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A non-Jewish friend of mine doing graduate work at Princeton just sent this to me

 Subject: Invitation to Sefer Hasidim celebration

 

Please forward this message to the faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students in your department:

 

On Monday, October 12, at 4:30 pm, we will celebrate the inauguration of the new Sefer Hasidim website.

 

Sefer Hasidim ("Book of the Pious") is one of our most important sources for the religion, history, and culture of medieval German Jewry. This Hebrew book originated between the late 12th and early 13th centuries in the Rhineland. Thereafter, it circulated widely, influencing the distinctive religious practices and Hebrew literary style of Jews in Ashkenaz but also shaping the discourse about Jewish ethics in medieval Europe and beyond.  For the historian, Sefer Hasidim offers a treasure trove of information about the daily lives of medieval Jews under Christian rule. Particularly significant are its detailed descriptions of the encounters between Jews and Christians. Although written in the wake of the Crusades, Sefer Hasidim attests to a surprising range of contacts between Jews and Christians, spanning the continuum from their common participation in a shared cultural context to their interpersonal interactions, both polemical and routine. In effect, this book preserves a poignant snapshot of a pivotal stage in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in Europe.

Despite the significance of this source for modern scholars and its popularity among medieval Jews, there is has been no edition that integrates all of the available Hebrew manuscripts. This task proves particularly crucial insofar as Sefer Hasidim circulated in multiple versions, which varied in shape, scope, and content. Thus, in 2003, a large-scale textual project was initiated and organized to be pursued at Princeton University. After the images of Sefer Hasidim manuscripts were acquired, undergraduate students engaged in the process of transcribing the manuscripts from medieval Hebrew into a modern database. All the transcriptions were reviewed and corrected, and further preparations were made for the issue of the Sefer Hasidim database. Finally, the Microsoft Word documents were converted into a digitalized interactive web database, a major technological advance for scholarly study and interaction. The Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database (PUSHD) is now free and available to all who go to the website (registration required).

To celebrate the inauguration of the new web site and the research done to make it possible, we will be having a reception at 4:30 pm on Monday, October 12, in the Lounge of the Department of Religion, room 140, 1879 Hall.  As part of the celebration, we will have demonstrations of how the web site operates.  Please join us.