The culture of the very rich and very poor: Do museum digital collections tell us anything about Jewish culture?

This paper presents the comparison of American and Russian digital museum collections related to Jewish studies. While a number of studies over recent years have employed computational technologies to analyze historical Hebrew newspapers (Soffer et al., 2019) and historical Hebrew manuscripts (Zhitomirsky-Geffet and Prebor, 2019; Prebor et al., 2020), relate the experience of Europeana as an aggregator of Jewish content (Winer, D., 2014) or the politicsof digitization revealed through textual collections (Zaagsma, 2019), digital images related to Jewish studies have not been the focus of analysis. This paper aims to look at museum datasets as sources of representative data showing the diversity of our understanding of Jewish culture. We also intend to consider the explanations of differences in the visual content not only across the two datasets but also within each dataset.