Le fonds de linguistique romane de la bibliothèque de l’Université hébraïque de Jérusalem

Abstract The present article aims at recounting the history of the library collection of Romance linguistic and philology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, inaugurated on Mount Scopus in 1925 and relocated several times until the renovation of the enlarged primeval campus in 1981. This collection that originally consisted in a Seminarbibliothek was enriched in spite of the afore-mentioned relocations. It eventually became a very complete resource in the frame of the Bloomfield Library of Humanities and Social Sciences. Our study is divided in two parts : the first one summarizes the main stages in the acquisition of the collection against the background of the heydays of the Jerusalem school of Romance studies; the second one focuses on the present and tries to foresee the future in an attempt to point at a critical situation due to the gap between the bibliographical resources at hand and the present readership. This disproportion is partly due to a critical withdrawal in the knowledge of all the Romance languages but Spanish in the Israeli academic world. Yet, a deeper analysis reveals that beyond the linguistic obstacle, the lack of interest in the library collection of Romance linguistics could be the consequence of a recent evolution in linguistic studies that increasingly move away from the philological ground, especially in the United States, a country whose scientific culture is exerting a decisive influence on the Israeli linguists of the last two generations.