YidTakNL corpus: 18th-19th centuries regulations of the High German Jewish community in Holland

The YidTakNL corpus comprises Yiddish regulations and announcements by Amsterdam's Ashkenazi Jewish community between 1708 and 1846. All items are related to social, political and administrative aspects of community life. The YidTakNL corpus was produced as part of an ongoing PhD dissertation in Erasmus University Rotterdam (2021-2026) by Ronny Reshef. The bibliography in the Excel-sheet "Zenodo statutes for YidTakNL" is based on Mirjam Gutschow's extensive bibliography, Inventory of Yiddish publications from the Netherlands: c. 1650 - c. 1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). However, it only focuses on regulations written and published by community leaders or charitable organisations for the benefit of the community. Gutschow's bibliography was rechecked, corrected, and four items were added, resulting in 64 sources. Most of the listed items are fully available online (reference is provided).

Texts from the corpus were used to train a Transkribus PyLaia HTR model. This model is dedicated to Yiddish texts printed in the Vaybertaytsh typeface, as printed in Amsterdam in the 18th century. This YidTakNL.1 Transkribus PyLaia HTR model enables researchers to decipher and read the well-known Yiddish Vaybertaytsh typeface. This Ashkenazi semi-cursive typeface (also known as Tkhine-ksav, Tsene-(u)rene-ksav, mashket/mesheyt, taytsh, vayberksav, ivre-taytsh and kleyn-taytsh), was broadly used for printing Yiddish documents between the 16th and the beginning of the 19th century across Europe and the Yiddish speaking world. As a base model, The Dybbuk for Yiddish Handwriting was used. The latest version of YidTakNL.1 is based on a training set size of 26331, and the CER is 0.10%. The model was based on ground-truth only [10% of the validation data], and will be made public during 2023.

Two preliminary editions of Yiddish takones (takanot) are also already published here: Takanot 1711 - YidTakNL and Takanot 1737 - YidTakNL. These will be turned into full editions, other texts will follow. The texts for these editions were rendered using Transkribus, applying the Yiddish-Amsterdam-Baseline model for layout & TakYidNL model for text recognition.

For additional information, see:

Reshef, R., & Gutschow, M. (2024). Text Recognition Model for Yiddish in Vaybertaytsh Typeface, Based on Community Regulations. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 10(1), 35. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.194

Reshef, R., & Gutschow, M. (2023). YidTakNL Corpus: 18th– 19th Centuries Regulations of the High German Jewish Community in Holland. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 9: 29, pp. 1–6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.161 

For the complete dataset, with transcriptions and images of the texts used for training the Vaybertaytsh model on Transkribus, see: doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25422844.