Acknowledgments
This book is grounded in the principle that the study of the past is only possible with the support of those in the present. It is true about historical research at large, which is built upon the tireless work of archivists and librarians, both those of generations past who gathered and preserved historical material and those who continue to make sources accessible today. And it is especially true for a book like this one, which over the years has been sustained through a community of colleagues, mentors, friends, and loved ones to whom I must offer my sincere gratitude.
This book began in my years at UCLA, where David N. Myers provided constant support and guidance. David’s teaching was not just about Jewish history itself. He also modeled what it means to be a historian and why what we do matters, which has helped shape me into the kind of scholar I aspire to be. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Todd Presner, and David Sabean, along with many others, also opened innumerable intellectual doors and pathways. Moreover, I must express thanks to my teachers through the years who nurtured my passion for Jewish studies, especially Eugene Sheppard and Jonathan Sarna.
A book like this one would have been impossible to write without research support and fellowships from institutions that have believed in me and this project. The Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, provided a fellowship that, together with the Elka Klein Memorial Grant, underwrote my first research trips to Germany. Fellowships from American Jewish Archives in 2012 and the Leo Baeck Institute and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 2013 brought me to Cincinnati and New York. The Association for Jewish Studies’ Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Harry Starr fellowship at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, and the Leo Baeck Institute’s Gerald Westheimer Early Career Fellowship afforded me opportunities to revise my dissertation and complete the book manuscript. And I have been lucky to land at the University of Texas at Austin, where the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies has been a wonderful intellectual and institutional home, which together with the Israel Institute has enabled me to bring this work to fruition. In addition, the publication of this book has
been supported by a College of Liberal Arts Subvention Grant awarded by The University of Texas at Austin.
I should offer profound thanks to the countless archivists and archival staff who opened the doors to this history, often through extraordinary means of providing internal files otherwise unavailable for research: Gary Zola, Kevin Proffitt, and Dana Herman at the American Jewish Archives; Batia Leshem and Rochelle Rubenstein at the Central Zionist Archives; Yochai Ben-Ghedaliah, Hadassah Assouline, Inka Arroyo, and the entire staff at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People; Frank Mecklenberg and Hermann Teifer at the Leo Baeck Institute; YIVO’s Fruma Mohrer and Marek Web; Tanya Elder and Melanie Meyers at the American Jewish Historical Society; Michael Lenarz at the Jüdisches Museum in Frankfurt am Main; Gerald B önnen and Martin Geyer at the Worms Stadtarchiv; Christine Axer and Christina Ahrend at the Hamburg Staatsarchiv; MarieAnge Duvignacq and Anne Fellinger at the Archives départementales du Bas-Rhin in Strasbourg; Lorenz Heiligensetzer at the University of Basel’s manuscripts division; Helena Vilinski and Yaacov Lozowick at the Israel State Archives; Leah Teichtal, Tzvi Bernhardt, and Haim Gertner at Yad Vashem; Peter Honigmann at the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Heidelberg; Susanne Ulsu-Pauer at the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna; Sabine Gresens at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin–Lichterfelde; Sven Kriese at the Geheimes Staatsarchiv–Preußisches Kulturbesitz in Berlin–Dahlem. I also relied on numerous library staff who provided materials both in person and electronically, including Zachary Loeb and the whole staff of the Center for Jewish History; Sheryl Stahl, Melissa Simmons, Israela Ginsburg, and David J. Gilner at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion’s Klau Library in Cincinnati; and finally the staffs of UCLA’s Young Research Library, Harvard’s Widener Library and the Judaica Division including Charlie Berlin, and the University of Texas at Austin’s Perry-Castañeda Library, who over the years have processed thousands of inter-library loan and scan requests. Many colleagues have read portions of this book over the years in various workshops, writing groups, and seminars, and they have helped shape it into what it has become with their insightful feedback. This list includes Ceren Abi, Jorge Arias, Max Baumgarten, A. J. Berkovitz, Aleksandra Bunčić, Michael Casper, Kate Craig, Arnon Degani, Idan Dershowitz, Rebecca Dufendach, Joshua Frens-String, Alma Heckman, Joshua Herr, Lindsay King, Martina Mampieri, Nathan Mastnjack, Laura Ritchie Morgan, Shari Rabin, Kathryn
Renton, Megan Raby, David Sclar, and David Stern, among countless others. Michael Silber, Michael A. Meyer, Jason Kalman, Ben Outwaithe, and Roni Shweka also have provided useful primary sources and secondary materials. I am also grateful to my editor at Oxford University Press, Nancy Toff, who championed the project and has helped shepherd it. Additionally, I should thank Francis Blouin and William Rosenberg who, as academic editors of the series, worked closely with me as I developed the book, read numerous drafts, and offered their thoughtful comments. Further, I would like to express my appreciation to Suganya Elango and the whole production staff, and also to Joseph Stuart for developing the index.
Finally, I must thank my wife and partner, Adra Lustig, who agreed to uproot our lives and take on a peripatetic existence, when for years we did not remain in the same place for more than a few months at a time. As I sit here typing late at night, I am reminded of the sacrifices you have made over the years, and I am ever grateful for the trust you’ve placed in me that in the end it will have been worthwhile. Our daughters, Sylvie and Eleanor, who were born in the midst of this project, have also grown as the book has come into focus. Every day with them has been a blessing. It is to Sylvie and Eleanor that I dedicate A Time to Gather: This book is about those who devoted their lives and energies to preserving in some manner Jewish culture so that it might be passed down from generation to generation—a task that, as I look to you, I know is not in vain.
Introduction
In August 1945, Judah Magnes, the San Francisco-born rabbi and president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, asked the American military to transfer to Jerusalem the historical files of the Jewish communities of Italy. When Cecil Roth, the Cambridge historian of Italian Jewry, heard of the plan, he wrote irately: “This is clearly a Time to Gather, not the reverse.”1 The sentiment highlights a red thread through twentieth-century Jewish culture, an imperative to summon the forces of Jewish life, alongside its fundamental contentiousness that one person’s gathering was another’s scattering, or even looting. These impulses attained heightened urgency after the Holocaust, when Jewish leaders looked to gather scattered survivors and cultural remnants. It was a time to gather, a feverish era of collecting—and conflict—when Jews turned to archives as sources of history, anchors of memory, and arbiters of “authentic” Jewish history and culture. It was a time when Jews around the world looked to preserve links with the past, pursuing diverse archive projects and harboring dreams of total archives comprehensively documenting Jewish life. And it was a time of struggle, when archival centralization became one means of asserting dominance over Jewish life. In such a time to gather, archives were powerful but contested symbols of control not just of the past but also of the present and future.
Jews’ archives became sites of struggle precisely because holding historical records stood for wide-ranging battles over the control of Jewish culture. In fact, archives offer one organizing principle of modern Jewish life. They constitute a concrete attempt to hold tight to the past in times of fast and farreaching change, and manifest a broader sensibility of gathering together the scattered sources and resources of Jewish life, with archives offering a means to rebuild and reconfigure Jewish life by bringing order to the past. The power of archives in modern Jewish cultures drew from a deep well within the Jewish tradition, and it also reflected the specific challenges and opportunities of modern Jewish life: Piecing together the fragments of Jewish culture held dynamic symbolism within Judaism, whether one looks to the image of the fragments of the tablets of the Law, fractured by Moses, or the core notion
A Time to Gather. Jason Lustig, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197563526.003.0001
of Lurianic Kabbalah, the mystical idea of the scattering of the shards of the universe and their reconstruction through tikkun ‘olam; the dispersion and gathering of documents thus both resonated with the Jews’ long diasporic history and also recent ruptures, which only heightened the impulse to bring together the materials of Jewish history. In a century marked by the destruction of European Jewry and the rise of new cultural centers in the United States and Israel/Palestine, the twinned reality of the written word—which, as Bruno Latour noted, is simultaneously immutable and mobile—meant archives presented a possibility to both link the past to the present and also resituate it in new and sometimes surprising contexts.2 Consequently, archive making allowed for the recombination and relocation of the fragments of history in the aftermath of destruction.
A Time to Gather excavates archives as battlegrounds over control of Jewish culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the cusp of the digital era. It centers on a trio of monumental repositories—the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, the central Jewish archive formed in Berlin in 1903, together with Jerusalem’s Jewish Historical General Archives and the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, both opened to the public in 1947—to showcase continual struggles over who might “own” the Jewish past. Both before the Holocaust and especially in its aftermath, gathering archives designated cultural dominance by offering concrete evidence of ties to the past and lending a sort of legitimization to communal life. Israel’s claims to be a successor to European Jewry, the reality of American Jewry’s rising prominence, and the question of the viability of Jewish life in Germany after 1945—in all these cases, possessing records represented a kind of “authenticity” by holding on to history when what was to come was not at all certain. In other words, archives were about more than the past. Just as records served as an arbiter of personal identity, repositories could establish identity on a larger scale and even offer “birth certificates” for entire communities. They marked epicenters of cultural hegemony and had the practical effect of determining who might tell and house the story of the Jews. Such debates, however, were not limited to the immediate post-Holocaust years. In fact, archives have continually been a contested canvas upon which to inscribe assumptions about the past and aspirations for the future. It was true in the 1980s and 1990s, when creating archives in Germany reflected the continuation of Jewish life there. And it remains true even with digitization, which might seem to resolve struggles over physical records but actually magnifies the tantalizing fantasy of reassembling collections scattered by the winds of
history, like the Cairo Genizah, as gathering historical materials stands for the wider effort to piece together Jewish life. In the end, this history reveals that archival struggle is not over. Instead, dreams of monumental archives are continually amplified by the possibilities of such a time to gather.
This book emphasizes the active role of actually existing archive repositories and institutions, as opposed to “the Archive” as a construct of theory.3 It channels attention on ambitious total archive initiatives that sought to centralize and take control of Jewish communal records, whose leaders specifically framed their activities as “archives.” But instead of a collection of individual archive stories, it offers a cohesive history that charts the functions archives have played in Jewish life, their relation to the wider history of archives, and the place of archives in structuring power dynamics and cultural hegemonies, by arguing that archives can be sites of power for the powerless while remaining sites of cultural domination.
Twentieth-century Jewish archiving underlines how archives are not neutral oases of “objectivity” but instead are highly political sites. In creating archives, Jews sought to take hold of their own history, offering illustrations of what archival scholars have termed community-based archives, the endeavor to actively collect materials under the direct jurisdiction and management of communities who can thereby control their own history and cultural heritage.4 This process, crucially, illustrates tensions between Jews’ aspirations for archives of their own and the reality that placing materials under professional management often went hand in hand with their removal from local control. Moreover, even after Jews received restitutable archives, for instance, the matter of which groups, institutions, or locales should get them was highly contested. The book thus underlines the consequence of archives’ archival nature, which is not just an intellectual issue but also holds real-world repercussions.
For Jews, archives offered one avenue to reshape Jewish life in their own image. Archives—both records themselves and the institutions that hold them—are thus not merely the results of history but are also active shapers of the human landscape. The turn toward archive making and the struggles over who might have them reflected a growing importance of archives and the urgency of archival memory, both within Jewish culture and beyond it. And what is more, this story about monumental archives and the struggles that surrounded them channels our focus toward big data and its stakes prior to the digital age: The impulse to gather, and to gather everything, gestures at a genealogy of information totality and the power of knowledge—not just
to know but to “own” and control. Altogether, archival conflicts raise complex questions about who could or should “own” history, thereby demonstrating how Jews’ archival initiatives mirrored a claim that these scholars, institutions, and communities owned not only the objects themselves but also the history they represented.
Archive Fever Rising: A Turn to Archives in Modern Jewish Cultures
The drive to secure the historical record of Jewish life and the struggles over who should hold it reflected a turn to archives in Jewish culture, as Jews increasingly viewed archives as valuable resources worth fighting for. This turn to archives closely parallels the turn to history in modern Judaism, when historical thinking became a baseline for communal and individual standards of leadership and life. 5 In modern times, many Jews increasingly viewed religion and culture through a historical lens, comprehending historical change that opened the horizons of cultural, political, and religious transformation. Likewise, archives offered a way to engage with tremendous change by protecting what many feared was being lost, as Jews placed great value in physical objects as repositories of personal memory and communal identity. It is reminiscent of Pierre Nora’s insight: Describing a deterioration of communal memory supported by shared social contexts, Nora remarked that “modern memory is, above all, archival.” 6 In other words, memory is maintained through preserved documentation, not lived experience. The twentiethcentury traumas that tore asunder the chain of Jewish life thus fostered a dependence on recorded truth and an instinct to halt time’s arrow; archives served as sites of Jewish memory that both preserved historical sources and offered a way to link the generations in the face of history’s elemental discontinuity. In one manifestation, we might chart this sensibility from German Jewish leaders’ turn-of- the- century sense of the erosion of provincial communities to the tragic destruction of Jewish life in Europe. Given these other upheavals in modern Jewish life, collecting offered a salve for a vanishing past, and archives could embody identity on a communal level. If documents serve as prostheses for individuals’ memory, as Jacques Derrida reflected, then collecting and documenting history could replace lost limbs of the body politic. 7 In this respect, the
turn to archives, and the value Jews assigned to them as part of it, set the table for pitched battles over their control.
Archive making is, of course, not an exclusively modern phenomenon in Jewish history. The sixth-century Babylonian Talmud prohibited Jews from destroying holy books and Torah scrolls, prescribing that they be deposited in a genizah (pl. genizot), a storage space that would be emptied periodically and its contents buried.8 Of these, the Cairo Genizah is the most famous. It was probably established in the eleventh century, and Cairo’s Jews expanded the prohibition and preserved anything with Hebrew characters. By the nineteenth century, this cache reflected a dynamic social history, and its study has radically reformulated our understanding of the Middle Ages across the Mediterranean world of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean. The business of moneylending also relied on debt receipts, which achieved especially mature form in medieval England when Richard I (r. 1189–1199) insisted records be kept in triplicate.9 The 1290 expulsion of the Jews from England hinged partly on who held these records, as nobles acquiesced to new taxes on the condition of the royal treasury’s seizure and restructuring of outstanding debts to the Jews. But ironically, because the king possessed the debt receipts, and not the nobles, the barons and knights paid far more in taxes than their previous liabilities.10 One can also look to charters of Jewish settlement throughout medieval and early modern Europe. The longstanding tradition of reissuing charters indicates how these records continually secured Jewish communal life, undergirding a royal alliance between Jews and local rulers.11 In early modern Europe, too, Jews kept books known as pinkasim (sing. pinkas), which compiled the records of autonomous Jewish communal self-administration.12 And Jewish business concerns also kept extensive records, especially with the rise of international networks in the early modern period.13
All told, archives have been a continually important force throughout all Jewish history, playing a role in religious practice, business, relations to the state, and internal communal administration. Although the historian Markus Brann once claimed that a lachrymose history had left Jews with “no leisure to create well-ordered archives,” in actuality the Jews’ dispersion corresponded with diverse collections reflecting the dynamism of Jewish history.14 By the turn of the twentieth century, Jews the world over pursued collecting activities ranging from historical societies in France (1880), Germany (1885), the United States (1892), England (1893), and elsewhere, to the folk collecting ethos of eastern European Jewry, which includes
Simon Dubnow’s 1892 appeal to gather historical materials, the 1912–1914 ethnographic expeditions of S. An-sky (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport), YIVO in Vilna in the 1920s and 1930s, and the thievery of Zosa Szajkowski in the 1950s and 1960s.15 Widespread efforts to document pogroms and other atrocities extended this model, from the Heye ‘im pefiot group, who spread news of the 1881 Russian pogroms, to Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes archive in the Warsaw Ghetto, the most well-known effort to collect reports on Nazi crimes.16 The rising bureaucracy of modern Jewish life also led to a new archival imperative. Jewish professional, communal, and nationalist organizations all created archives like the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (1903), formed partly to aid communal administration, and the Zionist Archives in Berlin, established by Gesamtarchiv alumnus Georg Herlitz in 1919, the same year as the creation of the Zionist archive and library in New York City.17 What is more, the Gesamtarchiv proved a point of origin of a global network of professional archives of monumental scale and scope. What is remarkable is not just the sheer number of initiatives but also how archive making became a common cause even among those who disagreed on all else. For instance, the Gesamtarchiv’s Eugen Täubler spoke of “salvaging” the documents of communities shrinking under forces like urbanization and emigration, while Moïse Ginsburger, himself an opponent of archival centralization in Berlin, similarly justified his own archive in Strasbourg in light of the demographic decline of rural communities.18 In 1924, Breslau rabbi Aron Heppner formed his communal archive in response to Jewish emigration from the region, the same year Berlin ophthalmologist Arthur Czellitzer urged Jews to form family archives as one remedy to the dispersion of extended families.19 For these figures and others, traditional social ties seemed to be fading, and gathering archives mirrored a search for community (Gemeinschaft) in an increasingly atomized or gesellschaftliche society.20 Instances like the Palestine Historical and Ethnographic Society in Jerusalem and YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute centered in Vilna (Vilnius), both founded in the winter of 1924–1925, further underscore how archives proliferated across the aisle: These groups might seem to represent opposing poles, with the former a Zionist group and the latter holding a diaspora nationalist orientation, but each pursued archival collecting to cultivate their respective nationalist program.21
In sum, archiving became a reflexive response to a sense of a falling away of an old way of life, as well as the aspirations to build new ones, offering an impression of a certain archival fever in modern Jewish life. But rather than a
Derridean universal archival drive, it has been a development within history, reflecting the meaning and challenges of modernity. This turn to archives was in conversation with the range of Jewish experiences from emancipation and mass migration to nationalism and the atrocities of genocide. What is more, it stood at the intersection of the changing relationship of Jews to the state—as well as eventually the struggle for Jews to achieve one of their own. Indeed, Europe’s centralized tutelary states increasingly intervened in the individual and institutional lives of their Jews with the aim to “productivize” them, in part by documenting the population for policymaking and military conscription. Consequently, Jews sought to document and make themselves legible to the state.22 Joseph II’s 1789 edict of tolerance for the Jews in Galicia, for instance, insisted Jews register members of their own community, which showcases how “modernization” and recordkeeping were part of the transaction of emancipation.23 Similarly, Napoleon’s reorganization of Jewish communities as consistoires mandated that Jews preserve records, and starting in the 1840s Russian state rabbis maintained metrical books recording births, deaths, marriage, and divorce.24 The changing position of Jews in modern times thus had a direct effect on their documentary culture. In earlier times, the security of Jewish communities and individuals in Europe depended upon proof of official privileges. Emancipation in theory (if not always in practice) seemed to offer rights without such documentary intermediation, making charters less directly significant for daily life but of great historical importance. But in fact, Jews’ status as citizens depended on new forms of documentation, like certificates of birth and marriage, that concretized Jews’ direct relations to the state. And as Jews turned toward their own national aspirations, archives offered an avenue to shape nationalist historical memory and chart out the structures of power over the past—and thus the future.
The turn to archives in modern Jewish cultures manifested the mechanisms of archival memory, how Jews gathered the past’s material remains to keep a grasp on that which slipped across the threshold of history. It also demonstrated Jews’ measured internalization of a certain archival logic of Western industrial societies, as records became markers of trust in an atomized world, or even a kind of “documentality.”25 That is, documents constitute a disembodied self, where you are what your records put in writing. As Maurizio Ferraris put it, extending Derrida’s claim, “There is nothing social beyond the text.” Paperwork also offers a mechanism for the development of social trust, and thereby the construction of imagined community. And
this is not to mention the state’s claim to hegemony over the documentation of daily life, with the authority to articulate and authenticate the recorded reality of personal status, property ownership, and law and justice. In this vein, a rising bureaucratic impulse—pushed by both the state and Jews’ own self-interest in the management of their communal affairs—reflected Jews’ internalization of the state’s archival logic and its ability to make history, whether in terms of historical agency itself or through the power to destroy the past by absolving debt or pardoning crimes.26 This process swept from a seemingly banal necessity to track and monitor the Jewish population to the Israeli state’s documentary regime that adjudicates “proof” of personal religious status, which marked a perverse pinnacle of this archival logic. There, personal status has little to do with internal belief or external practice but is instead tied to one’s parents’ marriage contract, a piece of paper produced (and often misplaced) long before one’s own birth, in the absence of which Jewishness is sometimes deemed dubitable. Consequently, the development of archives in modern Jewish cultures ties together the relationship of Jews to the state and its archival impulse—both to the states in which Jews have lived in the diaspora and also to the pursuit of a state for the Jews.
The turn to archives in Jewish life lays bare the transformative, forwardfacing nature of archival activity and the struggle for control of Jewish culture. Archivists and scholars may have believed that by gathering historical records, they were preserving the Jewish past for posterity as “neutral” actors. Just as in the turn to history in Jewish culture—when scholars claimed to pursue historical “objectivity” but actually lent ammunition to contemporary debates about emancipation, nationalism, religious reform, and more— so too was archiving never neutral. Neither was the act of calling something an archive. If scholars and others hoped to preserve Jewish history as it really was, the process of archiving actually transformed the past into new forms that could be reordered to reflect their own sensibilities. In the end, if creating archives was about Jews taking control of their past, this rising archive fever also led directly to the question of, and intense struggle over, how Jews should direct their future.
Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture
Broadly speaking, as institutions established to maintain the mountains of paperwork secreted by sprawling bureaucracies, archives can be construed
as instruments for the control and expansion of social resources and processes of the industrialized age. It is almost a truism that there have always been bonds between knowledge and power, following Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who theorized the ties of archives, administration, and governmentality, with representation (i.e., records) aiding in managing society.27 But over the past few centuries, archives have held more forceful and specific roles as bulwarks against what James R. Beniger termed a “crisis of control” brought upon by the incredible masses of material and processes in modern society.28 Archives are tools to bring society back under control by assembling, organizing, and making available information—but, notably, only to those properly authorized. Archives, then, reveal their nature as institutions of control over society and government, over access, and thereby over the narratives of history and culture that are produced on their basis.
For non-state or non-administrative actors too, archives represented a means to control one’s own culture and history. And Jews, like other minority groups, wanted to hold their own archives as a way to preserve history on their own terms and delineate how it could be told. In this way, Jewish archive making is comparable to the efforts of nineteenth-century Jewish scholars of Wissenschaft des Judentums and Hokhmat Yisra’el, who sought to wrest the study of the Jewish past from Christian scholars.29 But while historical scholarship is largely discursive, archives are eminently physical. They consequently place the matter of Jewish culture in concrete terms. The relics of the past stood for the possibility of controlling the present and marked the ability of Jews to take possession of their own history. They were symbols for groups, institutions, and communities to express claims of hegemony over certain spheres of Jewish life, and also potent tools of practical power, like when the Nazis commandeered Jewish archives to actively control Jewish communities and lives. After the Second World War these debates reached a fever pitch with the restitution struggles over who should receive the Jews’ looted archives and what all this might represent for the future.
The history of Jewish archives in the twentieth century, one might say, tells a story of collecting historical materials outside the purview of state archives. Or alternately, especially in light of post-Holocaust restitution, it tells us about an attempt to remove looted records from a perpetrator state to one that purported to represent, at least from the perspective of the Israelis, the Jewish people at large. In this respect, Jews’ archival activities were not dissimilar from other minority or disenfranchised groups who sought to construct community-based archives, libraries, and museums. In fact,
Jews present a paradigmatic illustration of a people who throughout their history have been persecuted and who, in modern times, were victims of genocide perpetrated by those who sought to destroy not only Jewish lives but also their culture, in part by looting historical materials. If some have written about archiving as a mechanism to fight against “symbolic annihilation” and the need for a “survivor-centered approach” to documentation, the Jews’ archiving in the aftermath of the attempted actual annihilation of their people is particularly striking.30 Archives allowed Jews to demonstrate their historical agency, especially for Zionist figures who saw holding archives as one manifestation of a return of the Jewish people to the stage of history. On the whole, creating archives constituted an effort by Jews to take control of their own history, sometimes in adverse circumstances. One needs only look so far as the ghetto archives of the Second World War.31 These projects sought to enshrine history for purposes of communal memory and to assert a community’s control of its own cultural heritage. It reflects an issue that has come to the fore especially in recent decades, as indigenous and persecuted peoples have sought to take ownership and control of their own culture from those who have long held it.
Twentieth-century Jewish archives simultaneously exemplify and complicate the model of community-based archives. They offer a genealogy of these ideas prior to professional archivists’ recent theorization and practice, gesturing at a complex layering of the relationship of archives, the state, and cultural control. Indeed, for Jews—historically stateless—diverse archival efforts indicate the possibilities of archives outside of the tools of state power. Yet in actuality, Jews’ archives were often closely allied or aligned with the state. The Gesamtarchiv, for instance, gathered files only within the boundaries of Wilhelmine Germany. And the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem clearly served the Israeli state-building project. Moreover, the entire notion that a “national” archive of the Jews should be tied to a state rested upon assumptions of the ties between archive and state; figures like the Israeli archivist Alex Bein posited the false notion that throughout Jewish history Jews had not kept archives due to their lack of a state, which could now be “corrected.”32 Nevertheless, even if archives like the Gesamtarchiv were closely associated with the Prussian state, the fact that the German Jewish community developed an archive of its own reflects the desire of a minority community to preserve its own cultural heritage through its own means. And the Israelis’ effort to create an archive of the diaspora hints at the complex meaning of a Jewish “nation” beyond the state. Altogether, these
instances clearly match the notion of community-based archiving, demonstrating the complexity of the phenomenon in all its valences, and also how such archives can be and still are put to use for varied political and ideological purposes.
If Jewish archives throughout the twentieth century illustrate communitybased archives prior to their official invention, they also demonstrate clearly how archives have always been both about preserving historical resources and also about the control of culture. That is to say, archivists never naïvely accumulated historical materials and preserved their “original order,” but instead they actively constructed scholarly edifices in support of preferred historical perspectives.33 If anything, the way Jewish archives served as battlegrounds showcases how archives have never been neutral. What scholars and archivists chose to gather reflected their own cultural priorities. In actively gathering archives, leaders and scholars shaped the frames of context in which these files could be studied, where they should be placed and who might claim to “own” them (whether actual ownership, or symbolically through the cities and institutions in which they were situated), and who could access them. Moreover, archives in Israel demonstrate that the community archives model can be utilized not just against state power but also in its service. Similarly, post-Holocaust archival struggles highlight the challenges in pursuing a “survivor-centered” approach when different groups of survivors lay claim to the same files. This history underlines how archives, even those consciously framed against the backdrop of restitution, can still be engines driving powerful metanarratives. Archives not only represented a mechanism for social, political, and economic control in the face of unwieldy bureaucracy, or for communities to control their own culture and thereby their own destiny. Holding historical archives also allowed institutions, communities, and individuals to express their control over others by laying claims to cultural hegemony, by taking hold of archives from other groups, and by establishing who could access and use them.
On the whole, Jewish archival institutions undergirded a broad intellectual and cultural “field.”34 Indeed, historical records constitute valuable cultural capital, and archives as institutions play a dual role of supporting both the production of history and the reproduction of culture. Collecting and protecting historical materials is thereby simultaneously about historical preservation, perpetuating existing social systems, and propping up new ones. Here, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s notion of “epistemic things” usefully complements the Bourdieuan idea of the reproduction and control of social
power through cultural capital like archives. Writing primarily on the natural sciences, Rheinberger emphasized how scholars create the objects of their study rather than “discovering” them in nature—they synthesize proteins in the test tube, isolate isotopes in the centrifuge, collect and preserve naturalist specimens for study.35 Likewise, archivists actively produce history’s materials through curation, collection, and preservation, placing them in new spaces that offer transformative epistemic and cultural meaning. Such a perspectival revolution reframes archival activity so its nature is laid bare. It is not documents that are at the center of archival activity, but rather the archivists, who actively transform the past into history. Collectors determine what makes its way into archives, when, and where. In this respect, archive making is a process that allows for sources to be recontextualized and reordered such that they might offer meaning to new social contexts far different from those of the historical actors they describe.
In the context of twentieth-century Jewish life, particularly the devastating destruction of European Jewry, archives offered opportunities not only to stitch together the past and present but also to demarcate a stark division between present-day possibilities and that which had been utterly lost in the realm of the past. This book thus distinguishes between the past and history: The act of archiving marks the transition of records from practical utility to historical study, a shift that possesses important political and social meaning. It holds a dramatic symbolism of the past’s passing beyond the shroud of history, and its enshrinement thereby as the material of memory. In this manner, what Derrida termed “the instant of archivization” is a crucial facet of cultural control.36 What is placed in the archival vaults stands for claims about which communities are a part of history, and which are part of the present. Consequently, the Holocaust and the Nazis’ looting and destruction of Jewish archival resources set the stage for a heightened debate over archives. However, many of the same issues remained. The question of archives represented the fundamental challenge of retaining the past. Archivists, animated by dreams of totality, found themselves engaged in fierce struggles over the control of Jewish culture.
The history of modern Jewish archives demonstrates both a diversity of archival activities and the rise of the paradigmatic but contentious vision of total archiving. This is a major thread tying together the initiatives which are the focus of this book. The Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, the first professionally managed archive of Jewish history, pursued its aim to collect the materials of all German Jewish communities. Jews in Austria,
the United States, and elsewhere all followed them in talking of creating their own “Gesamt-archives,” and after the Second World War archivists in Jerusalem and also Jacob Rader Marcus at the American Jewish Archives also had visions of monumental collecting on the model of the Gesamtarchiv. Altogether, the vision of collecting on a massive scale reflected the possibilities of centralization as a means to develop scholarly resources and also to present monuments to Jewish culture and the ability of the communities that held them to mark out the boundaries of the areas under their control. But it also meant competition over archives was by no means concluded when Jews took control of their own files.
It was not only a question of which countries held archives. Which city or even neighborhood housed them also held great symbolic value. The Gesamtarchiv constituted an archive of Jewish life as a monument to the ties between Deutschtum and Judentum, between Germanness and Jewishness, and the files it collected superimposed the then-current boundaries of Germany and the centrality of Berlin upon a history of Jewish life in central and eastern Europe that did not hew to such political frameworks. Gathering files to Jerusalem marked the newly established Jewish state as a hegemonic center of Jewish culture, whereas Jacob Rader Marcus’s American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati reflected a location that had once been viewed (at least by its own inhabitants) as a kind of “Jerusalem on the Ohio” when New York City was the ascendant center of American Jewry. Marcus collected archives to study the participation of Jews in American Jewish life in its broadest geographic scale, across the entirety of North America and in the western hemisphere at large. In contrast, the Jerusalem archive envisioned itself as the central point of research for Jewish history around the world. The formation of the Center for Jewish History in New York City in 2000 marked the dominance of that metropolis and also the aim to create a central institute for Jewish historical studies in the United States. Establishing new archives in Germany, likewise, might have seemed impossible immediately following the Holocaust, reflecting a commonly held view that Jewish life held no future there. But by the 1980s and 1990s, a resurgent community saw a need for archives of its own. Consequently, battles over where archives should be located stood for important questions of the geography of the cultural and political organization of Jewish life. The struggles over archives demonstrate the gravity of “owning” the Jewish past as part of the complex negotiation of Jewish culture in a global context at key moments of modern Jewish history.
It might seem that the advent of digital technologies, alongside new archival concepts of shared provenance and a shift away from “ownership” to stewardship, could mitigate such issues or undermine their significance. Digitization seems to offer a panacea to limited storage space, allowing one to preserve documents for posterity, or so goes the theory, and reconstruct scattered materials in unforeseen ways. Initiatives like the Friedberg Genizah Project, which is gathering and digitizing scattered fragments of the Cairo Genizah, present the possibility of “virtual collections” of materials whose originals are scattered or whose current holders will not relinquish them, further exemplified by YIVO’s project to digitize holdings from its prewar Vilna headquarters now found at Lithuania’s national library.37 Indeed, at a time when one speaks of an archival multiverse, parallel or shared provenance, or the possibility of joining dispersed collections in a kind of “universal super-archive,” it might seem the fundamental issues of struggle may be on the brink of resolution.38
However, the history of archival proliferation and struggle in Jewish life indicates that questions surrounding originals and duplicates were crucial even before the emergence of digital technologies. Jewish efforts to form “total” archives reflected a vision of big data in the analog age, part of a widespread pre-digital interest in comprehensiveness. Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum in 1930s Belgium, an effort to gather and categorize all human knowledge; Vannevar Bush’s envisioned Memex machine to handle tremendous amounts of data on microfilm spools; H. G. Wells’s idea of a “world brain”—all these were visions of how to handle what Borges would call in 1942 the “library of Babel,” coping with information overload and mythologizing comprehensiveness.39 The archives considered here thereby anticipate the renewed dream of total information in the present day. For this reason, the problems of centralization may not necessarily be resolved through the introduction of new technology. Instead, one might even say that rather than mitigating such issues, digital technologies magnify them, reopening dreams of totality on an even grander scale.
The Jewish archivists were aware of the possibilities of microphotography and photoduplication and were eager to put these techniques to use. But even Jacob Rader Marcus, who espoused the utility of duplication, also realized the value of originals and what they represent in practical and symbolic terms. Because even if digital files may seem to be decentralized in their access, they still must be mediated through computer programs that interpret and display data, and servers present sites of central control or single
points of failure. Further, the imagery of the ephemeral “cloud” compounds the idea of data divorced from its physicality, whereas the original must be housed somewhere. Indeed, digitization projects such as those at the Central Zionist Archives have stemmed from an aspiration not to open access but instead, in that instance, to maintain control over the originals following a series of thefts by ultra-Orthodox visitors.40 And so the struggles over Jewish archives make a powerful case for the continued relevance of archives’ locales and physicality. This book, then, illustrates two related impulses across all of the technological changes of the twentieth century: First, a vision of centralized repositories that would allow for the reconstruction of the past, whether in the original or using duplication techniques to bring together dispersed collections, and secondly, an aim to gain access to and serve as mediators for an “authentic” past that they could thereby control.
Jewish History and the Archival Turn: Methodological Reflections
This book situates the development of twentieth-century Jewish archives within the so-called archival turn of the humanities and social sciences, a set of critical approaches marked by intense interdisciplinary reappraisal of archives.41 Archives have been laid bare as instruments of power, and not just in its etymology from the “archon,” or magistrate’s abode.42 Medieval trésors des chartes weaved tapestries of overlapping claims of fealty and protection; in early modern Europe, archives were the bureau of bureaucracy enabling the consolidation of centralized states.43 Archives have been instruments of empire, and an archival panopticon is the beating heart of informationage regimes of surveillance at the nexus of political power and profit.44 Such scholarly attention reflects a commonsense assumption of the late twentieth century, that information is power, given voice in Foucault’s formulation of power-knowledge.45 It is also informed by a certain skepticism of the possibility of objectivity and the institutions and practices that once claimed to safeguard it. Archivists have noted that appraisal does not necessarily preserve files’ “original order” and historical context but actually imposes new orders and contexts.46 Some have proposed a “post-custodial” model in which archivists do not passively take custody of files at the end of their “life cycle” but proactively seek them out.47 Others have emphasized communitybased archives that preserve materials that do not necessarily make their way
