Puzzling with snippets of text: How to reconstruct biographies from book titles, printer’s licences and letters
The 7th conference of the Jewish Franconia Network took place on 24 November 2024 at the Jewish Museum Franconia in Fürth. It was opened by District Administrator Armin Kroder and Dr Annett Haberlah-Pohl, Head of Cultural Affairs and District Heritage Officer of the District of Middle Franconia. Professor Dr Lucia Raspe (Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute) and Meyrav Levy gave a lecture on Jewish hagiography and Jewish festival prayer books in the Middle Ages and early modern times.
In addition to Alisha Meininghaus and Benjamin Herrmann, our research assistant specialising in Judaism, Dr Nathanael Riemer, also led a workshop on “Puzzling with text snippets: How to reconstruct biographies from book titles, printer’s licences and letters”.
The workshop focussed on the Prague rabbi couple Bella and Beer Perlhefter, who lived in Franconia in several periods at the end of the 18th century, as well as the Altdorf polymath Johann Christoph Wagenseil. The workshop participants received extracts from letters and other manuscripts, title pages and printing authorisations of Hebrew works in German translation. The participants’ task was to work in small groups to extract the relevant information from the “text snippets”. In the subsequent plenary session, these “pieces of the puzzle” were collated on a timeline. The final result was a chronological overview of the lives of Bella and Beer Perlhefter.
This workshop was a joint event organised by BaFID and the Jewish Museum of Franconia.
You can find more pictures here.