Rare artifacts, 4,000-year-old tablet headline exhibition marking Jewish studies’ 50th anniversary

August 24, 2026

A remarkable collection of treasures—from a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet and ancient scrolls to a handmade 1804 prayer book—lies at the heart of Emory’s rich history of Jewish scholarship. Now, these fascinating artifacts are on display in a new exhibition at Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Library that celebrates 50 years of Jewish studies at Emory University.

“From Tablet to Tablet: Exploring Emory’s Jewish Studies Collections” opens Aug. 29 in the Schatten Gallery on Level 3 and will run through Feb. 14, 2027.

The opening event will be held on Thursday, Sept. 17, from 7 – 8:30 p.m. in the gallery and the Jones Room. Registration is encouraged. The exhibition and the opening are free and open to the public. Other related events will be announced during the exhibition’s run.

Items featured in “From Tablet to Tablet” include a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet (the enlarged photo shows the detail), a quill, rare religious books, and a photo of Professor Immanuel Ben-Dor and Emory University Museum (now the Carlos Museum) director Woolford B. Baker looking at artifacts, circa 1960.

The evening will feature an introduction by Ellie R. Schainker, Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of History, followed by opening remarks from the exhibition curators and time for guests to explore the exhibition.

Co-curators are Katalin Rac, the Jewish studies librarian who joined Emory Libraries in May 2023, and Eric Goldstein, associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Emory University, who also directed the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies for over a decade and has authored two books about Jewish life and history.

The exhibition’s title alludes to two objects displayed next to each other in the rotunda area, alike in the purpose to convey information and yet, strikingly different. One is a surprisingly small Old Babylonian cuneiform inscribed clay tablet from the period 2000-1600 BCE, from the Michael C. Carlos Museum, the oldest item in the exhibition. The other is an iPad tablet, representing the newest.

“That’s one of the most exhilarating or emotional points for me – to be able to have this 4,000-year-old-object and put it next to an iPad from 2012 and really have this breathtaking view in time and space, all through the library objects,” says Rac.

Materials throughout “From Tablet to Tablet” come from collections held at the Woodruff Library, Rose Library, Pitts Theology Library, and the Carlos Museum, as well as Oxford College Library, the MacMillan Law Library, and the Emory Herbarium.

From historic artifacts to modern research

Through three connected gallery spaces, the exhibition traces knowledge creation from historical preservation to active research, interpretation, and teaching. Together, the items on display reveal how library and museum collections document the past while also inspiring new scholarship and deeper generational connections.

Beginning in the rotunda gallery, the exhibition first highlights the range of formats of materials found in Emory’s holdings, from clay tablets to the “Scroll of Esther” written on parchment, to a codex (an early book written on parchment), to modern books, glass slides, microfilm, and more.

From there, a timeline of Emory’s Jewish studies program fills one corridor wall, with the history of Jewish studies in the United States on the opposite wall.

The main show, as Goldstein calls it, is in the Schatten Gallery. Around the railing of the spiral staircase, texts of traditional Jewish learning have been placed – a Torah scroll, two Talmud volumes (Jerusalem and Babylonian), different Bibles, the Zohar (a significant mystical text), the Shulchan Aruch, (a code of Jewish law), and others. The rest of the gallery is filled with materials that reflect the modern field of Jewish studies.

“These items represent a more scientific and critical approach to the study of Jewish life that emerged as Jews and Judaism became topics of research within the secular academy,” says Goldstein. They also include examples of the primary source material that contemporary Jewish studies scholars employ in their work.

There are four themed sections in Schatten Gallery:

History, Memory, and Social Sciences, with sketches, letters, memoirs, and significant books chosen by Jewish studies professors.
Jewish Law and Religious Studies, which includes writings from rabbis and other authors and demonstrates the evolution of Jewish law and religion. Also included is Atlanta Rabbi Tobias Geffen’s ruling on whether Coca-Cola was kosher. Geffen worked with company executives to replace glycerin, the problematic ingredient, which then made the soft drink approved for Jews to enjoy.
Medicine and Health, Natural Sciences, and Technology, where exhibited items reflect the intersections of public health, community identity, and state building. Materials on the study of genetic diseases and screening, modern technology used in archeological research, and the symbolic meaning of plant specimens can be found here.
Arts, Literature, and Culture, including Jewish poetry and children’s stories, works of art, and other items.

In the media space, attendees can watch videos of Jewish studies faculty members discussing resources in the exhibit they’ve used to teach or books that significantly impacted them. For his interview, Goldstein chose the autobiographical novel “The Promised Land” by Mary Antin, who immigrated to the United States as a child in the 1880s from the Russian Empire.

“It’s one of the classic books of the Jewish immigrant experience in America, in praise of the American experience and the promise of America for immigrants,” Goldstein says. “It was a book I read when I was a child, and it really influenced my interest in Jewish history.”

Notes will be placed throughout the exhibition next to the items mentioned in the interview videos. “It’s a way of connecting the scholarly work that our faculty conducts with items that are in our collections and in the exhibit,” Goldstein says.

Visitors can also post notes on a board and interact with the exhibition.

“We ask them what book or resource was influential to them, or what their favorite resources are and why,” Goldstein says. “We want people who attend, and students in particular, to write something about an item in the collections that’s been meaningful to them and post that on the board.”

This enlarged photo of the inscribed cuneiform tablet on display, dated 2000-1600 BCE, shows the detail of the tiny tablet, which measures a little over 3 inches long by 2 inches wide by a bit over 1 inch thick. (From James E. and Elizabeth J. Ferrell, Michael C. Carlos Museum.)

Among the many standout items and interactive elements:

A handmade High Holiday prayer book from Charleston, South Carolina, dated 1804. It is a particularly rare item in the Emory collections that documents Jewish life in what was then the largest Jewish community in the US.
A rare book, Sefer Yeshiʻyahu / Book of Isaiah, by David Kimhi. This version, published in 1492, is one of the last Jewish books printed in early modern Iberia, and it bears the fingerprint of the printer.
A letter from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild, dated March 10, 1965, thanking him for spearheading an integrated public banquet in King’s honor to celebrate his Nobel Prize and for Rothchild’s support of desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement.
An enlarged cartoon from Pipifoks (Pee-Pee-Fox), a Yiddish humor magazine from the 1890s, that refers to the common practice of male immigrants renting a room ahead of their families’ arrival. The cartoon also contains a riddle, translated for the exhibition audience and inviting them to find the solution hidden in plain sight.
“Gershom Sholem’s Zohar: The 1873/5633 Edition by Yozefof,” a reprint of a 19th century mystical Zohar work with handwritten notes made by one of the most important scholars of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem.

“This item shows that Jewish mysticism was part of traditional Jewish learning and became a subject of modern Jewish scholarship in the 20th century,” Rac says. “But it also gives us a rare look at how scholarship actually happens. This facsimile lets us see the scholar’s process, how he worked through the original text, with the printed text on one page and his handwritten notes on the other.”

Scholarship for a variety of fields

Rac and Goldstein also considered how Jewish studies relates to different disciplines beyond history and religion. “We found some interesting ways to think about it through the lens of science, technology, medicine, and agriculture, and that caused us to find things that we’d never known about,” Goldstein says.

For example, Rac found a clever way to include the Emory Herbarium as part of the natural sciences section, where the exhibition draws a connection between botany’s and rabbinic culture’s view of plants.

In a sermon notecard written by Rabbi Rothschild, whose papers are in the Rose Library, the rabbi made notes about the symbolism of four plant species used during the Sukkot holiday – the willow, the myrtle, the date palm, and the citron. The herbarium provided specimens of the first three for the exhibition, and Pitts Theology Library supplied the citron.

“From Tablet to Tablet” demonstrates not only the richness of the various Emory library and museum collections, but also how a narrow field of study like Jewish studies can open a wider window into multidisciplinary studies, says Rac.

“As the Jewish studies librarian, I appreciated the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues and showcase items from across library units and the Carlos Museum in one exhibit,” Rac says. “As a historian, I’m interested in how a minority group used the university as a space to become part of a larger history,” Rac says.

But these aren’t just stories of scholarship, she adds. It’s also about the everyday experiences of the people who lived them.

That’s why “From Tablet to Tablet” was curated to be enjoyed by broad audiences, Rac says. “This exhibition, and Jewish studies, are about relatable human experience,” she says.

Visit the exhibition webpage for more information, and check the hours page, which includes weekends and holidays, before visiting.

—written by Maureen McGavin, senior writer, Emory Libraries