Joshua Teplitsky, an associate professor and the Joseph Meyerhoff Chair in Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, will discuss his book Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library, offering a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe

David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library of Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders. Oppenheim’s world reached the great courts of European nobility, and his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended from Amsterdam to the Ottoman Empire. His impressive library functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. His story brings together culture, commerce, and politics, all filtered through this extraordinary collection. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, Joshua Teplitsky’s book offers a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe.

Joshua Teplitsky is an associate professor and the Joseph Meyerhoff Chair in Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held fellowships at the University of Oxford, the National Library of Israel, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. His book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History's Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library was published by Yale University Press in 2019 and was named the winner of the Salo Baron Prize of the AAJR for best first book in Jewish Studies in 2019, the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is the editor, with Warren Klein and Sharon Liberman Mintz of Be Fruitful! The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History (Mineged, 2022). He is an Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Cultures. He also co-leads a digital humanities project called Footprints: Jewish Books through time and place, which tracks the movement of Jewish books since the inception of print. He is currently at work on a book reconstructing a plague epidemic in eighteenth-century Prague and its impact on Jewish social and cultural life in the city.

Free and open to the public. Suggested donation $10. Wearing of a face mask during the event is required.

This event is organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews with support of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.