The Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies holds approximately 200,000 volumes, including 32 (17 Hebrew and 15 Latin) incunabula and over 8,000 rare printed works, mainly in Hebrew, English, German, French, Yiddish, Arabic, Latin, and Ladino. The rare Hebrew editions offer specimens from a variety of Hebrew printing houses around the world; particularly strong are holdings of early modern rare books printed on the Italian peninsula, including nearly 20 percent of all Venetian Hebrew imprints. The LKCAJS special collections of non-print materials include more than 500 manuscript codices written in eleven different alphabets as well as in twenty-four different languages and dialects as varied as Armenian, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Syriac, Yiddish and Telugu, a collection of ancient cuneiform tablets and artifacts dating from ca. 2,500 BCE and more than 600 medieval manuscript fragments from the Cairo Genizah. Significantly, the LKCAJS is also home to one of the most important collections of early American Judaica in the the Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica and the historic Dropsie College collections.
Helpful Links
- Library at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies website
- Finding aids
- Colenda Digital Repository
- Online exhibits
- Judaica DH (Digital Humanities) projects
Noteworthy Individual Collections
- Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica
- Cairo Genizah Collections
- The Dropsie College Library Collection
- Holy Land Collections
- Medieval Manuscripts
Rare Judaica on Campus
Contact
Library at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
420 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106-3703
katzlibrary@pobox.upenn.edu
Unique at Penn 