Hebraica & Judaica
Columbia University has been collecting rare Hebraica and Judaica since its inception in 1754. Columbia’s Hebrew and Judaica manuscript collection is the third of the largest of its kind in North America, and the largest of a secular research institution in the United States.
The Judaica collection currently contains:
- Over 1700 manuscripts
- 31 incunabula
- Over 500 sixteenth-century books
- Thousands of books from the 17th – 18th centuries
- Various archival material relating to prominent areas of Jewish and Israel Studies
- Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry
The manuscript collection is very diverse, covering many different times and places. The manuscripts span the 10th – 20th centuries. Many originate in Italy, but other places of origin include France, Greece, Persia, Yemen, North Africa, and the Netherlands. It also includes one of the most important collections for the study of Byzantine Jewry. About 620 of our manuscripts are available for browsing and download at the Internet Archive, and over 1700 of our manuscripts are available for viewing only at the National Library of Israel's KTIV: The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts.
Topics include philosophy, kabbalah (including some early works and many manuscripts from the Lurianic school), liturgy (prayerbooks and mahzorim), Jewish law, Rabbinic texts and related commentaries, poetry, Bible and its exegesis, responsa, letters from individuals and communities, historical documents, Ketubot (marriage contracts), documents from the Cairo Genizah and other general literature.
Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry
The Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), an extraordinary resource for research in Yiddish studies, consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape field interviews with Yiddish speaking informants collected between 1959 and 1972 and ca. 100,000 pages of accompanying linguistic field notes.
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Searching for Judaica Manuscripts
Most of the Hebraica and Judaica manuscripts are located in the “X” collection. This is the earliest manuscript collection at Columbia, which was cataloged using the Dewey Decimal System, with an “x” placed at the beginning of the call number. The majority of these materials begin with the call number “X893.”
To search only the Hebrew manuscript collection, open an “Advanced Search” in CLIO. Under “Author Keywords,” enter “Hebrew Manuscripts Columbia University Libraries.” You may then enter any other subject, author, or title keywords you would like (i.e. “Hebrew Manuscripts Columbia University Libraries” and “cabala”). This will limit your search to the manuscripts.
Specialized card catalogs for manuscripts, available in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, allow patrons to search across multiple collections for a specific name or subject.
For more information about what we collect, please see the Judaica and Israel Studies Collection Development Policy.
Contact Us
Michelle Margolis
Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies
- Global Studies