R. Gergely (ed.): Microcard catalogue of the rare hebrew codices, manuscripts and anciens prints in the Kaufmann Collection reproduced on microcards

Prof. Ignácz Goldziher's lecture

David Kaufmann and His Wife, Née Irma Gomperz. This library is marked out by its richness to be a resource of scientific research-work in wide circles. For this reason, the reverential widow of the late scholar entrusted his faithful pupil, Dr. Max Weisz, with the compilation of a Catalogue raisonné. This work appeared recently and, accounting with great expertness and precision for the contents of the library, makes its treasures generally accessible.

2 * * * The speciality of the library is naturally characterized by the branches to which mostly extended the scientific interest and productivity of the late David Kaufmann. Accordingly, most of the contents of the collection is made up by works dealing with Oriental, and especially Hebrew, literature, the history of the Jews and of medieval philosophy. These branches of literature are richly represented in all the large European libraries, not only on account of their connections with the literature of Biblical exegesis on the one hand and general and cultural history as well as a very important chapter of the history of the development of thinking on the other, but, apart from these, from the point of view of the history of universal literature also ; that is why considerable sums of money are expended on their enlargement and completion. They readily take the opportunity, even at the price of great material sacrifices, to acquire the pertinent material from the libraries of such deceased persons as collected in these domains. Bet me just mention the libraries of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, the Bodleian Eibrary of Oxford, the library of the British Museum, the library of St. Petersburg — now Eeningrad —, and the Italian libraries, especially that of Parma. The catalogues compiled by top-rank scholars who were entrusted with this task, which serve now as sources of the research of literary history, have actually made accessible to the world of science the Hebrew collections which are kept by specialists and are enlarged continually. 1 think it is for this reason also that we may greet with thanks the gift of the noble-minded lady, which remedied one of the deficiencies of our library and, in point of completeness, brings it nearer to the level of the large European libraries. 2 M. Weisz, Katalog der hebräischen Handschriften und Bücher in der Bibliothek des Prof. Dr. David Kaufmann s. A. Frankfurt a/M. 1906. 13