Press, 2007) <http://www.islamicmanuscripts.info/inventories/leiden/index.html>

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Primary and Secondary Sources

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Mills, Alexandra, ‘User Impact on Selection, Digitization, and the Development of Digital Special Collections’, New Review of Academic Librarianship 21.2 (2015), pp. 160-169 <https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2015.1042117>

Morrish, P. ‘Baroque Librarianship’, The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Vol. II: 1640-1850, ed. by Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 212-238.

Ommen, Kasper van, ‘The Legacy of Josephus Justus Scaliger in Leiden University Library Catalogues, 1609-1716’, in Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print, ed. by Malcom Walsby and Natasha Constantinidou (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 51-82.

Rold, Orietta da. ‘Tradition and Innovation in Cataloguing Medieval Manuscripts’, Anglia 139.1 (2021), pp. 32-58.

Shalev, Nitzan, ‘Mind Your Language: A Longitudinal Study of the Catalogues of Leiden University Library’s Hebrew Manuscripts Collection.’ (Master’s thesis, Leiden University, 2022). <https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3448598>

Schmidt, Jan, A Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts in the John Rylands University Library at Manchester. (Leiden: Brill, 2011). <https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004186699.i-358>

Steinschneider, Moritz, Catalogus librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana (Berlin: Berolini, 1852-1860).

Steinschneider, Moritz, ‘Jüdische Literatur’, Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, ii.27, ed. by Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber (Leipzig: Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, 1850), pp. 357-376.

Turner, James, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

Witkam, Jan Just, ‘Moritz Steinschneider and the Leiden Manuscripts’, in Studies on Steinschneider: Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, ed. by Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal, (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 263-275.

Online Sources

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Encyclopaedia Judaica, Encyclopedia.com, ‘Steinschneider, Moritz’, <https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/steinschneider-moritz> (Accessed 30 Apr. 2023)

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Vrolijk, Arnoud, ‘Collection Levinus Warner’, Leiden University Libraries, 2013 <http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:1887390> (Accessed 30 Apr. 2023)

Vrolijk, Arnoud and R.M. Kerr, ‘Hebrew Manuscripts and Early Printed Books Collection’, Leiden University Libraries, 2007 <http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:1887222> (Accessed 30 Apr. 2023)

Nitzan Shalev is a graduate of Leiden University BDMS programme, where she researched medieval Hebrew manuscripts, the history of cataloguing, and digitization. Her MA thesis, ‘Mind Your Language’, won the Victorine van Schaick prize for library science. She currently works as a production editor for Brill Academic Publishers. Shalev is originally from Israel.