Joshua Teplitsky is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University and the most recent winner of the Baron Book Prize. Photo courtesy of the Stony Brook History Department.
By Brandon Chavez
Professor Joshua Teplitsky is an Associate Professor in the Stony Brook University History Department whose research focuses on Jewish life in early modern Central Europe.[i] His book, Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library, focuses on the life and library of David Oppenheim, who was the chief rabbi in Prague in the early 1700s. The book also highlights the significant role that books played in Jewish life in early modern central European history. Professor Teplitsky is the most recent winner of the Baron Book Prize for best book in Jewish Studies, which requires the work to be the author’s first scholarly book in any area of Jewish studies in that respective calendar year.[ii] This interview discusses Professor Teplistky’s academic journey, the story of how his award-winning book came to be and his current research.
ACADEMIC JOURNEY
When would you say your passion for learning and history began?
My passion for learning history actually began very late when I was in high school. I never took a single history course and even in college I started studying the sciences. I thought I wanted to be a biologist or maybe even like an environmental lawyer or something like that. Then, I took a summer class because I needed some more credits to maintain my status. I took what I thought was going to be an easy history class, and I just loved it. It totally changed my undergraduate study path, and I haven’t looked back since.
Did you fall in love of history in general or just was it that one Jewish history class that projected your interest in history?
That’s a great question. You know, I think I certainly have been interested in Jewish questions. I think they’re a really interesting set of questions, but when I was in college, I devoured any history I could get my hands on except American history. It’s the thing that I still don’t know very much about.
I had a bunch of really inspiring professors and one of my most inspiring was a Jewish history professor. She had a bunch of assignments for us that just really made me think and got me really excited about doing history. One of them was just an amazing lecturer and used to ask great questions about primary sources and that was a 19th century European history class, so it’s just that it was a mix of European history and Jewish history.
I just got really excited about the combination between them, and I have a background in other forms of Jewish studies and Hebrew is a language that I’ve known for a long time. When I was interested in becoming a historian, I asked for advice from one of these professors. The thing they reminded me is to be a historian of cultures, languages and places that don’t speak English as the first language, you need to have the language. You have to open the door to that other culture and access them directly, and which is why sometimes in class I ask people, does anybody know Russian? Does anybody know that we do stuff like that? I already had a fluency in Hebrew, so I moved in the direction of studying Jewish history because it was a culture that I had the language ability to access. Then along the way I had to learn other languages, of course, that I had to improve my French and learn German, Yiddish, and Czech along the way. It was in part the linguistics that moved me in the direction and it’s a culture I’m interested in, personally invested and professionally interested in as well.
Were there any moments either in academia or when you were going through college or pursuing your degree where you had a moment or feeling that this was your calling?
When I was in my senior year of college, I was taking a class and we had to write a relatively short paper, but it had to be based on primary sources. I think it was called 20th Century Jewish intellectual history; it was a very focused class. I was an undergraduate at Yeshiva University and they had a very robust Jewish Studies curriculum and course offering, and I think it was supposed to be like a five or six-page paper. I started reading these primary sources and I became obsessed. The paper, I think, ended up being like 20 pages long, but the professor gave me permission to just keep writing it. He was like, “If you’re having a good time and don’t stop, give it in when you’re ready” so that was kind of an aha moment. Like, I found this stuff and I would stay up really late in the library reading all the different parts of it and doing all this research. I just got so excited about the idea of doing independent research and like reconstructing stories from the past that I knew it was something that I really wanted to continue with professionally. I feel lucky that hasn’t stopped.
PRINCE OF THE PRESS AND DAVID OPPENHEIM
Now we’re going to get to the story of David Oppenheim and how you told his story. I know it started as your doctoral thesis at NYU, but what inspired you specifically to write about him or what you encountered?
To be honest, the story started with failure. When I was a graduate student, the way it works is when somebody doesn’t teach history, they take a couple of years of classes and then they have to try to go out and figure out what they want to write as their own history. What kind of independent research do they want to do? What, basically like 200, 250, or 300-page paper are they going to write? That’s going to be the core of a new book. It’s going to create new knowledge for new readers, and I had a totally different project in mind. I flew to Prague. I visited archives there and I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I wanted to write a book about criminal underworlds, specifically Jewish criminal underworlds, but I wanted to explore how criminal underworlds involve just different kinds of cooperation, collaborations and activities between people of different groups. Here’s the thing about criminals: the good ones don’t get caught and if they don’t get caught, then they don’t appear in the archives because they never get brought to trial. There’s never any trial records about them. I came home totally crestfallen, so disappointed. It was a complete failure and I had to start the project from scratch. So I did what historians or what scholars of most disciplines do as I started reading.
I thought, okay, I knew that I like the city of Prague. I think that’s a really interesting place and I know that I like the period of the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s. Now I need a topic and I read around it a lot. As I would read about the history of this place and the history of this period, I kept on seeing the name David Oppenheimer sort of crop up in the margins of stories and I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to maybe see what happens to write this guy’s story at the center rather than just as a best supporting character?
That sort of sent me off into this book. When I first started it, I thought that the book was going to be something like a really strict biography of this man until I realized that what I think is the most interesting thing about him and what I think he thought was the most important part about him was his library, and that changed. That meant that my dissertation that started as a story about this man turned into a book about this man’s library collection. It took a long time to move from one to the other. By the time I got to this book, I had the good fortune to live in Oxford for two years. That’s where this man’s library is today. I would spend as many hours as I could every day thumbing through different volumes from the collection, often until they close the library at 10 o’clock at night. It wasn’t great for my social life, but it was pretty fun to actually get to handle these books on a daily basis.
Did you have any difficulties either at describing the contents of a certain document or telling the tale of David Oppenheim or the court Jews?
Yes, to all of those things. There were many times where I would ask somebody else to look at a piece of handwriting that was really difficult to decipher. Sometimes I would just be sitting in the library and there’d be somebody near me and I’d get so excited I would carry the book over to them to say, look at this, but just to share with them. Certainly there were many times where I would get in touch with a friend or a mentor or a teacher to say, “What do you think about this? How do you read this? Does this make sense to you?” So, you know, that definitely wasn’t a project that I did independently of any help. There were a lot of people that contributed here and there to help along the way. Also, I really struggled with the shape of the story for a very long time. In the first draft of this book, which was my dissertation, I was stuck between telling the story of the man and the story of the library. It was a six-chapter dissertation. The first three told the story of the man. The second three started the story from scratch and told the story of the library. It just didn’t work, it didn’t flow. It took me almost two years of wrestling with it and sharing and talking to people and finding out what they were interested in and realizing that what they were interested in were the things that I was most excited about, whenever I was excited about something, people got excited back and I realized, oh, that means this is this is what interests me the most. That helped me to iron out the story and really make it one that was about books. It was a real struggle to find the shape of the story, there was a lot of cutting and pasting at times. I always wanted to take real scissors to it and rearrange all the pieces because it didn’t come together naturally. It took a lot of time to figure out how to tell the story. So those are the two big challenges that really took a significant amount of time. A teacher that I rely on a lot read a chapter of it and she said, “I wondered what you were doing all this time, I didn’t understand why you didn’t publish this book right away. Now I see, okay, good.” But it really took like two full years, which is quite a long time.
Do you happen to have any documents that caught your eye in particular when you were researching, like a certain document that stood out?
Good question, I’ll answer the question in two ways. First, one of the really fun parts about doing any research is stumbling across things that don’t really fit with the project you’re working on and then you get to tuck them into a file and say, okay, this is for the next project. This is a bit of a segue, but I found a bunch of things that have pushed me into other directions that I wasn’t planning on doing at all, but because I just found them in the course of time, I decided this is something I want to be doing. I found this document that was very concerned in the city of Prague about scandalous Jewish bathers. What that means, I don’t know. I know that the government was very upset with Jews who were bathing in the river and were doing it scandalously so. Ever since then, I’ve been interested in the history of bathing, like what does this mean and who’s allowed to bath with whom and where, where they may be recreationally swimming or are they doing their laundry? What was going on there? I’m not sure. Over the course of my research, I found a lot of stuff on plague and epidemic and that’s what pushed me into this new book that I’m writing right now, which is all about that.
There are so many treasures in this collection. I found a 17th century riddle in handwriting in Yiddish. It’s like a poem and a riddle at the same time, and it’s all about glasses, like eyeglasses. I wasn’t expecting people to be writing a little essay about her glasses. I found a letter to a rabbi that mentioned the way 17th century people used to use birth control. The list goes on and on. They are all just fun, strange historical nuggets. I found books that were bound with velvety covers.
This one’s my favorite. I was reading through, and in fact, this is in the book. I think it might even be the first illustration in the book if you look at page 31. That is my all time favorite find. I was just kind of looking through different things and here is this book about butchers. Then I found these doodles that, what I think was just like a bored or maybe a very diligent student drawing in the back and what I think is happening there. I don’t remember if I really explained it that much in the book, but what I think is happening there is I think the person got bored and is drawing pictures of chickens slaughtering cows and getting them ready to be kosher meat, that I think is my favorite find.
Aside from the collection from David Oppenheim’s library, were there any particular aspects of your findings that really excited you? Let’s say for example, his work with court Jews in Moravia or Prague, or even the incident with Toff and Diodato?
I think that was the one I got most excited about. That was the first article I ever wrote and I was just so fascinated by that story. I was fascinated by the way this man got embroiled in this controversy. It was also that chapter about Toff and Diodato came from an article, the very first article that I ever published, and I was just so excited about looking at the ways that Jews and Christians clashed in the city of Prague and was fascinated by how it took place in spaces like a coffee house. You know, this Diodato guy, opened a coffeehouse. It was his own coffee shop, and it was right near the college and it was in that coffee shop that also books were printed or books were sold, rather, that were designed to help to lure or convert Jews. So I think that was the episode that also just really got me so excited about this event. It was sensational, but also Oppenheim kind of emerged from it almost completely unscathed, which is really interesting as well. The fact that he knew how to navigate the legal system, I thought it was particularly important, because so often when people hear Jewish history, they expect a history of persecution or a history of powerlessness.
What I wanted to show here was instead a much more complicated history of possibility of nuance. You’ll notice there’s actually very little persecution in the book entirely and that’s something that I struggled with. I wondered at times if I was being fair to my historical actors. Was I offering too rosy a picture of their lives? I mean, there is certainly destruction there. Oppenheim laments when his home town of Worms is destroyed, but that’s something that affects all the residents of the city, not just the Jews. On the one hand, it’s a story that is a long history of Jewish history, but on the other hand, not a lot of persecution. I was really trying to tell a story that I tried to balance those different factors and I don’t know if I’ve done justice to it. The readers will have to decide that. I think the story of him going to trial and succeeding in trial is a really, I think, useful episode of how this perhaps exceptional man lived a life that was that was very rich and fulfilling and not one that was marred by persecution and torture. There are obstacles, there are censors that he has to get away from to keep his books away from. He runs away from plague, at times he clashes with rivals. So it’s not just that it’s not a smooth and peaceful one, but by and large, it’s not a story that’s just between oppression and victims. It’s not that kind of story and I hope that I’ve done justice to his tale at that as well.
Did you have any revelations in your research on either understanding of 17th century, 18th century European Jewish politics or when it comes to the court Jews?
That’s a tough one. I think working on the life of the court, just from the perspective of Oppenheim and his world helped me see something that I think usually gets a little bit ignored. Often the court Jews or in a lot of the writings about the court Jews before this time, they often get written about as the first modern Jews, as more highly assimilated, as forerunners of emancipation. They often get tougher as the people who are leaving Jewish society and joining more of the wider society. I felt like what I see from the way that they funded things and supported and printed books and the list goes on for me, that showed me that they lived in both worlds simultaneously. For me, it made them much, much more interesting. They weren’t people who were running for the door. They were people who were standing in the doorway and I think living in both worlds pretty fully. So that helped me to see these figures in a bit of a different light. It wasn’t a straight path to leaving the ghetto. Instead, it was living in two worlds at once. I thought that was a really fascinating way to understand these figures, the men and the women that were part of this very small but very influential group.
Current Research & Advice to Stony Brook Students:
Can you tell us more about your research on epidemiology in Prague?
Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about plague a little bit. So in the middle of the Oppenheim-Diodato-Toff story, Oppenheim runs away from the city. They chase him, when I first read that in the documents, I was like, “What’s going on here? Why did he do that? What was happening?” Then I made a completely different discovery when I was in Jerusalem. In an archive there, I found this amazing big leather-bound volume with old, really well preserved paper inside. It was list after list, it contained court records of women who are widows. 63 widows who came to court and itemized all of their possessions and swore that these possessions belonged to them and they were all coming to court in the early winter of 1714. I just wanted to understand what this thing was. So I started doing a little bit of research and realized that there was this major outbreak of the plague that claimed the lives of thousands and thousands of people. Then I went back to Prague on another trip and I said to the archivist, “Can I please have these boxes that are about plague?” and I felt like it was just going to be fun. I’m going to see what was going on with plague in the city of Prague, nothing to do with Jews, let me just see what happens. As I opened the very first box with the very first folder, there were all these issues about Jews, the documents are so interesting, the document starts with this is what has to happen to all the houses, the emperor’s office demands the following cleaning exercises and the following burial practices and the following precautions. Then it says, and especially when it comes to Jews, let’s do the following and I thought, this is so fascinating. As I traveled through different parts of my research, I kept on finding different sources, some of them government instructions, some of them, the Jewish Kehillah, the Jews’ own community, writing about instructions to hire and salary Jewish doctors or the sources from up and running away, or these widows or three different Yiddish retrospective poems that talked about this outbreak of the single plague.
In the winter of 2018, I decided that I wanted my next book to be about the plague and I thought it would be fun to write. I thought it would be fun to write a history of what daily life is like during an epidemic. I wanted to learn about how people treat people they perceive as being different. I wanted to explore if the Jews face specific persecution, less persecution, more persecution. Did neighbors help each other more or less? I wanted to know what kind of pressures, what does a story of a crisis help us to see about a living moment? What kind of fissures does it expose? What kind of bombs does it expose? How does looking at a moment of crisis tell us something about the larger world that we live in? Then March 2020 happened, and this book has become a lot more current than I was ever expecting it to.
What advice do you have for future students who want to pursue the world of either history in general or Jewish history and research?
Be curious is my first quote, the first thing I remember we’ve often talked about, like three C’s in the class right, we said we’re here for curiosity, for criticism and for content, and I think I would that would be my advice. My advice would be to be curious. To think critically and to read and to just to take it all in, and when I say be curious, I don’t just mean be curious about facts, but also like keep an open mind about the possibilities.
You can use the study of history either to become a historian or to do a world of different things. Let’s loop back to these stories. A study of stories can prepare somebody for a career in marketing, for a career in news media, for a career in publishing, for a career in social media influencing. All of these are ways of telling stories, so a history degree or interest in history doesn’t just have to make more historians.
I don’t just want to be somebody who teaches people to be historians and like replicate that. I mean, I would love to see more well-educated and really excited history teachers, librarians, curators, and museum exhibitionists, but I also think that a study of stories can also prepare people for all kinds of exciting career paths. The advice, I think, cuts both ways. It’s to enjoy history for whatever you want to do and also for a career in history.
Be curious. Don’t forget that there are opportunities out there, even in our time, we live in a bit of a budget crunch. Markets are crumbling and we live in a budget crunch, but especially my advice for Stony Brook students is to keep your eyes open for opportunities, is to look for little pockets of scholarships that are available to students, to travel somewhere new, to learn a new language, to to live in a different city, to live in a different country, to live in a different continent.
These opportunities are hard to imagine right now, but they’re out there. Keep your eyes peeled and think about ways that don’t have to break your budget. There are ways to gain help and support to do something like that to get to be curious about and engage in the world.
Endnotes
[i] “Joshua Teplitsky: Department of History.” Stony Brook University. Stony Brook University. Accessed November 22, 2020. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/history/people/faculty/teplitsky.php.
[ii] “2019 Baron Book Prize Awarded: Joshua Teplitsky,” AAJR.org (American Academy for Jewish Research), accessed November 22, 2020, http://aajr.org/funding/baron-book-prize/2019-baron-book-prize-awarded-joshua-teplitsky/.