Sutro Library Hebraica
Item
Country
US
Name of institution (official language of the state)
Language of name of institution
eng
Contact information: postal address
San Francisco State University, 1630 Holloway Avenue, 94132-4030 San Francisco, CA
Contact information: phone number
001 (916) 323 9843 (reference services)
Contact information: web address
Contact information: email
Title (official language of the state)
Sutro Library Hebraica
Language of title
eng
Creator / accumulator
Adolph Sutro
Date note
13th century/19th century
Language(s)
ara
heb
Extent
167 storage units
Type of material
Textual Material
Scope and content
The Sutro Library Hebraica aggregates Hebrew manuscripts from several provenance and typologies. It includes bible fragments and scrolls, Bible commentaries, prayerbooks, Cabalistic works, lexicons, poetry and works on Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Medicine and other subjects.
Among this collection, there is a copy of a Hebrew translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, entitled Sefer ha-midot (le-Aristo), produced in Segovia (Spain) in 1482 and written in Sephardic square script (Ms. 162).
Among this collection, there is a copy of a Hebrew translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, entitled Sefer ha-midot (le-Aristo), produced in Segovia (Spain) in 1482 and written in Sephardic square script (Ms. 162).
Archival history
This collection was acquired by San Francisco businessman and politician Adolph Sutro in 1884 from the estate of Moses W. Shapira, a Jerusalem bookseller, and antiquities dealer. Shapira had committed suicide just three months prior as the result of a scandal surrounding his proposed sale of a Deuteronomy scroll to the British Museum. Although the Hebraica collection has been catalogued four times, it is highly under-researched. The fourth and final cataloguing/indexing was done in 1966 by Dr William Brinner of the University of California, Berkeley with the goal of creating an unbiased and well-researched description of the collection. Brinner’s list has provided the final arrangement.
This collection is primarily Yemenite in origin and has the potential to shed light on the intellectual and religious life of Jewish Yemenites. It is not known how the manuscripts and scrolls ended up with Shapira. However, as Brinner points out, the 1880s were a period of mass migration from not just Eastern Europe to Palestine, but from Yemen to Palestine as well. It seems likely that these items “may well have been among the articles of value brought from Yemen which these immigrants were forced to sell in a time of economic distress.”
This collection is primarily Yemenite in origin and has the potential to shed light on the intellectual and religious life of Jewish Yemenites. It is not known how the manuscripts and scrolls ended up with Shapira. However, as Brinner points out, the 1880s were a period of mass migration from not just Eastern Europe to Palestine, but from Yemen to Palestine as well. It seems likely that these items “may well have been among the articles of value brought from Yemen which these immigrants were forced to sell in a time of economic distress.”
Administrative / Biographical history
Adolph Sutro ( Aachen, Germany, 1830 - San Francisco, CA, 1898) was a German Jewish immigrant who went to San Francisco from Prussia in 1850. Along with his family, he boarded a steamship and headed to New York, and from there, he headed to San Francisco, California. Sutro arrived in San Francisco and made his fortune in various business ventures in and around the city, namely by founding the eponymous Sutro Tunnel Company and later investing in real estate. The tunnel, which Sutro engineered, was designed to drain the Comstock Lode mines of water, hot steam, and hazardous gas, but also to transport materials and men to and from the mines. And while Sutro spent many years raising capital, securing investors, and lobbying Congress, the tunnel had little relevance as it coincided with the end of Comstock’s boom. Sutro managed to profit from the tunnel company by selling stock before it went bust, and he eventually returned to San Francisco to settle down.
Beginning in the 1880s, Sutro purchased close to one-twelfth of the real property in the city, investments that would amass an even greater fortune for him. Adolph Sutro used his fortune to help shape San Francisco into a major urban centre. Today, his imprint can be seen in numerous landmarks and places throughout the city, such as the Sutro Baths, the Cliff House, Outside Lands, as well as the 81 acres of open space that make up Mount Sutro. In addition to this, Sutro became the 24th mayor of San Francisco, as well as one of the first German-Jewish mayors in the United States.
Sutro was a man of the people and a committed philanthropist. Part of his civic duty was directed toward building a public research library modelled after German Universities. His hope was that it would rival the best research collections in the world and his plan was to donate this library to the city of San Francisco. The mayoral campaign and Sutro’s declining health made it so that a building was never erected. The collection which was stored in two locations in downtown San Francisco, was, at the time of Sutro’s death in 1898, probably the largest private library in the world with somewhere between 250,000 to 400,000 tomes.
Beginning in the 1880s, Sutro purchased close to one-twelfth of the real property in the city, investments that would amass an even greater fortune for him. Adolph Sutro used his fortune to help shape San Francisco into a major urban centre. Today, his imprint can be seen in numerous landmarks and places throughout the city, such as the Sutro Baths, the Cliff House, Outside Lands, as well as the 81 acres of open space that make up Mount Sutro. In addition to this, Sutro became the 24th mayor of San Francisco, as well as one of the first German-Jewish mayors in the United States.
Sutro was a man of the people and a committed philanthropist. Part of his civic duty was directed toward building a public research library modelled after German Universities. His hope was that it would rival the best research collections in the world and his plan was to donate this library to the city of San Francisco. The mayoral campaign and Sutro’s declining health made it so that a building was never erected. The collection which was stored in two locations in downtown San Francisco, was, at the time of Sutro’s death in 1898, probably the largest private library in the world with somewhere between 250,000 to 400,000 tomes.
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Author of the description
Carla Vieira, 2022
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