Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a background of David Oppenheim and his Jewish library. At the core of Oppenheim's identity and activity as a rabbi, intellectual, and communal leader stood his library. His library gained renown among Jewish colleagues and Christian contemporaries. It thus informed the decisions of local courts and distant decisors. He possessed highbrow scholarly material alongside popular pamphlets and broadsides, and he preserved diplomatic exchanges and communal ordinances in manuscript—an archive of contemporary Jewish life. Oppenheim's intellectual authority made him a much-sought-after source for endorsements for newly written books. This book then tells the story of premodern Jewish life, politics, and intellectual culture through an exploration of a book collection, the man who assembled it, and the circles of individuals who brought it into being and made use of it.

Epilogue and Conclusion

This epilogue looks at David Oppenheim's library after his death. Because Oppenheim's library was so closely tied up with the personhood of its collector, its meaning and purpose dramatically changed after Oppenheim's death in 1736, and the untimely death of his son only three years later in 1739. The library traveled between different owners and users, and ideas for configuring new purposes for it were mooted for more than a hundred years. Much as the movement of the library's individual components revealed a map of power relations in premodern Europe, the wanderings of the entire collection similarly reflected commensurate shifts in Jewish political culture. Proposals for new homes for the library indicated that Jewish patronage culture was being left behind, replaced with new models of accommodation and advocacy, and the library's contents were imagined as a basis for new forms of Judaism and Jewish political life in the modern world.

Endorsing and Incriminating

This chapter details how David Oppenheim used the printed word to fashion a wider sense of credibility and to extend that credit of reputation to scholars of lesser rank. Because of his special relationship with the making of books, Oppenheim acted as a lynchpin in a system of literary promotion and the reception—both positively and critically—of books once they were released into circulation that was exemplary of rabbinic culture in the early modern period. Despite his reticence to publish his own writings, his approbata populated the pages of numerous books that entered the market during his lifetime. However, his approbata also provided others with evidence of misdoings, giving antagonists—Jewish and Christian alike—fodder for assaults against him. The spaces between endorsement and incrimination, between censorship and treason, and between hospitality and heresy reveal the thin boundaries between books as objects and the social worlds that created them.

“To Make Books Without End”

This chapter addresses David Oppenheim's will to “make books without end” and how he promoted that mission in a variety of material and cultural ways. Much as the circulation of books permitted a vantage point for discovering relationships of power and prestige, the production of books represented an equally fraught political field. To print a Jewish book required the cooperation of Jews and Christians, authors and printers, artisans and wealthy sponsors, censors and endorsers. Oppenheim stood at the meeting place of such concerted action: while his library offered a source of discovery for unpublished manuscripts, he also was personally involved in the publication process on account of his familial wealth to sponsor publications and the cachet he possessed, as a bibliophile and scholar, to discriminate between works that deserved publication and those that did not.

Creating a Collector

This chapter discusses David Oppenheim's start as an aspiring collector. Oppenheim's decision to accumulate a library and establish his identity as a preeminent collector began in earnest in his late teens, by which time he had graduated from the rabbinic training that was expected of young men of his social class. In itemizing the pieces of his collection in his earliest catalogue, Oppenheim recorded the sites of their acquisition, the people he transacted with, and the travelers who made up the world of book exchange for Jews in the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, his personal catalogue reveals the manifold ties Oppenheim had with family wealth, local vendors, and skilled scribes. Tracing the elements of the catalogue permits a reconstruction of the domains of book acquisition in Oppenheim's world, which involved education, exchange, family, and travel.

Collecting, Recording, and Practical Knowledge

This chapter explores how David Oppenheim's library offered him a means to assert superiority over his rabbinic colleagues on account of his ability to marshal and manage an ever-growing body of documentation and knowledge. Oppenheim's library was a product of the emergent pan-European development and provided him with a vehicle for shaping his place in the religious and social culture of the early modern period. His library-as-archive contributed to administering the autonomous life of early modern Jews in Moravia and Bohemia, across the German lands, and into the Jewish courts of Italy. By amassing, archiving, and mobilizing information, Oppenheim used his collection to interweave personal prestige with institutional practice. Indeed, acquired with family wealth, and symbolic of courtly influence, the library was used by both Oppenheim and a constituency of rabbinic and communal leaders to shape the legal, ritual, and daily lives of an even wider array of ordinary Jews in early modern Europe.

Politics, Patronage, and Paper

This chapter examines how David Oppenheim used his courtly connections for his own political struggles and interventions on behalf of others. He continued to purchase books himself, but many Jews found that they had much to gain by giving him books as presents. These books-as-gifts came from as far away as Jerusalem and as near as local communities in Moravia, but all were given in the hopes that Oppenheim's favor might be converted into a form of political patronage. Oppenheim's world of favor and families represents an important instance of this widespread political culture, one that was conducted by Court Jews as much as by princely courtiers. In this system, patronage and clientage were not simply vital elements of individual fortunes or the callously corrupt, but were decisive for the operations of an entire structure of governance, securing the welfare of its constituents and the power of its leaders.