Digital Spotlight: The Pinkasim Collection

The National Library of Israel has digitized a rare collection of communal ledgers from long-lost Jewish communities of Europe, offering the public a chance to study an era seen as a golden age of Jewish self-governance. The documents, known as pinkasim, include detailed descriptions of the administrative functioning of the Jewish bodies that created them, documenting the ways in which Jewish society organized its social, economic, religious, cultural, and family life, as well as aspects of its relations with non-Jewish governments and bodies.

The Library, together with its Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, holds​ the world’s largest collection of pinkasim. The Pinkasim Project aims to locate, catalogue, and digitize these surviving record books. Making pinkasim available to scholars and readers around the world will permit a deeper understanding of the European Jewish past.

Some of the goals of the project include:

• Locate, catalogue, and digitize record books from Jewish communities between the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
• Provide open access to project relevant pinkasim, on the internet, on computers, and on mobile devices.
• Support a quick and efficient search engine, enabling pinkasim searches according to their physical attributes, content, and historical context
• Offer a powerful viewer presenting the entire layout of the pinkas and single pages, enabling manipulation of high-resolution images, and supplying links to the catalog record and to other related items or texts.

To learn more about the project, read the official press release or visit the project’s user guide.

Photo credit: Blog, The Jaffa Gate, towards the end of the 19th-century, photo: Bonfils House