9

Looted Books in the New Jewish Landscape

[The Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction will] help redistribute the Jewish cultural treasures in accordance with the new needs created by the new situation of world Jewry.

—Salo Baron, 1946

On Sunday, December 1, 1946, Salo Baron arrived at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York for a meeting that would determine the fate of millions of Europe’s Jewish cultural treasures. It was a foggy day in the city and, with the temperature pushing fifty, unseasonably warm for that time of year.1 The posh hotel was only about four miles from the book-lined office at Columbia University where Baron spent most of his days, but when Baron entered that grand skyscraper, it was as if he were entering a different world.

Baron was a fastidious man, meticulous in his daily routine and frugal in his spending habits. His home featured thousands of books, shelved three deep in every room, even the bathroom. He awoke early every morning to do his historical research and writing, with his wife Jeannette working beside him as his research assistant and editor, and was also sure to spend time with his two daughters in the evenings. He devoted himself not only to his scholarly pursuits, but also to various causes and to supporting his family. A serious, reserved man, Baron was never known to have told a joke. He was so extensively organized that he is said to have had a twenty-five-year supply of shoelaces stored at home.2

By the mid-1940s Baron felt as if he carried upon his shoulders the weight of a lost world. When he arrived from Poland in 1926, he’d had no idea that twenty years later the European Jewish world of his youth would be all but obliterated, and he certainly had no idea that the forces that destroyed it would have murdered members of his own family. As the Nazi menace grew in the early 1930s, Baron had worked frantically to save his parents and his two sisters back in Europe, writing to them and imploring American officials to intercede on their behalf. One of his sisters arrived safely in America, but despite Baron’s desperate efforts to rescue his parents and other sister, their letters abruptly stopped arriving in mid-1942, leaving undeniable the tragic truth of their fate in the Nazi death machine.

Baron came to the United States with a bundle of degrees under his belt—three PhDs from the University of Vienna, as well as rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in the same city. He first taught history to young rabbinic students at the Jewish Institute of Religion but soon received an appointment at Columbia University. From that lofty perch Baron was able to establish the study of Jewish history and texts as a valid academic pursuit. Jewish studies had entered the American academy, and Salo Baron was widely recognized and celebrated as its dean.

Still, it was to be an unusual meeting—the man he had come to meet rarely interacted with the likes of Jewish historians. Yet it was the precisely unusual nature of their discussion that made it so enormously productive. As he stepped in to the lobby, Baron noticed its richly colored carpeting, ornate woodwork, and crystal chandeliers, but he probably didn’t stop to study the decor. He proceeded to the suite, knocked on the door, and was greeted by Gen. Lucius D. Clay, commander of the American military occupation of Germany. Clay’s slender military bearing was only slightly softened by his affable smile and the Georgia accent warming his baritone voice. He greeted Baron politely, but in this conversation, as in most others, it soon became clear that he would be all business.3 Baron and Clay were not the only ones at that meeting. Sitting with them were five other men. Clay had brought his legal advisor, Max Lowenthal, and Baron was accompanied by Dr. Wolf Blattberg of the World Jewish Congress, Prof. Alexander Marx of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Jerome Michael of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, and Prof. Aron Freimann, former librarian of the Frankfurt Municipal Library. The seven men sat down and began discussing what to do with the remaining troves of Jewish cultural treasures in Europe.

Who Gets the Orphaned Treasures?

A worldwide snapshot of the Jewish people at that moment would reveal a nation struggling to discern its path to the future. European Jews were still taking their first steps out of the murderous hell. Bewildered and dazed, they didn’t yet even have a word to describe what had just happened to them; the word “Holocaust” would not come into widespread use to describe the event until the 1960s.4 Survivors were struggling to find lost relatives, figure out where to live, and recover from the sheer physical brutality of what they had just endured. Almost ten million Jews lived in Europe when the war began; five and a half to six million of them had been murdered.5 The bombs had stopped, the roaring had grown quiet, and for a time the surviving remnant of Europe’s Jews stood blinking in the gray smoky light of the ruins that had once been their world. Indeed the war had transformed not only the Jews of Europe, but the Jewish people in its entirety, regardless of where they lived. Before the war, the two most visible Jewish population centers were in Europe and United States. Now most Jews of Europe were either dead, departed, or dispirited, and the Jews of the United States, though still visibly powerful, were orphaned and distraught. Refugees were everywhere. Hundreds of thousands came to America, many thousands more moved to Palestine, and others emigrated to Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Canada, and other countries to rebuild their lives. Nothing was the same. The loss was overwhelming, the pain was searing, and the future unclear. The massive earthquake called Nazism had turned the Jewish world upside down, and until the debris settled, nobody had a clue as to what the new Jewish world would be.

Such times of transition are often rife for conflict, and indeed an important one broke out in the most unlikely of battlefields. For the staff of the Offenbach Archival Depot one final question hovered over the entire enterprise like a looming cloud: Who owned the ownerless books?

Many of the books, like many Jewish people, were orphaned. For now, the U.S. Army held a good share of them, but what were they to do with millions of Jewish books? To whom should the American military turn them over? Should they be transferred to European governments in the newly reconstructed postwar Europe? Should they be sent to the United States? Should they somehow be given to the Jewish people? And if so, which Jewish people should get them? Jews in the Land of Israel? American Jews? Organizations of survivors?

Who, in other words, would get to speak for the Jewish people? It was a new question for Jews and governments alike. Yes, there had been Jewish spokespeople before the war—wealthy, powerful Jews near the seats of power who could intercede, like the biblical Esther, on behalf of imperiled Jews and Jewish communities. But these spokespeople usually represented local or regional communities or sometimes the Jews of a single nation. Now many felt the need for an individual or a group to speak for the worldwide Jewish community. In the absence of a formal structure or hierarchy, who could possibly assume such a role with any authority whatsoever?

The Battle of the Books

A “Battle of the Books” was brewing—a battle that was fundamentally more a struggle to determine the contours of the international Jewish landscape in the years after World War II. In some ways the battle had been brewing for more than a decade. Unlike the more well-known and more pressing issues (e.g., what to do with the refugees, how to prosecute war criminals), scholars had been thinking about the postwar fate of European Jewish culture for a long time. In 1933, the Nazis’ rise to power had raised alarm bells in Jewish communities everywhere. Those in the United States felt a special obligation. Many American Jews were first- or second-generation immigrants from Europe themselves, now replanted in a new land not only of freedom and opportunity, but also of great international strength. By the time the war began, organizations such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society were providing millions of dollars in aid and support to refugees. The American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee were advocating the cause of European Jewry on the political front, and Jews throughout the country were frantically trying to help their friends and families back in Europe.

Scholars also did their part. As early as 1940 Salo Baron observed that American Jewish leaders were “equipped with the knowledge furnished them by the methods of modern social and historical sciences and imbued with the accumulated wisdom of the ages of rabbis and thinkers.” As he observed the worsening situation in Europe, Baron called on those leaders to employ American Jewish know-how to “look courageously into the realities as they are and to adopt measures which they will consider best.” Doing so, he argued, would “render an historic service lesser to none performed by their predecessors in other ages of great transformation.”6

American leaders answered Baron’s call with gusto. By 1943 there were fully thirty-two different Jewish institutions in the United States addressing questions about postwar Jewish Europe. The American Jewish Committee created a commission “charged with the function of ascertaining, integrating and publishing of the requisite facts that will promote a better understanding of the Jewish situation and by the scholarly and scientific integrity of its findings, provide a reliable basis for subsequent efforts in the field of reconstruction and rehabilitation.”7 The American Jewish Congress established its Institute of Jewish Affairs and called on its new organization “to present proposals of Jews for the guarantee of rights and the assurance of equality at a forthcoming Peace Conference; and to plan the reconstruction of Jewish life at the end of the war.”8 Even the Jewish Labor Committee had created an operation called the “Research Institute for Jewish Post-war Problems.”9 Curiously, all of these organizations assumed that the Allies were going to win the war. During the darkest and most difficult times of that conflict—even during the years when Allied victory against the Nazis was far from certain—the very existence of these groups looking ahead to postwar Jewish life in Europe attests to the optimism of American Jewry.

As all these groups looked ahead to peacetime, their efforts naturally grew specific. Some groups focused on resettlement, others on prosecuting war crimes, and still others set their sights on dealing with Europe’s Jewish cultural treasures. Allied governments had been thinking about the issue for some time, of course; their efforts had yielded the Monuments Men (MFA&A) program. But as the war thundered on, scholars and librarians spurred more and more Jewish organizations to prepare for what they knew would be a postwar deluge of Jewish literary loot. By 1943 the campaigns began taking shape. They would rage strong until Baron’s meeting at the Waldorf with Clay, and skirmishes would break out even afterward.

The first campaign was led by an unlikely combatant, a bookish-looking Oxford University historian named Cecil Roth. Roth, an Orthodox Jew and avid collector of Jewish books, was head of the Jewish Historical Society of England and would later gain renown as editor in chief of the first edition of Encyclopaedia Judaica. He was also an ardent Zionist; his brother Leon was rector of the Hebrew University, and when he retired from Oxford in 1964, Cecil himself would move to Jerusalem. By 1943 the forty-four-year-old had already emerged as one of England’s leading Jewish scholars, which may have been why an address he delivered at the Jewish Historical Society that April gained such widespread attention.

29. Salo W. Baron. Courtesy Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio, americanjewisharchives.org.

30. Judah Leon Magnes. Courtesy Library of Congress.

31. Cecil Roth. Courtesy Joseph F. Roth.

Mincing no words, Roth opened with a salvo against what he saw as the very foundation of Nazi antisemitism. The Nazis, he proclaimed, had attacked not only Jews, but also Jewish culture—its spiritual and intellectual values. “It is unthinkable,” he continued, “that the German Government can be allowed to derive any profit from its campaign of murder and rapine, and it is obvious that it should be made to disgorge confiscated and stolen objects—to which must be added, too, those which have been disposed of by forced sale.”10 He called for all objects that the Nazis stole during the war to be returned to their rightful owners and for the material whose owners could not be identified to be sent to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Accordingly, the Jewish Historical Society of England set up a committee to deal with the postwar treasures, with Roth as one of its most prominent members. The committee was to work closely with Allied governments and cooperate with them in addressing all issues concerning stolen Jewish property and the reconstruction of European Jewish culture.

Roth’s committee created a questionnaire to help assemble an inventory of looted property for use at the postwar peace conference, and it crafted some preliminary plans for working with Allied governments. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, none of their work moved beyond the planning stage, but Roth remained proud of the fact that his group was the first to take on the work of postwar book restitution and cultural reconstruction in anything even resembling a systematic manner. As a result, he would later argue, his group should rightly be at the helm of later Jewish efforts in this area. When it came time to sort out the stolen books, he felt, the Brits should be in charge.

Of course Roth was far from the only Jewish scholar thinking about what to do with stolen Jewish literature after the war. One of the others—a man in some ways Roth’s ally and in others his adversary—was Judah L. Magnes, founding president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Born in San Francisco in 1877, Magnes was ordained a rabbi at the Reform movement’s the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1900. He continued his studies in Berlin and Heidelberg, where he became not only a PhD, but also an ardent Zionist—both of which would define much of what he did for the remainder of his life. Magnes served as assistant rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York, the oldest and arguably the grandest of the city’s Reform synagogues, and later as president of the New York Kehillah, an umbrella agency designed to coordinate and unite the city’s many Jewish organizations. In 1922 Magnes moved to Palestine, where he took his position at the helm of the Hebrew University.

To Magnes, the nascent state that he and his fellow Zionists would soon create represented the spiritual and intellectual center of the Jewish people. Diaspora Jewish communities were important, of course, but Magnes argued that for the Jewish people to thrive, there needed to be a vibrant Jewish community in its ancestral land. As early as 1930 he had described the Land of Israel as “one of the chief means, if not the chief means, of revivifying and deepening the [Jewish] people and the Torah.”11

With Palestine as the center of the Jewish world, could there be any question as to what should be done with the orphaned Jewish books? In Magnes’s view, they had to come to Palestine. Period. The Hebrew University, located on a hilltop overlooking the ancient ramparts of Jerusalem, was the perfect new home for them. More fundamentally, given the role that the soon-to-be State of Israel would play in the postwar Jewish world, sending the books to the Hebrew University was the only logical choice. He said so explicitly in a 1946 letter to Koppel Pinson:

We are to be the chief country for the absorption of the living human beings who have escaped from Nazi persecution, and we are of course proud of this. That is one of the reasons why the Jewish National Home exists in Palestine. By the same token we should be the trustee of these spiritual goods which destroyed German Jewry has left behind. It will be nothing less than disgraceful if there were any competition between Jewish organizations for the receipt of books, manuscripts and other collections. As anxious as we are to build up our library, which is the greatest library among the Jews of all the world, we are much more anxious that the Jews of the world should recognize that it is our duty to establish our spiritual and moral claim to be in the direct line of succession to the Jewish culture and scholarship of European Jewry. I can well understand that putting forward different claims would confuse the military authorities. But we are not putting forward a claim to books or property, so much as we are putting forward a claim which no one else can put forward, i.e. the claim to be the chief spiritual heir of those Jewish institutions for whose books we want to be appointed trustees.12

With this in mind, Magnes sent his own representatives to Europe to catalogue the looted treasures. He also fostered ties with American Jewish military chaplains in Europe, ties that would serve him quite well as the battle for the books raged on. But Roth and Magnes would have to deal with yet a third general in their efforts to get their hands on the books.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Columbia’s Salo Baron was also gearing up for his own campaign. Baron had been born in Galicia in 1895 and moved to New York as a young scholar in 1926. By the time of the war, he was just as much a leading light of Jewish studies in America as Roth was in England, if not more. Baron, however, found himself on the defensive during this period. Ever since the 1920s he had railed against what he called the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” Many historians, he observed, had long propounded a view that the history of the Jewish people was one of suffering and travail only. But suffering in Jewish history, Baron insisted, was far from the whole story. A truer view of the Jewish past would show Jews as sometimes suffering, sometimes successful, and often somewhere in between.

Now, however, the horrors of the war seemed to provide more than ample proof for the lachrymose view. If nothing else, some historians argued, the Holocaust was screaming, howling, horrifying proof that being a Jew meant being part of a people doomed to undergo new agonies in each generation. To maintain his own position, Baron would need to be vigilant in his efforts to reclaim the fullness of Jewish history in all its complexity. Of course the Holocaust was terrible; like countless other Jews, Baron too had lost many family members and dear friends. But the Holocaust not only destroyed human lives, it also obliterated a magnificent Jewish culture. A student who studied only the Holocaust might come out feeling pretty lachrymose about the Jewish past, one that was dark and devastating. But a student who looked at European Jewry in the centuries before the war would certainly have a rosier view. And what better witness was there to the richness and complexity of Jewish history than its books?

Baron came to the battlefield by way of his involvement with the Conference on Jewish Relations, one of the American Jewish organizations looking ahead to life after the war in Europe. In June 1933 City University philosophy professor Morris Raphael Cohen convened a gathering of scholars to discuss Nazism and the implications of its rise to power in Germany. In 1937 the group officially became the Conference on Jewish Relations (CJR) and pledged to look not only at the oppression of European Jews, but also at alarming rates of antisemitism in the Unites States and elsewhere. The following year the CJR began publishing a quarterly journal, Jewish Social Studies, with Salo Baron as its editor. In 1941 Cohen stepped down, and Baron became president of the conference.

The specter of Nazism hung like a cloud over everything the CJR did. From early on, before the war, Baron and his cohorts realized that to respond effectively to the Nazi threat, they would need to have a full picture of the Jewish world that the Nazis were threatening, particularly that of Europe. With the outbreak of the war, the CJR, in an impressive demonstration of foresight, strove to take the American lead in preparing to aid in the postwar reconstruction of Jewish culture in Europe. As early as September 1940, it recommended “a program for a sustained and intensive study not only of the actual situation of Jews abroad and at home, and of the possible effects of various plans and proposals for post-war reconstruction, but also of the problems which are likely to confront the Jewish people after the war.”13

The discussions continued, and by the end of the war the CJR had created the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. It consisted of sixty-nine scholars, librarians, and organizational leaders, representing many of the most prominent Jewish institutions in the world concerned with Jewish cultural reconstruction, including Theodor H. Gaster of the Library of Congress, Jacob Rader Marcus of the Hebrew Union College, Solomon Grayzel of the Jewish Publication Society, and Rabbi Edgar Magnin of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. Significantly, most members of the commission were American, but there were people from other countries too, such as Rabbi Simon Langer of the Association Pour le Retablissement Israelite en France and Rabbi David A. Jessurun Cardozo of the Netherlands Jewish Committee. Tellingly, tragically, some members of the commission were listed only by their former positions: “Aron Freimann, Formerly Director, Frankfort Municipal Library,” “Rachel Wischnitzer, Formerly Curator, Jewish Museum of Berlin.”14 The purpose of the new commission would be to serve as an advisory body to the United Nations and Allied authorities in rehabilitating the cultural institutions of European Jewry. The commission would, of course, need to be recognized as the official representative of the Jewish people in order to effectively perform its assigned tasks.

It wouldn’t take long for Baron and his associates to realize that the CJR’s Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction was tragically misnamed. In the wake of World War II, they learned, there wasn’t much Jewish culture in Europe left to reconstruct.15 Soon afterward the group dropped the word “European” from its title, calling it simply Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR) instead. (The confusion wrought by an organization called the CJR creating a subgroup called JCR seems to have been lost on them.) Sadly, the work of reconstruction couldn’t focus on Europe alone. Now Jewish cultural reconstruction would need to be a process by which the Jewish people worldwide adapted to the new realities of life after the cataclysm and destruction of World War II.

In late 1945, Baron headed a delegation that traveled to Germany to meet with Gen. Lucius Clay, the military governor of the American occupation. With great concern, the scholars told Clay that they had heard rumors of American soldiers and other passersby removing looted Jewish books, and consequently they asked the general to institute a systematic way to preserve the material. Clay, surely accustomed to similar such requests from the Monuments Men of MFA&A, responded cooperatively and ordered the establishment of the Offenbach Archival Depot (see chapter 8). After his initial meeting with Clay, Baron left behind a small staff of scholars to begin systematically collecting information about the looted treasures. The staff was led by a thirty-nine-year-old political theorist named Hannah Arendt.

Assessing the Literary Loss

A strategy was coming together in Baron’s mind, and in November 1945 he laid it out as the first substantive article in the inaugural issue of a new magazine called Commentary. His opening paragraph reveals not only the sense of confusion and fear perpetrating the Jewish world immediately after the war, but also Baron’s deep commitment to reclaiming the culture of European Jewry, a culture that, whatever the details of its fate, he knew to have been horribly decimated under Nazi oppression.

Although the blackout is slowly lifting from the areas where once flourished the largest centers of Jewish life in Europe, only fragmentary reports concerning the survivors have filtered through to the outside world. The simplest information, such as how many Jews remain alive—and where—is sparse and often contradictory; and we know practically nothing about the forms of their community life, their religious observances, or the character of their hopes for survival as Jews. Under these circumstances, any discussion of the spiritual reconstruction of the Jewries of Europe must inevitably be little more than one man’s personal estimate of long-term trends.16

Finally in 1946 Baron’s staff was ready to issue its report. That year Jewish Social Studies issued a supplement to its regular quarterly publication cycle. Its title was rather pedestrian: “Tentative List of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Axis-Occupied Countries.” But behind its lackluster cover lay the picture of a lost literary world.

Shortly after the war, the commission reported, it had assigned its researchers to compile a list of Jewish cultural treasures known to have existed in German-occupied lands before the hostilities had begun. The list contained only movable treasures—books, documents, and museum pieces. Other treasures such as synagogues and cemeteries were not included; their fate was more far more discernible than that of the smaller items. Compiling their data, the team was able to call on hundreds of informants for help. Some of their sources had fled to the United States during or after the war; others had remained in Europe. Some were librarians and scholars; others were chaplains and members of the press.

The list that they assembled was breathtaking in scope and magnitude: from the Lehranstalt fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, 58,590 volumes, 40 manuscripts, “some incunables”; 10,000 volumes from the B’nai B’rith library in Vienna; 250,00 documents and deeds from the Archives of the Jewish Community of Prague, as well as 1,020 bound books, the oldest of which dated back to 1681; 20 kabbalistic manuscripts from the Jewish communal library in Mikulov (Nikolsburg); a “large library of rabbinic literature” from the Beth ha-Midrash ha-Gadol in Munkacevo; and a small collection from the Jewish Community Library of Alfred Rosenberg’s hometown Talinn (Reval). In addition to the major collections from cities such as Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris, the report also listed material from dozens of smaller towns, most of whose Jews had perished in the war. The library of Sanok in Poland was described only as “rich in Judaica”; the material of the Jewish community of Iasi, Romania, as “small collection.” Genoa had yielded only “one Bible ms. [manuscript] in 7 vols.” The list included material from twenty countries in all, and in addition to its millions of books and massive amounts of archival material, it also recorded priceless Torah scrolls, ritual items, and artwork.

The report was careful not to overstate its findings. The list was only tentative; surely it omitted important material, and soon Jewish Social Studies would issue a supplement to the supplement, listing even more treasures. More important, the list included only materials known to have existed prior to when the Nazis got access to them. It was a portrait of prewar European Jewish treasures, nothing else. “Information on the present state of these treasures,” it noted, “is as yet insufficient to warrant publication.” Nevertheless, the implication was clear: most of the material listed in the thick report was gone.

Looking ahead, the commission acknowledged that the project now at hand would be far more complicated than just collecting the books and sending them back to where they came from:

In view of the wholesale destruction of Jewish life and property by the Nazis, reconstruction of Jewish cultural institutions cannot possibly mean mechanical restoration in their original form or, in all cases, to their previous location. The Commission intends . . . to devise if necessary some new forms better accommodated to the emergent patterns of postwar Europe. Ultimately it may also seek to help redistribute the Jewish cultural treasures in accordance with the new needs created by the new situation of world Jewry.17

The Jewish world, in other words, was now a different place than it had been just a few short years earlier. For Europe’s Jews, healing wouldn’t simply be a matter of cleaning up and moving on; it would demand new rules and new understandings regarding how best to live after the apocalypse.

Ordinarily it’s pretty clear what victorious armies are supposed to do with war booty—they’re supposed to return it. But this was no ordinary situation. In ordinary situations, winning armies can simply gather their plunder (or the plunder they reclaim from their enemies) and cart it off for return to their original owners. But in the cratered, devastated moonscape of postwar Europe, the “original owners” weren’t usually easy to find—if one could identify them in the first place.

The staff at the Offenbach Archival Depot was doing what it could to return the books, and indeed they succeeded in shipping millions of volumes to the countries from which they were taken. But America’s military occupation of Germany was going to end in the late 1940s, and soon it became clear that even with its secure facility, expert leaders, and large staff, the Offenbach Archival Depot wasn’t going to finish the job.

Salo Baron Takes the Helm

Given the size of the unidentifiable “what-are-we-supposed-to-do-with-these?” piles, and given the political heat that the whole matter was generating, everyone involved in the book restitution efforts soon realized that finishing the job was going to be a complicated assignment. That’s why Baron issued his “Tentative List.” His goal was understandably scholarly and philanthropic, but also political. Who, the report tacitly asked, should get to decide where the treasures should go? Why, the answer should be obvious, came Baron’s not-so-tacit reply: the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction of course. From the outset, Baron made it clear that his body would be the one to coordinate all of the other groups working on the issue. He wrote, “It is planned to have the Commission serve as the central research and co-ordinating body for all American activities in the field of European Jewish cultural reconstruction and work in close co-operation with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Committee on Restoration of Continental Jewish Museums, Libraries and Archives of the Jewish Historical Society in England and other national and international organizations.”18

Baron, in other words, had taken his place at the helm of the struggle for control of Europe’s Jewish books. As he continued to describe the work of his Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, he made it very clear: The commission, he said, would work with the UN and Allied governments. The commission would take charge of the books and assess claims of ownership. The commission would supervise the redistribution and reallocation of the books. Cecil Roth and his Jewish Historical Society of England could help if they wanted, as could Magnes and his associates at the Hebrew University. But the commission would be in charge.

By this time Cecil Roth, evidently willing to work with Baron, had effectively stepped into the background, and Magnes remained indignant at the very thought that anyone but the Hebrew University should get the books. To complicate matters even further, in late 1945 the Danish government came forward with an offer to bring the material to its country; doing so would not only keep the books in Europe, but also save on shipping costs.19

The planning and wrangling and squabbling continued. The Danish proposal was only short-lived, but the others weren’t. Baron’s commission staff worked tirelessly to assemble and update its “Tentative List”; Roth and his associates made plans and wrote memoranda; Magnes thundered that the unclaimed books must come to the Hebrew University, and he conducted reconnaissance of his own to begin gathering them.

Notably, at this juncture all of the contending parties agreed on one important point: that the Hebrew University should become the primary destination for the heirless European Jewish cultural treasures. They differed on several procedural matters—whose lists should be the official ones, which group should be in charge of the process, what the role of Allied governments and the UN would be—but with regard to the most important issue, they mostly agreed. Although they lived in the Diaspora, both Roth and Baron were ardent Zionists. Like Magnes, they too saw the nascent State of Israel as playing an essential and central role in the international Jewish community after the war, particularly with regard to the books.20

For the most part, in other words, they all agreed about what needed to happen. What they didn’t agree about was who got to be the boss.

By the spring of 1946 it looked more and more likely that in this battle for the books of Jewish Europe, Baron and his Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction were going to win. As it turned out, Baron’s approach to the situation was far savvier than that of Roth or Magnes, and he had been hugely successful in forming a broad, worldwide coalition of many stakeholders concerned about the fate of these treasures. In fact Baron’s commission included representatives of some of the very same groups that had originally opposed him.

Additionally, for all of its international character, Baron’s Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction was an American-based organization. This made it easier for him to work with the American army for the transfer of materials and also to get the support of key members of the American government and its military whom he would need to make the transfer happen smoothly. Theodor Gaster, chief of the Hebraica section of the Library of Congress, was actually a member of Baron’s commission. In internal conversations at the Library of Congress, he took a position far more critical of the Hebrew University than did Baron himself:

The Hebrew University Library, however it may choose to describe itself, is not, in fact, the national library of the Jews, since there is no such thing as a Jewish state in Palestine. It is merely a Palestinian Jewish institution, no whit different from any corresponding institution here. To give it preferential treatment would therefore amount to discrimination against sister institutions in this country or elsewhere, and would be the more likely to be resented here seeing that the material was, in fact, liberated by American troops and that the non-Jewish portions of it will be going, apparently, to American institutions.21

Seymour Pomrenze was also supportive of Baron’s group. Having returned to the United States from Offenbach in May 1946, Pomrenze encouraged the commission to get an official charter from the UN to become the sole trustee of the materials. He shared his views with officials from MFA&A, and like Gaster, he too weighed in with the Library of Congress. In a letter to Baron that month, he made his views clear: “When Prof. Pinsion [sic] gave me a copy of the list of treasures put out by your commission I said to him here is the Agency which can be the instrument of geulah (redemption) for these treasures.”22

With the support of Gaster, Pomrenze, and other Jewish officials in place, the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction was finally in a position to make its case to the American government. During the spring of 1946 it prepared an official memo for submission to the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) suggesting an advisory board be appointed to help with the restitution process. The board would consist of the commission, the Hebrew University, and the Synagogue Council of America (an interdenominational body representing Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox congregations throughout the United States). For items known to be stolen by the Nazis that were destroyed, damaged, or not found after the war, the memo called for “reparations in-kind.” Accordingly the German government would be required to provide other items of similar value from its own collections to replace those taken during the war.

Overwhelmingly officials in the State and War Departments found the commission’s reparations-in-kind proposal to be a nonstarter. The government was working to help Germany rebuild, and it feared that such a plan would create a bureaucratic behemoth of inventories, valuations, and political jockeying far more enormous than anyone would want. The rest of the commission’s proposals might have sailed through more easily, but Magnes, still unwilling to concede defeat, complained to the War Department; the Jewish Agency of Palestine voiced concerns to the MFA&A; and the World Jewish Congress (WJC)—a federation of Jewish organizations that had long wanted in on the plans itself and felt slighted by being left out of Baron’s commission—also complained and offered an alternative proposal that put the WJC at the helm.

Various government officials, particularly those in the State Department, were also concerned about the prospect of dealing with a body as amorphous as “the Jewish people.” When dealing with established governments, diplomats rarely have much of a problem figuring out who they should work with. But here the State Department faced the prospect of returning property captured during the war to “the Jews”—a religious entity . . . or perhaps it was an ethnic group . . . or maybe, given the recent struggle for Jewish statehood in Palestine, the Jews constituted a national group after all. To anyone concerned with the legal and ethical protocols of international diplomacy, the situation seemed destined to become very messy. Very messy indeed.

For its part, different factions within the American government failed to see eye to eye on the issue as well. OMGUS had been charged with the task of denazifying Germany and reconstructing its government, a task that would demand the cooperation of local and regional government councils. For these German officials to work with the military of the army that had just vanquished them in war was hard enough, many felt, but to force them to work with an officially recognized Jewish restitution organization might seem downright vindictive. On the other hand, there was also an awareness throughout the American government—and indeed throughout the world—of the ghastliness of the Holocaust, and a genuine desire to empower the Jewish people in the postwar reconstruction efforts.

By the end of the summer, both the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and the WJC had incorporated the Hebrew University into its plans. Furthermore, although the WJC submitted its own formal plan, it had also joined Baron’s team, and its proposal had become so similar to that of the commission as to render it effectively identical. Now the stage was set. For all practical purposes, Salo Baron and the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction could approach the American government as the fully—if unofficially—authorized representatives of the Jewish people. For its part, the American government was no longer caught in the middle of the internecine strife between these many groups of bickering Jews. Looking ahead to the end of its occupation of Germany, it finally had an identifiable, authoritative Jewish partner with whom it could work in determining the ultimate fate of the Jewish treasures it now held.

There remained, of course, myriad details to work out. How would the commission assure the officials of the State Department that it was okay to work with them as representatives of the Jewish people? How could they best set up a working relationship with Clay’s Office of Military Government in Germany? What were they to do with books and other treasures taken from communities that were mostly, but not completely, decimated during the war?

Government Approval

In June the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, with Magnes’s explicit approval, sent a memo to the State Department proposing a plan. Officially OMGUS, working on its own or through an appointed trustee, would be in charge of distributing the books. In reality, however, a Jewish advisory board would make the actual decisions, with the Library of Congress adding its expertise to help determine who had owned the books before the war. OMGUS would appoint tribunals to adjudicate the disagreements when there were conflicting claims regarding who should get the books. Private owners would get their property back, of course, while surviving Jewish communities and institutions would get theirs only to the extent that they could make full use of the material and to the extent to which the former Jewish population that owned them survived the war. All of the remaining material would be distributed to Jewish institutions and communities according to worldwide need.

The State Department agreed in principle to anything that would rid it of the responsibility for the books and get it out of the crossfire flying between the many warring Jewish groups. The State Department also specified that its decisions would certainly apply to material reclaimed in the American Zone and that it would seek “quadripartite approval” to have the material in the other three zones turned over to it or at least to receive the authority to determine the fate of this material on an ad hoc basis.23

Over the next several weeks there were informal discussions between Jewish leaders and officials at the State Department. Then, on August 26, Jerome Michael, vice president of the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, wrote to Gen. John H. Hilldring, assistant secretary of state for occupied areas, with a revised proposal. He informed General Hilldring that the commission was setting up a “membership corporation” under the laws of New York, which would include representatives from all concerned parties: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Synagogue Council of America, the Federation of Jews from Central Europe, the World Jewish Congress, and the Hebrew University. It would, in other words, be a widely representative entity, just as the State Department wanted.

The U.S. Army, the proposal continued, would appoint the corporation as the trustee for all Hebraica, Judaica, and other Jewish religious and cultural objects in the American Zone on behalf of the treasures’ “former Jewish owners and the Jewish people.” In cooperation with the American military, the corporation would examine and classify those objects that the American military had already found, endeavor to find additional material as yet undiscovered by Allied forces, search for material in the collections of German and Austrian libraries in the American Zone, and periodically report on its activities to the commanding generals of the American occupation. For their part, the commanding generals would provide housing, food, and clerical support to the corporation’s staff as they conducted their work.

Objects that had been owned by private individuals would be restored to them or their heirs; those that had belonged to surviving institutions would likewise be returned to their prewar owners. Objects that had been owned by communities would be restored “in proportion to the prospective religious and cultural needs of the community and its capacity to retain, care for, and use such objects for their appropriate religious and cultural purposes.” Un-returnable objects, on the other hand—those that could not be identified, or whose owners perished during the war, or belonged to communities that could no longer care for them—would “be distributed in such a manner as will in the judgment of the Corporation best serve the religious and cultural needs of the Jewish people and especially of the surviving victims of Nazi persecution, and satisfy the desire of the Jewish people to pay tribute to those victims who did not survive, as, for example, by establishing a library in the Hebrew University in Palestine as a memorial to those martyrs for their faith.”24

Hitler and his henchmen coldly murdered the Jews of Europe while also gathering a library to preserve Judaism’s destroyed culture. Now, shocked, grieving, and determined to reclaim what they could, the Jewish institutions of the free world lovingly strove to preserve the very same thing.

The memos and conversations continued. A host of legal and procedural issues needed to be worked out. How active would the American occupational forces be in the restitution of Jewish books? With Germany recovering, the world only beginning to heal, and the Iron Curtain slowly descending over a divided Europe, would Jewish books even merit a blip on the American military radar screen? Yes, Jewish leaders around the world were now mostly united under the leadership of Baron and the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, but with the support of the American military still in question, it remained to be seen whether such unity would matter.

The discussion at the Waldorf Astoria that day was cordial. Jerome Michael opened with a review of the proposal by the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction for a trustee corporation, touching on its complexities, the differences between various kinds of cultural property, and procedural matters regarding the transfer of such properties to a trustee. Baron chimed in with statistics from his “Tentative List” and some ideas as to how the corporation might distribute the material. Blattberg reminded the group of two important points: The proposed corporation was an international trusteeship—the World Jewish Congress stood behind it, as did the Hebrew University and other major Jewish organizations. Also the material under discussion wasn’t just any old property. Rather it represented priceless cultural treasures of enormous sentimental value for Jews everywhere. The books would be crucial to any future study of and by the Jewish people. Marx and Freimann agreed and, bringing their scholarly knowledge to the table, added several technical details about the material under discussion.

Lucius Clay took it all in and then responded with the decisiveness that had brought him to his high position. Yes, some of the formalities of setting up a trusteeship of the type that the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction had suggested would need to go through the State Department. But once it was established (surely Baron and his cohort were thrilled at the first explicit, high-level sign of support for their proposal), the corporation would work directly with OMGUS, directly with Clay himself. Having said that, Clay reminded his Jewish visitors that the restitution of looted property would be conducted strictly in accordance with the law. Therefore, the commission’s previous proposals for German in-kind reparations—taking valuable material from German libraries to replace items of similar value that were looted and subsequently lost during the war—was simply out of the question. The law provided no mechanism for this kind of restitution, and similar proposals from France and Holland had already been rejected as a result.

Most important, however, Clay agreed that all unidentifiable books and other cultural material should be turned over to the trusteeship as soon as possible. He rejected the notion that identifiable material from German communities with only a few survivors should receive only a small proportion of their material, but he suggested that many of these communities would probably be willing to cede portions of their collections to the trusteeship anyway.25

Clay touched on other questions in that two-hour conversation, but in their excitement the members of the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction likely missed the details. They had gotten what they came for; the highest-ranking American military official in Germany had given principled support to their plan. Now it was only a matter of writing up the paperwork.

On April 30, 1947, the articles of incorporation were filed in the State of New York. Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. had been created.