Hebraica and Judaica

Although Lincoln’s collection of Hebraica and Judaica is relatively small (just over 400 works in Hebrew and Aramaic with related works in Latin and Greek), it is remarkable, both for its range and depth and for the insight it gives us into the study of Hebrew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not only in Oxford but across Europe.

The collection comes largely from the private libraries of two Lincoln Rectors: Richard Kilby (1560-1620) and Thomas Marshall (1621-1685). Kilby was Regius Professor of Hebrew and one of the translators of the King James Bible. His library was rare even in its own time, with important editions of the Bible, biblical commentaries, and dictionaries of Hebrew and Arabic. Thomas Marshall was one of the most important philologists of the seventeenth century and his library, with books in Arabic, Aramaic, Coptic, Syriac, and Malay as well as Latin, Greek and Hebrew, reflects the breadth of his scholarship and intellectual interests.

Thanks to a generous donation from the John S. Cohen Foundation, the Lincoln Hebraica collection has been now catalogued onto the Oxford online catalogue SOLO and so is fully available to researchers.