From the Kislak Stacks
Join us for these monthly lunchtime presentations (noon – 1 pm) by Kislak curators, faculty, and students focusing on specific works or small archives/collections found among the holdings of the Kislak Center.
- Lecture
Who owns Judaica Cultural Heritage?
Arthur Kiron, Schottenstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
This event has already occurred
Hosted by: Kislak Center
This talk is meant to spur discussion about the way in which digital technologies may help mediate between the competing claims of private property ownership rights and public interest in material cultural heritage. Judaica provides a fascinating test case for exploring these issues for both historical and methodological reasons. During the Holocaust, the Nazis engaged in the systematic looting of privately owned Jewish cultural property such as books, manuscripts, archives, and ritual objects. The fate of this looted property, especially heirless property, after the war was a subject of enormous legal and political wrangling.
Over the course of the last 25 years, roughly since the Washington Conference on Holocaust Era Assets, in 1998, there has been an explosion of publications that has sought to reconstruct this fraught history, rethink the symbolic meaning of Judaica, and has led to new efforts, including here at the Penn Libraries, to review our own institutional holdings in search of looted Judaica. In the Kislak Center, curators regularly grapple with questions of provenance, namely the chain of ownership that legitimizes the acquisition of a given object and when and under what conditions should holdings with “murky provenance” to invoke Yoel Finkelman’s evocative phrase, be deaccessioned and restituted. While the provenance of Nazi-looted Judaica has helped frame this discussion, the subject is of ongoing general interest for methodological reasons as well. Given a global diaspora of Judaica documents, including physically dispersed fragments owned by different institutions and private individuals yet intellectually and even intrinsically related to each other, how should one go about curating such material when no one can own all the related pieces. Drawing from the Kislak Center’s collections, we will move from theoretical and historical issues to practical questions about what to do and examples of what we have done.
Event Series
Arthur Kiron
Arthur Kiron is the Schottenstein-Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Jewish history from Columbia University, an M.A. in religious studies from Stanford University, where he focused on the history of Biblical interpretation, and a B.A. from Brandeis University, where he graduated magna cum laude in Political Theory and Women’s Studies and was the recipient of the Giller-Sagan Prize in Women’s Studies. Kiron specializes in the history of Judaica as well as the history of Jews in the Atlantic world. He oversees the Penn Libraries’ Judaica programs of education and outreach, such as exhibits, concerts, workshops, as well as national and international partnerships to digitize significant collections of Judaica. He is the co-founder of Judaica DH at the Penn Libraries, the director of the Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah Project, and co-director of the Scribes of the Cairo Geniza project. He is the editor of Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History: The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica (2014), recipient of the Arline Custer Memorial Award. A selection of his publications may be viewed via the Scholarly Commons open digital repository at the University of Pennsylvania.
Featured image: [Baraita de-melekhet ha-mishkan 6-10 (commentary on Exodus 25-40 concerning the construction of the tabernacle (mishkan) in the desert)] [Cairo? 12th-13th century?], Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania (Halper 83). View full image (via OPenn). Two matching fragments are independently held by Cambridge University Libraries (Taylor-Schechter K21.82) and the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in NYC (ENA 2940). Identification of the matches by Robert Kirschner, Baraita de-melekehet ha-mishkan (Cincinnati : Hebrew Union College, 1992), p. 96.