LIBRARY COLLECTIONS OVERVIEW
The holdings are strongest in:
- Bible and ancient near eastern studies
- Hebrew, Arabic, and Semitic linguistics
- Classical and medieval rabbinics, law and exegesis
- Jewish history from antiquity to the modern period
- Classical and modern Hebrew literature
- Judaica Americana
- Yiddish literature
Rare Book Collections
- About 8,000 printed books with particular strength in Jewish law and liturgy. In addition, there are about 450 codices, primarily in Hebrew, Arabic, and Samaritan, as well as a collection of about 550 Cairo Genizah fragments.
- 32 incunabula (17 Hebrew, 15 Latin).
Archives and Manuscripts Collections
- The institutional archives of Dropsie College and various papers of its faculty.
- The papers of Jewish American scholars and community leaders who lived in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Among them are the papers of Isaac Leeser, Sabato Morais, Mayer Sulzberger, Moses Aaron Dropsie and Cyrus Adler. There are two significant collections of Yiddish archives: the papers of B.Z. Goldberg and Elias Schulman. The archives also house the Lenkin Family Collection of Photographs. The Lenkin collection consists of over 4,000 original photographs of the Holy Land, dating from 1850-1937.
- The preeminent collection of its kind, The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica.
Multimedia Collections
