Exhibition: Jewish Bibliophilia: Sacred and Secular
What drives humans to collect? Walter Benjamin, the early 20th century philosopher and cultural critic, commented: “O bliss of the collector… Ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them.”
McGill University Library Rare Books and Special Collections is the beneficiary of this deep human impulse to collect. Thanks to donations by and purchases from dedicated Judaic bibliophiles, collectors of books of Jewish interest, McGill University Rare Books owns a surprisingly large volume of Judaica.
Rabbi Daniel Lewin collected 16th-19th century printed editions of biblical, legal, kabbalistic and liturgical sacred books. The Montrealer, Saul Shapiro, amassed a diverse Anglo-American library, and the exhibit features his British emancipation literature and early histories of Jews written in English. Joe Fishstein, a Bronx garment worker, dedicated himself to collecting Yiddish poetry, translations and literature, for which he designed special dust jackets. Lawrence Lande collected Judaica for his main interest, Canadiana.
What inspired Lewin, Shapiro and Fishstein to fix on a particular area of Judaica? With a 5000 year history originating in Israel with shifting diasporic communities, Jewish tradition and culture offer an expansive historical, temporal, linguistic and geographic field within which texts have been produced for more than two millennia.
This exhibit can be viewed from different angles. You can follow a chronological path of Jewish literary production from the sacred scrolls and manuscripts to the printed book. You can look at the different languages, scripts, conditions of the books and wonder about their individual histories, provenance, and tribulations. Or you can glimpse at the love, appreciation, and fascination Judaica book-collectors like Fishstein, Shapiro and Lewin share.
This exhibition celebrates the American Academy of Jewish Research meeting at McGill University, 6th-8th of June 2016.
Curated by Briah Cahana and Richard Virr.
Image: A drawing by Marc Chagall accompanies one of Avraham Walt’s poems
