About

Meet the Team

Marjorie Lehman is Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Area Coordinator of Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures. Dr. Lehman is the author of The En Yaaqov: Jacob ibn Habib’s Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus (Wayne State University Press, 2012) and this book was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is also the author of Bringing Down the Temple House: Engendering Tractate Yoma (Brandeis University Press, 2022). Dr. Lehman has co-edited two books, Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization at Liverpool University Press, 2017) and Learning to Read Talmud: What it Looks Like and How It Happens. She has held fellowships at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, and is presently a Berkowitz Fellow at NYU School of Law.

Michelle Margolis is the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies at Columbia University. Michelle holds an MLIS from Long Island University and an MA from New York University. She is the 2022-2024 President of the Association of Jewish Libraries and has served in various executive positions in the organization since 2010. Michelle is also a co-convener of the International Forum on Judaica Provenance. She has published on the history of the Jewish book and Jewish Libraries, and digital scholarship in Jewish Studies, and has served on multiple advisory boards in the field of Jewish Studies and Judaica Librarianship. Most recently, she co-edited Jewish Studies in the Digital Age (De Gruyter, 2022)

Adam Shear is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and currently serving as Department Chair. He is the author of The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2008) which was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award, Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award in Scholarship, and the Morris D. Forkosch Award for Best First Book in Intellectual History, awarded by the Journal of the History of Ideas. Shear also co-edited The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy, with Joseph R. Hacker (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Shear has held fellowships from the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Israel Institute, and the US-Israel Fulbright Foundation. He is currently writing a monograph with the working title, “People of Books: Transforming the Medieval Jewish Library in the Early Age of Print” where he focuses on ways that early printers and publishers adapted, presented, and packaged medieval Hebrew texts using the new medium of print.

Joshua Teplitsky is an associate professor and the Joseph Meyerhoff Chair in Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also the director of the Program in Jewish Studies. He has held fellowships at the University of Oxford, the National Library of Israel, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. His book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library was published by Yale University Press in 2019 and was named the winner of the Salo Baron Prize of the AAJR for best first book in Jewish Studies in 2019, the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is the editor, with Warren Klein and Sharon Liberman Mintz of Be Fruitful! The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History (Mineged, 2022). He is an Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Cultures (Brill). He is currently at work on a book reconstructing a plague epidemic in eighteenth-century Prague and its impact on Jewish social and cultural life in the city.

Technical Team

Danny Chan Associate Director of Software Development and Project Management

Natalia Dittren Associate Programmer

Zarina Mustapha Senior Front-end Developer

Nik Nyby Senior Programmer

Evan Petersen Assistant Programmer

Sam Sadeh Learning Designer

Introduction

Footprints is a project dedicated to collecting information about individual copies of books printed between 1450 and 1800. It aggregates information about the movement of copies of Jewish books printed in the long early modern period (roughly corresponding to the hand-press era), and follows evidence of their movement into the twenty-first century. It stores this information in a relational database in which users can run specific queries and delivers the results in a number of visual representations for analysis and interpretation. The goal of Footprints is to pursue the histories of these individual book copies and to combine the data of their respective mobilities into a shared field to enable wider analysis. Footprints maps pathways of cultural transmission by beginning its inquiry with the printed book after the text is printed, exploring the journeys of the book-as-object by relying on evidence of its uses.

Since the definition of “Jewish” book is complex, we have opted to be as inclusive as possible, including Hebrew books, books in Hebrew script in other languages (e.g. Ladino and Yiddish), and works in other languages about Jews and Judaism (“Judaica”). Our chronological focus is on tracing the movement of imprints produced from the invention of the printing press ca. 1450 until the early nineteenth century, roughly corresponding to the “handpress” era in the history of printing and to the early modern period in cultural and intellectual history.

Footprints uses a PostgresSQL database (open source; code is available on Github). PostgreSQL is an object-relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. The Footprints application interacts with its data via Django's robust Object Relational Model.

Types of Evidence

“Footprints” in this database are based on:

• provenance metadata in library catalogs
• owner’s signatures and bookplates in extant copies
• handwritten notations of sales or transfers of books in books or in archival material
• references to exchanges of books in correspondence of scholars or merchants
• references to circulation of books in references to efforts at censorship and expurgation
• expurgator’s signatures in extant copies
• unpublished booklists found in manuscripts, archival documents, or copied in the flyleaves of books, including estate inventories and auction catalogs
• subscription lists and lists of approbations in printed editions, indicating backers or patrons of the books who presumably received a copy of the product.

A controlled vocabulary for types of evidence as used in the database can be found on our Github wiki.

We have many “actors” connected to books in our database including owners (individuals and institutions), subscribers (who may have immediately given away a copy sent to them), booksellers, censors, and so forth.

A controlled vocabulary for actor roles can also be found on the Github wiki.

Progress/Updates (Selected)

For a full list of individual and institutional contributors, see here

2022-2023: Published article “Footprints: A Digital Approach to Jewish Book History,” in the European Journal of Jewish Studies. Conducted second paleography workshop on North African hands led by Noam Sienna; UPenn student summer interns (PURM) worked with Oppenheim collection at Oxford; new uploads from Yeshivat Hokhme Lublin (Poland)

2021-2022: Received a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation with Jewish Theological Seminary to catalog Venetian-printed books. Brandeis University Library, University of Toronto, and the Museum of the Bible joined the project, and we continued to upload data from YIVO, with a focus on the Strashun collection.

2019-2020: In February 2020 we convened a three-day workshop on early modern Ashkenazic paleography at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, led by Professor Edward Fram of Ben Gurion University. Also in 2020, we worked with CTL to create and host an online repository of suggested ways to incorporate Footprints into course use.

2018-19: Partnership with the Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, the largest collection of Jewish Studies on the European continent (https://www.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/judaica/home_en.html)

2017-2018: Our "Year of the Hebrew Incunabula." We partnered with the Material Evidence in Incunabula (15cBOOKTRADE) project to create the 15cHEBRAICA project, which hired three researchers to work in libraries in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Israel. Concurrently, we worked with libraries in the United States, such as the University of Pennsylvania, Yeshiva University, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, to capture the same data and upload it into Footprints. We published a chapter on collaboration ("Old Texts and New Media: Jewish Books and the Case for Collaboration").

2016-2017: CTL worked on a "booster development project" to upgrade our search system, incorporate moderation into the site, and smaller upgrades for enhanced clarity. Partnership with Archbishop Marsh's Library (Dublin). Two sessions at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in 2017 (organized by the Footprints directors) focused on books and their movement.

2015-2016: Launch of “trusted crowdsourcing” model to allow a wider range of scholars and students to contribute to the project. The Schneerson Library (Moscow) began to add data. Implementation of batch upload allowed for direct upload including Columbia University, Leo Baeck Institute (New York), and Washington University (St. Louis).

2014-2015: Began pilot phase in cooperation with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL), now the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). The CTL team developed a back-end and front end data-entry system, constructed the database, and began work on a searchable public interface. Grant from the Jim Joseph Foundation supported a research assistant to add pilot data. In November 2014, a “research-a-thon” sponsored by the Center for Jewish History offered librarians, students, and collaborating scholars a chance to preview the interface and enter test data. JTS and Pitt students entered pilot data and field tested the database.

2012-2014: Following a series of roundtable discussions at the Center for Jewish History in New York, the annual conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, and the World Congress of Jewish Studies, developed a conceptualization of the project.

2009-2013: Convened by Marjorie Lehman and Adam Shear, the Lillian Goldman Scholar’s Working Group on the Jewish Book met under the auspices of the Center for Jewish History in New York. Among the research lacunae identified by this group was detailed studies on the transmission and circulation of Jewish books in the early modern period and provenance studies of extant Hebrew books.

Footprints Publications

Michelle Margolis, Marjorie Lehman, Adam Shear, Joshua Teplitsky. “Footprints: A Digital Approach to Jewish Book History,” in European Journal of Jewish Studies, 17 (2023): 1–30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/1872471x-bja10061

Michelle Chesner, Marjorie Lehman, Adam Shear, Joshua Teplitsky. "Old Texts and New Media: Jewish Books on the Move and a Case for Collaboration." In Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships: A Critical Examination of Labor, Networks, and Community, edited by Kate Joranson and Robin Kear, 61-73. Cambridge: Chandos Publishing, 2018.

Michelle Chesner, Marjorie Lehman, Adam Shear, Joshua Teplitsky. “Footprints: Tracking Individual Copies of Printed books Using Digital Methods.” 2018. Medaon, 23 https://www.medaon.de/en/artikel/footprints-tracking-individual-copies-of-printed-books-using-digital-methods/