Two Different Pasts − The German versus the Hebrew Book Collection of the Schocken Library

• In Event: Portable Homeland? German-Jewish Book Collections in Israel

Abstract

Upon his departure from Germany in 1933, Salman Schocken had his library sent to Jerusalem. The library consisted of two collections: The German collection comprised of valuable first and rare prints, as well as autographs of German writers and reflected its collectors taste and interest. The Hebrew library was a systematically built collection of early Hebrew print, incunabula and rare material. It was Schocken’s declared goal, to “trace the history of the Jewish people as manifested in and by its books.” Both collections were saved from the Nazis almost completely.
In Jerusalem Schocken hired Erich Mendelsohn to construct a library building and for the first time, the German and the Hebrew collections were stored in one place and made accessible to researchers and readers. The library became a home for the German-speaking emigrants in Jerusalem but functioned by no means as a nostalgic place but a place of continuity and renewal.
By installing two research institutes (Medieval Poetry; Jewish Mysticism) which were closely linked to the library and the Hebrew University, the Hebrew collection was constantly growing, it was being used and therefore stayed alive. The German collection on the other hand, served another purpose. . It was a place to revive German culture in literary evenings, which were held in German and therefore turned into an exclusive LIEU DE MEMOIR.

It is the aim of this paper to ask about the changing values attributed to the collections in their different national and political settings. Was it a home-coming of the Hebrew collection which could only be fully alive in Jerusalem – the new centre of Jewish research? Did the German collection really become a place of continuity, as intended by its collector, or did it eventually turn into a memorial for a lost world? The different perception of the two collections will be explored from a biographical as well as from a socio-political perspective from the point of their rescue in the 1930s until after the death of their collector in 1959.

author

• Stefanie Mahrer, Rosenzweig Minerva Center, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem