November 8: The Bodleian Library

Oxford University’s Bodleian Library was opened to the public on this date in 1602. The library then and now possessed one of the world’s foremost collections of Hebrew manuscripts and early printed Yiddish books, including a manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (c. 1180) signed and authenticated by Maimonides himself, which is now available for viewing in digital format. In 1981, the Yiddish daily newspaper, Morgn Freiheit, founded in 1922 as a Communist journal, donated its archives to the Bodleian. The library also has a copy of a Yiddish translation of an Arthurian story, “The Legend of Sir Bevis,” the “Bovo Myseh,” which entered into popular Yiddish culture as “bobe mayse,” meaning “grandmother’s tale” (or “tall tale”).

“I would say, after Jerusalem, Oxford may be the most important destination for understanding European Jewish civilization, because the treasures of Jewish civilization, other than those that were destroyed in the Holocaust, have been preserved at the Bodleian better than anywhere else.” —Professor David Ariel, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies