Author: Chiara

Chiara is a PhD in Asian and African Studies from Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She's currently working on a research project aiming t cataloguing all the early Hebrew books and manuscripts kept in Sicilian libraries and archives.

2022

We’re almost there! The last libraries are being examined in order to identify all Hebrew books, manuscripts, and fragments in their collections.

Now, I have a clearer overall idea of the materials that compose this bibliographic heritage, and what I expect to find from now on is mainly Hebrew-Latin versions of the Bible, grammars, and dictionaries.

The staff of some libraries is actively cooperating, providing digital copies of the books that enable me to catalog them remotely.

The catalog is being edited, the final work is on its way! Keep posted!

The project in 2020

2020 is expected to be the crucial year to complete this huge cataloguing project! I am still collecting and cataloguing Hebrew books all over Sicily, although I obviously had to stop researching since March because of Covid-19 pandemic.

The quarantine gave me the opportunity to revise and organize the collected material, and to start working on the final draft for the Catalogue, that should appear by the end of this year.

A summary of the first results of this research will be published soon in the journal Materia Giudaica n. XXV (September 2021) with the title “Il patrimonio bibliografico ebraico in Sicilia“. Don’t miss it!

A journey through books and libraries

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.

Palermo, Biblioteca Comunale in Casa Professa

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.