»From One End of the Earth to the Other End of the Earth«: Changing Perceptions of the World in Late 19th-Century Hebrew Journalism

During the 19th century, new and improved communication and transportation technologies expanded »the known world.« This was especially true for the interconnected Jewish world, which readily utilized these technologies to communicate between remote communities. Accordingly, late 19th-century Jewish journals describe their readership, authorship and content as global rather than local. Although this concept rarely refers to the whole world, it is meaningful, since it mixes contemporary perceptions of geography, culture, race and politics. This paper explores the changing perceptions of the geographical world as reflected by Jewish media. Recent digitization of 19th-century Jewish journals, such as Hameʾasef and Hatsfira, enables a deeper understanding of the dynamic Jewish view of the world using computer-based visualizations. Digital tools, such as Geographic Information Systems and Network Visualization, are applied in order to make sense of the hidden data as a first step towards a historical interpretation toward closer reading of the computer-based-results and their contextualized meanings.