19th century Hebrew Press Reuse Network

This dataset supports a study of textual reuse in the Hebrew-language press between 1856 and 1897—a period during which Jewish communities, dispersed across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, created a shared communicative infrastructure through Hebrew newspapers.<br>The dataset includes approximately 130,000 articles drawn from 13 Hebrew-language periodicals, digitally processed and compared using a Hebrew-language plagiarism detection tool (Originality). It identifies over 300,000 instances of sentence-level reuse between articles, with metadata on source and target journals, the number of shared sentences, and time lags. Only reuse between Hebrew texts was analyzed; translations from non-Hebrew sources were excluded.
By mapping these intertextual connections, the project reconstructs a transnational media network that functioned as a global Jewish “town square.” The data enables exploration of editorial behavior, thematic clustering, and the role of journalism in diasporic identity formation.