Digitising European Minority Heritage: The Case of Yiddish

This paper builds upon my recent article Digital History and the Politics of Digitisation and addresses the question of how European minority heritage fares in the digital age by taking the transnational case of Yiddish as an example.

The question of the digitisation of European religious and/or ethnic minority heritage has recently attracted increasing scholarly attention, within the context of broader debates about how to represent diversity in heritage collections and practices. The digitisation of Jewish, and especially Yiddish, cultural heritage represents an interesting example, and can be seen as a relative success story as well as a cautionary tale. Over the past three decades, Yiddish materials have gone from being underrepresented in of online Jewish cultural heritage to forming a more than sizeable part of it today. The story of how that has happened highlights the various factors that are, or can be, involved in the digitisation of minority heritage, especially when it is of a transnational nature.

My paper will discuss the digitisation of Europe’s Yiddish heritage over the past 30 years, the context in which it took place and the various factors involved. from the politics of digitisation and memory to financial and (EU) policy aspects as well as actors. In doing so, it seeks to provide a window into the complexities and contingencies of digitising European minority heritage. Along the way it will also focus on the kind of materials that have been digitised in that period, and the accompanying shifts in the kind of stories about Europe’s Yiddish pasts they enable(d). By way of conclusion, it will ask what lessons we could learn from the Yiddish case for the preservation of (transnational) European minority heritage more generally, for instance when considering transnational minorities such as Roma/Sinti.