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156About the Guestbook
The Jerusalem home of the artist couple Miryam Ben-Gavriêl (born Martha Schnabel, 1893–1980) and Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl (born Eugen Hoeflich, 1891–1965) was a place of cross-cultural gathering and intellectual encounter. From the time they emigrated from Vienna to Mandatory Palestine in 1927 and until the husband’s death in 1965 the two dedicated hosts kept a guestbook which recorded the various visitors to their houses in the Musrara quarter (1927–1933) and in 9 Shim’on ben Shatah St. (1933–1965). Today, it is held in the Moshe Ya’akov Ben-Gavriêl Archive at the National Library of Israel, call no. ARC. Ms. Var. 365 1 11.
Nearly 1,200 individual entries in German, Hebrew, English, French, Arabic and more than a dozen other languages provide a fascinating glimpse into the personal and professional networks of the Ben-Gavriêls. Famous contemporaries who left written traces of their visits include Samuel Josef Agnon, Hugo Bergmann, Max Brod, Albert Ehrenstein, David Frankfurter, Louis Fürnberg, Tim Nahum Gidal, Nahum Goldmann, Avigdor Hameiri, Mascha Kaléko, Josef Klausner, Oskar Kokoschka, Theodor Lessing, Leopold von Mildenstein, Arthur Schnabel, Alice Schwarz, Miriam Singer, Khushwant Singh, Shaul Tchernichovsky, Gabriele Tergit, Friedrich Torberg, Harry Torczyner, Heinz Ullstein, Menahem Ussishkin, Armin T. Wegner, Felix Weltsch, and Arnold Zweig.
Signatures, greetings, dedications, poems and drawings offer a window into a variety of contexts, including German-Jewish immigration, German exile literature, Hebrew literature, Zionism, British Mandate Jerusalem, German-Israeli post-war relations and more. Uncovering some of the amazing stories behind the visits and the visitors may serve as an inspiration and encouragement for further research. Above all, the guestbook is a testament to the ideal of hospitality, tolerance and lasting friendship put into practice in a rather turbulent historical setting at the crossroads of East and West.
Explore the Guestbook
Provides a digital canvas to intuitively explore the entries with options for zooming, filtering, searching and details-on-demand.
Allows you to browse a digital copy of the guestbook and see the entries in their original context supplemented with additional information.
Research Context
The digital edition of the Ben-Gavriêls’ Jerusalem guestbook is part of the research project ‘A Fresh Look. Visualising Digitised German-Jewish Archives’ at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Universität Hamburg. It is based on material from the digitisation of 24 personal archives and collections of 19th and 20th century German-Jewish intellectuals, which was carried out in 2021-2022 in cooperation with the National Library of Israel. It also draws on the results of the accompanying research project ‘Wandering Artefacts. The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives’.
The main objective of the project is to investigate human information seeking strategies in archival contexts that go beyond targeted, systematic searching, namely open-ended, curiosity-driven browsing based on the available visual information. In the digital context, appropriate and user-friendly visualisation solutions can enable and facilitate an exploratory approach and thus increase the probability of serendipitous discoveries by the metaphorical “information flaneur” (Doerk et. al. 2011).
As an exemplary use case, the digital edition of the guestbook combines two open-source viewers, each offering a different visual experience, different interaction options and thus a different perspective on the same material. The canvas view is powered by VIKUS Viewer, the full-page view uses OpenSeadragon. The initial segmentation of the entries was done using Recogito.
The transcription and translation of the entries as well as the (partial) identification of the visitors, was achieved with the generous help of colleagues with the necessary linguistic skills and contextual knowledge. Their invaluable contribution is acknowledged in the metadata of the entries. Wherever possible, the names of the visitors have been linked to the relevant authority files (VIAF, GND, Wikidata) and other sources of information.
Request full dataset from ZFDM Repository at Universität Hamburg (forthcoming)
Statistics
Visitors by weekdays*
Visitors by gender (m/f)*
Visitors with academic title
Entries by content type
Use of writing implements
Use of writing implements over time
Frequency of alphabets
The statistics presented here are based on the enriched metadata of all the entries in the guestbook. Like any form of man-made data collection, it is prone to error, somewhat arbitrary and should therefore be treated with caution. It is based on specific research interests and a limited time frame. However, it illustrates the potential of quantitative analysis to raise new and unexpected questions. .
Funding acknowledgment
The digitisation and visualisation of the guestbook was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG / German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 “Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures”, project no. 390893796. The research is conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) in cooperation with the Hub of Computing and Data Science at Universität Hamburg.
Legal notice
The guestbook and its entries are presented here for scholarly and educational, non-commercial use based on the fair use principle. If you wish to use the material for any other purpose it is your responsibility to obtain permission from the copyright holders. If you have a legitimate claim in terms of copyright or privacy, please contact us.
Imprint
Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts
University of Hamburg
Warburgstraße 26
20354 Hamburg
Germany
Tel: +49 40 42838-7127
Fax: +49 40 42838-4899
Content responsibility
The creators of the individual pages are responsible for the accuracy and topicality of the presented content (including comments from readers).
Professor Dr Konrad Hirschler
Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg
Tel: +49 40 42838-9394
Email: konrad.hirschler@uni-hamburg.de
Technical responsibility
Web master:
Karsten Helmholz
Tel: +49 40 42838-9383
Email: karsten.helmholz@uni-hamburg.de
University of Hamburg central administration address
University of Hamburg
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Deutschland
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Fax: +49 40 42838-9586
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University of Hamburg is a corporation under German public law, represented by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Hauke Heekeren, president of the University of Hamburg, Mittelweg 177, 20148 Hamburg.
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Ministry of Science, Research, Equalities and Districts
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Value added tax (VAT) identification number
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