For Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Gershom Scholem—today the best-known protagonists of postwar Jewish initiatives to salvage looted cultural goods—their efforts to advance cultural restitution was much more than just a temporary task. It was their work for JCR and YIVO that first confronted all four individuals, in a concrete way, with the consequences of the Holocaust. It shaped their view of what had happened and had a lasting impact on their understanding of its significance to Jewish life in general. As they sought to achieve restitution, these scholars learned how the Nazi cultural raids had unfolded and how they were organized, furnishing them with comprehensive insights into the Nazis’ political practices and key elements of their policy of destruction and annihilation. Early trips to a postwar Europe in a state of material and moral collapse compelled them to face the immediate past of war and Nazi terror, while the search for and salvage of books and objects stimulated discussions on memory and the Jewish future. Their political and personal experiences molded their view of events that—in a wide range of ways—left behind traces in their historical thinking. Important later writings, particularly those of Arendt and Dawidowicz, echo some of the questions that have determined their work for both organizations. Baron’s and Scholem’s long-lasting scholarly and cultural activities in the United States and Israel as well as their ways to respond to the Holocaust were shaped by these specific experiences.
The four scholars differed fundamentally in terms of their generation, background, self-image, and political vision. Nonetheless, all regarded their shared rescue mission as an existential duty. The political arena of cultural restitution created an opportunity to preserve fragments of European-Jewish tradition and history. On the one hand, this enabled these scholars to shape the ongoing and future life of the Jewish collectivity in its new centers outside Europe. On the other hand, as discussed earlier, the negotiations that ultimately resulted in a more just concept of restitution allowed them, in a supposedly peripheral sphere, to advance a central goal of Jewish politics: to ensure Jews’ participation in international law and thus their international political recognition. Besides the general aims that all four shared, the motives underlying their commitment were very different. Scholem linked his engagement closely with his Zionist aspirations. In particular, he viewed the acquisition of precious Judaica from Europe as a vital component of nation-building in Eretz Israel. Dawidowicz, meanwhile, saw the transfer of the dislocated YIVO holdings to the United States as a means of perpetuating and transmitting the lost Jewish worlds of Vilna, a way of preserving part of the old world in the new. Arendt was determined to participate actively in Jewish politics, while her work for the JCR gave her important insights into the character of Nazi rule, which she was busy researching for her magnum opus on totalitarianism. Finally, in the JCR, Baron found an important forum for the advancement of his goals of institutionalizing and promoting Jewish spiritual and cultural life within the US.
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Between 1942 and 1944, the scholars in New York and Jerusalem later involved in cultural restitution became aware of the practices of annihilation unfolding in Europe. With the help of Lucy Dawidowicz, senior YIVO figures searched for the dislocated library and archival collection of the original institute in Vilna. Salo Baron and Hannah Arendt, meanwhile, initiated their cooperation in the Commission in the summer of 1944. And in Jerusalem, Scholem met with other Hebrew University personnel to create the Otzrot HaGolah working group. Based in the United States or Palestine, all four protagonists sought to determine the prospects for a political initiative to salvage the looted treasures, each of them bringing differing political views and biographies.
Born in Tarnów in 1895, Salo Wittmayer Baron came from a middle-class family, deeply rooted in Jewish traditions, in the Habsburg monarchy’s crownland of Galicia. After his studies in Lwów, he moved to Vienna; there, in addition to his ordination as rabbi, he obtained three doctorates in politics, history, and law in the early 1920s. By 1926, he had immigrated to New York, where he took up an invitation from the eminent rabbi Steven S. Wise to teach at the Jewish Institute of Religion. Baron fully established himself in the United States after assuming the first American chair in Jewish history, literature, and institutions at Columbia University in 1930. Concurrently, through his multifaceted engagement in political and charitable organizations, he managed to build up a broad intellectual and political network. In this process, the “multilingual, well-travelled European, the sophisticated intellectual who knew Berlin and Vienna and Kraków,” became “an American.”1 Beginning in 1933, Baron’s position and responsibilities within the American-Jewish public sphere fostered his political mobilization in opposition to anti-Semitic propaganda and his calls for greater attention to be paid to developments in Europe.2 Significantly, his sensitivity to the political processes unfolding there prompted him to make a research trip to Germany in the summer of 1933. The insights he gained in Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Breslau intensified his concerns about developments under Hitler, particularly when it came to the Jews, and lent new impetus to his political initiatives in the United States.3 Baron’s leading role in the Conference on Jewish Relations, officially established in 1936, and the Jewish Social Studies journal, a quarterly first published in 1939, along with his work for the National Jewish Welfare Board, are examples of the different ways in which he sought to respond during this period to the growing threats facing the European Jews.4 In addition, Baron became an important interlocutor for Jewish scholars who had immigrated to the United States. He helped many of them secure invitations, visas, affidavits, and passage to the United States, communicating with the authorities in support of their cases and providing them with an initial point of contact in New York.5 He also played this role for Hannah Arendt, who sought him out on the recommendation of the famous rabbi and historian Ismar Elbogen immediately after her arrival in 1941. It was not long before he had helped her achieve her first English-language publication and arranged her first job in the United States by employing her at the Commission.6 Toward the end of the war, Baron focused his political efforts on the preservation of the European Jewries’ cultural heritage. Specifically, he sought to lay the groundwork for the provision of aid for the revival of European-Jewish congregations and institutions. On a practical level, his commitment complimented what Baron was in the process of developing as his particular view of Jewish history, one that was increasingly turning into a historical school of thought. Since the mid-1920s, he had focused his attention on the historical preconditions for the Jews’ survival over the centuries. This prompted him to concentrate on their social history as a collectivity, rather than on the history of the leading exponents of Jewish tradition and their scholarship. Against the tendency to write what he famously referred to as the “lachrymose history” of the Jews, which focused solely on Jewish suffering, he sought to highlight the many different forms of Jewish action, creativity, and organization in non-Jewish environments in various places over time.7 His convictions clearly provided the framework for his political ideas during and after the war. The catastrophic news of the destruction and annihilation of the European Jews did not prevent him from cultivating a certain optimism, enabling him, even beyond the 1940s, to keep faith in the Jews’ capacity for survival. This is particularly evident in his essays from this period.8 In 1940, he indicated to his colleague and friend Alexander Marx that he was depressed by the “international situation,” which was having an adverse effect on his writing, but he still cleaved to the belief that it was possible to exercise a positive influence on events in Europe.9 Baron’s biographer, Robert Liberles, explains this faith partly in light of his personal situation. Throughout the war, he states, Baron had remained hopeful that his parents and sister, whom he could not persuade to leave Tarnów, had survived. It was not until several months after the German capitulation that he received news of their deaths.10 After this, Baron increasingly abandoned the position—one he was still advocating in early 1945—that Jewish life ought to be reestablished in Europe and that a strong European-Jewish community could rise again. Henceforth, he focused with even greater commitment on the development of American Jewish community life. Rather than retreating into reflection and spirituality, as one might have expected given his profession, Baron found a way to deal with the disaster in Europe through his tireless work for the Commission and the JCR, devoting almost half of his weekly working hours to these and other political and philanthropic initiatives intended to help Jews.11 He was the engine and heart of the JCR, whose members were predominantly recruited from among his personal network and helped him implement his ideas. Baron gave his all to make a success of the JCR’s mission.
Gershom Scholem, born in Berlin in 1897, felt drawn to Eretz Israel at young age. Marking a critical distance from his bourgeois, assimilated, secular German Jewish parents, after completing studies in mathematics, philosophy, and Semitic languages, he had emigrated from Germany to Palestine by 1923. He thus experienced the Second World War and the Holocaust from the perspective of Jerusalem. The realities unfolding in Europe first impinged on his life directly when he received news that his close friend Walter Benjamin, on the run from the Nazis, had committed suicide near the French-Spanish border. Like Benjamin, Hannah Arendt too was living in southern France at the time and was in contact with both men. After distressing experiences of expulsion from Germany, exile in Paris, statelessness, internment in the French internment camp of Gurs, and fortuitous escape, Arendt now endured a period of profound uncertainty as she waited for a transit visa in order to travel to Lisbon and obtain safe passage to New York. In 1940, she wrote to Scholem from the French city of Montauban with the shattering news of Benjamin’s death, expressing her dark presentiments of the disasters to come: “Walter Benjamin took his own life on September 29 in Portbou on the Spanish frontier. [ . . . ] Jews are dying in Europe and are being buried like dogs.”12 For both of them, Benjamin’s death meant the loss of an inspiring thinker and important friend. At the same time, they considered it an unmistakable sign that Europe’s Jews faced a hopeless future.13
The Nazis’ war on the European Jews moved geographically close to Palestine when General Rommel and his German Italian troops advanced toward the territory of the Yishuv as part of the Axis North Africa campaign. In the fall of 1942, however, they were beaten and repulsed by British soldiers under the field marshal Bernard Montgomery in the battle of El Alamein, Egypt. While this removed the direct threat to the Jews of Palestine, uncertainty and fear persisted in view of the disastrous situation in Europe.14 Scholem related this to Arendt in a letter of 1942: “Over time we’ve lived through some quite anxious days, and now it appears as if the miracle indeed has happened and Palestine will be spared. [ . . . ] But of course, what else may yet go to wrack and ruin—that is still unimaginable.”15
Scholem described his nagging sense of unease again in another letter to Arendt in December 1943: “We don’t know what sort of revelations we will encounter about the state of the Jewish people in Europe, though one gets ill just thinking about what we already know.”16 This prediction was to come true for Scholem on a personal level more literally than even he perhaps imagined at the time. Concrete knowledge of the mass murder of the European Jews, a development of which he became increasingly aware, had a highly destructive impact on him. His wartime accounts are testimony to his despair and turmoil.17 Hitherto, Scholem had focused mainly on the project, so close to his heart, of building a new Jewish existence in Palestine resembling the conception of Ahad Ha’am. The latter’s idea of cultural Zionism stressed Palestine as the Jews’ spiritual-cultural center, as a means of renouncing the assimilated Western European way of life, and as a new vehicle for developing a modern Jewish consciousness rooted in tradition, one that would in turn impact the Jews in the Diaspora. Scholem had grave doubts that this project would succeed. Since the 1929 Arab uprising, he had been increasingly pessimistic. His fears grew over time, as becomes evident in one of his letters to Arendt in spring 1942: “The moral atmosphere here in this country is calamitous, giving rise to the gloomiest thoughts regarding the fate of our local work here.”18 Fears for the Zionist endeavor intensified as ever more dreadful news poured in from Europe; the prospects of establishing a Jewish national entity seemed poor.19
By the end of the war, Scholem had shifted position and was now publicly defending the foundation of a state in Israel as the only means of securing Jewish life in a world pervaded by lethal anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, he kept his distance from the political realm and concentrated on fostering the country’s scholarly and cultural development. As a result, he soon occupied an outstanding position within its intellectual life. With the inauguration of the chair of Jewish Mysticism within the Hebrew University’s Institute of Jewish Studies—an institute Scholem himself played a significant role in developing—and through his efforts to breathe new life into the entire field of Jewish history, he made a major contribution to the university’s emerging profile.20 The development and institutionalization of the National and University Library in Jerusalem were also projects close to his heart ever since, in the mid-1920s, he had formulated a new method for cataloging and systematizing its Judaica collection, which is still in use. Through the efforts of the Otzrot HaGolah committee, which Scholem did much to sustain, the library received hundreds of thousands of books and documents from Europe, and ultimately, he bequeathed his private library, comprising more than thirty thousand volumes, to the JNUL as well.21 If Israel was to have a future as a vibrant state, and particularly if it was to be built on solid intellectual foundations, then according to Scholem it was not just crucial that as many Jews as possible emigrate there; it was just as important to ensure that Israel acquired the cultural and spiritual legacy of the European Jews, enabling this heritage to bear fruit. The first steps toward establishing the university as a repository and trust for the books and art objects of Europe’s murdered Jews, taken by Judah Magnes in 1944, expressed Scholem’s vision.
Hannah Arendt, born in the German city of Hannover in 1906 to assimilated, bourgeois parents much like Scholem’s, observed events in Europe from the perspective of an emigrant who had fled to the United States after being driven out of Germany. In spring 1941 she managed to escape via Portugal to New York with her husband Heinrich Blücher, and later she arranged safe passage for her mother Martha Arendt as well. Having arrived in the United States, she sought to gain an academic foothold in light of her outstanding degrees in philosophy, theology, and philology. First, though, she learned English and with the help of various contacts—above all Baron—tried to build up her professional and social life in this new world. Arendt started to write for the journal Aufbau, which catered chiefly to émigré German Jews, and in 1942, she began to teach modern European history at Brooklyn College. While still in France, Arendt had begun to engage with Jewish politics. As the threats to Europe’s Jews mounted, she had increasingly shifted focus away from individual and toward collective constructions of belonging and, consonant with the Eastern European tradition, came to regard the Jews as a distinct national and political group that must act as such and assert its rights.22 In the same vein, she continued after her arrival in New York—for example, with her impassionate call for the raising of a Jewish Army as an act of collective defense, which drew her closer to Zionist circles in the United States. In May 1942, she participated in the famous Biltmore Conference, where David Ben-Gurion called for a Jewish commonwealth in Mandatory Palestine and an unlimited right to Jewish immigration. But Arendt was soon to distance herself from the nationalistic elements of political Zionism, which she accused of ignoring the lot of the Arab population in Palestine and disregarding the Zionist project’s fateful dependency on the major powers’ goodwill.23 It was during these months of intense political debate in American-Jewish circles that Arendt was first confronted with news of the ultimate genocide of the European Jews, and she described this moment in poignant detail later on in her famous interview with Günter Gaus:
What was decisive was the day we learned about Auschwitz. [ . . . ] That was in 1943. [ . . . ] That was the real shock. [ . . . ] It was really as if an abyss had opened. Because we had the idea that amends could somehow be made for everything else [ . . . ]. But not for this. This ought not to have happened. And I don’t mean just the number of victims. I mean the method, the fabrication of corpses and so on [ . . . ]. This should not have happened. Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves.24
But the impossibility of coping with what had happened did not paralyze Hannah Arendt—quite the opposite. Looking back, Alfred Kazin, a New York–based writer and Arendt’s friend, described her as driven and indefatigable during this period, obsessed with the search for answers: “Hitler’s war was the central fact in the dark shadowy Morningside Drive apartment where she [Arendt] and her feisty husband, Heinrich Bluecher, now lived [ . . . ]. Hannah never stopped thinking. [ . . . ] How did it happen? How had it all happened? How had this modern age happened?”25
In 1947, Arendt was still describing her state of mind in much the same way in a letter to her friend and mentor, the German Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld, who lived in Jerusalem from 1933 onward: “I simply cannot get over the factories of annihilation [ . . . ]. I have my own kind of melancholy, which I can only fight my way out of through thinking.”26 This concept of thinking as a way of surviving and dealing with the burdens of her time may explain her ceaseless writing. After her columns for Aufbau, beginning in 1944, she wrote many articles and essays for American Jewish journals: texts that enable us to trace the different ways in which she approached the political situation and its consequences.27 All appear to have been guided by Arendt’s dogged attempts “at understanding, what at first and even at second glance appeared simply outrageous.”28 This quest to understand virtually became the basis of her postwar existence: “Understanding [ . . . ] is an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world. [ . . . ] to understand totalitarianism is not to condone anything, but to reconcile ourselves to a world in which such things are possible at all.”29
She had also stressed this conviction to Scholem, to whom she wrote that the “metaphysical shock” triggered by the news from Europe made striving for “a clear glimpse into the catastrophe” unavoidable—but she believed that only a very few were prepared to undertake this journey.30 This quest was consonant not only with her thinking and writing but also with her work for the Commission and later the JCR.31 Once again, it was Kazin who recognized more clearly than many others the importance of this work to Arendt’s life after the war: “When I met her in the late forties she was a blazing Jew, working round the clock for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction.”32 But Arendt’s commitment to the JCR was not only a political endeavor; the research she conducted for the Commission, especially while she was drawing up the Tentative Lists, gave Arendt important insights into the functional principles of Nazi rule. In this context, she came to view the scale and significance of cultural theft as an explicit part of the Nazi project of annihilation. Arendt’s intensive work on the seizure of goods and dispossession on behalf of the Commission gave her a concrete sense of the complex structures of the Nazi system, providing key reference points for her concurrent research, which was to culminate in her great study The Origins of Totalitarianism. In its third chapter, when describing the structural character of totalitarian forms of rule and their central features, she referred several times to the robbery of the Jews and to Nazi scholarship as the beneficiary of dispossessed books and documents.33
In addition, in her work for the Commission, Arendt saw an opportunity to achieve political objectives that she believed were imperative in view of the terrible news from Europe. Arendt simply felt compelled to intervene by prevailing realities: “There are certain extreme situations where you have to act,” as she explained in retrospect with reference to the 1930s and 1940s.34 From this perspective, Arendt’s activities in the postwar period must be observed, on the one hand, as a key element in her process of understanding and as part of her attempt “to be at home in the world” again. On the other hand, she was well aware of the limits of this approach and expressed this aporia of thinking and acting in response to the catastrophe as early as 1944: “For systematic mass murder [ . . . ] strains not only the imagination of human beings, but also the framework and categories of our political thought and action. [ . . . ] There is no political method for dealing with German mass crimes [ . . . ]. Just as there is no political solution within human capacity for the crime of administrative mass murder.”35
Lucy Dawidowicz’s confrontation with the Holocaust and her path toward cultural restitution resembled that of Arendt in terms of their dynamics, but they occurred in a different milieu and in light of different questions. Born under the name Schildkret in New York in 1915, Dawidowicz grew up in a family of Polish Jewish origin. In addition to the standard American school education, she completed a traditional Jewish education at the Sholem Aleichem College in New York before devoting herself to the study of English literature at the city’s Hunter College. Finally, at the suggestion of Jacob Shatzky, her most influential teacher in the Jewish school, in 1938, she began a year of research at the YIVO in Vilna within the framework of the institute’s Aspiratur program, intensifying her relationship with the Yiddishland.36 Just a few weeks before Germany’s attack on Poland, Dawidowicz left Vilna and was able to travel back unscathed to New York, where she decided to work for the local YIVO. As its members learned of the monstrous events in Europe, they were forced to watch the annihilation of the institute’s frame of reference—indeed, its very substance. During the war years, Dawidowicz worked as assistant to the institute head Max Weinreich, who had managed to flee Vilna via Copenhagen in 1939 as he happened to be attending a conference there when the war broke out. He was never to return to Poland. Over the next few years, the institute in New York functioned as a gathering place for many Eastern European immigrants who had managed to save themselves and who brought with them important information about the situation in Europe. In addition, YIVO maintained its own close links with the Polish underground and the Polish exile government in London, so its staff members were among the first to receive detailed information on German death camps and mass shootings in Poland and the Soviet Union. In her autobiography, Dawidowicz recalled, “Being at the YIVO, I probably knew more than most other American Jews about what was happening to the European Jews. [ . . . ] We were witnessing the end of the world. [ . . . ] None of us had seen the heavens turn black, but in Europe I knew the earth was red with Jewish blood.”37
As she herself explained, her personal reaction oscillated between disbelief and a desire for revenge: “It was past my fathoming how even fanatical anti-Semites could become mass murderers. [ . . . ] We were aware of our impotence. Powerless to avenge the murder of the Jews, we fell a-cursing like Hamlet unable to avenge his father’s murder.”38 One of the most important tasks pursued by YIVO during this period, in part because more active means of intervening in Europe were infeasible, was the quest to identify the whereabouts of the Vilna YIVO’s material remains. Those involved seem to have associated this activity with virtually religious hopes of salvation. Looking back, Dawidowicz described this phase of anxiety and hope in emphatic terms: “Finding the library would be a token of redemption. [ . . . ] The recovery of the looted art treasures gave us hope.”39 The protracted search for the dispersed books ultimately led to Frankfurt and Prague, and to the poet Abraham Sutzkever, who was one of the few survivors of the Vilna ghetto. Together with a few other inmates, he had managed to save some YIVO book holdings under the most difficult of circumstances.40 These developments became a crucial source of meaning during a period otherwise pervaded by shock and terror at reports from Europe, which were worsening by the day: “Our intentness in searching for YIVO’s library helped to sustain us then against the horrors of the camps, horrors which we had internalized from accounts we had read back in 1944.”41 This sense of salvation was to intensify when Dawidowicz directly encountered the salvaged holdings from Vilna during her trip to Germany from 1946 to 1947.
Dawidowicz arrived in Germany in October 1946 on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. During the first few months, she primarily helped provision Jewish Displaced Persons in Munich, but her focus soon shifted to researching the remnants of the YIVO Institute. She had been encouraged to take up a post in Germany by Koppel Pinson, who was cooperating closely with the Commission and YIVO. He himself worked for the Joint between 1945 and 1946 in the American occupation zone and was keen to employ Dawidowicz as an education officer. She accepted the challenge. In Munich, she was responsible for obtaining licenses for Yiddish-language DP newspapers, procuring printing presses and paper, and securing supplies of schoolbooks and other materials for DP camp schools along with religious texts and prayer books. She also helped Jewish students obtain scholarships for study in the United States. During the course of her work, she managed to ensure that DP newspapers were produced and printed in the former publishing house of the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter, now home to the Neue Zeitung published by the American military government—a “grotesque historical irony,” as Dawidowicz later put it.42 Overall, her impression of Germany and the Germans was pervaded by distrust and disapproval: she did not believe that anti-Semitic convictions could have disappeared overnight. Particularly in her activities for the DPs, she often had no choice but to work with German authorities and institutions, something that greatly rankled her: “I hated the Germans and hated to do business with them. [ . . . ] I was convinced that Munich, as indeed all of Germany, was aswarm with former Nazi Party members and sympathizers, all at liberty, their minds still filled with the lurid anti-Semitism in which they had been indoctrinated for over twelve years.”43
More affecting yet, according to Dawidowicz’s own accounts, was her work at the Offenbach Depot.44 Tasked with continuing the selection, begun by Koppel Pinson, of material to be lent to DP camp libraries, she quickly discovered her true mission: identification of the Vilna holdings found at the depot. Under Dawidowicz’s leadership, the efforts begun in New York to locate the collection, and the subsequent tough negotiations on their restitution, were brought to a successful conclusion: several thousand books, documents, and manuscripts, brought to Frankfurt by the ERR, passed once again into YIVO’s possession. Dawidowicz took up her post in Offenbach in February 1947 and began to systematically sort the vast mass of so-called unidentifiable Jewish book collections and those holdings of Jewish origin categorized as heirless. When she arrived in Offenbach, the many Yiddish- and Hebrew-language papers, journals, books, and manuscripts had received virtually no attention (with the exception of the efforts of Pinson and Scholem, who had worked at the depot in the summer before her arrival). As she inspected the books, Dawidowicz found ever more volumes and documents from Vilna. In her memoir she recalls, that 175 ex libris were discovered in Offenbach, indicating a Lithuanian origin.45 By June 1947, Dawidowicz had sorted, organized, stacked, identified, and cataloged just under 180,000 books and several crates of papers and documents at the depot, giving her direct exposure to the extreme level of destruction.46 Every book reminded her of the murdered; she felt confronted by both the final, fragmentary traces of European Jewry and the eminent material witnesses to the crime committed against them: “The smell of death emanated from these hundreds of thousands of books and religious objects—orphaned and homeless mute survivors of their murdered owners. Like the human survivors, these inanimate remnants of a once-thriving civilization had found temporary and comfortless shelter in the land of Amalek. The sight of the massed inert objects chilled me.”47
Time and again, Dawidowicz drew a parallel between the Jewish survivors, the “saved remnant” (Sherit HaPletah)48 hoping to leave Germany, and the books, which she regarded equally as a “saved remnant” awaiting transfer to a new and better place. Her equation of the history of the books and the history of human beings led her to anthropomorphize inanimate objects: “At last, the YIVO books, like survivors with visas and travel permits, would soon be en route to a new home and a new life.”49 This perception of material objects also reflects Dawidowicz’s hopes that salvaging the remnants of Jewish Vilna could provide them with future relevance. Clearly this was a mission to counter the Nazis’ destruction of YIVO and its world. When her work in Offenbach was over, however, she understood that this had been rendered impossible due to the sheer scale of devastation and destruction. She was forced to recognize that Jewish Vilna had been reduced to scraps of paper and vestiges of memory that could never again yield any kind of whole.
Gershom Scholem’s trip through Europe from April to August 1946, which took him as well to the Offenbach Depot, had a similarly decisive impact on his perception of the Holocaust and its consequences. His journey put him under tremendous strain, and he returned to Jerusalem a psychologically broken man. In his intellectual biography of Scholem, Noam Zadoff quotes the striking assessment of Scholem’s state of mind made later by his wife, Fania Scholem:
He returned to the Land of Israel physically exhausted and mentally depressed. He would lie down for most of the day, doing nothing, hardly speaking with anyone, and only occasionally repeat sentences like: “The Jewish people has been murdered, has ceased to exist, only smoldering stumps are left, with no strength or direction. Their source of nourishment no longer exists, the people has been cut off at the root. And we in Israel, a handful of people, the remnant (sheerit hapletah). Will we really find the strength to build the creative, free society, not materialistic, for the sake of whose formation we came here? Maybe we won’t succeed in the task and we will degenerate, because we are bereft of our nation, we are orphaned.” He was prostrate on his bed, going from couch to couch in his house, without finding repose for himself. Scholem refused to be consoled and he only became himself again and recovered a year later.50
Scholem was left utterly drained by his exposure to the few remaining scraps of a centuries-old Jewish culture now in a state of misery and emptiness, his experience of profound destruction, and his confrontation with the Germans who had carried it out. Over and above this trauma, he also had to cope with the death of his mother during his time in Germany. His travel journal bears ample testimony to the situation he found himself in: “Everything is sad and is becoming ever sadder. [ . . . ] Every little step here hurts for a long time. [ . . . ] Something within me has been shattered, something of my creativity and strength, and I am very depressed. This mission bereaved me and has not brought me the inner redemption I had envisaged.”51
Scholem too had traveled to Germany with certain hopes. But the reality of the devastation that confronted him there exceeded all his previous imaginings, and he was disappointed at the correspondingly limited potential to salvage books and manuscripts. Only fragments of the formerly extensive corpus of texts central to Jewish intellectual history in Europe were ultimately found.52 During this journey, Scholem gained a comprehensive impression of postwar Europe, having traveled from Paris via Zurich, Vienna, Prague, and Bratislava to Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Munich, and Berlin. But he was to do more than take stock of Jewish library and archival collections. He also visited Jewish survivors in a number of DP camps, met Walter Benjamin’s sister Dora in Switzerland shortly before her death, prayed with Jews in makeshift prayer houses in Berlin and Munich, negotiated with rabbis on the future of these Jews and their books, and debated with both members of international Jewish organizations and representatives of German cultural institutions.53 This confronted him with the sometimes conflicting experiences and political outlooks of these different groups, and once again he perceived the hopelessness of the situation in more drastic terms than he had done from the perspective of Jerusalem. While traveling, Scholem became increasingly convinced that there would be no place in Germany for either Jews or their cultural and spiritual remains and that it was thus necessary, without restriction, to initiate the transfer of all recoverable material and encourage the remaining Jews to emigrate. In his newspaper article “Besuch bei den Juden in Deutschland” (Visiting the Jews in Germany, 1946), he drew a gloomy picture of efforts to rebuild Jewish life there. He confirmed the tendency of Jews in Germany to distance themselves from “things Jewish”: “the scale of ignorance” defied imagination and interest was “negligible.”54 He then described the difficulty of their situation, as there was little opportunity to make an income outside the black market. Overall, his views resembled those of some local congregation members, whose drastic assessment he quoted: “The Jews will not remain here. Those who do are lost to Judaism. There can be no new beginning here.” According to Scholem, the same went for survivors in the DP camps who had come to Germany from Eastern Europe as a result of their “unfortunate geographical position.” Their situation too, he stated, was demoralizing and discouraging, and only immigration to Palestine could now offer them any hope. Letters written by Scholem following his return to Jerusalem also attest to the discontent, pain, and sorrow that his journey had caused him and that his wife Fania described so poignantly. To his close colleague Siegmund Hurwitz in Switzerland, he wrote, “I have to tell you that I arrived here from Paris in a state of utter exhaustion; the moment it was all over the extreme, prolonged nervous tension in Europe and all the little things that go with it burst to the surface, leaving me weak and incapable of doing anything [ . . . ]. It will be a long time before I have processed the many impressions arising from this trip to Europe.”55 His tone was similarly deflated in communication with his acquaintance Ernst Grumach, whom he had met in Berlin to discuss the whereabouts of books stolen for the RSHA: “The journey and the entire heavy burden of impressions have truly exhausted me. I was severely run down for two months.”56 Eventually, he also articulated his thoughts on Germany and his condition during and after his journey in detail to Hannah Arendt: “I was so worn out when I returned from Europe that I immediately collapsed into a heap, and I’m only now slowly recovering. [ . . . ] For over six months or more what I’ve been doing or experiencing has pushed scholarship into a very distant corner. That I wrote neither to you nor to anyone else during my time in Europe just goes to show how incapable I was of lifting my pen. What I saw didn’t exactly stir up my desire to write but instead ended up adding considerably to my melancholy.”57 His condition was worsened by his growing anxiety over the future of the Jewish collective consciousness. In his letter to Arendt, he continued, “My experiences in Europe were very gloomy and depressing [ . . . ]. In my opinion, there is a catastrophic chasm opening up between various Jewish communities in Europe, America, and Palestine. There is no overcoming this through any conceivable theory. Everything is falling apart, and people don’t understand one another.” Scholem feared that the unity of the Jewish people was threatened by the experience of the Holocaust and the Jews’ further dispersal across the world. This was bound up with the fear that, due to its problematic security, legal, and supply situation, Palestine would fail to become the go-to location for most European survivors, denying Zionists their most important objective. At the end of his letter to Arendt, in a shattered state, he wrote, “I’m afraid that this trip broke my heart, if I have such a thing (as I presume). In any event, I left behind in Europe all my hopes. I’d really like to know where I could recover this hope.” While preparing for his journey, Scholem had anticipated that concrete involvement in the salvage of cultural treasures would bring him some relief from the agony unleashed within him by the dire situation in which Jews found themselves. And yet the opposite had happened—“these were among my bitterest moments.”58
Hannah Arendt’s first trip to Germany, which she began in late 1949 on behalf of the JCR, would augment her understanding of the principles of Nazi rule and leave a mark on her personally. While engaged in a meticulous search for Jewish cultural property, she also sought to find traces of the Germany that had once been her home. But the reality she encountered reinforced her view that she would never be able to live there again.59 Her impressions of postwar Germany from 1949 to 1950 generally confirmed the picture she had constructed before her arrival. In response to Scholem after his devastating journey, she concluded, “You are no doubt right about Germany. [ . . . ] The blabber just like in 1932—the ridiculous talk of forging forward amid the ruins—is bad; even worse is the lack of vitality, the absence of rage, of fury.”60 This assessment was reinforced by what she herself saw during her first trip back. In the analysis of contemporary Germany she composed after it, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule. Report from Germany,” published in Commentary in 1950, she made virtually identical remarks on the situation there: “But nowhere is this nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about than in Germany itself. A lack of response is evident everywhere, and it is difficult to say whether this signifies a half-conscious refusal to yield to grief or a genuine inability to feel. Amid the ruins, Germans mail each other picture postcards still showing the cathedrals and market places, the public buildings and bridges that no longer exist.”61 She also referred to the absence of rage among the Germans, which she considered symptomatic of German behavior: “The only conceivable alternative to the denazification program would have been a revolution—the outbreak of the German people’s spontaneous wrath against all those they knew to be prominent members of the Nazi regime. [ . . . ] But the revolution did not come to pass [ . . . ]. This wrath does not exist today, and apparently it has never existed.”62
During their trips to Germany, Scholem and Arendt both felt that virtually all the Germans they met lacked empathy, were heartless, and failed to take responsibility while also suppressing the crimes that had been committed. The social climate seemed poisoned. Scholem was unable to grasp how Jews could “breathe in this air” and described the atmosphere as “most sticky.”63 Arendt agreed: “Germany is terrible. I’m haunted by this place; I’m filled with inner revulsion. Disgust. Every conversation I have leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”64 She also sensed an alarming tendency toward the persistence of anti-Semitic and Nazi convictions. In this regard, she wrote to Salo Baron: “The renazification of Germany is frightening. SS people who are now returning from the internment camps have great amounts of money in their pockets [ . . . ] the atmosphere is frightful.”65 Her close confidante Hilde Fränkel received similar accounts from Arendt. Since she was suffering from a serious illness in New York at the time, she was, apart from Blücher, the only private individual to whom Arendt regularly wrote from Germany: “Right now, the Nazis (known as Mitläufer [followers]) are resuming all their old positions, while behaving as if they had a self-evident right to them. In Heidelberg I have just been told that all that is now meant by the ‘politically persecuted,’ whom the whole world is trying to rehabilitate, is Nazis. It is a fantastical situation.”66
The key source of Dawidowicz’s, Scholem’s, and Arendt’s drastic assessments of Germany was their work at the American collecting points and with numerous German cultural institutions, ministries, and authorities, which put them into direct contact with German personnel. This often led to confrontation with individuals who had managed to seamlessly continue their careers after the demise of National Socialism or whose political convictions were simply an unknown quantity. This was a particularly onerous problem for Arendt because she was the JCR officer in closest contact with Germans. Tirelessly, she traveled back and forth between occupation zones, holding discussions with state ministers for education and culture, directors of museums and libraries, staff of the American restitution agencies, and both members and leaders of reestablished Jewish congregations.67 She searched meticulously for personnel who had held leading positions in research institutes, archives, and libraries during the Nazi era and who might be able to provide information on the whereabouts of looted items. Time and again she had to face high-ranking representatives of cultural institutions who refused to cooperate and strove to hang on to clearly identifiable looted collections of Jewish provenance, showing no awareness of the unjust nature of their actions. For example, she related a case in Hamburg in which the director of the city museum initially refused to allow deported Jews’ confiscated household silver to pass to a Jewish trust organization, simply stating that the museum was keen to “establish with them a special division.” The crime inherent in this collection—as Arendt concluded—was camouflaged by an invented story of rescue of the silver by the German authorities.68 Outraged, she described to Fränkel the “animosity,” “lack of understanding,” and “malice” of many of the Germans with whom she interacted. In another letter, she spoke of the “denazified SS leaders, thick as thieves, who have access to a large quantity of money” and of whom “the entire German population believes they are the masters of tomorrow.”69 Despite the painful reverberations of the Nazi regime and its ideology, which were so apparent to Arendt time and again during her journey and provided her with empirical evidence for her great study of totalitarianism,70 she showed a willingness to engage in dialogue. Whether she did so for pragmatic reasons or because she managed to preserve a remnant of trust is an open question. Unlike most other Jewish emissaries active in Germany on behalf of various international organizations, Arendt believed it necessary to enter into dialogue with the Germans. She explained this controversial stance to Scholem:
God knows mistrust is certainly in order, but there is also a kind of mistrust that can be just as blind as blind trust. Or, to put it differently, you can take the position that everyone is lying, everyone is hiding something, that no one has any goodwill. But if you do this, you’re not only closing off discussion, you’re also preventing any possible action. As a matter of fact, in this context, I can say that many of the people at the top of public institutions in Germany are first-rate. (And Gerhard, don’t hit the roof: this is a brute fact!) But in these very same offices I see the people—and I have names—trying their best to sabotage everything. Without question, the power of those who are trustworthy has never been great, and at the moment it is constantly dwindling as the de-Nazified people stream back.71
Overall, however, what Arendt felt most keenly was the loss of her former homeland: “Since I’ve been in Germany for the second time I’ve been overwhelmed by grief: the devastated cities with their lost façades, the devastated people. After all, there is still the German language and an incredibly beautiful, homelike landscape, a familiarity we have experienced nowhere else and never will again.”72
Joshua Starr, Arendt’s predecessor as executive secretary of the JCR, was equally ravaged by the confrontations with German reality that overwhelmed him during a number of trips on behalf of the JCR between 1946 and 1948. He committed suicide in New York just as Hannah Arendt was beginning her journey. In an obituary included in a commemorative anthology put together by the publishers and editors of Jewish Social Studies, Abraham Duker reflected on the situation in postwar Germany as one reason for Starr’s tragic step: “A sensitive person, Starr surely must have suffered extreme emotional strain and constant tension while living among the Germans and handling daily the visible testimonies to Nazi barbarism. [ . . . ] Indeed, he watched what he termed the re-nazification of Germany with a blend of anger and melancholy resignation.”73
Salo Baron, who spent just a brief period in Germany in 1946, undertaking most of his activities for the salvage mission from Paris and London, related more hopeful moments than his colleagues Arendt and Starr. He was able to strengthen the cooperation with the JCR’s future partners by meeting with representatives of the British Committee on Restoration and with Scholem in early summer in Paris. He coordinated with them the various interest groups’ next steps toward establishing a Jewish trust organization and exchanged information on the situation in Germany and the former German-occupied areas. Scholem and Baron were particularly concerned that valuable books risked being displaced once again, this time to Eastern Europe, an anxiety that focused their attention on the incipient Cold War. Their meeting in Paris was a milestone in the cooperative endeavors of the Hebrew University and the Commission and, in the unique political initiative that resulted, a joint effort by Yishuv and Diaspora.74
For Baron, such experiences pointed the way ahead: after his trip, he led the Commission into the corporative framework of the JCR, thus laying the groundwork for practical cooperation among all those Jewish individuals with an interest in cultural restitution. Baron was long to remember another meeting in Paris, though this one was of more personal import. During a conversation with the local rabbi Maurice Liber of the École Rabbinique, with whom Baron met on several occasions to discuss looted French property, Baron asked him for his thoughts on the future of the Jews in Europe. He later remembered that in his reply, the rabbi made an analogy with the year 1349, a time of murderous pogroms of thousands of Jews all over Europe, who were blamed for the spread of the plague. No one, the rabbi told Baron, could have imagined that after a few years, Jewish life would thrive in Europe once again. Baron recalled that this comparison had given him hope and led him to look differently at the rebuilding of Jewish institutions in Europe—he himself, he noted, had joyfully welcomed the reopening of a Jewish school in Paris as an expression of a new beginning among the survivors.75 The letters to his wife Jeanette in New York also confirm his positive impression of Paris: “I had the distinct feeling that things are picking up in France and that the French Jews are beginning to take care of themselves. They still need financial assistance, but are trying to do things on their own.”76 The anecdote about Maurice Liber and the letter demonstrate how Baron tried to maintain an optimistic perspective on Jewish life in Europe after 1945. Time and place allowed him to see the potential rather than the destruction that became increasingly apparent the further eastward one looked. Baron sought inspiration in the centuries-old history of Jewish survival, which had long preoccupied him. Yet his increasing focus on Jewish life in America was anchored in the same experiential nexus. Here, alongside Israel, he saw the new center of Jewish culture and community developing after the Second World War. Besides these tiny glimmers of hope in Europe, overall he understood and fully agreed that the focus of Jewish life was moving to new locations.
Right from the outset, the push for restitution was accompanied by debates on the future, survival, and security of Jewish life after catastrophe. For the protagonists, this was bound up with questions about the appropriate political framework for the Jews’ ongoing existence, questions that foregrounded the ruptures and continuities of Jewish life as a whole. When it came to the salvage of books and other cultural property, all those involved tried to deal first and foremost with the preconditions for and limits to the preservation and revival of history, tradition, knowledge, and the Jewish cultural heritage. The second important field of debate centered on legal issues. For Arendt, Baron, Dawidowicz, and Scholem, negotiations on rightful jurisprudence were about more than securing formerly Jewish property: this was a battle for justice, recognition, the constitution of the Jewish collectivity, its security, and representation.
The debates on the postwar reconstruction of a Jewish cultural landscape were guided by a desire to reconstitute the past and by the idea that salvaging material remains would enable future generations to build on the traditions of Jewish knowledge. Time and again, in an attempt to imagine a post-Holocaust future, Salo Baron thus called for an appreciation of the Jewish people’s strength, vitality, and indefatigable will to survive. He made it clear that while he saw the annihilation of European Jewry as historically unprecedented, he was still trying to promote Jewish strategies of continuance.77 According to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Baron believed two elements of the Jewish quest for continuity to be central: a continued adherence to tradition and the pronounced Jewish sense of community.78 He applied this vision to the situation prevailing in the 1940s. In 1945, before the war had ended, he was still expressing this belief in the form of a rather timid hope: “Religious history has given evidence of how deeply humanity may sink, and still rise again to high spiritual levels. [ . . . ] It is not unreasonable to hope that out of the depths of misery and despair some new saving forms of belief and observance may arise which will provide an answer to the perplexities of our Jewish experience.”79
In his article “At the Turning Point,” written just after the war, Baron already argued with more resolve, making an appeal of sorts to the Jews: “Without an inner determination to survive, without strong beliefs and a rich culture and powerful institutions, the Jewish people could not possibly have come down the ages.”80 His efforts to salvage cultural property fit with this notion in every respect, symbolizing the potential to secure and preserve past worlds, their knowledge, and traditions. His work also embodied the desire to strengthen Jewish community life outside Europe, particularly in the United States—communities he believed could in turn revitalize the Jewish world as a whole.81 Baron underlined that the preservation of tradition, the fostering of community, and the securing of continuity were particularly potent motives for the JCR when he took stock of its work in 1955: “The Jewish people succeeded in salvaging some 500,000 volumes, 1,200 scrolls of law, 7,000 artistic and ceremonial objects. [ . . . ] Far beyond their monetary value, these collections symbolize the continuity of the heritage of the Jewish people.”82 The community-building function that Baron ascribed to the JCR is most clearly evident in his use of the term Jewish people, which he identified here as the subject of legal negotiations and the allocation of treasures. At the same time, he also emphasized the commemorative function of the JCR’s work, which he believed facilitated the perpetuation of the Jews’ historical legacy. The first official letter from the Commission to the State Department had already cited exactly the same arguments in an attempt to initiate negotiations on the JCR’s eligibility for trustee status. Here too, emphasis was placed on books and ritual objects’ special function for the Jewish collectivity and its ongoing existence. For generations, the letter stated, these objects had represented “the physical embodiment of this long, devoted, and often heroic spiritual and intellectual activity” in Europe and “constitute a priceless heritage and one of the proudest possessions of the Jewish people.”83
In cultural restitution, then, Baron discerned the concrete manifestation of his notion of continuity—to him, the books represented the Jews’ European legacy while also establishing identity and a sense of community. In emphatic terms, he claimed in 1945 that “books have always been the very life-blood of the ‘people of the book,’” reiterating the imperative of salvaging them. In this sense, books symbolized the very existence of the Jewish people as a collectivity, their survival depending on this “life-blood.”84
When it came to this function of salvaged objects and the enhancement of Jewish culture in the United States, Hannah Arendt had ideas resembling those of Baron even if she framed them differently. In her little-known 1947 article “Creating a Cultural Atmosphere,” which appeared as an op-ed in Commentary’s series “Jewish Culture in This Time and Place,” she called for a new consciousness of what Jewish culture might entail. There is no explicit reference to the JCR and its significance here, her focus being on the future of a secular Jewish culture in general. Nonetheless, Arendt’s perspective demonstrates how close to her heart the initiatives of the JCR were.85 Her remarks on the shattering of Jewish intellectual life and on the loss of ties to tradition as a result of secularization since the Renaissance and Enlightenment unquestionably speak to the situation in 1947: “The danger of losing historical continuity as such, along with the treasures of the past, was obvious; the fear of being robbed of the specifically human background of the past, of becoming an abstract ghost like the man without a shadow.”86 This account of losing stocks of knowledge and intellectual traditions, stripping people of their shadow—that is, leaving them devoid of history—reads like a description of her experiences in the postwar period. Arendt clearly advocated the redefining of modern cultural life in order to deal productively with these very experiences of loss. With a sense of urgency, she pleaded here for the recreation of a culture that, by means of a new consciousness and on its own terms, would draw on both the religious and folkloric traditions of the past.87 She also shared Baron’s conviction that the United States offered Jews the right environment for the development of a new cultural identity.88 The link to Arendt’s view of the JCR becomes even clearer if we consider a short text she wrote on its mission in 1950, where she stated, “Jewish scholarship everywhere in the world will have received that heritage of European Jewry to which it can rightly lay claim and many countries, especially Latin America and Israel, but also the United States, have received new and inspiring sources of learning.”89
She was, in other words, concerned not just with preserving but also with productively developing Jewish scholarship and culture with the aid of holdings salvaged from Europe. Jews outside Europe ought to benefit from their ability to draw on the “remnants of many centuries of spiritual life of European Jewry” and take inspiration from them.90 Her visible and profound dedication to Jewish culture at the time was also mirrored in Arendt’s work as chief editor at Schocken Books in New York, headed by Salman Schocken. Between 1946 and 1948, she was responsible for the publication of Franz Kafka’s diaries. With varying degrees of success, she also tried to persuade Schocken to publish English translations of the European Jewish intellectual canon, which she wished to introduce to an American Jewish readership. This included the work of such key figures as Spinoza, Heine, and Lazare but also lesser known Eastern European authors such as Bruno Schulz and Samuel Joseph Agnon.91
Unlike Baron, however, Arendt was not only concerned with the continuity of Jewish life after the Holocaust; in fact, we can discern a dual movement of thought here, as she appealed emphatically for an awareness of the rupture that had occurred as a result of National Socialism, a rupture that made it impossible to build seamlessly on the period “before” and its intellectual traditions. With respect to her epistemological approach to time—namely, the question of the ambivalent relationship between preservation, rupture, and renewal in conditions of modernity, Arendt articulated her thoughts most instructively in a 1968 essay on Walter Benjamin.92 Here she reflected on the potential for “new ways of dealing with the past” following the “irreparable” break with tradition engendered by the catastrophe of the twentieth century.93 For Arendt, since “there was no such thing as a ‘return’ either to the German or the European or the Jewish tradition” and there was now no prospect of seamlessly passing on the Jewish cultural and intellectual canon, the only way to relate to what had gone before lay in wresting and gathering “the ‘thought fragments’” from the past.94 She related this to Benjamin’s conception of time: “Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, [ . . . ] to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages.”95 This Benjamin-inspired trope casts a special light on Arendt’s postwar experiences, as it can be applied metaphorically to the reality of salvaged books after the Holocaust. They too seemed like historical remnants, pearls from the depths of the past, and they too were no more than fragments in the present, but according to Arendt, they ought to contribute to renewal, to help people develop their culture while remaining aware of a destruction that persisted. In fact, this awareness could not be avoided in confrontation with the rescued books: the marks of theft and murder adhering to them remained and could not be denied.
Confronted with the Offenbach Depot, Lucy Dawidowicz penned a disturbing, impressive account of this state of affairs: “The orphaned books [ . . . ] inanimate remnants of the world the Germans had destroyed [ . . . ] had been dumb witnesses to mass murder. They were relics of six million murdered Jews.”96 As hinted at earlier, Dawidowicz’s view of the potential to build a bridge to the past through the restitution of looted items changed over the course of her work in Europe. She had arrived hopeful that incorporating the books from Vilna into the holdings of its American successor institute would provide the devastated world of the Vilna YIVO with a new place in the present. In her vision, it was not only the continuity of personnel in New York, most prominently the institute’s director Max Weinreich and YIVO’s founding fathers, Elias Tscherikower and Jakob Lestschinsky, that would perpetuate a part of Vilna in New York; she also hoped to achieve continuity with the help of its material remains.97 The high hopes that accompanied salvage initiatives during the war were bound up with this idea. Reminiscing about these years, Dawidowicz recalled, “If even a small portion of the YIVO library would be found among the ruins in Germany, it would be a sign that the Jerusalem of Vilna would yet rise phoenix-like from the ashes, that it would reestablish its earthly presence.”98 The advocates in New York viewed the search for these holdings and their transfer to the United States as a means of countering Nazi destruction. In addition, these activities were born of their desire for the continued existence of everything the institute in Vilna had stood for. Just as the language, spirit, folklore, and everyday life of Yiddish-speaking communities had been investigated and promoted at the YIVO in Vilna, they now wished to make use of the knowledge that had been acquired under new circumstances. Before the end of the war, Shlomo Noble, a member of staff at the YIVO in New York, had already described the institutionalized link between these two places and worlds: “From Vilna to New York—in this passage the Yivo symbolizes the timelessness and universality of Jewish life and Jewish learning. Vilna and New York! Vast is the distance separating these two cities, and the bond uniting them is Yivo.”99 By detaching YIVO’s history from its specific time and place, and transcending its destruction, it seemed possible to imagine its future role in the United States and to build a seamless connection to the past. Max Weinreich confirmed this perception in 1947: “That a Vilna institution has put down roots in New York while remaining a Vilna institution is a miracle in itself. [ . . . ] That such a remnant of the world that was has made it over to the New World, that it is vibrant and creative, is one of the greatest miracles of the Jewish uprising amid mass murder.”100
Yet the attempt by the New York activists to continue and build on YIVO’s research on all fields of Yiddish life and learning inevitably tailed off, as did the idea that the Yiddish world could remain a vital part of Jewish life in the United States. Despite the many Yiddish-speaking immigrants, many of whom had already been living in the country for two generations, YIVO staff were compelled to reorient themselves, refocusing their work on the commemoration of the Yiddish heritage rather than its active perpetuation. They had to face up to new social realities: in the 1950s, more and more Jewish families were being integrated into the American middle class and thus were turning away from the language and traditional ways of life in general.101 As she later remembered, Dawidowicz became aware that there was little prospect of reenacting Vilna in New York, of conceptualizing its American branch as a geographical extension of its Lithuanian predecessor, partly as a result of her confrontation with the Vilna survivors whom she had met in Paris during her journey in 1946. This meeting prompted her to conclude, “Even if all of Vilna’s survivors were to be assembled in one place, they would still be only fragments, from which no one could ever put Vilna together again.”102 Given what they had been through, including the experience of the Holocaust, the chasm between her and the survivors, and between present and past, was too wide to be bridged.103
In much the same way as her teacher Baron, whom she had studied under briefly at Columbia University, Dawidowicz tried to engage with the issues of the survival and endurance of Jewish life and culture. The salvage of cultural treasures could be integrated into this objective of continuity in a highly meaningful way. Similar to Arendt, however, as Dawidowicz grasped more and more of the reality on the ground, she too emphasized that Jewish life could only go on in full awareness of the catastrophe. Particularly with respect to Vilna, she thus shifted the focus of her scholarly work to historical reconstruction, documentation, and commemoration: “One of the last people to have seen Vilna, I have been haunted by the compelling Jewish obligation to remember. I wished [ . . . ] ‘to make the silences of history speak,’ to bestow on Vilna and its Jews a posthumous life. I felt it was my duty to resurrect it, if I could, by recreating the life in that world capital of the realm of Yiddish.”104 Precisely because she had seen that “Vilna had been reduced to fragments of paper” she felt the obligation to invest in its memory.105 Ultimately, for her, ensuring continuity meant securing memory, saving the Yiddish culture from oblivion.
Gershom Scholem addressed the need for continuity or a new beginning, the notion of building on the past or acknowledging an existential rupture after 1945, from a different perspective. For him, the Holocaust marked a definitive end of the models of Jewish dwelling in Europe and proved them utopian. Consequently, the foundation of the state of Israel appeared to be the only consistent means of overcoming the flaws of earlier Jewish existence. This did not mean completely renouncing the thousands of years of Jewish history in Europe. As a historian aware of tradition, instead Scholem sought to maintain and breathe new life into certain intellectual and religious accomplishments of the European-Jewish canon—the transfer to Israel of as many collections of venerable Jewish provenance as possible seemed vital to this objective. He thus wrote to Leo Baeck in the aforementioned letter, “It is precisely the productive use of these collections, for the spiritual work within Judaism and in its most decisive centers, that has motivated us to take these steps.”106 The preservation of cultural treasures gave him a sense of returning to history, of preserving the Jewish tradition and thus laying the spiritual and cultural foundations for the Israeli polity. As a bibliophile textual scholar with a “passionate devotion to the sources,”107 the salvage of books and manuscripts was close to his heart. In line with his specific approach to Jewish thought, his understanding of the restoration of lost and looted books differed from that of other scholars. Scholem devoted himself to very specific collections in Europe, his main interest being Judaica and Hebraica. First and foremost, this meant collections that had once been the property of the most famous and established Jewish communities, rabbinical seminaries, and yeshivot. Most important to him were their pinkasim (community records), collections of responsa and all sorts of rabbinical commentary, editions of the Talmud, and prayer books. Scholem’s focus was evident in a number of ways: in the unauthorized transfer, which he initiated together with Rabbi Herbert Friedman, of religious documents and Hebrew manuscripts from the Offenbach Depot to Israel in the summer of 1946; in his meticulous search for such holdings throughout Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria; and in his unrelenting negotiations with representatives of Jewish communities and German librarians on the Hebrew manuscripts among their holdings, especially those in Frankfurt and Munich. His detailed knowledge of the Bavarian State Library’s treasures stemmed from his own time as a student in the city from 1919 to 1922, where he had worked with the library’s Hebraica collection and had become aware of the Talmud manuscript he later wished to transfer to Jerusalem. In his autobiographical text, From Berlin to Jerusalem, he recalled, “Most of my time, to be sure, I spent in the manuscript department of the Bavarian State Library, where my table was garnished with Hebrew codices and printed works.”108
It was these same texts that Scholem wished to obtain for Israel after the war, though his wish was never to be granted. With steely determination, he negotiated with the heads of the Berlin community concerning the archival materials and pinkasim in their possession originating from famous Jewish congregations throughout Europe, which in his assessment “no one in Berlin is even capable of reading.”109 His memoirs also show that he was familiar from his youth with the Berlin Congregational Library on Oranienburger Straße: “For years I was among the most zealous users of this library, which was later destroyed by the Nazis.”110 Resembling his own route from Berlin to Jerusalem, he strove to bring to Israel as much as possible of what little was left of this library. Scholem argued bitterly with the JCR leadership in New York over every fragment of rabbinical texts and rare books that was not to be sent to Jerusalem: he was outraged by the transfer to Switzerland of parts of the Breslau theological seminary collection and by what he perceived to be the favoritism shown to the JTS in New York when it came to the choice of manuscripts.111
His efforts to obtain the texts he longed for was part and parcel of the intellectual project he pursued throughout his life, one that threatened to end tragically with the total destruction of the European Jewish cultural landscape: the appropriation and renewal of the different strands of the Jewish religious and spiritual tradition. His early encounter, in Berlin as elsewhere, with the classical Jewish texts, was the foundation and point of departure for the development of his consciousness as a Jew and scholar of Jewish thought. Beginning in the 1920s, he expressed opposition to modern assimilation—which intensified with the emancipation of Jews in the nineteenth century—as a model for Jewish life, advocating a return to a more Jewish self-awareness anchored in a profound knowledge of the traditional sources.112 This connection to the written sources, according to Scholem, marked the continuous existence of the Jewish people: “[That the Jews] were the ultimate people of the book there can be no doubt. For they not only preserved this book [the Torah] but lived with it. [ . . . ] It is fair to say that the book, in terms of its world-historical function, was the making of the Jews as a people.”113 He was convinced that even modern Jews’ language, way of life, historical perspective, and spatial imaginations bore the traces of the Torah and religious exegeses, creating a sense of collectivity even in an age of increasing secularization.114 The contemporary philosopher and writer George Steiner conveys this idea in similar terms when he emphasizes that the notion of “The People of the Book” “defines a lasting authenticity” and that an “addiction to textuality has characterized, [and] continues to characterize Jewish practice and sentiment,” thus also guaranteeing the “actual survival of the Jews.”115 But Scholem went beyond this focus, passed down over the centuries, on the “textuality and bookishness” of the Jewish people.116 As he saw it, if there was to be a future for “Jews as Jews,” it was vital to maintain a historical consciousness that refers dialectically to the traditional, fusing its conservation with its renewal.117 Here his thinking was structurally consonant with that of Arendt and Benjamin, as he was to provide the renewed Jewish life (in Israel) with a new spiritual and cultural foundation: “The solution of questions regarding the Bible and the Talmud, the problems of living Jewish society and its physical and spiritual world—in short, everything about everything—demand a basic revision, an intellectual stock-taking in light of our new understanding. A general change or orientation will not suffice. The new perception must penetrate into each and every detail: must examine it anew in light of the sources, each problem unto itself; reconsider it and plunge into its depths.”118
As Scholem saw it, safeguarding the Jews’ cultural and spiritual legacy was crucial if contemporary Jews were to critically engage with the realm of Jewish knowledge and thought. During the Second World War, his project was endangered by new forces and took on an unforeseen material aspect: the imperative was no longer merely to deal appropriately with the sources but to prevent them from disappearing altogether. After statehood, in some ways, Scholem echoed the mainstream Zionist reading of the 1950s and 1960s in Israel, linking the annihilation of the European Jews and the foundation of the state. This reading of events found expression in the widespread narrative of Mi-Shoa Le’tkumah, from the Holocaust to rebirth.119 In the same vein, in light of a biblical parable that held out hope for the future and the present, Scholem drew a parallel with the consequences of the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE: “There is an old saying that is the basis for many a Jewish legend: on the day of the destruction of the Temple, the Messiah was born. This bold sentence [ . . . ] probably expresses in a paradoxical form the feeling—not to say the knowledge—that the great historical catastrophe of the Jewish people and redemption are inseparably connected, dialectically intermeshed. With the falling into ruin of the Temple, the main focus of a people [in other words,] the possibility of redemption is disclosed from another level and from a focal point that cannot as yet be determined.”120
This implied that the emergence of the state of Israel equated to deliverance from the apocalypse that Nazism had brought upon the Jews of Europe, and Scholem integrated the Otzrot HaGolah committee’s efforts to salvage books into this process of redemption. For its members, who rescued thousands of books and objects, their work was part of a greater historical interpretive framework—namely, national and cultural rebirth. One of the leading Israeli historians, Ben-Zion Dinur, himself a member of the Otzrot HaGolah and later a deputy in the Knesset and a government minister, described this framework in unambiguous terms: “This ‘cultural heritage’ [of exile], which is the bedrock of our existence, is also the foundation upon which the entire House of Israel rests; working diligently to preserve and strengthen it is one of the most important things the State of Israel must do.”121 Still, Scholem himself knew that such hopes could be no more than a utopian dream. The experience of the Holocaust and the awareness of millions of murdered victims was entrenched in Israel, where people “were deeply affected and transformed by the attempts to master this trauma.” The “existential situation” of the Jews had changed after this experience, and “all were confronted by a fact with which they had not reckoned, a fact that boggled the mind, and the reaction to which involved a task for one’s awareness that was as urgent as it was insoluble.”122 So while Scholem was deeply invested in the Jewish future, he was equally affected and disturbed by the past and the rupture it represented—a rupture that could never be overcome.
To varying degrees, Baron, Arendt, Dawidowicz, and Scholem felt a profound, almost existential desire to safeguard and preserve books and cultural objects. They saw it as a means of ensuring continuity and passing on centuries-old knowledge after the Nazi attempt to wipe it off the face of the earth. For these individuals, every saved volume provided an opportunity to extend fine, fragile threads into the past and preserve a fraction of the Jewish culture of Europe. In the course of their engagement, it became ever more apparent to them that the reconstruction of the old world, the revitalization of the past, was impossible. This left a strong albeit very individual mark on their efforts to come to terms with the Holocaust and engage with its commemoration.
Efforts to ensure the continuity and security of Jewish life were closely linked to the spheres of law and justice. Legal issues were part and parcel of the salvage initiatives and impacted on them as significantly as did questions of continuity. Convinced that the reestablishment of a legitimate title of ownership—in other words, the return of looted items—would give Europe’s Jews back their place within the legal order after the war, the Commission had dedicated itself to the cause of cultural restitution. Jewish lawyers who had formulated relevant plans came to believe that enforcing restitution and reparations was the only way to advance the political, social, and economic resurrection of Europe’s devastated Jewish congregations and bring about justice and peace.123 One of the specific consequences of the unprecedented, industrially organized mass murder of Jews was its profound challenge to all existing legal means of achieving restorative or retributive justice after armed conflict. Hannah Arendt captured the failure of the law in the face of the monstrousness of these crimes when she stated to Karl Jaspers, “The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough.”124 This was equally true of the prosecution of the Nazi theft of Jews’ property. As part of the systematic war of annihilation, the crimes committed in connection with Aryanization, confiscation, dispossession, plunder, and theft undermined conventional principles of international criminal law after armed conflict. This aporia was a core element in the experience of those working for the JCR and YIVO. It brought in its wake political and legal negotiations into which general questions about Jewish life and its future in the face of the Holocaust forced their way.
During their work on cultural restitution, both Arendt and Scholem had always striven to move beyond the role of political adviser traditionally occupied by Jews within the international legal and political context; they aimed to play an active role and ensure that Jews helped shape international law to serve their own interests. Since the 1930s, Arendt had studied the historical circumstances of the European Jews’ cumulative loss of rights, which extended from exclusionary developments within the nation states of interwar Eastern Europe, which left millions of Jews stateless, to the policies of Nazism, which stripped Jews of all their rights. The expulsion of Jews from the judicial arena as a precondition for murder is meticulously described in The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Even the Nazis started their extermination of Jews by first depriving them of all legal status (the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps; and before they set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged.”125
For Arendt, Jews’ total rightlessness as experienced under Nazi domination was bound up with the process of depriving them of a place in the world in the most general sense. By creating this extralegal status for Jews, the Nazis were able to declare them “superfluous” and turn them into “living corpses,” stripped of all capacity to act, think, and articulate their views, abilities that for Arendt defined the essence of humanity.126 These insights into the logic of Nazi extermination policy formed the background to her demands in the postwar period, when she believed it crucial to reestablish the legal ground for Jews’ political participation on a self-responsible basis. Her famous call for a “right to have rights,” which envisaged a universal human right to participation in a political entity and hence a general right to citizenship also applied in its broadest sense to her political vision of Jewish reentry into the legal sphere. In the realm of restorative justice, she of course argued for the right to collective group rights—namely, the Jews’ right to their cultural heritage.127 Particularly when it came to the right to restitution, Arendt had recognized that traditional agreements, based on either private law or international law among nation states, would be ineffective. If the perpetrators or other states were to be prevented from benefiting from stolen property, the relevant legal entity must be the Jews as a nonstate collectivity. In 1945, Arendt pointed to the fact that the models that had been found to ensure this right needed advocates and further improvement: “And that leaves the restoration of Jewish property. The only remarkable thing in that regard is that thus far no Jewish body has found the courage to speak out against individual reparations—with which we have had the worst of experiences everywhere—and for a collective restitution, for which Jewish communities would appear as the plaintiffs and national states as the agents of restitution.”128
Scholem put forward very similar arguments when he summed up his experiences in Europe in a 1947 article for Haaretz, the Hebrew daily: “These regulations on property and assets [the territorial principle in restitution law] [ . . . ] have [ . . . ] greatly damaged the interests of the Jewish people. There has been a failure to recognize its authority as an organized corporation that can lay claim to the treasures of which it has been robbed.”129 Partly through the tireless efforts of its protagonists, the JCR and JRSO did finally find the courage to take on such a role and advance the recognition of the Jewish collectivity as claimant. The success of both was in many ways linked with their integration of the various Jewish factions and of the Jews’ different geographical centers after 1945.
Among those actively involved, however, JCR’s diversity spawned tensions. There was a lack of clarity over the composition and location of the Jewish collectivity. Of the four activists, Scholem probably had the clearest solution to this problem. Notwithstanding pragmatic considerations, which made joint action with representatives outside Israel unavoidable, he regarded the Israeli polity as the Jews’ most important representative. As he saw it, Israel would give the Jews of Europe what they had always lacked: sovereignty, their own entity, whose territory they could invoke as representative of their interests and guarantor of their survival and autonomy. Through the foundation of the state of Israel, he aimed to facilitate a new beginning for the entire Jewish collectivity: “It [the foundation of Israel] was none other than the decision to return to ourselves, to become fully and consciously involved with the flow of Jewish history and to take into our own hands the responsibility for our lives as participants in all areas—both the secular and the sacred or religious—as Jews, and as Jews alone.”130
In Scholem’s view, Israel should be recognized as the focal point of all Jews worldwide. This had less to do with nationalist politics than with his vision that there, in the “land of the fathers,” the Jewish people could experience a “cultural and communal renaissance.”131 And just as he regarded Israel as a safe haven for Jews fleeing Europe, “books in search of refuge” should find a home there as well. In Scholem’s thinking, law and justice for the Jewish collectivity chiefly meant ensuring the existence of an autonomous nation state that could develop into a scholarly and cultural center of Jewish life.
Arendt’s, Baron’s, and Dawidowicz’s efforts were dedicated primarily to Jewries outside Israel. From their perspective, shaped by their diasporic experience, there was another way of looking at the constitution of the Jewish people, which they believed must still be seen as a transterritorial entity even after the disaster of the Holocaust. Arendt derived her convictions from her analysis of the Jews’ political situation in modern Europe. She invoked the Jewish collectivity as an entity, and indeed a political one, as soon as this collectivity was attacked by the Nazis. And in 1942, when Jews failed to defend themselves collectively despite Germany’s declaration of war, she predicted a dark future: “Those people who do not make history, but simply suffer it, [ . . . ] tend to lay their hands in their laps and wait for miracles that never happen. If in the course of this war we do not awaken from this apathy, there will be no place for us in tomorrow’s world.”132 After the war, her hope for a Jewish Army was transformed into the demand for Jews’ legal and political participation in the international arena. Her appeals for Jews’ to take part in the war already contained the elements that were to become significant later in the context of the JCR. In 1941, Arendt had stated that it “must [ . . . ] become the living will of a majority of the Jewish people to join the battle against Hitler as Jews, in Jewish battle formations under a Jewish flag.”133 When the plan to create such an army resulted solely in the establishment of a Jewish brigade within the British armed forces, Arendt continued to believe that Jews across the world ought to regard themselves as a unified political entity and act as such. This was her key objective during the preparatory work on the “Frankfurt Agreement,” which authorized the JCR to act as Jewish trustee and was signed in February 1949. Through her work at the JCR, she wished to help strengthen and safeguard this political entity, and it was within this entity and on its behalf that she sought to take political action. This perspective enabled her to discuss territorial and national questions on a universal level: ultimately, her aim was to rethink human coexistence and the Jews’ place within this general framework after the caesura of the Holocaust.134
Baron too aspired to secure Jewish life in the diaspora through the establishment of binding legal structures. As the initiator of the Commission and JCR, he thus put all his efforts into negotiations with potential Jewish partners on the one hand and the American and Allied authorities on the other. In particular, he regarded it as incumbent upon the American Jewries to support survivors from Europe and thus help rebuild Jewish life: “Just as for the past three decades we have helped world Jewry with our economic and political efforts; just as we have attained new high marks in world Jewish philanthropy and world Jewish political action, so we must now assume the new role of guide and mentor for both the distressed Jewries of Europe and the perplexed Jewries of other lands.”135 Baron’s objective of gaining the Commission a legal status was embedded in a far broader goal—namely, the security of Jewish life worldwide. Like Arendt, he highlighted that the survivors, and thus the remaining fragments of the Jewish congregations of Europe, required new political and legal foundations if they were to survive into the future. But as huge numbers of Jews fled from Eastern Europe toward the West and the new state was founded in Israel, Baron too was compelled to fully support both the Jewish nation state and the Jewish communities in the United States. When leading figures within the JCR realized that the hope of reestablishing Jewish life in Europe was essentially wishful thinking, detached from political and demographic realities, they changed their strategy. Baron himself now focused on the reconstruction and institutionalization of Jewish cultural institutions in Israel and the United States. His main concern, however, was with American Jewish communities. He advocated a certain degree of Jewish autonomy while highlighting that Jews in the United States enjoyed the full rights of citizenship. It was not assimilation that he saw as the most promising path for Jews, but a life balanced between Jewish self-determination and adaptation to the social and cultural premises of their environment.136 Most importantly, he wished to establish the United States as the vibrant center of a visible and emancipated Jewish culture and thought—building on but also refining the traditions, institutions, visions, and ideas of the old center in Europe.
The panorama of perspectives described here demonstrates that the political and legal debate provided an initial means of coping with the reality of Nazi crimes. The political struggle over recognition and rights offered a way to respond to what had happened and translate the unfathomable into negotiable categories.137 That the JCR, together with the JRSO, managed to ensure the transformation of property titles into administrative titles, facilitating a shift from individual to collective claims, implied in turn the official recognition of the Jewish people as a political and legal entity. In response to an international jurisprudence that had become hopelessly inadequate to coping with the monstrous crimes that had been committed, the Jewish collectivity now entered new legal territory. Ultimately, within the framework of the successor and trust organizations, its recognition in international law made a reality of what had previously been no more than a political dream. This was particularly significant partly because Jewish lawyers and activists were not as successful in other areas of post-Holocaust justice, especially the retributive field. The idea of ensuring official Jewish representation in the war crimes tribunals in Nuremberg, for example, failed—the Jews were not granted an amicus curiae or any other formal status in court.138
Alongside these historical and legal interpretive models so central to the four scholars’ commitment to cultural restitution, which show intersections in their views on what it meant to reconstruct European Jewish culture, all four authors developed differing strategies for dealing with the Holocaust and its consequences. Arendt’s unshakeable conviction that she had a duty to examine what had happened and try to confront it, which she perceived the moment she read the first reports on the catastrophe unfolding, inspired a historical assessment of the disaster that was, at the time, exceptionally incisive. Her many essays and her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, are impressive testimony to this. She saw her political work for the JCR as bound up with a search for understanding, and by the late 1940s, both these ways of approaching events under Nazism were already shaping her historical judgment. During and after the war, Baron felt compelled to focus on forms of political organization aimed at “healing the wounds inflicted upon the Jewish community and culture by the Nazi barbarians.”139 While he considered the process of reflective confrontation with Nazism just as urgent as did Arendt, he stimulated other researchers to study Nazism and the Holocaust rather than subjecting the topic to historical analysis himself.140 Instead, this catastrophic event reinforced his sense of obligation to strengthen Jewish community life in the United States.
One event that combined consideration of just what the JCR’s field of action ought to be and the historical interpretations of Arendt and Baron was the conference “Problems of Research in the Study of the Jewish Catastrophe, 1939–1945,” which took place in April 1949. This gathering was organized by the Conference on Jewish Relations in collaboration with YIVO and was held at the New School for Social Research to mark the ten-year anniversary of the Jewish Social Studies journal. As initiator and host of the conference, Salo Baron provided both introduction and moderation; Max Weinreich helped organize it; Philip Friedman, Joshua Starr, Hannah Arendt, Samuel Gringauz, Herbert Wechsler, and Solomon Bloom delivered the papers; Abraham Duker provided a commentary on them; and they were then discussed by Zosa Szajkowski, Mordecai Kosover, Paul Neurath, and Koppel Pinson.141 It was the first conference in the United States to explicitly consider the general and methodological prerequisites for the investigation of the Holocaust in the English language. While it did not immediately achieve the goal of an academic institutionalization of Holocaust research, given its prominent attendees, profound insights, and detailed documentation, it can certainly be regarded as one of the first steps toward it. In a specific way it showed once again just how much the network established by Baron—within the orbit of the Conference on Jewish Relations, Jewish Social Studies and the JCR—became the engine, and hub, of a far-reaching attempt to respond and come to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust among Jewish intellectuals in New York.
It was the paper by Joshua Starr, still executive secretary of the JCR at the time, that most clearly addressed the link between the investigation of the Holocaust and efforts to salvage cultural treasures. While other speakers focused more on general problems involved in the scholarly confrontation with the topic, he provided an initial, detailed account of the history of Nazi cultural theft. Starr was the first to publicly present these events as an inherent feature of the Nazi plan of annihilation, highlighting the centrality of the topic during and after Hitler’s rule.142 Hannah Arendt’s presentation operated on a different level. She reflected on the methodological and conceptual limits of traditional scholarship when facing an event compelling scholars in the humanities and social sciences to redefine their basic assumptions “regarding the course of the world and human behavior.”143 In many ways, she provided a preliminary glimpse of her later scholarly work on totalitarianism. Arendt analyzed the structure and character of the concentration and extermination camps established by the Germans, underlining the epistemological challenges thrown up by their investigation.144 The main aim of her lecture was to create an awareness of the reality of the camps and their unprecedented modus operandi to show in what sense these camps had to be considered the “central institution of government” within totalitarianism, while their underlying structure challenged rationality, common sense, and utility.145 Such a structure, Arendt asserted, was incompatible with the conventional logic of scholarly investigation and made it impossible to fit what had happened into the chronology and tropes of progress-oriented “human history.”146 No explanatory model could adequately grasp the “death factories”—“a human-made hell.”147 Neither war aims nor ideological, political, and economic goals—indeed, not even anti-Semitism—could fully explain this form of mass extermination. The “calculated establishment of a world of the dying in which nothing any longer made sense” and that aimed at the industrial “fabrication of corpses” defied imagination. And here she also reiterated publicly that this was a crime “which no punishment seems to fit.”148 Arendt was soon to capture these insights in the term break with tradition: “Totalitarian domination as an established fact, which in its unprecedentedness cannot be comprehended though the usual categories of political thought, and whose ‘crimes’ cannot be judged by traditional moral standards or punished within the legal framework of our civilization, has broken the continuity of Occidental history. The break in our tradition is now an accomplished fact.”149 Arendt managed to turn the experiences of her time into an epistemological analysis that sought to go beyond all established models of historical explanation and that led to a profound shift in her own thinking—a shift unusual at the time.
Baron had called for just such a revolution in thought in his brief opening address to the conference. This is one of the few sources to reveal his position on the necessity for a scholarly approach to the Holocaust and thus his own historical understanding. While his address remained sketchy, the fact that he agreed to organize this conference for the JSS anniversary in itself shows the centrality he ascribed to this topic and his desire to contribute to the emerging academic discourse about it. It was the duty of those present, he emphasized, “to subject the harrowing experiences of the great Catastrophe to rigorous scientific scrutiny.” At the same time, he underlined his skepticism about such a project’s chances of success. He felt that these historical events were still too recent for scholars to discern the great transformations resulting from them. Nonetheless, he called on his colleagues to not only focus on the preservation of the few remaining original sources on Nazism and the annihilation of the Jews but also take up the complex challenge involved in their investigation.150 He explained this challenge on a number of levels. First, Baron underlined his reservations about attempts to fit the Holocaust into a historical series of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic pogroms and massacres, thus declaring it the culmination of a centuries-long history of persecution, as was common at the time, especially among Zionist historians. In his account of the hallmarks of the German war of annihilation, which clearly distinguished it from earlier anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic events, he explicitly highlighted the singularity of this crime. Above all, he referred to its geographical scope: earlier “tragedies” had occurred within limited territories, but not the Holocaust, which had spanned most of Europe. Furthermore, no other form of persecution had entailed such a clear plan to annihilate all Jews everywhere, and never before had Jews been unable to save themselves through either conversion or other ways of renouncing their Judaism.151 Second, like Arendt, Baron suggested that it was the Nazis’ irrational motives, coupled with their totalistic intentions, that was truly novel. According to him, the Nazis’ approach had contravened every military strategy, economic argument, and practical consideration, and its destructive impact had extended far beyond the national territory of Germany. It was thus misguided to compare Nazism with the Middle Ages, as many did at the time. Instead it was vital, according to Baron, to analyze both its historical roots and its unprecedented characteristics.152
This speech reveals a dualism typical of Baron’s response to Nazi crimes at the time. Certainly he felt that action was necessary both to help the Jewish community and to advance a research agenda for coming generations dwelling in the United States. Yet while Baron gave crucial impetus to the nascent research on the Holocaust and Nazism, he did not see this as his own immediate scholarly priority. Overall it appears that he delegated this research to others, first and foremost his student Philip Friedman. The latter also spoke at the conference and presented an overview of the state of research, classifying and assessing all previously published documentary collections, first-hand accounts, and writings on the Second World War and the Holocaust.153 Drawing on his experiences in Europe, where the different Jewish groups involved in early efforts to document the Holocaust tried to set up a transnational network inaugurating the field, he also called on the Conference on Jewish Relations to foster cooperative research and documentary projects between Israel, the United States, and Europe.154 In this context, Friedman emphasized the urgent need to get trained scholars, chiefly historians, to work on this subject, which was still too dependent on the efforts of “amateurs.”155 He himself was quick to answer his own call, becoming with Baron’s support a, if not the, pioneer of Holocaust research in the United States. Friedman is the author of several important publications in the field, covering case studies and methodological and bibliographical approaches, which were often introduced and brought to publication by Baron. In collaboration with the latter, he also developed seminars that integrated the Holocaust and Nazism into the history curriculum at Columbia University.156
In some ways, Gershom Scholem’s approach resembled that of Baron. After returning from Germany, Scholem focused chiefly on his work for the Hebrew University with respect to restitution while stepping up his efforts to develop Israel’s cultural and scholarly landscape. As late as 1967, he reflected on his commitment as follows: “I speak to you as one who has lived in Israel for the past forty-five years, and whose life has been bound up with the renaissance of the Jewish people in its old-new homeland in the Land of Israel.”157 At the same time, he distanced himself, in a way reminiscent of Baron, from the destructive realities of Europe, explaining this in light of his status as a contemporary witness. As a result, Scholem too composed virtually no essays and no scholarly texts on the Holocaust, either at the time of his direct confrontation with Nazi crimes or later.158 He also avoided any extensive involvement in the Yad Vashem research and remembrance center in Jerusalem despite the offers made to him and his colleagues at the Hebrew University by Ben-Zion Dinur, one of the center’s initiators. But Scholem had taken part in that institution’s founding event, the “World Conference for the Study of the Shoah and Heroism,” held in Jerusalem in July 1947 within the framework of the first “World Conference on Jewish Studies.” The participants were asked to discuss the establishment of a national institution for research and commemoration of the Holocaust. At this conference, Scholem represented the group of historians, mostly of German Jewish background, who came to be known as the Jerusalem School, even though his main field of scholarship—Jewish mysticism and kabbalah—was generally distant from their research interests. These scholars pursued a historical-critical approach stemming from their education in Europe but were often committed to writing a unifying history of the Jewish people, a teleological narrative with Israel at its center.159 Scholem’s focus was different, yet he was part of this cohort, and he resembled these historians in his rejection of the impetus, generated by the conference, for systematic historical investigation of the Holocaust.160 Similar to Baron, he explained, “I do not believe that we, the generation that experienced this event—which affected all that was dear to us—either directly ourselves or through our neighbors, can be in a position to draw the consequences as yet. However, the meaning of the holocaust must remain of overwhelming significance for the problematics of the Science of Judaism and, in my opinion, cannot be assessed too highly.”161
A rather ambivalent stance—a personal reticence, coupled with a sense of the need to comprehensively investigate what had happened—seems to best describe Scholem’s impulse to engage in a scholarly and public conversation about the Holocaust. Consonant with Arendt’s thinking, he too underlined that “historical knowledge and conceptual clarity” about these events were the precondition for all thinking after the catastrophe,162 but he was also convinced that the time for this had not yet come. In this vein, in 1952, he wrote to the German author Rudolf Hagelstange, “I am one of those who believes that a rationality that looks the events square in the face, that refuses to cover up or gloss over anything [ . . . ] must be rejected for now.”163 This diagnosis was clearly opposed to Arendt’s project, as she articulated it later as the starting point for her study of totalitarianism: “This book is an attempt at understanding [ . . . ]. Comprehension however, does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents [ . . . ]. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden that events have placed upon us [ . . . ]. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.”164
In this study, she set out her views on how best to deal with the destructive realities surrounding her. The book was a compilation of her political and historical analyses as they had developed from the early 1930s onward, shaped primarily by her experiential world in exile in France and, after her escape, the United States. Arendt’s form of “facing up to and resisting of reality” was manifest in her writing, which expressed a spirit of shock and outrage. In 1948, she described this special approach and style as guided by sheer “fear of the concentration camp,” which enabled her to avoid a paralyzed posture and led her to “keep thinking about horror” in order to achieve a mode of “perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political passions.”165 Arendt’s engaged form of writing aroused opposition from the beginning. In her response to her critic Eric Voegelin, she defended her style by stating that an account of the concentration camps “sine ira” (without anger) would not result in objectivity but in the toleration of these camps’ reality.166 This political dimension of writing as an act of resistance is directly connected with Arendt’s practical political work during this period. Like her writing, her activities too were geared toward facing the present as honestly as possible, understanding it as a warning, and shaping the future in light of it. Arendt discerned in action a crucial human mode that made it possible to participate in the world, to work out and advocate one’s own views, and to enter into relationships with others—elements vital to ensuring human freedom.167 These early postwar years cast an interesting light on Arendt’s intellectual profile. The tense relationship between thought and action, one of Arendt’s central concerns throughout her life, found its most specific expression during the period when she herself was most clearly challenged in this regard: in her work for the JCR and her concurrent quest to understand the rupture with tradition that had occurred.168 More directly than all other protagonists of cultural restitution, we can discern the close connection between her thinking, writing, and political action during this period. She strove to advance the JCR agenda as head of the research group dedicated to drawing up lists of documents on European Jewish culture prior to 1939 and was JCR’s executive secretary, which took her back to Germany for the first time after her forced flight. These activities were crucial to her search for historical understanding and judgment. She augmented her views on the structure and significance of Nazism and its consequences through intensive examination of the Nazis’ systematic cultural theft, which she found to be a representative component of Nazi power and political practice. The negotiations on the JCR’s status gave Arendt a new perspective on the legal situation of Jews and minorities within both national and international law—topics that had concerned her since her exile in France. In addition, she provided a comprehensive account of the principles at play in the extermination camps—namely, dehumanization and antirationality—thus demonstrating the historical singularity of the murder of the European Jews. She examined how one might portray and represent these crimes and cast light on the consequences of the disaster for the development of civilization in general, showing how Auschwitz had ruptured the parameters of conventional thought—ideas that are commonly associated with much later debates on the significance of the Holocaust. Arendt’s writings after the war strive to relate the specific features of the Jews’ situation under Nazism to human history as a whole. While acknowledging the particular position of the Jews, she was interested in the universal meaning of the events, eager to understand the structures, elements, and forms of political organization that had made politics “radically evil.”169
Lucy Dawidowicz’s desire to undertake historical research as a form of memorial work, an ambition she formulated, as discussed earlier in the chapter, while working for YIVO and during her trip to Germany, was rooted in motives similar to those underpinning Arendt’s quest to understand. In the historical situation in which Dawidowicz found herself, she felt called upon to document and relate what had happened. Departing from her original plan, from the late 1930s, she dedicated herself entirely to the study of Jewish history: “Through the intervention of Jewish history, I became a Jewish Historian [ . . . ] at the time I was entering adulthood, Europe was rapidly overtaken by the darkness that was National Socialist Germany [ . . . ]. It was then that the unfolding events of Jewish history converted me into a devotee and eventually a practitioner of Jewish history.”170 Her “conversion” to history began following her research stay at the YIVO in Vilna. In the mid-1940s, in parallel to her work at that institution, Dawidowicz began her studies at Columbia University. It was during this period that events in Europe forced their way into her consciousness, molding Dawidowicz’s subsequent endeavors: “We who lived in the safety of the United States, sheltered from the disasters that had overtaken the European Jews, were nevertheless beset by the turbulence of world events. Obsessively we followed the course of the war across the ocean. Our very existence hung on its outcome [ . . . ]. Consciousness of the war always intruded into our everyday existence, always persisted, even in moments of intense private joy.”171 Dawidowicz’s description of the overwhelming psychological and emotional impact of the situation in Europe recalls Kazin’s account of Hannah Arendt’s life around the same time. From now on, Dawidowicz too devoted herself entirely to the fate of the European Jews. This is apparent among other things in her dedicated contribution to Max Weinreich’s work on his 1946 monograph, Hitler’s Professors, which he had started during the war.172 Among other things, this study of scholarship and scholars under Nazism and their collusion in the systematic murder of Jews examines Alfred Rosenberg’s Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt. Dawidowicz and Weinreich learned about the predatory raids carried out by Rosenberg’s task force, the main profiteer of the library plunder of Vilna. The two scholars not only published one of the first comprehensive studies on Nazi policies; as they pursued their research, they also brought to light information of relevance to the search for the YIVO library.173 And it was not just YIVO that benefited from the research undertaken for Weinreich’s book. Arendt too cooperated with Weinreich while composing the Tentative Lists for the Commission, making use of the material and documents that Dawidowicz and Weinreich had available to them. In a review for the widely read Jewish journal Commentary, she called the book “the best guide to the nature of Nazi terror that I have read so far.”174 The collaborative work with Weinreich was Dawidowicz’s first step into her new profession as a historian. When she realized during her later work in Offenbach that she herself would not be able to rebuild the Yiddish life of Vilna, she resolved to dedicate herself to its legacy and commemoration: “In the course of my melancholy work [ . . . ] I came to realize that all we can do is to remember and, [ . . . ] to create out of our memories lasting monuments of remembrance—poems and stories, memoirs and history. It is the only way through which the past, irrevocably destroyed, can survive.”175
She devoted herself to this task after returning to the United States in December 1947. In contrast to Scholem and Baron, she viewed her personal status as witness as a kind of inescapable obligation.176 Over the next few years, Dawidowicz developed the methodological toolkit and collated the empirical material needed to take the first steps toward writing an integrated history of the Holocaust. The special feature of her approach was her attempt to reconcile the criteria of historical objectivity and data-based facticity with an obligation to the dead and their remembrance—and thus to convey the specific vantage point from which she wrote. In his review of her later magnum opus, The War against the Jews, Irving Howe emphasized the outstanding effect of her form of writing:
Mrs. Dawidowicz’ “The War Against the Jews” comes to us as a major work of synthesis, providing for the first time a full account of the holocaust not merely as it completed the Nazi vision but as it affected the Jews of Eastern Europe. [ . . . ] It is a work committed to the sovereignty of fact [ . . . ] and emerging out of an awareness that no theory about the holocaust can be as important as a sustained confrontation with the holocaust itself. [ . . . ] This book comes to seem an exemplar of that Jewish belief—or human delusion—that somehow there may still be a moral use in telling what it meant to live or die in the 20th century.177
This book was Dawidowicz’s most enduring contribution to the historiography of the Holocaust. In 1981, she added a comprehensive overview of the historiography: The Holocaust and the Historians. Always concerned that the history of the six million murdered Jews risked being forgotten, in her texts, she sought to underline that the Holocaust had been a key objective, a core feature, of Nazism, one planned and carried out by Adolf Hitler systematically and on a long-term basis.178 This interpretation of the Holocaust, later categorized as intentionalist, is bound up with Dawidowicz’s personal history during and after the war.179 This history included the fact that, particularly when it came to Jewish Vilna, she herself was familiar with a steadily worsening history of persecution and annihilation during the German occupation, a history she found to be confirmed by her experience in postwar Europe. But in her collaboration with Max Weinreich, we already find an interpretation of the Holocaust as a plan of annihilation drawn up by the Nazis, and Hitler himself, from the very beginning of Nazi rule, and systematically carried out following the invasion of Poland in 1939. Dawidowicz considered the exclusion of Jews’ perspective from the historical examination of Nazism until the late 1970s a grave failure, as she set out in The Holocaust and the Historians. This too prompted her, time and again, to place the Holocaust at the center of her historical appraisal of Nazism and the Second World War.
She took her lead from the traditions of Eastern European historiography taught at YIVO, particularly that of Simon Dubnow: she favored social scientific approaches that tried to honor the Jewish perspective and examine it in its social contexts. In her studies on Eastern European Jewry, she made use of material from YIVO that had been restituted via Offenbach or that belonged to survivors from Vilna.180 At the same time, she was eager to use her scholarly work to create a place of commemoration for the Eastern European Jewish world in the United States. She herself described the historiography of the Holocaust as a “secular act of bearing witness to Auschwitz and to the mystery of Jewish survival.”181 With the help of anthologies such as The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (1967), in which Dawidowicz published letters, autobiographical and literary texts, and essays by Eastern European Jews over several centuries, through the establishment of the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, intended to make the world of Yiddish writing accessible to the American public, and through her work at YIVO, she sought to preserve the Jewish heritage of Vilna and Eastern Europe for future generations.
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The experiences garnered by the four figures considered here—as they strove to salvage Jewish cultural property in Europe—continued to exercise an effect in their writings and subsequent activities. The two key studies by Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism) and Dawidowicz (The War against the Jews) reveal traces of these experiences. Because both of them were at the beginning of their scholarly careers during the Second World War, it is no surprise that the historical caesura they experienced and perceived had a more direct influence on their thinking and writing than in the case of the older and more established historians Scholem and Baron. Both women wrote virtually all their important studies against the background of the upheavals of the twentieth century and their experiences of it—they were, as Enzo Traverso aptly put it in reference to Arendt, “a product of the ‘dark times’ of [their] century, an age of extremes of which Germany was the epicenter. The stages of [their] intellectual and political formation are the same as those that marked the European collapse: Nazism, and the exile, persecution and genocide of the Jews.”182 Both acquired the material foundations and sources for their writings partly from salvaged holdings, and they tackled issues that molded their thinking and action in the postwar period. In Arendt’s case, it was the functional principles and mechanisms of the Nazi form of rule, culminating in the superordinate attempt to determine what legal and political constellation might facilitate human coexistence under conditions of human diversity; hers was a distinctly universalistic approach. Dawidowicz, meanwhile, spoke from the perspective of the particular Jewish experience of the Holocaust while examining the potential for the continuity and preservation of Eastern European Jewish traditions in the new environment of the United States—subject areas, as in Arendt’s case, that were linked with her working life in the 1940s and 1950s. Gershom Scholem and Salo Baron, meanwhile, half a generation older, were confronted with Auschwitz and its consequences having already taught and worked in established academic contexts outside Europe for a lengthy period. They felt a sense of historical rupture as they learned of the disaster that had befallen Europe’s Jews and the losses they had suffered. But it was mainly on the charitable and political levels that they sought to respond, doing all they could to support different welfare and political initiatives and salvage the precious cultural property they considered vital to survival and intellectual development in the “shifting centers” of Jewish existence. In accordance with their interests and status as intellectuals, in a number of ways they strove to foster and safeguard Jewish scholarship and culture in the United States and Israel after 1945. That such different figures as Arendt, Baron, Dawidowicz, and Scholem all chose to dedicate themselves to salvaging the Jewish cultural heritage had much to do with their interests, education, personal experience, and political beliefs. Their engagement led to a direct and very early confrontation with the destruction of Jewish life in Europe during a period whose overwhelming, ungraspable reality raised questions about the meaningfulness of all forms of political activity. This in turn paved the way for their subsequent thinking and acting in the wake of the civilizational rupture that had occurred.