July 26, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Mt. Airy ‘bookie’ creates ‘Great Hebraica’ exhibit
by VICTORIA M. INDIVERO

The custom of using a wooden case to hold a Torah scroll is still preserved in some Sephardic communities  This case is believed to be from Iraq, probably early 20th century. (Photo by Rick Echelmeyer)

“Books are sort of like people; they have their lives afterwards, they move from one owner to another, sometimes from one country to another, and often you can see physically in the book how it’s actually moved, how people read it and so on. They are these incredible windows into human experience and history, they’re not just words on a page.” These are the words of David Stern, as he sits in his office surrounded by shelves overflowing with books.

Stern is a bibliophile. With a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, Stern teaches in the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Throughout his career at Penn, Stern has cultivated his interest in the history of books, which is showcased in the exhibit that he created, “Chosen: Philadelphia’s Great Hebraica.”

The exhibit, now on display at the Rosenbach Museum, was a “labor of love” for Stern. He worked on the exhibit during his own time over the past two years, in addition to his academic workload as Ruth Meltzer Professor of Classical Hebrew at Penn. His dedication and love for the work is obvious by the enthusiasm he exudes as he walks you through the exhibit space.

Stern is originally from Chicago, and moved to West Philadelphia 24 years ago when he accepted his job at Penn. Twelve years later with his wife, Kathryn Hellerstein (who also teaches at Penn), and their two children, Stern moved to Mt. Airy.

“There is a nice Jewish community here, which is one of the reasons we moved. It was in the city, we found a great house, we liked the neighborhood. It’s urban but very beautiful,” said Stern. The family belongs to the Germantown Jewish Centre, and his children were sent to Akiba Hebrew Academy in Merion Station. (His daughter graduated this spring; his son still attends).

Stern’s love of all things literary was evident throughout his college years. As he studied Classics, English Literature and Comparative Literature during his undergrad years at Columbia University and then through his doctoral studies at Harvard, it seems only natural that he became interested in the history of the physical objects that he was studying — the books.

“I was studying different literatures. I was studying Greek, Latin, English, and then I started to study some Hebrew, which I knew, and I got more interested in that. It was ancient Jewish literature, from the Greco-Roman period … the first couple of centuries. That’s my official field,” said Stern. “But then I got interested in books. The physical book and the history of the book. And that’s a second field.”

Scholar David Stern relaxes among some of his favorite books in his Mt. Airy home. (Photo by Erin Vertreace)

With his research in this second field, Stern began to discover a wealth of resources of Hebrew literature right here in Philadelphia. Through his research he was finding a wide range of Hebrew texts housed in many different places, including area colleges, synagogues and libraries. He found books in libraries that nobody knew were there except for the librarian.

Stern felt that these pieces should be exhibited, and he wanted the objects to tell their own story. He began looking throughout the region for all different Hebrew texts. “Things started to come out of the woodwork,” said Stern of the vast but seemingly unknown Hebrew literature collection of Greater Philadelphia.

He approached the Rosenbach Museum and Library with the idea of hosting an exhibit to highlight the different texts he had found. The Museum agreed, and the exhibit “Chosen: Philadelphia’s Great Hebraica” opened on March 29 of this year.

Stern wrote the accompanying narrative, but he is quick to point out that if you know where and what to look for, the texts tell their own story. “Chosen” consists of objects that specifically tell the story of the Hebrew book — where the texts have traveled with their various owners and how the codex evolved to the bound book we see today.

“The physical book is such a fascinating thing because it’s not just a text, and the physical object itself has its own history. It’s about the history of what produces the book — the physical object — the scribes, the printers, the circumstances, the place and the historical events that surround it and lead up to it. And after the production of the book, a scholar can follow the life and history of the book, just as one could follow a person’s history.”

Throughout the exhibit, Stern’s narrative points out how to follow the history of the displayed objects. For example, one can follow the journey of a specific Bible as the Jews were expelled from Spain in the late 15th century and then from Portugal, and how the scholars know this is what happened.