Library Briefings

New collection for Jewish Studies

Northwestern acquires a respected scholar's private library

Northwestern University Library has purchased the private library of David Patterson, founder and Emeritus President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Patterson is also Emeritus Fellow of St. Cross College, Oxford University. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth named him Commander of the British Empire for “services to Jewish Studies,” making him the first such honoree.

Professor Patterson’s library reveals his wide-ranging interests. In addition to Hebrew literature, his major research and teaching specialty, he collected widely in Jewish humanities and history. Northwestern will benefit from numerous works on the history of the Hebrew language, rabbinics, biography, correspondence, and art. The Library's reference collection will be enhanced by dictionaries, encyclopedias, and bibliographies -- for example, a 1927 bibliography of books that would later become the core of the Jewish National Library. Some of the books are rare, having been published in pre-WWII Poland, Germany, and Palestine, and there are long runs of journals that have long ceased publication.

The 3,600-plus items are in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, German, and Russian, with more than one-third in Hebrew and one-fifth in English. One of the strengths of the collection is its run of 19th-century periodicals such as Ha-Asif, a literature journal published by Nahum Sokolov, a close colleague of Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Also included is a quarterly journal, Ha-Tekufah, which documents the changing centers of Jewish intellectual life. At various times in the 1920s through the 1940s the journal was published in Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, New York, and Tel Aviv.

The greatest strength of the Patterson Library lies in the fact that it was the sustained effort of an active scholar for more than five decades. Professor Patterson built a collection that reflects great depth in the area of his specialization, while judiciously purchasing monographs and journals in related areas. For example, the collection includes scores of pamphlets, small in size but valuable in content. It would be impossible to find most of these publications on the antiquarian market today.

The collection is unique in the literal sense of the word—being one of a kind—which means that no one book dealer could offer the equivalent and it would have taken years to duplicate even one or two sections of the splendid catalog of his collections.

Shelli Elstein