Ilona Steimann, PhD

Research Associate
Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg

“I study Jewish book culture and book collecting practices with a strong focus on the perception and handling of Hebrew manuscripts by their medieval Jewish and Christian owners in Europe. My research brings the post-production lives of books to the front and is built around the questions of how manuscripts were redirected to meet the needs of new audiences and how they were adapted to the new religious, intellectual, and sociocultural settings. To answer these questions, I examine the trajectories of books, owners’ additions, and material modifications, which turned older books into actualized, customized, and personalized objects.

After completing my doctoral dissertation (2015, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), which dealt with the collection of Hebrew manuscripts of the Nuremberg physician and humanist Hartmann Schedel, I conducted a number of research projects at the universities of Munich, Münster, and in the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’ at the University of Hamburg. These projects sought to capture the interplay between original Jewish texts and their interpretation, reception, and functions in the Christian milieu and to reveal the patterns of converting Jewish texts into Christian objects in terms of content and material appearance. The results of these projects are published in a number of my articles, for example, ‘Jewish Scribes and Christian Patrons: The Hebraica Collection of Johann Jakob Fugger’ (Renaissance Quarterly 70, 2017) (https://www.academia.edu/35466826/Jewish_Scribes_and_Christian_Patrons_The_Hebraica_Collection_of_Johann_Jakob_Fugger); ‘“Das es dasselb puch sey”: The Book as Protagonist in the Ceremony of the Jewry-Oath’ (European Journal of Jewish Studies 13, 2019) (https://www.academia.edu/31235631/_Das_es_dasselb_puch_sey_The_Book_as_Protagonist_in_the_Ceremony_of_the_Jewry_Oath); ‘A Forced Journey between Two Faiths: The Hebrew Manuscripts of the University of Vienna’ (forthcoming). The encounter of Jewish and Christian views of Jewish texts and Jewish books as objects is also the main subject of my book Jewish Book – Christian Book: Hebrew Manuscripts in Transition between Jews and Christians in the Context of German Humanism (Brepols, 2020), which discusses the earliest attempts of German Hebraists to produce their own manuscripts in Hebrew (https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503590745-1).

While dealing with Christian collecting of Hebraica, I realized how little is known about Jewish medieval book collecting practices, in particular about the ways Jews created, organized, and maintained their collections. To reveal tangible dimensions of medieval Jewish libraries, which undoubtedly predetermined the ways knowledge was disseminated and preserved, I started to investigate how books were circulated among the Jews, integrated within a collection, and stored, as well as how the collections were controlled and navigated. The first observations in this field will be presented in my forthcoming article ‘Books in a Medieval Household: Ashkenazi Book Collecting in Its Material Context’ to be published in Ars Judaica.

Another research direction that emerged out of my work in the long-term project Corpus Masoreticum at the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg (https://corpusmasoreticum.de/), which I joined a year ago, relates to medieval Bible manuscripts from Ashkenaz, especially those that contain micrography. To explore the process and context of their production, I study the Masoretic codices in their complexity and reconstruct the methods of work of medieval masoretes.”

---

---