Joshua Teplitsky | “Disastrous Diseases and Ritual Resilience: Early Modern Jews Confront Plague” 

Josh Teplitsky’s first book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library (Yale, 2019), explored the history of an early eighteenth-century Jewish book collector, with an eye to the history of material texts, the history of collecting, and the cultures of learning and power in which his library was formed. The book was awarded the Salo Baron Prize of the American Academy for Jewish Research for best first book in Jewish Studies in 2019, the 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.

Co-sponsored by the Early Modern Workshop in the Department of History  and by the Center for Jewish Studies

Joshua Teplitsky

Joseph Meyerhoff Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History
Director, Jewish Studies Program
University of Pennsylvania

Teplitsky received his PhD from NYU in 2012, and has held fellowships at the University of Oxford, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University, and the Yad Hanadiv/Beracha Foundation Programme at the National Library of Israel. In addition, he has twice been a fellow at Penn’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.

He is a co-director (alongside Michelle Chesner of Columbia University, Marjorie Lehman of the Jewish Theological Seminar of America, and Adam Shear of the University of Pittsburgh) of the digital humanities project Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place, an ongoing collaborative research project that reconstructs the history of Jewish books-in-motion from the invention of print through their contemporary provenance. He also serves as an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Book Cultures Online and on the editorial board of the German Jewish Cultures monograph series. Along with Francesca Bregoli (CUNY-Queens and the Graduate Center) he convenes the Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In 2022 he published an edited volume entitled Be Fruitful! The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History (Mineged Press), with Sharon Liberman Mintz and Warren Klein.

He is currently at work on a second monograph, provisionally titled Quarantine in the Prague Ghetto: Jews, Christians, and the Plague in Early Modern Europe. The book reconstructs a six-month plague epidemic in the city of Prague in the early eighteenth century, and uses the event as a window into examining Jewish life in the context of the wider city, exploring medical, religious, economic, and social life through the prism of crisis.