The Taube-Baron Collection of Jewish History and Culture

The Taube-Baron Collection is the cornerstone of the Stanford University Libraries’ Jewish Studies holdings. Comprising 20,000 volumes from the personal library of Professor Salo Wittmayer Baron (1895-1989) of Columbia University, the collection was purchased in December 1985. In 1990, shortly after Prof. Baron’s death, the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation donated his extensive personal papers to Stanford (M0580). Salo Baron was the author, among other things, of the 18-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews. He held the first Jewish History chair established in a major American university (1930-1963). His library includes Hebrew editions of the Bible dating from the 15th century, rare volumes of Jewish literature and history from Eastern Europe and around the world, works on Jewish Americana, Jewish anthropology and sociology, and thousands of pamphlets and journals. It also includes Baron's own publications. Approximately 1,000 printed volumes and manuscripts in the Taube-Baron Collection are housed in Special Collections together with other rare books; the rest of the books belong to the circulating collections of the Stanford University Libraries.

The Baron collection was acquired with the generous support of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, and Marin and Sonoma Counties, and the family of Tad Taube.

To find online records for these items in SearchWorks, use the keywords “Taube Baron.”

The Samson / Copenhagen Judaica Collection

The Samson / Copenhagen Collection includes close to 2,000 works printed in over 115 locations from 1517 to 1939. The books in the Samson Collection belonged to the Jewish Community of Copenhagen, Denmark, until the early 1980s, when they were purchased by Herman R. Samson, a native of Copenhagen. The collection was acquired by Stanford in 2003, with a lead grant from the Koret Foundation and funding assistance from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund and private donors.

Books in the Samson / Copenhagen Collection cover a wide range of topics, including Bible and Talmud texts and commentaries, Jewish law and ritual, Jewish liturgy, rabbinical responsa, treatises on Jewish law (halakhah), scientific works in Hebrew, kabbalah, apologetics, bibliography, the sciences, ephemeral publications relating to the Jewish communities of Denmark and other Northern European countries, and even poetry. About half of the books were printed before 1800 in places as far flung as Amsterdam and Calcutta. Enhancing their value for research, many of the volumes contain handwritten, marginal notations by rabbis and other scholars. The collection also contains a small number of manuscripts documenting religious life in Denmark’s small but influential Jewish community.

To find online records for these items in SearchWorks, use the keywords “Samson Copenhagen."