By the early 1940s, Jewish activists across the world had already begun to contemplate the issue of restorative justice in response to the Nazi terror. While the war raged on, the United States in particular saw the formation of a number of groups that dedicated themselves to different aspects of the Jewish condition in Europe. Virtually all individuals involved had one thing in common: they were focused on the future. Their priority was to prepare for the postwar order. It was the preconditions for Jewish participation in possible peace negotiations and the preparation of claims for compensation and restitution against Germany, rather than the present situation, that dominated the agendas of existing or newly founded political forums. A lot of activists began to draw up plans for peacetime on the basis of the strategies, misjudgments, and successes of Jewish diplomacy and politics after the First World War. One of them was Salo Wittmayer Baron, who was to become a leading figure in postwar Jewish efforts to salvage and restitute looted cultural property as head of the JCR. By 1942, he was already publicizing the looting and destruction of the European Jews’ cultural landscape, underscoring the collective obligation to reconstruct it after the conclusion of a peace settlement. Baron’s key concern was to explore options for securing Jewish life in the postwar world: “The rebuilding of the destroyed religious, educational and cultural institutions and the reawakening of the vast creative cultural energies of European Jewry will, in any case, remain principally a specific Jewish communal obligation. [ . . . ] It seems most advisable now to work along two lines and to seek for a two-fold program of action: one relating to the intermediary reconstruction period after the war, and the other looking toward more permanent solutions.”1
Here, Baron, together with other Jewish scholars in the United States, laid the groundwork for later efforts to salvage looted and displaced Jewish cultural assets. The problems of Jewish cultural property—which were to become so pressing for the leadership of the Offenbach Depot just a few years later—were already being considered at this early stage, well beyond Europe’s borders. In the early 1940s, several groups and individuals played an important role in the development and perspectives of what was to become the JCR. The most significant was the Conference on Jewish Relations (CJR), created in New York in the early 1930s by Salo W. Baron and Morris Raphael Cohen. It was under its aegis that the JCR’s predecessor, the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (Commission), came into being in mid-1944. The latter body received resources and personnel from the CJR, which was in turn partly funded by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), an organization that also did much to set its agenda.2
During the war, Baron and Cohen, like many other central figures in the later JCR, were part of a broader network of engaged politicians and lawyers from the leading Jewish organizations of the time. All of them were committed to ensuring justice for Jews in the postwar world. The most prominent organizations in this field were the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and its think tank, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, established in February 1941 in New York.3 Led by Jacob Robinson and later his brother Nehemia, its crucial contributions to redefining the premises of the political and legal recognition of Jews made this institute a key authority for everyone concerned with restitution and reparations. Jacob and Nehemia Robinson were already championing Jewish collective rights and treaties protecting minorities in Europe in the interwar period. In 1940, the two brothers fled from Lithuania to the United States, where they continued their political work. Over the course of the 1940s, like most politically engaged Jews in America, their frame of reference for evaluations of the present and future was the situation of Europe’s Jews since the First World War. Though the associated political concepts were severely shaken by events in Europe and transformed on many levels, when it came to compensation and restitution, Jewish jurists often built directly on interwar experiences, attempting to formulate Jewish collective rights that might be recognized within the framework of international jurisprudence.4
The institute was not the only body to concern itself with these topics. Before the end of the war, the AJConf (convened in 1943 to represent the interests of a number of Jewish American organizations) and the American Jewish Congress (or AJCon, active since 1918 and a champion of Jewish rights in the context of the Versailles peace treaties) had also considered possible collective claims for reparations and compensation against Germany after any Allied victory. Jewish scholars and activists in Palestine and the United Kingdom were contemplating similar issues as well—most prominently Siegfried Moses, Cecil Roth, Chaim Weizmann, and Salomon Adler-Rudel, whose contributions were noted and debated in the United States.5
Baron and Cohen were immersed in this variety of ideas and opinions on Jewish participation in the construction of the postwar order, and it was a major stimulus for their political initiatives. We can grasp the nature of their activities in the CJR, and the Commission to which it gave rise, only if we examine the surrounding networks and their discursive emphases and thus the broader context of Jewish politics in America during the Second World War. Regardless of the political factions they represented, two overriding themes dominated the many Jewish organizations’ plans for the future as discussed in the early 1940s. Their declared goal was, first, Jews’ legal recognition as a collectivity and, second, the reconstruction of European Jewries and their sociocultural worlds. The key topics here were reconstruction, restitution, compensation, and welfare, but also emigration and the Jewish future in Europe more generally. Both themes, recognition and reconstruction, later formed the foundation for the JCR’s mission. Baron and his colleagues built directly on the legal and political goals developed by the American-Jewish organizations during the war. But they tried to achieve them with the tools of the historian and the philosopher rather than the legal and political instruments deployed by most of their counterparts.
The international legal recognition of the Jewish people as a collectivity increasingly rose up the agenda of Jewish politics beyond the reach of German power. Many felt that the Jewish response to the German attack on the entire Jewish people must also be collective in nature. In light of the Nazis’ systematic robbery, Aryanization, plunder, and destruction of Jewish property, Jewish campaigners working for the aforementioned organizations were determined to construct a Jewish legal subject capable of filing claims for restitution and reparations on a nonnational basis.6 The quantity of assets involved was far from clear during the war. But there was little doubt that the persecution and destruction were of a severity likely to overwhelm the existing tools of international law. The “Inter-Allied Declaration” signed in London in January 1943 gave the Jewish organizations’ campaign new impetus, with the signatory states announcing that, after an Allied victory, all property transfers and acts of dispossession within the German occupied areas would be declared null and void, even if they appeared to have been legal. As we saw in the case of the Offenbach Depot, there was an urgent need for an internationally competent form of Jewish representation: if states alone were involved in European restitution programs, Jews risked being shut out. Consonant with later discussions in Offenbach, by 1943, Jewish claimants were already wondering on what legal basis they might file claims against their own state, including émigré German Jews’ claims against Germany. By declaring war not just on other countries but on its own Jewish citizens, and consequently the Jewish people as such, Germany had de facto destroyed the traditional modes of warfare, which had previously formed the basis for international agreements on war and peace. This new situation required new legal strategies in response.
After consulting with both Jacob and Nehemia Robinson, Nahum Goldmann, one of the chief negotiators after the war on all matters relating to recognition of Jewish rights and restitution, had already publicly considered these issues in November 1941 at the WJC’s first Pan-American Conference in Baltimore, deriving Jewish claims for reparations from the German war against the Jewish people.7 In the summer of 1943, in a pioneering essay on restitution, Ernest Munz—a Jewish lawyer from Vienna who had fled to the United States in 1941 and was later on the Commission staff—also highlighted the necessity to recognize the robbery of Jews in Europe as a specific form of warfare that required new legal measures and “collective action” by Jews vis-à-vis Germany.8 To define the Jewish collectivity, stakeholders tended to refer to the “Jewish people” as the entity in need of recognition. But they had quite different ideas about just what this meant. Some regarded this entity as constituted chiefly through the collective experience of persecution. For others, collectivity centered on religious affiliation. Still others understood it as a national group that could be defined in transterritorial or (in Zionist models) territorial terms. The boundaries between these definitions were often fluid.9 For those who couched their arguments in Zionist terms, the Jewish settlement in Palestine should be the Jewish people’s natural center, and therefore, its representatives ought to lead negotiations with the Germans and the Allies. In addition to their overriding objective of giving the polity in Palestine state form and thus solving the legal and international question of the Jews’ recognition once and for all, from the early 1940s on, Moses and Weizmann called for the JA to be appointed legal representative of the Jewish people. Moses expressed this aspiration in his important study Jewish Post-War Claims of 1944, which was to become one of the pioneering works preparing for reparation negotiations with Germany. Here, he identified the JA as the sole legal, moral, and political representative of the Jews of Palestine, which should enter into a coalition with globally active Jewish organizations to create “a representative body capable of action on behalf of the Jewish People” worldwide.10 This idea was based on the desire to establish a collectivity that could stand on an equal basis alongside other national entities, putting it in a position to make legal claims: “Jews who have emigrated to Palestine and other countries should be recognized as nationals of a nation that has been at war with Germany since 1933. Insofar as it may be necessary for the presentation and realization of Jewish claims to reparations, these Jews as well as the bodies representing the Jewish People, should be granted the same rights in respect of the regulation of compensations as will be afforded to the nations united in the war against Hitler and the subjects of those nations.”11
Moses’s ideas were a key source of inspiration for Gershom Scholem, who later served on the JCR board of directors, and other prominent members of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—who were quick to explore issues of cultural restitution in particular. In line with Moses’s arguments, they too equated the Jewish people with the Yishuv (the prestate community) in Palestine in their 1944 discussions with the Allies. On this basis, they asserted its claim to represent the Jews as a whole and its status as legal successor to the European Jewries.12
Following her flight to the United States in 1941, Hannah Arendt was to work full-time for the Commission and the later JCR in New York from 1944 onward. She was one of those individuals who, in reaction to the German persecution of the Jews, adopted a rather universalistic position on the Jewish collectivity, seeking to lay the foundations for a united form of Jewish resistance. In view of the Nazis’ goal of annihilating all Jews everywhere, Arendt perceived a collective Jewish response as an existential imperative. As she saw it, this required a Jewish self-image that was independent of territorial ties, applied beyond a purely religious framework, and encompassed Jews worldwide. In April 1942, Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem, with whom she had been acquainted since the 1930s and who was to become a close colleague at the JCR just a few years later: “I never believed in the Two World Theory: that of Zion and the Diaspora. The events of the past few years have really proven that Jews are one people.”13 As Arendt saw it, a Jewish army must be established to guarantee an active, visible form of collective defense. On several occasions in her columns for the German Jewish émigré journal Aufbau, composed between 1942 and 1944, Arendt made impassioned calls for the establishment of such an army and called on the Jewish people “to take their political fate into their own hands”14 and bolster the prospect of Jews having a say in postwar negotiations through “participation in the war with full and equal rights, that is, a Jewish army.”15 Arendt too embraced the argument that every idea developed with reference to the present must be combined with consideration of future options—she supported Jews’ active participation in war chiefly because she believed it would enhance their postwar negotiating position.
Despite their different political backgrounds, Salo W. Baron and Nehemia Robinson also supported the idea of a universal perspective on the Jewish collectivity that reflected the realities of diasporic Jewish life. Robinson’s perspectives were rooted in the Eastern European approach to Jewish nationality known as Gegenwartsarbeit, prompting him to champion the idea of a representative legal entity, beyond territorial constraints, that could speak for all Jews worldwide.16 During the war, Baron called for American leadership on these issues of representation because he believed that it was incumbent upon American Jews, more than anyone else, to champion the interests of the Jewish people: “The present war has placed in its [the American Jewry’s] hands undisputed leadership of world Jewry [ . . . ]. The enormity of the relief and migration problems confronting European Jewry at the end of the hostilities will be so great as to overtax the resources of the entire Jewish people. [ . . . ] Undoubtedly some international action of unprecedented magnitude will be required to salvage the hundreds of millions of suffering humanity in Europe and Asia. But the extent to which such international action will take cognizance of the Jewish sufferers will depend largely on American Jewry.”17 This leadership role, however, was based more on pragmatic considerations than hierarchical thinking—Baron was convinced that the whole of the Jewish people, be it in Israel or the Diaspora, was constituted by a shared history and shared historical consciousness and must therefore seek to achieve common objectives and a united approach to shaping the future.18 This is what underpinned his own political initiative, which was intended to benefit Jews worldwide and promote the later JCR as the representative of all Jewries. Nehemia Robinson presented the different views held by members of the Institute of Jewish Affairs in his famous 1944 study Indemnification and Reparations: Jewish Aspects, in which he put forward a detailed plan for postwar jurisprudence focusing on Jewish representatives’ participation in negotiations and Jewish claims to compensation and restitution. He too expressed these ideas as aspirations shared by the Jewish people as a whole, whose representatives, he believed, must be recognized as equal to governments: “The property of extinguished families and legal persons, communities and organizations must be disposed of in favor of the Jewish people [ . . . ]. There is no doubt that the transfer of the equivalent of the property or the compensation funds and the disposition of heirless communal property is a difficult task, but it can be solved if entrusted to an organization of international scope entitled to deal with the governments concerned on equal footing.”19
While Hannah Arendt, Nehemia Robinson, Salo W. Baron, Morris Raphael Cohen, Ernest Munz, and Nahum Goldmann came from very different backgrounds, they all shared a transterritorial understanding of the Jewish collectivity as a historically, religiously, or nationally constituted community and attempted to build its legal claims on these bases.
Within the overall context of Jewish political debates during the Second World War, however, differing views on the significance, future, and location of the Jewish collectivity certainly led to tensions over who might represent this people. The main dividing line ran not just between Zionist and diasporic claims to representation but between different political organizations. The associated conflicts were to continue until well after the war. It was partly because of them that the first step toward satisfying the calls for a representative body (beyond the sovereign form of representation assumed by the state of Israel) was taken only in 1948 with the establishment of the JRSO, which focused on heirless Jewish property, and its subsidiary, the JCR. Despite this delay, the uniting of all the aforementioned organizations in the JRSO and JCR was a considerable achievement. Despite the legal obstacles, after the war, the American government decided—through precisely the kind of institutionalized representation demanded by Robinson—to endow the Jewish people itself with the status of collective legal heir to this legacy. Apart from the preparatory discussions and interventions, what expedited this decision more than anything else was probably the overwhelming mass of heirless property, objects, and real estate generated by the annihilation of the Jews and found by the Allied forces on German or German-occupied territory.20
The second aspect to planning for the future, one closely bound up with recognition and representation, was the attempt to rebuild Jewish life after the war. The associated debate proceeded under the heading of “reconstruction,” which centered on the restoration of the European Jewish communities’ previous structures and thus a return to the status quo ante or envisaged a new beginning in a new place. By 1940 at the latest, virtually every statement, speech, strategy paper, and text produced by the Jewish organizations was working with this term, though the different factions had different ideas about its ramifications. Whether reconstruction ought to be pursued in Europe or in the new centers of Jewish life—the United States and Palestine—depended on the observer’s point of view and the timing of the discussion.21 At the beginning of the war, many commentators still considered it possible to reconstruct the communities that had existed in Europe, and it was primarily Zionists who saw Palestine as the only hope for a Jewish future. But mounting awareness of the scale of the European Jews’ annihilation made reconstruction in Europe seem increasingly unlikely.
The annual report of the AJC of 1941 was already identifying the need to “engage in efforts for post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation of the plundered and uprooted Jewish victims of Nazi tyranny.”22 In February 1943, its members thus urged upon the “United Nations and upon those who shall frame the terms of peace the relief from the havoc and ruin inflicted by the barbarism on millions [ . . . ] especially Jews, their reparation, rehabilitation and the complete restoration of their equal civil and religious rights.”23 But it was the Research Institute on Peace and Post-War Problems, established by the AJC in November 1940, that considered this issue in the greatest depth.24 The institute was of significance to the emergence of the JCR because Baron and especially Cohen were involved in it and formulated elements of their later political work there. Cohen was one of the founding fathers of this research initiative and supervised its activities together with the Belgian social scientist Max Gottschalk. In his essay “Jewish Studies of Peace and Post-war Problems” of 1941, Cohen outlined the program planned for the institute: “Under no conditions must we fall into Hitler’s deliberate trap of paralyzing us by inducing feelings of terror or else benumbing uncertainty. Our problem is thus: How can we escape this trap [ . . . ]? Obviously only by fearless and painstaking study of the actual condition and drift of world affairs, and by such preparation for the different eventualities that only a well informed understanding can foresee.”25
Once again, it was planning for the future that stood center stage. The institute sought to provide the necessary research to better understand the current situation but primarily to draw up plans of action and catalogs of demands for the postwar period. According to Cohen, the preparatory work should focus on three key areas. First, “Relief and Reconstruction”—in other words, measures to promote rehabilitation of survivors and salvage of the European Jews’ “remaining resources.” Second, “Migration and Colonization,” including all the different aspects of flight, migration, and settlement in new places in terms of not just practical organization but also legal, social, and political conditions. Third, he called for rigorous study of the “Political, Economic, and Cultural Status” of the Jews after the war’s end. Among other things, this required the implementation of an international jurisprudence that would guarantee universal human rights for all groups regardless of ethnicity and origin.26 The members of the institute (many of whom later worked at the Commission) carried out a remarkable program of research to address the catalog of issues identified by Cohen.27 In 1943, under the overall heading of “Jewish Post War Problems,” Abraham Duker and Max Gottschalk implemented an eight-part study program, bringing together the issues discussed there in a monograph published in New York in 1945.28 Referring explicitly to experiences gained in the First World War and the interwar period in their analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Jewish politics from 1914 onward, the authors discussed the situation in Europe and presented plans for a postwar order. Here Gottschalk and Duker used the term reconstruction to refer to the realities of rebuilding Jewish life after the war, giving special emphasis to the role of culture and tradition because of its outstanding meaning for guaranteeing the Jews’ long-term survival.29 In addition to the study by Duker and Gottschalk, the research institute published a number of shorter texts dedicated to various aspects of the—anticipated—postwar reality and especially its pressing legal aspects.30
In their key speeches and texts, Jacob and Nehemia Robinson and Siegfried Moses expressed the same ideas about restoration and reconstruction. On the first page of the preface to his brother’s study Indemnification and Reparations, Jacob Robinson pointed out that political, economic, and social reconstruction and security for the Jews must constitute the core of a just postwar politics: “The present study is concerned with the situation of the Jewish people and their needs. Its aim is to show what can and ought to be done to rehabilitate the Jews in the countries where they were persecuted and despoiled.”31 In the study itself, Nehemia Robinson tried to tease out the legal preconditions for such rehabilitation in Europe and provide concrete political proposals on how to implement it. Moses took a different approach. He too referred to the reconstruction of Jewish life with the help of reparations to be secured from Germany, but what he had in mind was clearly reconstruction in Palestine.32 Finally, the AJConf, which saw itself as a democratically elected American corporation dedicated to saving the European Jews, preparing postwar demands, and fostering the Zionist project in Palestine, published its “Program for Postwar Jewish Reconstruction” shortly before the end of the war. This articulated the aspiration to banish all forms of anti-Semitism, help surviving European Jews immigrate to Palestine and ensure their postwar rights, push for war crimes trials, and facilitate the restitution of stolen property.33 That Baron chose to use the term reconstruction in the name of his commission in 1944 was therefore no coincidence: it directly reflected these debates. The ideas trading under the name of “reconstruction” were one of the core elements in the political projects pursued by Jewish organizations in the 1940s and thus in the development of the JCR. First of all, the term highlights participants’ difficulties in dealing directly with the disaster unfolding in Europe. The focus on “writing for the ‘Day after Tomorrow’”34—as Günther Anders once described his work as an exiled Jewish author in France and the United States—applied equally to the activities of Jewish organizations in America.35 The reality of Nazi annihilation, violence, and destruction defied imagination and was incompatible with most participants’ perceptual horizon, forged prior to National Socialism.36 A number of essays by Cohen, for example, demonstrate that the actual threat was beyond anything he envisaged. In 1941, he certainly assumed that Hitler would cause terrible suffering but that it would prove impossible to simply wipe out large numbers of people: “And if the history of the Jews since the Hadrianic persecutions be any guide, it is reasonable to assume that there will be Jews in Europe after Hitler’s days are over. [ . . . ] For a thorough examination of Hitler’s general policies shows that they have little originality, that they are all but a brutal intensification of plans and measures previously discussed or even in part carried out in Germany since the reaction that followed the Napoleonic wars.”37
Many of his contemporaries argued in much the same way as Cohen. Even if they faced up to the emerging threats—and later realities—of annihilation, they generally fit them into explanatory models anchored in the Jewish historical experience hitherto. Integrating the logic of Nazi persecution into the narrative of a continuous Jewish history of suffering seemed to reduce the associated danger to a manageable scale. Oscar Karbach, a later member of the Commission, aptly criticized this attitude in a 1945 review of the previously cited volume by Duker and Gottschalk: “[The Book] is astonishingly successful in underemphasizing the decisive tragedy of the annihilation of the European Jewries.”38 Baron’s texts from the early 1940s evince similar forms of rationalization and future orientation while also being captive to the political explanatory models of the past. In both his essays published in the Contemporary Jewish Record, “Reflections on the Future of the Jews of Europe” and the previously cited “What War Has Meant to Community Life,” he not only underlined American Jews’ responsibility to lead the effort to help the embattled Jews of Europe but also outlined an action plan to safeguard Jewish life after the war. He provided no further detail on the requisite aid but emphasized that the lack of preparation for what might be a sudden peace could be a major blunder: one need only think of the undesirable developments that occurred after the First World War due to inadequate Jewish representation in the peace negotiations.39 At this point in time, Baron seemed unable to recognize the current reality of persecution and its impending intensification in Europe. Two years earlier, in 1940, he had even imagined that—given the historical experience of Europe’s multinational empires—the kind of imperial Germany envisaged by the Nazis would ultimately offer Jews greater security than an ethnonational constitution: “It has been an old historic experience that the Jews suffered more heavily in purely national states than in countries of multiple nationality. [ . . . ] Germany’s nationalist spirit draws the country irresistibly into military adventures. Should it win and conquer large territories, it would lose its national homogeneity and become a state of multiple nationality, which, incidentally, might cool its anti-Semitic zest.”40
Baron’s flawed assessments, which seem astonishing from a present-day perspective, are unsurprising within the logic of the time. At this point, it was impossible to foresee the scale of the coming annihilation. Moreover (and as was true for most of the politically active Jews in America), his arguments were embedded in the historical and political ideas that held sway in the interwar period—and concepts of Jewish politics that derived from them. He thus sought to integrate his present into schemata provided by this experiential framework. Protection for minorities and the pressing “national questions”; the potential for Jews to acquire an unambiguous legal status without their own state; and a new approach to international jurisprudence that might enduringly safeguard peace and human rights and bring perpetrators to court: it was to this spectrum of topics that Baron, and most other politically active, US-based Jewish scholars of the time, devoted themselves.41 In the early 1940s, many of them were still assuming that the European Jewry would survive the Nazi threat just as it had survived other pogroms and expulsion plans emanating from the gentile environment. This allowed them to focus on rebuilding survivors’ lives after the war. These Jewish actors, operating “out of the firing line”42 were ultimately concerned not so much with saving people in the sense of active intervention (regardless of how much—given the specific features of Nazi terror and the systematic campaign of annihilation—American Jews could in fact have intervened to save their European counterparts) but with preserving Europe’s age-old Jewish worlds.43 Baron articulates this perception as early as 1940. In the previously cited essay on the future of the European Jews, he writes, “One realizes that at present there still are some three quarters of the Jewish people left [in the United States, Soviet Union, Latin America, and the British Dominions] who might assist the remaining suffering quarter not only through direct relief but also in permanent reconstruction.”44
This striving to maintain and preserve was inscribed in the concept of reconstruction. Within this conceptual framework, sustaining the people, which was identified as the core of Jewish affairs, tended to mean addressing—in an abstract and long-term way—a future for the Jews in general rather than saving particular Jews under threat. The key participants thus dedicated themselves to preparing for restitution, safeguarding the Jewish cultural and intellectual legacy, maintaining traditions, and rebuilding Jewish communities in the United States and Palestine in light of the European Jews’ predicament. This is precisely what Baron envisaged: “Europe is likely to emerge after the next peace treaty in a state of utter economic collapse [ . . . ] shattered European Jewry may, in the course of fewer years than we now dare to hope, reconstruct its existence on a basis more solid than that upon which it had lived during the present generation. But moral obligation [ . . . ] will require that the Jewish communities still left relatively intact should unite in furthering these reconstructive endeavors.”45 The “reconstructive endeavors” Baron and the CJR wanted to focus on were obviously very specific. They were convinced that “the new stimuli given to Jewish learning in a much-neglected field and the refinement of new methods [as proposed by the CJR] would in themselves represent a highly significant contribution to Jewish culture, which, in the long run, may assist the Jewish people in its struggle for survival perhaps to an even higher degree than any direct political or economic action.”46 Only against this background can we understand the broad attention given to the recovery of expropriated, dislocated, and vandalized cultural property. By 1933, the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin was already discussing the specific role played by the spoliation of cultural treasures within attempts to destroy entire groups, underlining the crucial importance of the phenomenon:
An attack targeting a collectivity can also take the form of systematic and organized destruction of the art and cultural heritage in which the unique genius and achievement of a collectivity are revealed in fields of science, arts and literature. The contribution of any particular collectivity to world culture as a whole, forms the wealth of all of humanity, even while exhibiting unique characteristics. Thus, the destruction of a work of art of any nation must be regarded as acts of vandalism directed against world culture. The author [of the crime] causes not only the immediate irrevocable losses of the destroyed work as property and as the culture of the collectivity directly concerned (whose unique genius contributed to the creation of this work); it is also all humanity which experiences a loss by this act of vandalism.47
What Lemkin conceptualized here is what he later termed “cultural genocide.”48 He made it very clear that the destruction of its cultural assets is an attack on a collective’s, or even humanity’s, essence. And it is this understanding that led Jewish individuals to put such emphasis on cultural restitution. They were eager to ensure the survival of Jewish tradition and history, the constitutive grounds of the collective self. The historian Dalia Ofer describes this prevailing vision in relation to postwar Palestine: “Rescue was seen not only as the direct and real act of saving lives [ . . . ], but included all actions that would ensure the future of the Jews as a people [ . . . ]. Rescue now included reconstruction.”49 A close look at the debates of the early 1940s reveals the same diagnosis during this era, beyond the borders of Palestine.
***
This realm of ideas and discussions had a direct impact on the genesis of the JCR. Baron sought to fulfill the obligation to maintain the European Jews’ religious, spiritual, and cultural heritage through the work of the Commission. This sense of obligation was anchored in the deep-rooted conviction, shared by Baron and Cohen, that there was an urgent need for scholars and intellectuals to mobilize in an organized way in response to developments in Germany from 1933 onward. As early as April 1933, Baron published a farsighted appeal in the New York Times in an attempt to raise awareness of the new, dangerous situation for Jews in Germany after Hitler’s rise to power. He called for international “Jewish Action” and underlined the global significance of these events: “The recent occurrences in Germany show how national hysteria can violate the most fundamental human rights of the Jews. [ . . . ] Only the formal acknowledgement of the question’s international character and the adoption of common measures for the entire Jewish people can help establish more peaceful conditions between the Jews and their neighbors in many lands.”50
By the next summer, Cohen and Baron were already corresponding about possible responses. Cohen summed up the main points: “It occurs to me that some permanent organization of professional people, teachers, students, doctors, lawyers, artists and other intellectual workers and educated people—all the classes can, on the basis of their own experience, sympathetically understand what is happening to our Jewish brethren—is needed to combat the permanent forces that are trying to destroy the Jewish people.”51
Inspired by motives that recall the German-Jewish Defense (Abwehrkampf) of the late 1920s and early 1930s,52 they began their joint campaign of mobilization. They strove to utilize their profession to combat German anti-Semitic propaganda, nurturing empirical research and source-based historical accounts. Their liberal political stance dovetailed with their conviction that by spreading knowledge, and thus facilitating sounder judgments, it might prove possible to create a more humane and tolerant future.53 Their vision was realized through a circle of New York intellectuals who belonged to a number of competing Jewish factions, all of whom agreed that the growth of education could engender a more positive perspective on the Jews in the modern world. In line with earlier initiatives launched by their Jewish contemporaries in Europe, the goal was to disseminate sound demographic and historical data on the Jews in response to anti-Semitic polemics.54 Cohen described the idea underpinning this coalition of New York scholars and professionals in his autobiography: “We were united in thinking that in days of bitter stress for the Jews over most of the world there was a great need for an organization that would be devoted primarily to the business of fact-finding so that our attitude and policies might be based on the most reliable information and not on cant or illusion.”55
The group met at the New School—which was considered a progressive place and seemed particularly close to Europe as home to the University in Exile, which had been established by the school’s president Alvin Johnson in 1933 to support European refugee scholars—and was soon calling itself the Conference on Jewish Relations (CJR): “‘The Conference on Jewish Relations’ is the name that best represents the attitude of our membership. We shall subjoin a motto indicating that ours is an association of men and women in the liberal professions devoted to the ascertainment and dissemination of the truth in regard to the relations between Jews and their fellow citizens.”56 The CJR first aroused public interest through a 1935 conference on the history of anti-Semitism from an anthropological and history-of-law perspective. In addition to Baron, some important scholars of the time such as Hans Kohn, Franz Boas, Israel Wechsler, Edward Sapir, and Marvin Lowenthal participated and laid the groundwork for the well-regarded anthology by Koppel Pinson, Essays on Antisemitism, which was published in 1942.57 The analyses of Judeophobia at the conference extended all the way back to antiquity but rarely touched on the present. When contemporary anti-Semitism was discussed at all, its portrayals primarily attested to these scholars’ struggle to grasp its racial character, which underpinned the Nazi mania for destruction and the redemptive element of Nazi ideology at the time.58 In the wake of the conference, the CJR was officially established, and its mission spelled out, in spring 1936 in New York. With motives akin to those of the later research institute of the AJC and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, it sought to improve relations between Jews and non-Jews and respond to the increasing Jew-baiting and propaganda in Germany. As evident in Baron’s memorandum previously cited, this goal was to be achieved through publications and studies—“answering the lies of Goebbels”59—while also sensitizing the American public to developments in Europe and the Jews’ situation.60 Albert Einstein and Harold Laski spoke at the founding meeting, and Henry Morgenthau pushed for donations; Harry A. Wolfson, Felix Frankfurter, and Monroe Deutsch attended early meetings to help raise public awareness of the CJR’s mission.61 Financed by private contributions, the CJR subsequently appointed a number of working groups to investigate the economic, social, and demographic status of American Jews, the legal situation of Jews in Germany, and issues of anti-Semitism. It soon numbered more than seven hundred members and was involved in a very broad range of activities.62 In a speech to the CJR in 1937, Cohen underlined that the organization regarded empirical research and the promotion of knowledge as its most important tasks, being convinced of “the ancient insight that where there is no vision the people perish.”63 This conviction also stimulated the CJR’s further professionalization through the founding of its journal Jewish Social Studies in January 1939. Koppel Pinson, Theodor Gaster, and Joshua Starr made up the editorial team, while Salo W. Baron, Morris Cohen, Hans Kohn, and later Koppel Pinson were acting publishers. They aimed to provide a journal “devoted to the scholarly exploration of the social aspects of Jewish life past and present.”64 Another motive was to help combat anti-Semitism and counteract Nazi propaganda, which they feared might influence American public sentiment toward Jews. Once again, these scholars felt that nurturing American Jewish research initiatives was essential at this time of crisis: “The destruction of important centers of Jewish learning in Eastern and Central Europe makes it imperative that the United States, which is the largest and richest Jewish community in the world today, should do its share to see to it that Jewish studies and research do not perish.”65 A large network of Jewish scholars rapidly grew up around this journal, many of whom cooperated with or supported the JCR a few years later. Most of its early contributors had fled Europe, such as Hannah Arendt, Adolf Kober, Jacob Lestchinsky, Raphael Mahler, Zosa Szajkowski, Max Weinreich, and Bernard Weinryb. Jewish Social Studies was soon to develop into a leading and respected scholarly forum in the United States.66
The outbreak of the Second World War prompted discussions within the CJR as elsewhere on how to shape the postwar order. In 1940, Cohen stated that it was important to actively prepare for peacetime policies. He regarded the empirical documentation of Jewish social and demographic reality in America as a means of preparing for incoming refugees and paving the way for their professional integration.67 The CJR’s focus on the collection of information and data had direct consequences for the later work of the Commission. Very much in the tradition of its parent organization, many of those involved in the newly set up Commission saw their main task as gathering documentary material that would enable them to initiate the process of cultural restitution in Europe.
All these attempts at intervention had the same ultimate objectives. For the most part, however, the plans so meticulously drawn up by those involved in the CJR, and other organizations and institutes in the same field, were on paper only. The individuals involved tried to respond to the challenges of their time with the tools of science and research and to shape the future in light of historical and political experiences—a reflection of their origins, education, and self-image. As early as 1942, in one of her columns in Aufbau, Hannah Arendt was making trenchant remarks on the risks associated with this attitude, excoriating the leading American-Jewish organizations: “With scientific meticulousness [they have been] busy preparing us for peace” rather than taking an active approach by pushing for the establishment of a Jewish army. Arendt continued,
And so we too are being prepared “unpolitically” for peace. It is true that a discussion about the goals of peace always tends to arise during a war—and so far it has always turned out that the only goals of peace that are realized are those already implemented in war and the way in which it is fought. But so far no people has ever come up with the idea of trying to replace participation in a war with dreaming in advance about participation in a peace conference. This is a scholarly idea, and we like to hope that our scholars will not succeed in turning a “people of the book” into a people of papers. Because as long as a Jewish army remains on paper, the best collections of materials in the world are just stacks of dead paper.68
But the Jewish army was to remain on paper only, along with a vast number of other plans, organizational templates, and strategic ideas generated by the many-layered activities of Jewish organizations and individuals as they grappled with National Socialism’s persecution of the Jews and with the war. While their eyes may have been fixed on the future and in some ways closed to the present, the American Jews’ indefatigable engagement in response to events in Europe flatly contradicts the claim, often found in the research, that they were indifferent to the fate of their European brethren. Quite the reverse: the scale of their activities attests to the tremendous sense of responsibility felt by the broadest array of politicians, scholars, rabbis, and lawyers vis-à-vis the embattled Jews of Europe in the early 1940s.
The restitution of Jewish property that had fallen victim to Nazi looting was central to all the aforementioned political forums and their plans. Restitution was regarded as crucial to reestablishing law, justice, and stability. Against the background of the anticipatory schemes outlined above, the Commission, founded within the CJR in summer 1944 by Baron and Cohen (which laid the legal and organizational foundation for the work of the JCR, which began to operate in 1947), sought to create a representative Jewish body to pursue the recognition of the Jewish collectivity and campaign for the reconstruction of prewar Jewish life in Europe. But it was to be a number of years before the JCR was legally authorized by the American government. Arendt spoke prophetically in 1944: “It would be foolish to believe that peace will be easier for us than a war, in which, right to the end, we fought as allies but were never recognized as one of the Allied Nations.”69 In some ways, at least, Arendt was quite right, as evident in the tremendous efforts made from 1944 onward by the members and appointees of the Commission, and by Arendt herself, to achieve its recognition as trust for Jewish cultural property and ensure the latter’s safekeeping in Europe.
Surprisingly, it was in the UK rather than the US that the first initiative for Jewish cultural restitution took on an institutional form. In April 1943, under the auspices of the Jewish Historical Society of England, a committee was set up to promote the reconstruction of the Jewish libraries, museums, and archives that had been affected by Nazi plunder and destruction: the Committee on the Restoration of Continental Jewish Museums, Libraries, and Archives (Committee on Restoration). Under the chairmanship of Cecil Roth, this body brought together Jewish scholars such as Norman Bentwich, Oscar Rabinowicz, Franz Kobler, Ernst G. Lowenthal, and Adolph G. Brotman to discuss the restitution of stolen Jewish cultural property. They aimed to present their findings to the Allied powers in the form of a resolution and establish the committee as key interlocutor for all issues relating to the cultural restitution of Jewish property in Europe.70 In his opening address to the founding conference on April 11, 1943, in London, Roth brought home to his audience the scale and consequences of the Nazis’ cultural raids and called for immediate action to salvage the items involved and return them to their owners.71 Where the owners could not be identified, Roth proposed that these items be stored at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Roth explained that his UK-based committee was best placed to take charge of the salvage of Jewish cultural heritage because of the special role of the Jewish Historical Society as virtually the only Jewish scientific body still active in Europe.72 These discussions occurred not long after the signing of the “Inter-Allied Declaration” in London, which undoubtedly helped inspire the committee’s demands. Roth’s plans came to the notice of Nazi Germany. In September 1943, the anti-Semitic weekly Der Stürmer published a sneering commentary on the committee’s establishment and its aspiration to transfer looted cultural property to the Hebrew University or claim indemnification for lost collections, demonstrating once again the significance of theft and plunder in German politics—the Nazis carefully monitored every countervailing measure and calibrated their own approach accordingly.73
Roth knew he could count on support for his project from New York. Just four days after the conference in London, he made contact with Baron, informing him of the resolutions that had been adopted and asking for his appraisal. Baron explained that the CJR was making plans similar to those of the London Committee and that the Joint had established a division dedicated to the same issues under Abraham Neuman; he emphasized that the goal must be to ensure cooperation between these different bodies.74 But it was a number of years before this was achieved. The relationship between the British and American interest groups was pervaded by a sense of rivalry, while the political issues thrown up by the process of restitution long remained contentious. Nonetheless, over the course of 1943, the CJR in New York agreed that the reconstruction of Jewish culture in Europe must be its top priority. The CJR, composed mainly of academics in the humanities and social sciences, seemed made for this task.75 In December of the same year, at an in-house conference, the CJR executive secretary Theodor Gaster presented a program for the reestablishment of cultural life in Europe that adumbrated the core objectives and future structure of the Commission. The CJR resolved to establish three subcommittees dedicated to (1) the reconstruction of Jewish cultural institutions in Europe, (2) Jewish education in Europe, and (3) surveying the European-Jewish communities, collecting “all information available from émigré sources concerning the assets, structure, etc. of German communities, as of 1933.” The first subcommittee set out to advise the Allied nations “on the rebuilding of such institutions as have been destroyed,” to serve as trustee “to administer cultural institutions formerly owned by communities which have since been dispersed,” and to present claims “for indemnities in respect of Jewish cultural properties.”76 In the summer of 1944, correspondence between Baron and several members of Jewish organizations began to refer to the CJR Reconstruction Committee. At this point, Baron shared responsibility for the Committee primarily with Gaster, who from 1945 on concurrently headed the Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. They jointly appointed a group made up of members of the CJR and other organizations, including Hannah Arendt, Raphael Mahler, Max Weinreich, and Horace Kallen, whose work was partly funded by organizations such as the AJC and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars.77 A text composed by Gaster in September 1944 outlined the tasks and profile of the group, now known as the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction: “The Conference of Jewish Relations has recently set up a commission of leading scholars and educators in this country for the Cultural Reconstruction of European Jewry after the war. [ . . . ] The Commission is intended to serve as a central co-ordinating body for all activities in this field.”78
Initially, then, the Commission’s work revolved around advice, education, and research, with a particular focus on the latter. Unlike the English Committee on Restoration, its members thus set about meeting the obligation already articulated by Baron in 1942 to foster cultural reconstruction in Europe rather than abroad.79 Baron discussed this obligation and its practical implementation in his essay “The Spiritual Reconstruction of European Jewry,” which appeared in the first issue of the monthly journal Commentary in 1945.80 Once again, he explained the special role of the non-European Jewish communities—particularly in the United States—in supporting the surviving Jews of Europe and the necessity for a “spiritual resurgence” after the disaster. As he saw it, books and literature must play a key role in this new beginning. Not only was there a need to provide the “shattered remnants of European Jewry” with books and religious texts, all their possessions having been lost, but the salvage of the looted libraries was also crucial in light of a pronounced Jewish bibliophilia.81 Here he made much the same argument as the staff and visitors at the Offenbach Depot, underlining the profound significance of salvaging and restoring books due to their special status in the collective Jewish identity. Baron aimed to provide an advisory service for the Allied soldiers who had been tasked with finding and safeguarding stolen libraries. His and the CJR’s goal was to restitute stolen property to its owners and ensure that it was allocated in such a way as to advance the “general cultural reconstruction of European Jewry.”82 He was obviously aware that such allocation was a difficult undertaking due to the changed political, social, and cultural realities. He thus underlined the duty of Jewish political organizations to help out and highlighted the steps already taken by the CJR and similar initiatives in Palestine and the United Kingdom, which he wished to turn into coordinated action.83
Three working groups, created by the Commission in June 1945, were to lay the groundwork for the salvage and restitution of Jewish cultural property in Europe. Initially the largest and most important group was the Research Committee, led by Alexander Marx of the JTS in New York, which was composed of a permanent staff and an advisory body. Hannah Arendt, herself employed full-time at the Commission since early 1945, headed the research staff and guided their work. The second working group, the Committee on Cooperation, presided over by Horace Kallen of the New School, sought to establish structures of cooperation with other Jewish and non-Jewish organizations and institutions. The third and later the most significant group, the Legal Committee, was dedicated to reworking and improving restitution laws. It was headed by Jerome Michael, Baron’s colleague at the Columbia Law School, and like the Research Committee, it consisted of permanent and honorary staff. Beyond the fields of activity, there was a growing circle of registered members at the Commission who were on hand to provide advice and support. This group was composed of around seventy individuals, many of whom were acquainted with Baron and recruited from various Jewish organizations: Nehemia Robinson, Simon Federbusch, Gerhard Jacoby and Oscar Karbach from the WJC, Jacob Landau from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Max Gottschalk, Abraham Duker and Simon Segal from the AJC, Leo Jung and Nathan Reich from the Joint, Jacob Shatzky and Max Weinreich from YIVO, and Eugen Täubler from the Hebrew Union College (HUC). Over time, this circle was to expand to include other personalities, with the later JCR gathering together many leading figures in Jewish public life of the 1940s and 1950s in the United States. As the director of the Commission, Salo W. Baron was able to shape and had the final say on all its activities, and he used his extensive personal network to promote its interests. The Commission received funding from the Joint, the JA, the AJC, the American Association for Jewish Education, and the B’nai B’rith. In addition, the Guggenheim Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation awarded grants to Commission staff, while offices and materials were made available by the CJR.84
The Commission’s seemingly solid structures should not obscure the fact that it had to cope with persistently meager budgets and that initially it was just one of several initiatives being pursued by the Hebrew University, the Committee on Restoration, the WJC, and the Royal Library of Copenhagen. What was to distinguish the Commission and, crucially, pave the way for its formal recognition later on was its impressive research preparing for restitution. As announced in its first programs, from fall 1944 onward, members of its staff had set about gaining a detailed picture of the Jewish cultural landscape as it existed before the Nazis’ campaign of robbery and destruction. The idea behind this tremendous research endeavor was that a comprehensive overview would be indispensable to filing specific restitution claims.85 The Commission not only established a working basis for the search for looted property and its identification but also, quite literally, created an archive of Europe’s devastated Jewish culture.
Building on a tradition established by the CJR, the members of the Commission initially sought to counter the boundless destruction through empirical research as well. In order to “investigate the manifold, complex problems of the cultural reconstruction of European Jewry after the devastation of the Second World War”—to quote Baron86—the Research Committee under Alexander Marx and Hannah Arendt decided to publish lists documenting cultural institutions and collections of Jewish cultural property in Europe before the war in as complete a form as possible. This comprehensive inventory of all Jewish museum holdings, schools, scientific bodies, rabbinical seminaries, libraries, publishers, journals, and important private collections was intended to render visible the wealth of Jewish cultural treasures that had existed in Europe for centuries. Key activists in New York soon realized that there was a lack of precise information on the assets existing prior to 1939 and their location, greatly hindering the search for these objects and their restitution.87 In Germany too, most of the MFA&A officers and military government members active in this field complained that the lack of reliable evidence was severely hampering the discovery and identification of Jewish collections.88 The Research Committee was keen to help remedy this. Its advisers included Aron Freimann, former director of the Frankfurt City Library; Rahel Wischnitzer, former curator of the Jewish Museum Berlin; and her husband, Mark Wischnitzer, who had been secretary-general of the Relief Organization of German Jews (Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden); Max Weinreich; Jacob Shatzky; Joshua Bloch of the Jewish division of New York Public Library; and Bernard Dov Weinryb, director of the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary. The staff consisted of Hannah Arendt, Adolf Kober, Raphael Mahler, Nathan Eck, and Herbert Strauss, and it was their responsibility to compile and process all gathered data. They created overviews of all accessible European library catalogs and previously existing Jewish journals in Western and Central Europe, made a collection of newspaper excerpts on relevant topics with the help of the AJC library, and surveyed refugees from Europe and members of the Jewish Landsmanshaftn (homeland associations).89 For the most part, however, they got their information from around 250 standardized questionnaires conceived by Arendt and her colleagues and sent to exiled Jewish scholars, publicists, journalists, rabbis, social workers, librarians, artists, and members of American-Jewish organizations as well as personnel working in the occupation zones in Germany. The respondents had to provide information on collections and institutes in Europe and their holdings, rare items, administration, budget, and staff. They were also asked for information on the present state of assets and on non-Jewish institutions in Europe that housed Jewish cultural property.90 The Research Committee made contact with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was compiling its own list of Jewish-European cultural goods. Some of its entries were used, but for the most part, upon perusal, the researchers in America discarded the list in light of major lacunae and shortcomings.91 Through its tireless efforts, between 1945 and 1948, the Research Committee ultimately drew up five lists, which were published as supplements to Jewish Social Studies.92 The fact that Baron and the CJR could present this work in an established and acknowledged journal was critical to the project’s success. The published lists covered the following fields: first, so-called Jewish cultural treasures, which included libraries, museums, archives, and private collections; second, Jewish schools, adult educational institutions, and rabbinical seminaries; third, journals from all over Europe; and fourth, Jewish publishers. The fifth list expanded on and corrected earlier entries, providing new and more detailed information, and it was published under the title “Addenda and Corrigenda.”
The composition of the research group, including staff of varying backgrounds and education, was intended to ensure coverage of as much of Jewish Europe as possible. Hannah Arendt was mostly responsible for Western Europe; historians such as Raphael Mahler (who had dropped out due to illness by October 1945) and Adolf Kober, in consultation with Bernard Weinryb, professor of Eastern European Jewish economic and social history, were entrusted with the Central and Eastern European countries. Nathan Eck, later on the staff of the Yad Vashem research and remembrance center in Jerusalem, also worked on Eastern Europe for the Committee. Baron particularly valued his involvement because he had previously been a member of the Polish underground; Baron perceived him as a “living testimony to the tenacity with which East-European Jewry pursued its cultural and educational interests under the most harrowing conditions.”93 Beyond their authors, the lists identify a few other individuals involved in their preparation. Mention is made of Nehemia Robinson and Rabbi S. Fischer, who contributed detailed information on Jewish publishing and journals in Lithuania, Romania, and Hungary.94 In addition, the sources show that Berlin-based philologist Ernst Grumach provided important details. He was a long-standing friend of Hannah Arendt and had worked as a forced laborer in the RSHA. He was already collaborating with the staff of the Offenbach Depot.95 Despite their sometimes competing interests, even the staff of the WJC and the Committee on Restoration in London provided valuable advice.96 For example, Oscar Rabinowicz, a key figure on the Committee on Restoration under Cecil Roth and later a member of the JCR executive board, sent a paper with detailed information for the list of corrections, which was included as a section in its own right.97 Every conceivable resource was used to obtain as complete a picture as possible of Jewish cultural life before the devastation wrought by the Nazis. The five lists contained several thousand entries from more than nineteen European countries, from Norway to Greece and from Belgium to the Soviet Union—“all of them [ . . . ] reflected the richness and variety of Jewish cultural life on the European continent before the curtain of history was pulled down upon it.”98 In addition to this past-oriented research, the Research Committee in New York was concurrently attempting to compile an index detailing the current situation of Jewish cultural property, institutions, and educational establishments; in combination with the lists, this was to form the working basis for later restitution claims. The staff collected demographic data on the Jewish population and Jewish DPs in Europe and documented evidence of all newly established or reestablished Jewish schools as well as the whereabouts of stolen cultural property.99
The Commission’s research had far greater ramifications than initially envisaged. The documents cautiously referred to as “Tentative Lists” are of significance on a number of levels. Contemporaries already regarded them as valuable sources for historical research on European-Jewish cultural and intellectual history. In his introductory remarks to each list, Baron emphasized their value to future research, thus attributing an importance to them that went beyond their immediate function. Herbert Strauss too underlined the lists’ relevance to Jewish historiography. In a letter to Baron, he remarked that the lists brought out the diversity of cultural activities in Jewish Europe, giving the reader, for example, an impressive sense of the vitality of Jewish publishing in Poland and France.100 A press release published in January 1947, in which the Commission set out its mission and called for help in collecting the correct data, provides particularly striking testimony to the great value placed on the lists:
In addition to the sad and complicated task of salvaging and recovering what is left of a once flourishing Jewish cultural life on the European continent, the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction previously made valuable contributions. Its research staff, after more than a year’s painstaking research published two Tentative Lists, one of cultural treasures and the other of educational institutions in former Axis-occupied countries. [ . . . ] Their momentum is highly estimated, by scholars and laymen who are writing the history of a period of proud spiritual achievements in the Jewish past, as a balance sheet of the spiritual losses suffered by the Jewish world through the comparably short period of the reign of madness.101
This communication also hints at the impact this documentary project was having beyond its utility for historical research. The lists were attaining the status of a monument. The systematic compiling of information on the institutions and other key components of Jewish culture in Europe was tantamount to the creation of an archive of documentation and remembrance. This detailed portrayal of the European Jewish cultural realm was the first of its kind and to this day serves as an important store of knowledge. In addition to the reconstruction of the past, and thus its preservation, the Tentative Lists convey the brutality and violence of National Socialism: their blank spaces are in a sense their disturbing focal point. In a similar way, as we have seen, the catalogs produced at the Offenbach Archival Depot articulated the void left by an obliterated world in the schematic form of figures, numbers, and facts. The representation of both the irretrievable past and the magnitude of destruction distinguish the Tentative Lists as outstanding historical testimony.
Seen from this perspective, the Commission’s research fits into the larger context of postwar initiatives launched by many Jewish organizations and Jewish survivors, who set themselves similar tasks: providing a precise description of Nazi crimes, assessing acts of destruction, and making preemptive, offensive efforts to counter any attempts by the perpetrators and those not involved to hush up or repress the Nazi past.102 Most prominently, this was a significant motive for the Jewish Historical Commissions active in a number of European countries. As early as 1943, they had begun to collect oral testimony and any documentary evidence of Nazi crimes in order to lay the groundwork for war crimes trials and compensation claims; at the same time, their work generated some initial tools of historical research, new rituals, and new ways of remembering the dead.103 In much the same way, the lists compiled under the leadership of Hannah Arendt were an attempt to meet this obligation to record and commemorate the atrocities. They concurrently established a form of order, returning the unstructured, chaotic “remnants” of Jewish culture in Europe to their original context. They thus have not just a documentary but also a constructive function, expressing the goal pursued by Baron through the Commission of reappropriating the Jewish historical and cultural space.
Despite their increasingly significant symbolic, historical, and commemorative value, the lists always retained their practical utility. They became the basis for the work of the many individuals employed in the depots and collecting points in Europe and for the activities of the American military government, and they were of crucial significance to cooperation with American government officials when it came to the Commission’s formal recognition. Upon receiving the first list while working in the DP camps and the Offenbach Depot, Koppel Pinson, long a close confident of Baron as coeditor of Jewish Social Studies and himself a member of the Commission, expressed his enthusiasm in a letter to Arendt: “You have done a wonderful job and as one of the people here put it, you gave us a catalogue for the Offenbach Collection.”104 It was Pinson who passed the list on to Seymour Pomrenze, first director of the depot. The latter was so impressed by the list that he increasingly promoted the Commission’s interests in his dealings with the agencies of the State Department. In May 1946, Pomrenze wrote to Baron, “When Prof. Pinson gave me a copy of the list of treasures put out by your commission I said to him here is the Agency which can be the instrument of geulah [redemption] for these treasures.”105 The list circulated both in the various subdivisions of the MFA&A and within the American military government’s restitution division.106 And in his correspondence with the officials of the MFA&A and Isaac Bencowitz, second director of the depot in Offenbach, Max Weinreich used the first list as proof of the ownership of the Vilna YIVO holdings.107 Arendt also sent the lists to the Jewish communities in the American zone to aid with the identification of cultural property and books, to the rabbis working for the military government, to Jewish journalists in Europe, to key organizations such as the Joint and the JA, which were the main advocates of Jewish interests in Europe, and to American libraries that did not subscribe to Jewish Social Studies.108
The lists were thus to play an important role in planning the Commission’s subsequent activities as well.109 In line with its self-image as an advisory body during the first phase of its work, for the time being, the lists were to be passed to the United Nations and to those political organs that had dedicated themselves to protecting cultural property, in order to support their work: “It is planned to have the Commission serve as the central research and co-ordinating body for all American activities in the field of Jewish cultural reconstruction [. . . and] to constitute [ . . . ] an Advisory Council to the United Nations in the restoration and/or reconstruction of the cultural aspects of European Jewish life.”110
Before long, the focus of the Commission’s work increasingly shifted to its own active role in the restitution process. Once again, the lists were of great significance. It was not just Pomrenze who saw them as an embodiment of the Commission’s professionalism, prompting him to support its plans henceforth. Officials at the State Department, who received the lists along with the Commission’s application for the role of trustee for heirless Jewish cultural property, were also extremely impressed by them.111
In addition to the many strategic advantages the Commission had gained through its comprehensive research work, one thing had become abundantly clear: there was a vast amount of scattered and “homeless” cultural property of Jewish provenance in Europe whose owners and heirs had been murdered or could no longer be found, whose institutions of origin had been plundered and destroyed, and whose communities of origin had no realistic prospect of being reestablished. This was the point of departure for the wide-ranging discussions among those Jewish intellectuals keen to preserve this heritage. Who could undertake the search and salvage operations? How was the objects’ future to be decided? How could one ever reconstruct anything that resembled the world before 1933? For all those involved, these issues threw up one of the most complicated questions of post-Holocaust Jewish life: Was there any prospect at all of reestablishing Jewish life and Jewish culture in Europe, or had the reality of annihilation rendered such ideas null and void?
Commission members’ ideas about strategy and about the organization’s role in shaping the future of Jewish culture were always bound up with general debates on the prospects for Jewish life after the Holocaust. All of them struggled to find an answer to the question of how best to reconstruct the European-Jewish cultural landscape. Numerous reports from Germany and Europe reached New York, strengthening the conviction that increasingly held sway there—namely, that the future of the Jews must be pursued elsewhere and that it was therefore vital to transfer surviving cultural property from Europe to the new centers of Jewish life. Above all, this view was reinforced by the near-innumerable heirless objects of Jewish provenance collected at Offenbach and other sites. It was becoming increasingly clear that the Germans’ war of annihilation had left an enormous discrepancy between the surviving cultural property and the individuals who might have been able to make use of them. New solutions had to be found beyond traditional forms of restoration. For the key advocates in New York, the issue of a just form of restitution was thus intimately bound up with the future location of the European Jewries, and this in turn was a core element of the general discourse among Jews after 1945. The moral and political issues of the time forced their way into the legal debate.
Initially, Baron and the Commission were quite clear about how best to approach the “where” and “how” of cultural reconstruction: it must be fostered locally. Early in 1945, Baron began by calling for the normalization of the European Jews’ situation and for the renewal of institutional and community life with outside help. Communities in the process of reestablishing themselves must be provided with the necessary resources, while their infrastructure must be restored with the support of American welfare organizations.112 But this idea was soon overtaken by reality. First, the New York YIVO was a key source of information for the Commission; as early as 1942, Max Weinreich and his colleagues were searching for the remains of their Vilna predecessor and were therefore in contact with the American authorities and other information-providers in Europe. At the end of the war, they were among the first to know about the finds in Hungen and the establishment of the Offenbach Depot, passing this news on to the Commission executive board. Weinreich was convinced that all the book holdings on Jewish culture, religion, and history, including those from national and city collections, must be removed from Germany and distributed to Jewish institutions across the world. Under no circumstances could they remain where they were.113 The second key source for the Commission was Rabbi Philip Bernstein, later adviser to the American military government. When the war ended, he was already in constant contact with his predecessors in Germany, had a precise grasp of current developments locally, and kept Baron up to date. In numerous letters and reports, he described the situation, pushing for the implementation of an action plan to salvage cultural property. As early as July 1945—in light of information from Rabbi Judah Nadich, the first adviser to the military government—he was able to report on the Americans’ difficulties in dealing with Jewish cultural treasures and their idea of setting up collecting depots to identify and return material to their “pre-Hitler owners.”114 In addition to the data provided by Bernstein and Nadich, a report from March 1946 by the Jewish captain Abraham Aaroni, who worked for the American military government in Frankfurt, also set out in detail the urgent need for Jewish scholars to aid the work of the collecting points and depots.115 Finally, at a relatively early stage, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sent Gershom Scholem and Abraham Yaari to the American occupation zone in an effort to obtain reliable reports, which were also sent to New York.116
From April to August 1946, Scholem pursued his mission to prepare for the future work of the university’s Otzrot HaGolah group with respect to cultural property. Like the university representatives that succeeded him, after his experience in Germany and the former German-occupied areas, he confirmed his initial assessment that the university must assume the trusteeship of every locatable object and that as many of the Jewish cultural and ritual objects as possible should be taken to Palestine. Scholem and the other members of the Otzrot HaGolah wished to support the Yishuv in building a new center of Jewish cultural life, gain sovereignty over the emerging culture of Holocaust remembrance, and become the prime inheritor of the European Jewry.117 In mid-1945, this was an attitude held by many Jews, far beyond the borders of Palestine. A symposium in London held at the time on “The Future of the Jews” brought together politicians, scholars, and writers. Most agreed that a “return to [the] slaughterhouse” of Germany was out of the question, that it was unclear whether there could be a future for Jews anywhere in Europe, and that the only sustainable prospect for Jewish life lay in the development of Palestine.118
The rejection of Europe, and particularly Germany, as a future home for the Jewish people opened up much potential for conflict among Jews over the role of the Jewish communities now emerging in Germany.119 Should one support their reconstruction in places where, as Robert Weltsch bluntly put it, there was a lingering stench of “gas chambers and torture chambers,”120 let alone enrich the tiny communities by entrusting to them large amounts of salvaged cultural property? On his trip to Germany in late 1945, Weltsch was directly exposed to the debates surrounding the American approach to restituting the looted collection created by the ERR. He later expressed his indignation:
Take for example the library of the rabbinical seminary in Breslau, or of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. Can we, that is, the Jewish world, accept the view that Breslau or Berlin has a right to the return of these books? These Jewish educational establishments and communities no longer exist! Who should be considered their legal successor? This is already a question of a Jewish-political nature, and one of the first importance. Eretz Yisrael must be assigned a fitting role here. We must win over global public opinion to the idea that Eretz Yisrael is the cultural center of the Jewish people, where the now ownerless cultural property stolen from the Jews must find its legitimate home.121
And Weltsch soon had an unambiguous view of those he managed to meet in the Jewish communities of Germany: “The fact is that there is no trace of continuity, that is, of any connection with Jewish life before the war. The people are ignorant of the simplest things, of which every German Jew was well aware in 1938 [ . . . ] In other words: these remnants of the German Jewry are complete outsiders that just happened to be left over here.”122
A year later, in the course of her work at the Offenbach Archival Depot, Lucy Dawidowicz (then Schildkret) gave a similar assessment: “German-Jewish institutions, if reconstituted as Gemeindes [sic], [ . . . ] no longer have the same composition or serve the same number of constituents. Because of the systematic extermination of Jewish professionals, we do not believe that there are at present among the Jews living within the German economy such persons as can make proper use of valuable books.”123
By July 1945, Hannah Arendt had already warned Baron of the risk that the German Jewish communities might be recognized as the legal heirs to cultural goods.124 Most Jewish international organizations active outside Europe—their members themselves often of German origin—felt it would be highly unjust if the American restitution authorities recognized the few small German Jewish communities as claimants to this valuable material and were keen to see this option ruled out unconditionally. A strategy paper produced by the Commission in the spring of 1946 stated that the group of Jews now in Germany had no legal right to recovered cultural objects because a far larger number of surviving German Jews were now living in New York, Tel Aviv, and London.125 The politically active Zionist and trained lawyer Georg Landauer, who was involved in the debates about restorative justice in Palestine/Israel at the time, later summed up the view dominant among Jews worldwide, underlining that there was “no reconstruction that might supersede destruction,” while the “impoverished Jewish life in Germany [could not represent] any continuation of more than fourteen centuries of German Jewry.”126 Here he highlighted one of the thorniest legal issues in the aftermath of the war—namely, whether the reestablished communities in Germany should in fact be regarded as the same as the ones that existed in 1933. With regard to community property as well as heirless German Jewish assets, the communities taking shape after 1945 were entitled to file claims only if they could be recognized as identical to their predecessors. Surrendering goods to a Jewish trustee rather than Jewish communities in Germany, as both the Commission and the Hebrew University wanted, could be justified only if one assumed that these communities had nothing in common, apart from their name, with those existing before their enforced dissolution. This was the thrust of the arguments put forward by the JRSO, which was officially appointed in 1948 to administer heirless Jewish assets and property (excepting cultural property) in the American zone.127 A brochure prepared by the JRSO executives at the German headquarters in Nuremberg summarizes their position. Here they declared that the size, composition, and form of the new communities did not create an identity with the earlier ones, while the assets that had formerly been at the disposal of six hundred thousand Jews in Germany could not be entrusted to the twenty-three thousand Jews now living there, of whom, moreover, more than 40 percent were of non-German origin. As a compromise, however, the JRSO proposed that these communities be furnished with capital and ritual objects to help ensure their survival and cover their needs.128 By 1948, the American military government, along with the relevant authorities in the United States, was viewing these communities’ role in much the same way as the JRSO and other Jewish representatives: “It does not seem proper to consider the communities where some Jews have survived the successors to the communities or organizations that existed at the same places prior to the Nazi regime because not only their number is [sic] only a small percentage of their former number, but, also, the composition of the people seems, in most instances, to be entirely different from those that formerly belonged to these communities.”129
The competition that generally existed between the interests of the communities in Germany and those of Jewish organizations elsewhere developed into a persistent problem for restitution policy, hampering the establishment of the Jewish successor organizations and trusts.130 Also linked with these communities’ problematic legal status was the question of how best to deal with the unprecedented German case of the systematic robbery of one’s own citizens and what to do about heirless property, issues that had already been raised with respect to the Offenbach Depot. In the American occupation zone, the military government’s law 52 on the blocking and control of property in the German Reich and its organizations—a second, amended version of which was ratified in July 1945—resolved some of these problems by decreeing that all stolen goods, whether of German or other origin, must initially come under American supervision and jurisdiction. Only upon submission of unambiguous evidence of ownership—the task of the restitution officers registered at the Offenbach Depot—were these goods released for restitution. This procedure was often problematic in the case of formerly German Jewish property. Implementing the restitution measures to which the Americans had committed themselves through this law presupposed “the existence of a claimant. In cases in which an entire family was killed in the concentration camps or gas chambers and has been deprived of all heirs, no such claimant existed.”131 In cases involving the former property of German Jewish citizens who could not be found or had been murdered, it was Germany that would have acted as administrator according to the escheat doctrine of common law. In the absence of legal heirs, this called for property to revert to the state. Jewish advocacy groups regarded this as outrageous because it “would mean to reward them [the Germans] for the extermination of the Jews.”132
It was this legal situation that compelled American-Jewish emissaries to intervene in a more targeted way. Members of the JRSO, along with Commission officials, attempted to persuade the American authorities to transform individual claims into collective claims. Just as Nehemia Robinson had envisaged in his pioneering study in 1944, as so-called successor organizations (ones that formally succeed to the inheritance of the murdered), both groups thus strove to gain the right to file claims to and administer the property involved on behalf of the Jewish collectivity: “The creation [of the] successor organizations is the inevitable consequence of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews. [ . . . ] Where a bleak silence reigns over scenes of carnage, this is the voice demanding atonement for the wrongs committed. [ . . . ] Hence it is in the successor organization, which serves no special interests [ . . . ] and is intended to prevent the ongoing alienation of property under the pretext of Nazi law for want of legally effective claims, that the idea of restitution has found its clearest and most unconditional expression.”133
The dilemma with which the international Jewish organizations struggled was that while the Americans certainly acknowledged the moral justification for restitution and compensation, they failed to provide the political and legal means of achieving them. At the Paris Conference on Reparations of November and December 1945, the Allies had granted those persecuted by the Nazis a special status, resolving to use gold bullion found by the Allied armed forces on German territory, along with an additional twenty-five million dollars, for the rehabilitation and settlement of stateless victims, thus signaling their sympathy for Jewish claims. In legal terms, however, these provisions initially had no effect on restitution and compensation.134
Beyond the complicated legal status of stolen Jewish goods in the American occupation zone, Commission members were also deeply concerned about Jewish cultural treasures elsewhere, especially in Eastern Europe.135 Officials responsible for collection and restitution in Germany constantly complained about the lack of experts capable of identifying material. Furthermore, many of the cultural goods outside the depot were at risk of being carried off or illegally sold or falling into disrepair. With growing concern, Commission members in New York learned of the black market trade in valuable materials and the use of papers and parchments from Jewish estates as scrap paper. Seymour Pomrenze reported to them that in Łódź, Poland, fish was on sale at markets wrapped in pages from the Talmud; some time later Arendt stated that she had been offered five Jewish gravestones through the Budapest black market.136
In addition, like the officials in Offenbach, Commission members struggled to work effectively with the Soviet military leadership. The authorized Soviet officials made no distinction in their confiscation policy between German goods and goods looted by Germans, creating an ever-present risk that stolen Jewish assets would be subjected to displacement once again. Accounts of the confiscation of Jewish property in the Soviet occupation zone and in other areas of Soviet influence regularly did the rounds. In 1946, Scholem told of a supposed Soviet plan to establish an oriental library in Samarkand and Tashkent, for which a Russian restitution officer in Offenbach was to file claims to Jewish holdings.137 Furthermore, the Soviet military government and Soviet authorities refused to cooperate with Jewish nonstate organizations. The Soviet leadership took the view that the restitution of stolen goods should take place in their countries of origin so they could be of benefit to the victims of the Nazi regime without distinction. There was no recognition of any special “Jewish case.”138 Keen to do all they could to prevent the transfer of goods into the Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe (even on a legal basis), the Jewish interest groups campaigned for an end to the restitution of items to Polish and Soviet officers on the basis of the territorial principle. They also drew up plans to salvage stolen goods in the Soviet zone. In both cases, many individuals were convinced that the assets and treasures would not make it back into Jewish ownership but would end up as state property that would never benefit a single Jew. In March 1946, Pinson expressed his fears to the chair of the Otzrot HaGolah in Jerusalem: “There is a very immediate and grave danger that the Soviet Union may make claim to everything that comes from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia and Russian occupied Germany, regardless of legal ownership. In such a case our headquarters in Berlin would be forced to bow to these claims and the greatest bulk of the collection would be lost to us all.”139
It was to a large degree as a result of this clearly dire predicament that the participants in the Commission agreed to push for the transfer of most material out of Germany: “Our idea [ . . . ] is to get all the non-identifiable parts of the collection [OAD] out of Europe into the U.S.A. as soon as possible. In the U.S.A. our research department [Commission] can better carry on its work and a more just and equitable distribution and restitution can be made.”140 Very similar arguments were put forward by Salo W. Baron and eminent scholars of the Hebrew University (including Judah Magnes, Gershom Scholem, Ben-Zion Dinur, and Martin Buber) at a September 1946 meeting in Jerusalem. While there was a total lack of agreement on how to proceed, everyone agreed that cultural goods must without fail be taken out of Germany and Czechoslovakia, another location where large quantities of looted items were to be found. Gershom Scholem spoke bluntly of the dangers posed by “the Russians, who [would] hand over nothing to the benefit of the Jews” and had already taken objects to the Soviet Union while also emphasizing that “this danger exists to no lesser a degree when it comes to the Germans themselves.” It was thus “impossible to leave the collections in Germany.”141
Throughout 1946, the Commission’s Legal Committee worked intensely to resolve the outstanding issues: the idea was to strengthen the Commission’s international authority and presence through closer cooperation with other groups and institutions, particularly those in Palestine. It was also proposed to submit to the State Department a memorandum advocating the case for the Commission’s authorization as trustee of heirless Jewish cultural goods, with the power to transfer goods out of Germany.142 This was submitted to the State Department in June 1946. Eight pages long and composed by Jerome Michael, the memorandum set out the organization’s status; its core ideas and key concerns; the situation of “Jewish religious and cultural treasures” in Europe, particularly the large quantities of heirless objects; the value of these cultural treasures to the Jewish people; and a detailed plan for their redistribution to Jewries worldwide. The paper envisaged the Commission as part of a board of advisers to the American military government that, along with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Synagogue Council, which represented the various Jewish denominations in the United States, would be consulted on matters of restitution and the allocation of property to facilitate recognition of “the special and exclusive interest of the Jewish people in these objects.” There was no reference as yet to its own potential role as trustee. In analogy to the discussions of the early 1940s, here “the Jewish people” was taken to mean the ethnic collectivity of the Jews throughout the world, a group characterized by a shared religion and historical experience. The Commission also called for compensation for the many destroyed Jewish collections formerly held by German and Austrian cultural institutions and libraries. The final point in the memorandum underlined the risks entailed in the impending postoccupation transfer of responsibility for restitution to the German authorities and requested a change of approach: “To entrust the disposition of these objects to the German land governments or other German agencies is to desecrate them and gratuitously to offend deeply the Jewish people.”143 The first Tentative List was appended to the letter to provide an impression of the dimensions and significance of the theft of cultural property and thus underline the need for bespoke regulation of their salvage: “The instrumentalities, the tangible products, and the physical embodiment of this long, devoted, and often heroic spiritual and intellectual activity [the long-term historical development of Jewish religious, scientific and cultural institutions all over Europe] were books, manuscripts, Torah scrolls and other religious and cultural objects which constitute a priceless heritage and one of the proudest possessions of the Jewish people.”144 The goal of the memorandum was to convince the American authorities to help draw up plans for the “preservation and ultimate disposition of the Jewish religious and cultural treasures which are still to be found in Germany and Austria” in order to “save them for mankind in general and the Jewish people in particular.”145 The memorandum was accompanied by a letter from Philip Bernstein to the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces and then military governor in Germany, Joseph T. McNarney. In it, Bernstein too emphasized the urgency of the issues raised, highlighting the complexity and significance of the political and legal decisions required to resolve them: “In fact, Jewish scholars all over the world—and particularly in the United States and Palestine—are the rightful heirs of such treasures. But the laws presently under consideration by military authorities do not place these collections in a separate category. [ . . . ] general legislation overlooks a special case.”146 Bernstein regarded the provision of advice to the military government by the Commission as an important step toward the appropriate treatment of the “special case” of Jewish property.
In light of changes suggested by State Department staff and the assistant secretary of state John H. Hilldring, on behalf of the Commission, Michael submitted a second, improved version of the paper on August 26, 1946. The most important change was that now the Commission no longer presented itself as an adviser to the military government but instead acted as the official representative of collective Jewish claims to stolen cultural property in Europe. To this end, the plan was to establish a corporation consisting of the AJConf, the Joint, the AJC, the Synagogue Council, the American Federation of Jews from Germany, the WJC, and the Hebrew University, which could be expanded later if necessary. According to this plan, the new corporation would be entrusted with the safekeeping and allocation of all heirless and nonidentifiable objects, ensuring that they benefited Jewries across the world. Michael called for special arrangements to be made with respect to Poland and the Soviet Union as the sites of the grossest misalignment between the quantity of discovered objects and the number of local survivors. The new corporation would thus aim to take charge of almost all items stolen from Eastern Europe and would return them to their countries of origin only if they were demonstrably necessary for the securing of the religious and cultural life of the Jews resident there. The practical implementation of these tasks should initially be the responsibility of a small group of experts who could travel to Europe and begin searching for, inspecting, cataloging, returning, and reallocating items. The American military government was asked to grant unimpeded access to every depot and collecting point and freedom of movement within the occupation zone. All the costs of this undertaking would be borne by the German states.147
Astonishingly, after the submission of this memorandum, which already mentions key elements of the later agreements between what was then the JCR and the American government, it took more than two more years for the JCR to be recognized as the trustee. This was due, first, to the complexity of decision-making processes within the American administration: both the State and War Department, and the occupation government in Germany, had to be convinced of this proposal. Second, cooperation between the various Jewish interest groups—within the corporative structure adopted by the JCR from 1947 onward—entailed a number of problems that had to be solved before articles of incorporation could be drawn up. State Department officials were concerned about how the transfer of responsibility for goods to which Michael aspired might be viewed in Germany: “It gives the impression of an act of revenge on the part of the Jews using the American Army and American Officials as a reverse version of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg.” In the same vein, the demand for “restitution-in-kind”—the transfer of cultural treasures of Jewish provenance belonging to German museums and collections to Jewish bodies in the Yishuv and elsewhere as a form of compensation for the losses suffered—was dismissed with the argument that this contravened both Allied policy and the Hague Convention. The activities of potential successor and trust organizations must, according to departmental officials, be strictly controlled: “Jewish organizations [ . . . ] could loot with the assistance of United States troops, German public museums, libraries and archives, of any cultural treasures which, in the opinion of the personnel of the Jewish mission, had a Jewish character. It is contrary to elementary principles of justice.” Nonetheless, State Department officials seemed convinced of the Commission’s integrity. Keen to achieve a common solution for all Western occupation zones, they initially proposed consulting the Commission on how best to integrate its plans into the legislation of the Allied Control Council in Berlin.148 In a letter to the military government of September 1946, meanwhile, the War Department declared itself ready to consent to all the Commission’s proposals, pending the agreement of the military government and a positive reaction from the British and French.149 The response from the military government was initially guarded. Its assumption was that Allied law permitted no role for nonstate or nonmilitary corporations, and it would therefore be necessary to uphold the bilateral agreements with specific countries. Lester Born, MFA&A archive officer within the military government’s restitution division, expressed major reservations about evaluating the “Jewish case” entirely separately from all others. He thought it right for Jews to file their claims as citizens of countries that were entitled to restitution. Furthermore, for him, Jewish cultural treasures were always also part of the cultural heritage of their country of origin, and in his eyes, this legitimized sending them back there.150 His appraisal was typical of many of those working for the American military government and its Allied counterparts who dealt with restitution. Above all, though, the military government underlined that it was vital to ensure that the future Jewish trust comprehensively represent all Jewish aspirations—special attention must be paid to the interests of German and European Jews still living in Europe. Like the other authorities, the military government balked at the idea of taking compensatory cultural items from Germany, viewing it as tantamount to destroying the German cultural landscape (the “cultural rape of Germany”).151
The Commission had influential backers in the State Department, and they played a major part in its ultimately successful attempts to gain authorization. Thanks to his close contacts with members of staff at the MFA&A and the Library of Congress, Seymour Pomrenze was to become a crucial source of support. At a meeting with Hannah Arendt, Horace Kallen, and Simon Federbusch in June 1946, he pledged the Commission his assistance as soon as it had, first, applied for the status of a nonprofit organization of the United Nations and in the state of New York (enabling it to act as an international corporation), second, established a depot where it could store the transferred holdings, third, persuaded the Library in Washington to act as a partner in logistical matters, and fourth, achieved unity among the various Jewish organizations and their conflicting views.152 Judah Magnes, president of the Hebrew University, also expressed his support for Jerome Michael’s proposals by sending a series of letters to the State Department.153 This was mainly because the university had itself made numerous unsuccessful attempts to attain the status of trust. Since Israel did not yet exist as a state and had not existed during the period of Nazi looting, and because the Nazi campaign of spoliation had obviously not affected property in Palestine, it was virtually out of the question for the university to play a leading role in the legal procedure of restitution. Its aspirations also came to nothing because the Western Allied military governments as well as other Jewish individuals feared that if it gained trust status it would be likely to allocate goods solely to Palestine/Israel. Pinson put this to Magnes in stark terms in a letter of March 1946, going so far as to state that if the Hebrew University were the sole actor in the field of restitution, it would hamper the success of Jewish initiatives: “Official claims or representations at this time from Palestine, a country from which no part of this collection has come and which, unfortunately, is not recognized as possessing any legal claims in restitution proceedings, would only serve to stimulate or incite Russian claims. May I assure you that we here on the spot are doing all we can to preserve the collection, and that the interests of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem are very close to the hearts of us all.”154
Many key figures agreed that the Hebrew University should be one of the main repositories of salvaged objects, but most American-Jewish representatives advocated the equitable distribution of goods to a number of countries. Magnes embraced a collective approach and supported the Commission in his communications with the State Department, greatly increasing its prospects of recognition—his advocacy being seen as evidence of unity between the Jews of Palestine and the Diaspora. Lucius Clay, then deputy to the military governor McNarney, was also well-disposed toward the Commission’s aspirations and was dedicated in his pursuit of a positive outcome for Jewish cultural goods in the American occupation zone.155 On December 1, 1946, the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York was the scene of a meeting between Clay, Salo W. Baron, Jerome Michael, Alexander Marx, Aron Freimann of the Commission, and Wolf Blattberg of the WJC, where they discussed how to proceed. Clay again pushed for greater inclusion of European-Jewish and German Jewish representatives. The meeting focused chiefly on the legal options available to nonstate actors and on how a future law on restitution might apply to cultural goods.156 Clay then began to step up his efforts to effectuate a law of this kind that would recognize Jewish claims. In March 1947, he succeeded McNarney as military governor and initiated a comprehensive discussion of the issue of restitution with the German state governments and the Allied Control Council. His plans for a joint resolution came to grief due to the Allies’ irreconcilable positions and the state governments’ desire to transfer responsibility for restitution to German courts and authorities. In the face of this opposition, Clay had little choice but to implement a solution for the American zone alone. In November 1947, the new military law 59 on the restitution of identifiable property was passed, clarifying the approach to restitution in this zone and permitting the appointment of trust organizations to file nonstate claims.157 In his memoirs, Clay relates his struggle over the law and its significance: “After months of fruitless effort to obtain a quadripartite law and also a bipartite law, United States Military Government enacted for the United States Zone a law which provided for the restitution of identifiable property taken by Germany by duress [ . . . ]. To ensure that the property of the Jewish people who were killed in Germany and left no heirs would not benefit German holders, a Jewish successor agency, formed by recognized world Jewish organizations, was authorized to claim and receive their property, including valuable cultural property.”158
Among the Western Allies, the Americans were the quickest to formulate a comprehensive policy to address the specific situation of stolen goods of Jewish origin. Most scholars explain this in light of the fact that the Americans had no need to pursue compensation to cover their own losses during the war or to deal with the aftereffects of German occupation because—in contrast to their European counterparts—their national territory had been unaffected.159 A secondary explanation highlights the Americans’ special sensitivity to the predicament of those persecuted by the Nazis. This is put down to the diverse range of Jewish political initiatives in the United States, which had emerged in part because it was the destination of the largest wave of refugees from Europe. Perhaps even more significant than these factors, however, was that the softening of the territorial principle meant that the United States and Palestine could obtain cultural goods while countries such as France and especially the Eastern European nations had to forego some of the objects formerly located there. Because Jewish art and cultural goods were often considered part of a given nation’s cultural heritage, the debate on their future inevitably caused friction.
As a result, in addition to its copious work on the Tentative Lists, the first phase of the Commission’s activities involved legal negotiations relating to the constitution of the JCR, its recognition by the Allies, and more far-reaching questions about the future of Jewish life. Plans for the literal postwar reconstruction of European Jewish communities and institutions had been superseded by plans to commemorate the dead and preserve the European-Jewish cultural legacy abroad. Despite this shift of perspective, however, the same term continued to be used for JCR operations. Reconstruction finally encompassed everything associated with the reestablishment of Jewish life after the Holocaust. According to the leading perspective in Israel, this semantic shift went so far that reconstruction was seen as an element in a “process of redemption” bound up with the foundation of the Jewish state, imbuing the term with a new significance for the future of the Jewish people in that country. The issues of salvaging, preserving, and incorporating the cultural heritage into the Israeli realm were expertly integrated into the dominant historical narrative that accompanied the construction of the early Israeli self-image; here, the prevailing perception was of the “Holocaust as an inevitable outcome of the Jewish exilic situation and of the return to Eretz Yisrael as the ultimate act of redemption.”160 If one presupposed that the Jewish people and Israel would become as one, and that Israel was developing into the hub of Jewish life—an assumption that amounted to a more or less unambiguous rejection of the Diaspora—there could be no doubt that heirless assets and property must find their future home there. Within this frame of interpretation, according to the historian Hannah Yablonka, Zionism represented “the only hope for salvation and rebuilding what was left of the Jewish population of Europe.”161 Through the Zionist lens, reconstruction could only take place in Israel. It was there that most survivors of the Holocaust went to find a new home, and it was there that the remnants of their property and that of the murdered must be transferred as well. Those active within the Jewish Diaspora shared this view only to a limited degree. Cecil Roth, for example, who championed the Hebrew University’s interests, discussed the problem of cultural rebuilding in Palestine and the United States in his essay “Jewish Culture: Renaissance or Ice Age?” of 1947. From an Anglo-Saxon perspective, he described the “starving” of Diaspora culture through what he calls a “cultural inferiority complex” and a focus on Palestine, something he considered every bit as dangerous as excessive assimilation into the surrounding culture.162 He thus called for a renaissance of Jewish culture in both Palestine and the Diaspora—with his main emphasis being on the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries outside of continental Europe. A few years after the war, the Committee on Restoration, which had still unambiguously viewed Palestine as the target destination for every recoverable fragment of the European-Jewish cultural heritage in 1944, had also changed its view. As he observed the emergence of the Jewish state, Roth became convinced that salvaged cultural goods must strengthen not just the Yishuv but the Diaspora as well, and here he pushed for the United Kingdom to play a major role in negotiations on the Jewish heritage, his goal being to make it the third center of Jewish life alongside the United States and Palestine/Israel.163 With an eye on the future, in his introduction to the first Tentative List, Salo W. Baron explained the changed meaning of the term reconstruction for Jewish life: “The term ‘cultural reconstruction’ is not to be interpreted in any too narrow sense. [ . . . ] In view of the wholesale destruction of Jewish life and property by the Nazis, reconstruction of Jewish cultural institutions cannot possibly mean mechanical restoration in their original form or, in all cases, to their previous locations. The Commission [ . . . ] may seek to help redistribute the Jewish cultural treasures in accordance with the needs created by the new situation of world Jewry.”164 Understanding that former centers of scholarship and publishing, academic institutions, and rabbinical seminaries had been irretrievably destroyed, Baron and his colleagues advanced the idea of establishing the United States as a central space for Jewish culture and thought. The transfer of knowledge and ideas through the migration of material remnants from Europe to the United States and the fruitful integration of former cultural and educational traditions into the American context became Baron’s enduring preoccupation.
Not least, this shift away from the Commission’s original concept found expression in the organization’s reconstitution as a corporation made up of several institutions, named Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., in April 1947. In contrast to its predecessor, the JCR did not include the word European in its title. The spatial perspective had shifted. There was no point in systematic reconstruction in the absence of those to whom it would have meant something. From 1946 onward, the Commission executive board had expressed an increasingly clear view of where the locus of Jewish life ought to be: “Europe is no longer, and it is very unlikely that it can again become, a center of Jewish spiritual and cultural activity. The great centers of such activity are now, and will continue to be, Palestine and the United States, where so many thousands of the survivors of European Jews have found refuge.”165 The JCR’s Hebrew name allowed the changed perception of reconstruction to shine through even more clearly. Labels on the volumes allocated by the JCR to Israel later bore the inscription Tekumah Latrabut Israel (resurrection of Jewish culture), almost entirely undoing the original idea of returning stolen property to its earlier ownership and thus to its previous setting as typically entailed in restitution. Here restitution meant a new beginning, and with respect to cultural activities, it specifically meant a new beginning for the Jewish community in the Altneuland of Israel. But some obstacles still had to be overcome before any objects could be distributed to the new centers of Jewish life. The key challenges were the formation of a sustainable corporative structure and the legal negotiations that preceded the conclusion of the “Frankfurt Agreement,” which authorized the JCR as trust.
The competition between the various Jewish and non-Jewish initiatives described earlier impeded concerted action and slowed institutions’ attainment of trust status. One highly controversial rival initiative on European soil was launched by the Royal Library in Copenhagen. As early as 1945—due to its neutral location and its famous collection, which had suffered no damage during the war—its representatives were envisioning the library as a locus for heirless books of Jewish provenance and called for the establishment of a Jewish memorial collection. Its promoters projected a World Jewish Library in Copenhagen that would make its holdings available to researchers from all over the globe.166 With backing from UNESCO, which had been founded shortly before, Raphael Edelmann, head librarian of its Judaica division (consisting most prominently of the Rabbi David Simonsen collection), argued vigorously for this solution in proposals presented to the American occupation authorities and various Jewish advocates, causing outrage among the latter. Jerome Michael urged him to instead support the Commission’s project and keep in mind the Jews’ special situation: “There is a deeper reason why we feel that these plundered Jewish libraries should be handed over direct to the Jewish people without the intermediary of any organization. The Jewish people have suffered in the war spiritually and materially more than any other community; and we want therefore that these books, the precipitate of the labors of generations of Jewish scholars, be restored without unnecessary delay to the Jewish people. Unfortunately the lives of six million Jewish victims cannot be restored. But these books belong to the Jewish people, and to its scholars and students.”167 In the same vein, Judah Magnes wrote to Edelmann in January 1947, seeking to convince him to abandon the idea and instead support the Jewish salvage initiatives: “It would—if I may be allowed to speak frankly—be a real demonstration of your Government’s sense of generosity and its genuine understanding of the plight of the Jewish people if they were to support a plan, which has been agreed upon by recognized agencies of the Jewish people, rather than to oppose it through a plan of their own.”168 For Magnes and those of like mind, the time seemed anything but ripe for a “universal” European approach to heirless Jewish books; rejecting Edelmann’s proposal, they were determined to ensure Jewish ownership of all heirless cultural remnants on the continent. In a letter to his friend Hugo Bergman, who was also helping salvage books and religious objects from Europe, Gershom Scholem was uncompromising: “As you (may) know, the peculiar activities of this Dr. Edelmann, who tried to steal the property of the Jewish people for the Danish government in order to boost his own profile (though he failed in this!), have raised our suspicions. [ . . . ] I’m sure you realize that we have absolutely no intention of supporting Dr. Edelmann’s plans in any form [ . . . ]. I’m convinced that there is no objective reason to accumulate valuable books in a place such as Copenhagen that is devoid of any real Jewish life.”169 Edelmann’s plan was thwarted as a result of this fierce opposition. UNESCO, prominently backed by the United States, dropped the plan for a Jewish library in Europe. But the initiative had rekindled the debate on whether—and if so, where and how—there might be post-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe. Most Jewish representatives’ blunt rejection of the Copenhagen plan was testimony to their virtually unanimous view of the issue.
The second major non-Jewish library that was involved in every debate and whose representatives took part in months of discussions on potential cooperation was the Library of Congress in Washington. As early as December 1945, Theodor Gaster of the Commission had underscored the benefits of cooperation and even proposed the library as an independent agency to administer heirless European holdings.170 He envisaged himself playing a key role here. Similarly, in the summer of 1946, the head of the Library of Congress mission, Reuben Peiss, suggested to Lucius Clay that the four victorious powers ought to administer the holdings found in their zones and allow the various national libraries to allocate nonrestitutable items.171 At first, the other Commission members were also persuaded that the Library of Congress should play the kind of role suggested by Gaster, and they endeavored to provide support as an adviser on Jewish affairs. But the more Baron and the executive board intervened actively in the restitution procedures, the more they shifted away from their original vision, conceding the library a purely logistical role in their dealings with the American authorities. The deciding factor here was the moral and political argument, already put to Raphael Edelmann by Jerome Michael, that the disaster that had befallen Europe’s Jews made it both impossible and undesirable to entrust the administration of the Jewish heritage to non-Jewish institutions.
The imperative, then, was to join forces and dismantle the barriers between the various Jewish initiatives. Network building was entrusted mainly to the Commission’s Cooperation Committee under the leadership of Horace Kallen. Two aspects were important here: first, forging links with other organizations and institutions, covering as many Jewish factions and geographical areas as possible that were prepared to work together within a corporative structure under the chairmanship of Salo W. Baron; second, cooperation with the JRSO, which was emerging in a parallel process. JRSO registered as a corporation in the state of New York in May 1947, integrating the JA, the Joint, the AJConf, the AJC, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the CRIF, the Council, the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American Zone of Germany, the WJC and the recently founded JCR. Between June and August 1948, it began operating as the official Jewish successor organization for the American occupation zone in Germany.172 It took laborious discussions to establish the Commission as a key agent of heirless Jewish cultural property under the aegis of JRSO. There were disagreements about its leadership, the different groups invited to join feared their interests would be neglected if they were subordinated to Baron’s organization, and there were conflicting views on where to finally locate cultural treasures. Cooperation between the Commission and representatives of the AJC, AJConf, and the Synagogue Council went fairly smoothly; they supported and funded it from the outset. In early 1947, efforts were made to persuade Rabbi Leo Baeck to join the Commission. Once the State Department and military government had made recognition of the Commission conditional on improved integration of German Jewish and European Jewish representatives, it was an obvious step to ask the chair of the Council for the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Jews from Germany—later the Council of Jews from Germany (hereafter: the Council)—to become a member. After some initial hesitation, Baeck agreed.173
The Commission’s relationship to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Committee on Restoration, and the World Jewish Congress was more complicated in nature. The Congress was the only competing initiative on American soil. The Commission certainly consulted Nehemia and Jacob Robinson as legal and political advisers, basing its concept of restitution on the principle of collective claims put forward by the Institute of Jewish Affairs. Both Robinsons were directly involved in the Commission’s work and are listed as members. The same applies to Simon Federbusch, who had agreed to become a member separate from his work in the WJC. But initially, the WJC still insisted on pursuing its own projects to salvage Jewish cultural goods.174 In 1945, WJC representatives were still suggesting that Baron ought to join Federbusch’s Committee on the Recovery of Jewish Cultural Property and that the latter would be entirely responsible for the practical implementation of the Commission’s ideas. The high-profile and politically engaged Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of the WJC since its establishment in 1936, also rejected the idea of participating in the Commission because of the near-identical project being pursued by the WJC.175 In June 1946, the Commission asked the WJC for financial aid, but this was curtly rejected with reference to its own plans.176 Jerome Michael then turned to the executive board and Nahum Goldmann, who succeeded Wise as president in 1949. Goldmann ultimately reined in all of Federbusch’s unilateral activities and ordered him to work together with Baron on issues of cultural restitution. It was agreed that the WJC should use its diplomatic contacts to negotiate the fate of Jewish cultural goods in Poland and Czechoslovakia in particular—where the Commission could make little headway due to resistance from the local authorities.177
Cooperation with the Hebrew University went more smoothly because its representatives quickly realized that no member of the Commission was in any doubt that it would play the leading role in the allocation of goods. University members soon grasped their poor prospects of winning over the Allies in Germany if they tried to act alone, the legal basis for those activities being even weaker than that of the American interest groups. It therefore made sense to abandon its exclusive approach and ally itself with the Commission. In contrast to the WJC, the university’s close personal contacts with its New York colleagues smoothed the way for cooperation.
As we saw earlier, Cecil Roth’s Committee on Restoration ultimately hoped to establish itself as an independent European advisory body with respect to Jewish cultural heritage. There were repeated misunderstandings and communication problems between the Commission and Roth’s Committee, chiefly due to the Americans’ preeminent role in the restitution process. This conflict was obviously an expression of the broader transition occurring in the Jewish world at the time, which saw the shift of Jewish centers away from Europe to the United States and Palestine. Evidently due to financial problems and in the awareness that it was in a far weaker position vis-à-vis the American military government, the Committee too shifted its stance and signed a contractual agreement on cooperation. In March 1947, after consulting with the Hebrew University, Oskar Rabinowitz, later member of the JCR executive board, requested the Committee’s incorporation into the JCR, though Baron approved this only in January 1948.178
When it came to their objectives and key ideas, the various individuals involved agreed on far more than was apparent at first sight, and the Commission’s established status (relatively secure funding, a large network, recognition by the American authorities, high-profile supporters) ultimately helped ensure a joint approach. On April 30, 1947, through a deed of incorporation in the state of New York, the following bodies came together as the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR): the AJC, the AJConf, the Commission, the Council, the Hebrew University, the Synagogue Council, and the World Jewish Congress. The new organization’s mission statement set out its responsibilities in three sections: first, to “locate, identify, salvage, [ . . . ] preserve, repair, protect, [and] catalogue” books, manuscripts and ritual objects; second, to work as a successor organization “to institute and prosecute claims for the recovery of, or compensation for Jewish religious and cultural objects”; and third, to distribute the goods in its charge in such “a way as to best serve and promote the spiritual and cultural needs and interests of the Jewish people in particular and of mankind in general, and especially the spiritual and cultural needs of the victims of Nazi or Fascist persecution.” The signatories undertook to fulfill these responsibilities on the basis of the legal requirements of the United States.179
By the time the American authorities finally authorized the JCR as trustee in February 1949, it had gained several other members: the Agudas Israel World Organization, the American Federation of Jews from Central Europe, the Joint, the Anglo-Jewish Association, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Committee on Restoration, the JA, and the Committee Representing the Interests of the Jewish Communities of Germany (initially in the American Occupation Zone, known as Interessenvertretung der jüdischen Gemeinden und Kultusvereinigungen in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone).180 The final body to be integrated into the JCR in December 1949 was the French Alliance Israélite Universelle, JCR members having repeatedly complained about the lack of French representation.181 The JCR had thus not only succeeded in besting and incorporating its competitors while securing its status as sole Jewish interest group in the field of cultural restitution but had also managed to unite under one banner all the important Jewish organizations of the day and thus the various factions of world Jewry. Apart from the Commission executive board’s efforts, this was probably achieved chiefly because, for all those involved, preservation of the meager remnants of Jewish cultural life in Europe was an existential matter.
The legal and financial framework for the JCR’s work was to be provided through its ties to the JRSO. Cooperation made a great deal of sense given that both organizations had the same goal—namely, to establish the Jewish people as collective heirs to the remaining heirless goods in Germany. Cooperation was also favored by the representatives of the American government. In response to the Commission’s proposals, US officials had suggested that it was best to wait until the JRSO had been authorized and then proceed in cooperation with it.182 Precisely because the two organizations’ spheres of activity overlapped, the American officials regarded their fusion as conducive to their success.183 The Commission endorsed this proposal. In early 1947, in a letter to Isaiah Kenen of the AJConf chiefly concerned with financial issues, Baron also mulled whether
to organize a membership corporation under New York law with some such name as the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Corporation. This corporation [ . . . ] will be given powers sufficiently varied and broad to enable it to act either as the Restitution Commission’s [JRSO] agent with respect to confiscated cultural property [ . . . ] or as the trustee of the cultural property, in the event that there shall be a separate trustee for such property. [ . . . ] In the event that there shall be a single trusteeship for all confiscated property, the Restitution Commission shall irrevocably designate the Reconstruction Commission as the trustee’s agent to perform, in the Trustee’s name and on the Trustee’s behalf, the duties and functions of the trustee with respect to cultural property.184
The JCR executive board later backed such cooperation as well, so in June 1947, the JCR and JRSO signed an agreement setting out their different responsibilities, which was also signed by the Joint and the JA as the JRSO’s future sponsors: “You will distribute such Jewish cultural property as you may succeed in recovering among Jewish communities throughout the world in such manner as will in your judgment best serve the religious and cultural needs and interests of the Jewish people. [ . . . ] To the best of your ability you will act as the Commission’s [JRSO] agent in relation to cultural property and, as such, will promptly undertake necessary and appropriate measures in order to discover, claim, acquire, receive, hold, maintain, and dispose of such property.”185
In August, this agreement came into force, laying the groundwork for the two organizations’ joint endeavors.186 As a result, the JCR too now received financial support from the Joint and JA.187 On June 23, 1948, the JRSO gained formal recognition as the successor organization with responsibility for Jewish property in the American occupation zone after the two organizations had jointly negotiated the final steps in the process, while the JCR was authorized as its agent on February 15, 1949.