As a graduate student, you will have access to the University's wide range of resources including libraries, museums, galleries, digital resources and IT services.
The Bodleian Libraries is the largest library system in the UK. It includes the main Bodleian Library and libraries across Oxford, including major research libraries and faculty, department and institute libraries. Together, the Libraries hold more than 13 million printed items, provide access to e-journals, and contain outstanding special collections including rare books and manuscripts, classical papyri, maps, music, art and printed ephemera.
The University's IT Services is available to all students to support with core university IT systems and tools, as well as many other services and facilities. IT Services also offers a range of IT learning courses for students to support with learning and research, as well as guidance on what technology to bring with you as a new student at Oxford.
You will have access to the Leopold Muller Memorial Library in the Clarendon Institute building which has a collection specialising mainly in the areas of Jewish history and Hebrew literature. It comprises some 90,000 Hebrew volumes and pamphlets and an archive of 400,000 newspaper cuttings mostly from the Hebrew press. A significant addition to the holdings was the library of Gedalyah Elkoshi (1910-1988), a collection containing some 17,000 books, and constituting a richly varied library in Jewish studies and Hebrew literature. The library also holds a collection of more than 900 Yizkor Books, the largest unified and open-access collection of this literature in Europe. Yizkor Books - memorials to Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust - are indispensable sources of information regarding Jews in Eastern and Central Europe.
The library contains several other important collections: the Montefiore Book Collection, one of the most significant collections of its kind in the UK and a major resource for the study of modern European Jewish history; the Coppenhagen Collection, comprising nearly 30,000 books relating to the history of Dutch Jewry from the early 17th century until the end of the 20th century; the Rabbinic library donated by Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs, in particular the sections on Kabbalah, Mysticism and Hasidism, subjects little covered in the Centre’s Library previously. The section on Halakhah, containing Responsa from early to modern times, provides an exceptional resource for the study of Rabbinic Judaism and is probably the only one of its kind in Europe. The Western Hebrew Library, collected by Sir Samuel Montagu, 1st Baron Swaythling for the New West End Synagogue, has nearly two thousand books, the majority 17th and 18th century Hebrew prints. The Hugo Gryn Library and Archive, the Loewe Pamphlet Collection and the Loewe Archive, are important resources for the study of Anglo-Jewry.
The main sections of the library are: Bible, Bibliography, History of the Jewish People, Holocaust, Israel Judaism, Modern Hebrew Literature, Yizkor Books, and Zionism.
The Bodleian Library has unrivalled collections of Hebrew and Yiddish manuscripts and printed books. You will also benefit from the Nizami Ganjavi Library part of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, which contains Biblical, Jewish, Islamic and other Oriental works.
You will have access to the University's centrally provided electronic resources, the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies' IT Officer, and other bibliographic, archive or material sources as appropriate to the topic. There is a computing room for the use of graduate students in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, as well as a common room where tea and coffee are available and staff and students can meet.
