Ludwig Lewysohn, Die Zoologie des Talmuds

Frankfurt am Main, 1858: the first systematic collection of the Talmudic and Midrashic material on animals, in German (set in Fraktur) with Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin. This is a test reading edition: machine transcription and English translation of a few pages, made to see what current tools can do. The companion project for plants is Löw, Die Flora der Juden.

New: Talmud zoology fact-check, the Talmud's statements on animals (and Lewysohn's comments on them) checked against modern zoology, with links to the §§ here.

• Title page and dedicationHalf-title, title page, dedication to his brothers, motto (Eccl. 4:12)
• PrefaceVorrede · pp. VII–XII · the aim of the book, its sources, earlier Jewish works on zoology
• ContentsThe printed Inhalt: parts and classes (one page)

Entries

• First part: General zoologypp. 1–63 · living beings, reproduction, the senses, anatomy, illness and death of animals
• Second part, first class: Mammalspp. 64–158 · from the ape to the whale
• The lion, the tiger (test entry)§§ 114–115 · pp. 68–71 · the first entry done, with the two hand-checked pages; also in Mammals

What this is

• The transcription and the translation are machine output (Claude Opus 5.5). Two pages (pp. 68 and 70) were checked by hand.
• The book has no list of abbreviations. They are expanded from a table built from the text and reviewed by hand (table); “guess” marks an expansion that is not certain.
• Each page links to the scan: please check it before citing anything.
• Code, data, method and costs: github.com/EzraBrand/lewysohn-zoologie.