The Culture of the Very Rich and Very Poor: Do Digital Museum Collections Tell us Anything about Jewish Culture?

Abstract

Digital approaches to Jewish Studies allow collecting data from multiple sources. This enlarges the picture, makes our understanding of historical experiences more complete, and triggers further research questions. This chapter compares samples of artworks from digital online collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Russian State Catalogue of Museum Collections in the Russian Federation. We show that the difference in their temporal and geographical coverage of Jewish artworks/historical documents often results from tagging, naming and understanding of what is deemed Jewish. The collective decisions made in these datasets, by many individuals, and differing institutions about cataloguing, indexing, and returning searches on Jewish culture in a digital age inform what parts of Jewish culture are accessible. The technological and data-led decisions become a part of multiple layers of decisions that inform how primary sources are formed in a digital age.