GENERAL OVERVIEW

The Kaplan Collection, donated to Penn in November of 2012, is considered the most important private collection of its kind. It consists of over 11,000 individual items that document an astonishingly broad range of commercial, social, religious, political, and cultural ties that connected Jews and the general public from the colonial era through the onset of mass migration at the end of the nineteenth century. This exhibition, mounted in partnership with the National Museum of American Jewish History, features a treasure trove of representative examples of Jewish life around the Atlantic. Among the earliest items in the collection is a late 16th-century codex of the proceedings of the Mexican Inquisition against a New Christian accused of Judaizing, with handwritten and signed confession. Engraved maps dating from the 17th and 18th centuries are among the first to document Jewish permanent settlement in the New World. A major component of the collection focuses on the development of Jewish mercantile, social, and religious activity in the Americas of the 19th century. Many items in the Kaplan Collection shed light on the unique characteristics of American Jewish life, but at the same time scores of its documents, particularly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, demonstrate the ways that early American Jews were part of a more expansive Atlantic world. As historians have increasingly eschewed isolated treatments of colonial North America and the early republic, so, too, does the Kaplan Collection place American Jewish life into the larger context of emerging communities in the Atlantic world. In fact, the Kaplan Collection contains material pertinent to virtually every aspect of American Jewish history before the era of mass East European migration. The collection embraces such a vast of array of materials that it defines any neat categorization. Ultimately , the guiding principle that emerges from the Kaplan Collection is a commitment to document Jewish experience in the Americas in its fullest sense, including items from a variety of genres that record Jewish expressions from the extraordinary to the mundane (Adapted from Professor Beth Wenger’s Introduction in Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History).

COMMERCIAL EMPHASIS OF THE KAPLAN COLLECTION

The commercial aspects of American Jewish experience have particular prominence in the Kaplan Collection along with thousands of letters between merchants, the collection includes account ledgers, trade catalogues, bill heads, and many other items that taken together offer a comprehensive overview of Jewish economic life. Complementing the other commercial materials is one of the gems of the Kaplan Collection: the more than four thousand Victorian trade cards issued by Jewish businesses across the country. Trade cards were a common form of advertising in the late nineteenth century, and in this respect the abundance of such cards reveals that Jewish merchants followed broader business trends in American culture. By examining the choices that Jews made about their advertisements and the particular images that they chose to incorporate, scholars will be able to use this substantial collection of trade cards to uncover distinctive aspects of Jewish Culture in the United States (Adapted from Professor Beth Wenger’s Introduction in Constellations of Atlantic Jewish History).

THIS WEBSITE

This website offers one interface with the Kaplan Collection. Here you can explore maps and visualizations of the Collection. This website is not intended to serve in place of physically going to the archive or seeing the objects online (coming soon), but offers scholars, students, researchers, and the general public a different way of thinking about the collection. Go forth and explore!