“Find books. Write history.” Such is the tagline of a fascinating new project curated by the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem and its London branch. The project invites readers from around the globe to help track down the thousands of books that once belonged to the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin (Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums), one of the world’s most important Jewish libraries before World War II.
The Higher Institute for Jewish Studies (Berlin), founded in 1872, was one of the leading liberal rabbinic seminaries in Germany, and its library featured 60,000 volumes on Jewish history, culture, and religion. In 1942, the Nazis shut down the institute and confiscated the library’s books in an effort to rewrite Jewish history. Some of the books were destroyed in the war, while others survived and ended up in various libraries and collections worldwide. To date, approximately 5,000 of the 60,000 volumes have been located in Prague, London, Berlin, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem.
For decades, historians, archivists, and librarians have attempted to track down the missing volumes. The Baeck Institute’s Library of Lost Books project is inviting bibliophiles throughout the world to join the search efforts for these lost books.
The remarkably well-designed Library of Lost Books website (libraryoflostbooks.com) provides an eye-catching and enthralling retelling of the events, such as the founding of the Institute for Jewish Studies, its distinguished faculty members and students, and the difficulties encountered by the institute, and all Jewish institutions, with the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933. The website features striking graphics, a choice of narration in English or German, and many clever graphic elements.
Irene Aue-Ben-David, director of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, and Bettina Farack, doctoral fellow at Leo Baeck, who initiated the Have You Seen This Book? project, discussed the significance of the project and its unique character in a recent interview with the Magazine.
Aue-Ben-David explained that the initial discussions about the exhibition focused on a traditional physical exhibition in Berlin. “Then COVID came,” she said, “and we decided that the Internet was the best place. There are books all over the planet now, and it wouldn’t make sense to have a physical exhibition only. The online exhibition, combined with the physical exhibition in important places for this library, seemed the best way to go about it.”
Farack pointed out that the vast number of volumes in the library and the quality of the books in the collection made the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies library one of the most important Jewish libraries of the time. “The books in the library included books written in many languages such as English, French, German, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and the subject areas covered Jewish history, Jewish culture, and a wide variety of topics that overlapped collections of non-Jewish institutions. One of the important research areas of the institute was interconnected with Christianity, so there were books on Christian religion and history,” she explained.
“One of our important aims in bringing the online exhibition to a wider public,” Farack added, “was to show that book burnings were only part of the program of the Nazis.” Beginning on May 10, 1933, Nazi-affiliated student groups carried out public book burnings in 34 university towns and cities. The books that were set aflame included works by prominent Jewish, liberal, and leftist writers.
“The book burnings took a lot of the public’s attention,” she said, “because they were staged in such a prominent way, but the looting of books was much bigger. The victims of theft were not only institutions in Germany but also in the occupied countries. The number of books stolen from Germany and the occupied countries in total was much bigger than the number of books that were burned.”
Why did the Nazis steal Jewish books?
THE IDEA behind the National Socialist plunder of Jewish books, said Farack, was to gain control over the books as primary sources. “As they were murdering the Jewish people, they were trying to rewrite Jewish history. For that reason, the control over these primary sources that talk about Jewish history was important.” The website explains that paradoxically, under Nazi rule, interest in Jewish history grew exponentially, with the aim of substantiating anti-Jewish legislation with supposedly scientific evidence.
In 1939, the Reich Security Main Office began to build up its “Jewish Library.” The SS security service listed all Jewish libraries that escaped the destruction of Kristallnacht, confiscated their holdings, and sent them to Berlin. According to the Reich, the books represented a “threat to public safety and order.”
The Library of Lost Books website relates that from 1941, the Nazis deployed Jewish laborers in the concentration camps to organize the thousands of Jewish books that they had collected from throughout Europe. Jenny Wilde, the librarian of the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, was sent to Theresienstadt, where she, together with a team of forced laborers, processed 40,000 books and cataloged over 28,000 books in Hebrew. Of the 35 forced laborers in the group, only nine survived, including Wilde. Another group also cataloged books, and after the books had been cataloged in Berlin, they were sent to sites in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany.
Before the war, anticipating what might happen, the institute smuggled some books and documents out of Germany through private individuals. Alexander Guttmann, a professor of Talmudic studies at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, left Germany in 1940, taking the 60 most valuable works of the Institute to Cincinnati with him. In 1939, the institute sent three boxes of material to Jerusalem.
The most significant number of books from the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, said Farack, ended up in Prague, in the Jewish museum, and over the past 80 years they have turned up as far away as Mexico and Canada. “The 5,000 books that have been found can give us clues where to find more,” said Farack. “So far, we have identified 25 contemporary existing public collections that have preserved books from the Higher Institute today.”
In some locations, such as Prague, they are certain that they will not find any more books. But elsewhere, they are confident that the “book detectives” can find more of them. Ben-David said that some books from the Higher Institute’s library may have ended up in flea markets, private book collections, or in secondhand bookstores. “We don’t need the books back,” Farack said. “Our aim is to collect all the information in one place.”
ULTIMATELY, SAID Aue-Ben-David, the project has two primary goals. “We want to receive the research data of the project, and all the knowledge about the books that we can get is important for research. It is also an educational tool. Telling young people about the history of books, where they come from, to ideally bring them into libraries and collections is another side of this project that we hope will be widely used.”
Farack added, “One of our aims is to increase awareness for people when visiting the library in their own research to be aware when they by chance come across a stamp or bookplate to have this in the back of their minds – to be interested in deciphering the stamp. The Higher Institute was only one pre-war Jewish institution that was robbed of its books. It is an important aim to make people generally aware of these provenance marks.”
Aue-Ben-David and Farack said that if they find stamps from other pre-war library collections, they should contact them. “We will invite people, if they find stamps or hints from other collections, to submit them to us, and we will forward them to the relevant scholars.” Online “book detectives” who find missing volumes from the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies or other pre-war collections can fill out the online submission form on the Library of Lost Books website.
The physical Library of Lost Books exhibition opened on November 28 at the Berlin State Library and will travel throughout the year to Los Angeles, Prague, London, and Israel before concluding in Frankfort and Heidelberg. The collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute Friends Association was funded by the German Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future (EVZ) and supported by the German Ministry of Finance (BMF).
“Your library is your portrait,” said George Holbrook Jackson, a 19th-century journalist, writer, and publisher. Through the efforts of the Library of Lost Books project to locate the missing volumes from the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, the likeness of the Jewish people during those challenging times will be clarified; and perhaps a new generation, whose exposure to libraries has heretofore been minimal, will appreciate their importance.