About

The Library of Haskala as a showcase of JudaicaLink Mannheim: the complete research database of the Library, made browsable and searchable again from its open data.

The Library of Haskala

The Library of Haskala was a German-Israeli research project (2004–2010) headed by Shmuel Feiner (Bar-Ilan University), Zohar Shavit (Tel Aviv University) and Christoph Schulte (University of Potsdam). It described 525 books of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, in great detail: their titles, editions and translations, publishers and printers, the structure of the books, the people mentioned in them (subscribers, approbations, dedications), their textual models, topics and target audience, their reception, and where copies are kept. From 2015 the database was published as haskala-library.net, hosted by the Judaica Division of the Frankfurt University Library; the site went offline in 2025. Its start page said:

This database contains 525 books in German and Hebrew identified by leading scholars as Haskala literature. The database is hosted and run by the Judaica Division of the Frankfurt University Library.

The detailed bio-bibliographical information, presented here for the first time, was collected as result of a collaborative research, headed by Profs. Shmuel Feiner, Bar Ilan University; Zohar Shavit, Tel Aviv University and Christoph Schulte, Universität Potsdam within a joint German-Israeli Research Project in 2004-2010.

Please note: for every book title only those fields containing information are presented.

Contact today: the FID Jewish Studies at the Frankfurt University Library, which runs JudaicaLink. Please share any further information.

This site

This is a static site, generated from the data by a small program (build.py, Python standard library only) and served by mannheim.judaicalink.org, the Mannheim development platform of JudaicaLink. It aims at the features of the original site and adds a few:

• Same pages, same paths. Every book, person, place and term has a page at the path it had on haskala-library.net, below /haskala/ (for example /books/<name> is now /haskala/books/<name>/). Each page names its former address and links to the archived copy in the Internet Archive. The only exception is the vocabulary “alignment of text”, whose old path contained no-break spaces: it is /haskala/alignment-of-text/.
• Book pages as on the old site: the 22 sections in their original order, with their original labels, only the fields that have a value, yes/no answers, links to people, places and terms; editions, translations, mentioned people, book producers and prefaces inline. Added: a list of the sections at the side, a citation (text, BibTeX, RIS), the year of publication derived from the Hebrew year where needed, and the notes on prefaces that the old site did not show.
• Complete lists of books, digital books, people and places (the old lists stopped at 50 entries per letter), with Latin and Hebrew initials, and a page for every term of the 19 vocabularies.
• Search (new): over titles in every form, names of people (also German and Hebrew names and pseudonyms), places, and optionally the notes; Hebrew without vowel points and with or without gershayim; filters by year, language, place, publisher, topic, textual model, target audience, typography, the paratexts of a book (approbations, subscribers, dedications …), holding library and more. The search runs in your browser on an index of 546 kB that is part of the site.
• People list the books they produced (with their role), the prefaces they wrote, the translations they made and the books that mention them.
• Places show where books, editions and translations were published, who was born, died or lived there, and a small map.
• Links into JudaicaLink: every record links to its view in the knowledge graph and to its JudaicaLink entity page, which joins it with the same person, place or work in other datasets (GND, other encyclopaedias).

The site works on phones, in light and dark mode, without cookies, and loads nothing from third parties: the maps are drawn from a base map that is part of the site (Natural Earth, public domain), not from a map service.

The data

Built from version 2026-10-12 of the JudaicaLink dataset haskala (77,667 triples), which was made from the database of haskala-library.net (dump of 2015-04-20) and keeps all its records, fields and vocabularies, and its schema (the labels and order of the fields and the sections of the book page). Licence: CC BY 4.0. Please credit: The Library of Haskala, research project of Shmuel Feiner, Zohar Shavit and Christoph Schulte, 2004-2010 (https://web.judaicalink.org/datasets/haskala/); FID Jewish Studies; JudaicaLink.

• haskala.ttl.gz
• haskala-vocabulary.ttl.gz
• haskala-gnd-2019.ttl.gz
• haskala-net.ttl.gz
• haskala-meta.ttl.gz

Links to entity pages: version 2026-10-12 of the JudaicaLink dataset ep.

Notes on the data

• Years. 303 books give a Gregorian year; for 145 more it is converted from the Hebrew year (a year of the Jewish calendar spans two Gregorian years, so תקמט is shown as 1788/89); 69 come from other sources; 8 books have no year.
• Scripts. The data has no language tags. Most names of people are in Hebrew script (also many “German names”); titles and names are shown in their own writing direction.
• Coordinates. 199 of 312 places have coordinates; 18 of them lie outside Europe and the Near East, and some of those are probably a place of the same name elsewhere (Danzig in North Dakota, Tarnopol in Canada …). They are shown as in the data.
• As in the database: some people have more than one record (they were entered twice), a few terms are spelled in two ways or entered in two languages (e.g. languages in English and in Hebrew), and the person data is thin (dates of birth and death for a handful of people). The JudaicaLink entity pages often know more.