This website is dedicated to a research project aiming at discovering and cataloguing all the Hebrew manuscripts and printed books that are kept in libraries and archives in Sicily.
Visiting all the main Sicilian libraries and archives, I am cataloguing all the Hebrew manuscripts, fragments, and early printed books that I find in their collections. The major part of these books once belonged to convents and monasteries, and they were seized by the State in 1866-1867 with a law that suppressed the religious orders and confiscated all their properties.
In some cases, since the entire convents buildings were expropriated together with the libraries, books were not removed from their location (smaller collection were brought to bigger former convents to be kept there). The huge quantity of properties and goods seized by the State, however, was too large to be well managed after the monks were forced to leave. The books, therefore, were often neglected and abadoned, as well as the libraries that quickly declined and became pray of parasites and mice. At that time highly valuable volumes disappeared from almost every library.
It was only in the 1980s that these libraries started being recovered and restored, and this process is still ongoing in many places, while some other libraries are still closed because of lacking of funds and/or employees that could grant access to the public.
