How do Jewish communities in the global diaspora transform the Passover Haggadah to meet their local needs (visually, symbolically, and textually), and what information do these transformations provide about the common beliefs held by each community?

In order to answer these questions, Zachary Bleemer, a Graduate Student in Economics has been collaborating with the Digital Humanities-focused Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) of The Magnes. Together with a team of undergraduate students, he digitized and textually organized 30 different editions of the Passover Haggadah from The Magnes Collection, published in the United States between 1840 and 2015. The Haggadah, read at the Passover Seder, represents the manifestation of a local Jewish community’s spiritual and communal practice. The digital copies created by the research team can be used to display substantial changes in visual content, as well in text choices, including the words used to translate the Hebrew and Aramaic of the original text into English, and across time and place. The presentation, which will include both original volumes and their digital counterparts, will center on a new Digital Humanities method that aims at quantifying and explicating a community’s beliefs through the analysis of text patterns.