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Jewish History With and Without Archives

Mon, December 17, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cityview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

This paper traces the changing approaches and attitudes of Jewish studies scholars towards archives during modern times and what it means for the past and future of Jewish research. Analyzing the work of Heinrich Graetz, Gerson Wolf, and Marcus Brann, this paper will explore the diverse sources utilized by nineteenth-century historians, including rare manuscripts, published materials, and gravestones and other inscriptions. Indeed, the first Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars hoped to set themselves apart from their predecessors through intensive research and criticism. But if Leopold Zunz called in 1822 for the opening of Europe’s archives, he and his contemporaries did not examine them, and neither did Heinrich Graetz a generation later. Instead, the first archival institutions for Jewish history were established at the turn of the twentieth century, almost a century after the emergence of modern Jewish studies.

The turn to archives in Jewish studies did not result from a Rankean revelation, whereby archives suddenly became the foremost source of history. For the first modern scholars of the Jews, archival institutions were less important than an emergent network of colleagues who shared access to resources. Ultimately, Jews’ use of archives was not based on any kind of standard of archival research as the basis of professional scholarship. Instead, it was contingent on political factors and topics of study, such as a shift from the study of “Jewish literature” toward Jewish communal history, leading to the rising importance of archival sources and the creation of the first Jewish archival repositories after 1900.

In an age of digitization, we face important questions about the nature of archival research. By tracing the sources of Jewish history, we will consider how and why Jewish historians have conducted research with and without archives and what it signals about the possibilities for future research. In the end, this paper suggests that today we are reentering a world in which networks are more important than central repositories, partly because of the opportunities individuals now have to photograph materials and share them among themselves, creating their own individual archives.

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