A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust

by Elisabeth Gallas, Alex Skinner

Overview

Winner, 2020 JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, given by the Jewish Book Council

The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust

In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution.

A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust.

The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479809875
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Series:	Goldstein-Goren American Jewish History , #17
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	545
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Elisabeth Gallas is chief research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture—Simon Dubnow in Leipzig, Germany.
Alex Skinner holds a first-class MA in Scandinavian Studies and German from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in social anthropology from the London School of Economics. He has translated more than twenty books from German to English in the humanities and social sciences.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1

1 Confronting the Present: The Offenbach Archival Depot 17

2 Envisioning a Future: American-Jewish Politics of Restitution 61

3 Reconstructing Jewish Culture: The New Map of Jewish Life after 1945 113

4 Building the New State: Israel and the European Jewish Cultural Heritage 163

5 Taking Action in Dark Times: The Commitment of Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, and Gershom Scholem 195

Conclusion 243

Acknowledgments 255

Notes 259

Bibliography 323

Index 365

About the Author 383

About the Translator 385

Plates follow page 182

Editorial Reviews

"A Mortuary of Books is an incredible historical work that will benefit scholars in upcoming generations, partly because this is one aspect of post-Holocaust life that has not received much attention. The sheer amount of detail about the numerous Jewish organizations and officials featured is amazing."

The Reporter

"This well-researched and original monograph not only reconstructs a complex history in a multilayered and nuanced fashion, but also demonstrates the key importance of efforts in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi genocide to create new bases for Jewish culture and politics."

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

"In meticulous detail, drawing on archival sources, memoirs, correspondence, and histories, Gallas . . . makes an impressive book debut with a comprehensive history of efforts to recover, identify, and restore artifacts of Jewish culture and scholarship. . . . A fresh, significant contribution to Jewish history."- STARRED Kirkus Review

From the Publisher

★ 2019-02-20

Saving cultural property was central to postwar Jewish identity and recognition.

Throughout World War II, Jewish leaders around the world became horrified that Nazi looting of books, manuscripts, Torah scrolls, ritual objects, and documents would annihilate Jewish culture in Germany and Eastern Europe. In meticulous detail, drawing on archival sources, memoirs, correspondence, and histories, Gallas, chief research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture, makes an impressive book debut with a comprehensive history of efforts to recover, identify, and restore artifacts of Jewish culture and scholarship. The process was complex and sometimes contentious, generating debates about how to define the "Jewish collectivity"—as constituted through "the collective experience of persecution," religious affiliation, or by territorial boundaries; how to give legal recognition to that collectivity; where European Jewries and their sociocultural worlds could be revived; and where—and under whose auspices—recovered property should be housed. Gallas focuses on four individuals who took prominent roles in the efforts: political theorist Hannah Arendt; rabbi and scholar Salo W. Baron, who held the first professorship of Jewish studies at Columbia and came to believe that Jewish communities could never be re-established in Europe; archivist and historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the daughter of Polish immigrants; and philosopher Gershom Scholem, who championed an Israeli state as the only home for Jewish culture. Offering capsule biographies of these key figures and extended examination of their efforts, Gallas notes that they "differed fundamentally in terms of their generation, background, self-image, and political vision" but "regarded their shared rescue mission as an existential duty." All contributed actively to Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., the most significant of many such organizations devoted to compiling detailed data about the recovered material. The result, writes the author, "was tantamount to the creation of an archive of documentation and remembrance." Their work was imbued with emotion: "The smell of death," Dawidowicz said, emanated from hundreds of thousands of books and objects, "orphaned and homeless mute survivors of their murdered owners."

A fresh, significant contribution to Jewish history.

Kirkus Reviews