SLIDE 1
FIVE CENTURIES OF THE GLOBAL JEWISH BOOK: HIGHLIGHTS OF WESTERN LIBRARIES’ JUDAICA COLLECTION
DAVID SCHLITT, JUDAICA PROJECT ARCHIVIST WESTERN WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
“A PORTABLE HOMELAND”
“The Koran calls Jews a ‘people of the book’, but this is an understatement. We are a people only because of the
- book. […] It was, said the German poet Heinrich Heine,
the ‘portable homeland’ of the Jew.” “The key word of the twenty-first century is ‘globalisation’. For most, it is the newest of the new. For Jews it is the oldest of the old. Since the Babylonian exile twenty-six centuries ago, certainly since the Roman era two thousand years ago, Jews lived at great distances from one another, yet they were connected by a thousand gossamer strands of the spirit. They were the world’s first and, until recently, its only global people.” Heinrich Heine, Geständnisse (1854) Rabbi Jonathan Sacks