A Global Network and Diaspora of German-Jewish Historians and Archives: Reappraising the Enduring Legacy of German Jewry

• In Event: Interdisciplinary Approaches in German-Jewish Studies Today

Abstract

In 1933, the German-born archivist Alex Bein fled to Palestine where he would help lead the Zionist Archives, become Israel’s first state archivist, and train generations of archivists. In the course of his lifetime, from the 1930s to the end of the 1980s, Israeli archives were dominated by a cohort of figures who all had ties to Germany, as did many Jewish archives in the United States. Altogether, the outsized impact of German Jews on the development of Jewish archiving in the course of the twentieth century reveals the significance of a global scholarly network tied to German Jewish cultures and then, after the Holocaust, its diaspora.
Using the case of the development of archives in modern and contemporary Jewish life, this paper considers how we can reconceptualize German Jewish history and culture, its diaspora, and its place within contemporary Jewish scholarship. A global network of German Jewish émigrés helped develop a surprisingly wide array of the archival infrastructure of Jewish studies, creating and leading institutions like the Central Zionist Archives, Jewish Historical General Archives, American Jewish Archives, and the Leo Baeck Institute—and through it, embedded in the archives their own sense of the centrality of German Jewish history.
The network of archives and archivists helps us reappraise the impact of the German Jewish context on how we approach Jewish history. In particular, many scholars have suggested that Jewish studies has been overly dominated by a Germanocentric perspective. By looking at archives and collecting practices dominated by Jews of German origin, I suggest one reason why this may have been the case, that the people who were developing the collections and repositories were themselves German Jews and so they created archives that focused on those regions. Consequently, we must think about the impact that scholarly and archival networks exert on the development of scholarship, and what it means for the world of Jewish archives as this network of German archivists eventually dissipated. In the end, this research on the history of archives presents one more way to think about the enduring legacy of German Jewry in a global context.

Author

• Jason Lustig, University of Texas at Austin