Irina Wandrey works as head of the research library at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at the University of Hamburg. Since 2011 she has built up a special collection focussing on manuscript studies in Asia, Africa and Europe. After studying German Literature and Jewish Studies in Berlin and Jerusalem, she wrote her doctoral thesis on medieval Jewish magical literature. Since then she has participated in different research projects, on manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah and on the edition of the Samaritan Torah, and taught Jewish Studies and Hebrew at the Freie Universität Berlin, in the Jewish Community Berlin and also at the University of Hamburg. Her research focusses on Hebrew manuscripts. In 2014 she organized an exhibition showing a choice of beautiful and typical examples of Jewish manuscript cultures from the important and extensive collection of Hebrew manuscripts at the State and University Library in Hamburg (exhibition catalogue: Tora – Talmud –Siddur, ed. by Irina Wandrey, Hamburg, 2014 [= manuscript cultures 6], https://fiona.uni-hamburg.de/21507602/manuscript-cultures-06.pdf). Also, Dr. Wandrey was managing editor of CSMC’s research journal manuscript cultures until last year and continues with this task in the current editorial team (https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hup4/mc/ index).

“The invitation by Tarık Tüten to participate in this marvellous book project about the Hafiz Ahmed Ağa Library on Rhodes and the world in which it was and is situated in today surprised and enchanted me, and I am grateful to be able to participate with my modest contribution. Being a librarian myself, I think the meaning of a library cannot be overestimated as each true library strives to include the world, to be comprehensive and – to borrow a term reinterpreted by Isaac Luria for his system of Kabbalah (1534–1572, Zefat, Galilee, Ottoman Empire) – to bring forward with its very own means, intentionally or unintentionally, the tiqqun of the world. That means to salvage the divine sparks of light scattered and entrapped in our physical world and to repair the primordial cosmic catastrophe and enable “the restoration of harmony” (see Sholem, 1946, 244–286; cf. Fig. 10).”

Irina Wandrey