Past versus Future – The Salvage of German-Jewish Book Collections to Israel after 1945

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

Abstract

German-Jewish tradition constituted a disputed area within the spiritual nation-building process in Israel. Tensions arose, because the overall Zionist historical narrative rejected most of the cultural heritage of the Diaspora. According to this understanding, Israel sought to transcend also the spiritual foundations of the past condition of Jewish existence.

A group of prominent German-Jewish intellectuals of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who after 1944 engaged in the salvage of Nazi looted book collections, tried to challenge this rejection. Their initiative represents in a nutshell the ambivalences of the Yishuv’s and later Israel’s confrontation with the German-Jewish past. The committee’s members, among them Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem, wanted to create a central repository at the university for heirless European-Jewish libraries, documents and archives, which had been found by the Allies on German territory. After some years of painstaking negotiations they were successful in transferring some hundreds of thousands of them to Israel. Huge parts of the transferred materials had originally belonged to German-Jewish institutions, communities or private collections. All salvaged cultural materials from Europe were publicly received in Israel as vessels of memory – relics of a destroyed past.
In contrast to the general public as well as the Zionist leadership, the committee members did not feel that these objects served for commemoration only. To them they were rather meant to take an active role in the constitution and provision of knowledge in Israel. Being educated in German universities they felt that the rescued volumes from Germany formed an essential material basis for their goal of establishing academic norms and standards of a 19th century tradition of WISSENSCHAFT in Jerusalem.

The proposed paper will discuss the motifs of the so called OTZROT HAGOLAH (treasures of the diaspora) committee in Israel. Processes of inclusion and exclusion of the German-Jewish legacy within Israeli culture during the first years of statehood will stand at the center of attention.

author

• Elisabeth Gallas, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem