February 2020 101 C&RL News

Acquisitions

The University of Pennsylvania Libraries has re- 
ceived a series of gifts from Arnold and 
Deanne Kaplan, including the world’s first 
endowed position in Judaica digital humani-
ties, totaling $12 million. The Kaplans’ con-
tributions also comprise an in-kind gift of 
collections of Americana and Early Ameri-
can Judaica, research 
fellowships, and an en-
dowment for continuing 
acquisitions.

The most recent gifts 
coincide with the release of 
a new website, The Arnold 
and Deanne Kaplan Col-
lection of Early American 
Judaica, offering free ac-
cess to nearly 7,000 digital 
copies of items from the 
collection for viewing and 
downloading. Digital cop-
ies of recent acquisitions 
will be made available this 
year, and all future items 
will be made available, 
as well.

The foundation for a 
partnership between the 
Kaplans and the Penn Libraries was estab-
lished more than ten years ago between Ar-
nold Kaplan and Arthur Kiron, Schottenstein-
Jesselson Curator of Judaica Collections at the 
Penn Libraries. Their initial collaboration, the 
Jesselson-Kaplan American Genizah Project, 
centered around the letters of the mid-19th-
century rabbi Isaac Leeser. The resulting 
website served as an early model for using 
digital technologies to integrate dispersed but 
related documents and make them accessible 
to scholars around the world.

When the Arnold and Deanne Kaplan 
Collection of Early American Judaica was 
donated to the Penn Libraries in November 

2012, it was considered the most important 
private collection of its kind. Since that time, 
the Kaplans have added numerous additions. 
Now largely available online, the collection 
documents a broad range of commercial, so-
cial, religious, political, and cultural ties that 
connected Jews and the general public from 
the early colonial era through the onset of 
mass migration at the end of the 19th century.

The collection reveals four centuries of 
history, not only from the 
perspective of American 
Jewish citizens, but also in 
the context of the larger 
communities in which they 
lived and traveled across 
the Atlantic. A bound file of 
documents, dating back to 
1597, follows the arrest and 
trial of Goncalo Perez Ferro 
by the Mexican Inquisition 
for a “relapse” into Judaism. 
One of the publications of 
David Nassy, a Suriname-
born Jewish physician who 
was in Philadelphia during 
the yellow fever epidemic 
of 1793, details his suc-
cessful treatment of the 
disease, which defied the 
bloodletting methods of 

Benjamin Rush. A handwritten receipt by 
Solomon Levy, confirming payment from 
Martha Washington for a shipment of cotton, 
is the only known document demonstrating 
trade between a Jewish merchant and the 
Washington family. A set of five rare trade 
cards advertise the Levi Strauss clothing 
business, which supplied pants worn by 
the “forty-niners” during the California Gold 
Rush. A small handful of artifacts—a Civil 
War–era pistol, an oil painting of a naval 
ship, and a shaving mug—were owned and 
held by Jefferson Levy at Monticello, which 
he restored following the Civil War at great 
personal expense.  

G r a n t s  a n d  A c q u i s i t i o n sAnn-Christe Galloway