1. Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 17a; Pesachim 9b ff., Sukkah 23a–b.
2. Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), 2:602. Translation slightly edited for clarity.
3. Raphael Posner and Israel Ta-Shema, eds., The Hebrew Book: An Historical Survey (Jerusalem: Keter, 1975), 98.
4. Ch. B. Friedberg, Bet Eked Sepharim (Israel, 1928), 1:291.
5. Fraenkel Family Tree, “Aaron ben Uri Lipmann Fraenkel’s Tree,” http://www.geni.com/family-tree/index/6000000006911140325.
6. Evidently Meshulam’s father and his son were both named Aaron.
1. The general information in this chapter about Vilna and its book world is accurate. Khaykl Lunski’s tour of the Strashun Library is imagined.
2. Yad Vashem, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania: The Story of the Jewish Community of Vilna,” http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/vilna/overview.asp.
3. Mordechai Zalkin, “Strashun, Shemu’el, and Matityahu,” trans. I. Michael Aronson, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Strashun_Shemuel_and_Matityahu; Yad Vashem, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania: The Story of the Jewish Community of Vilna, The Interwar Period, Cultural Life,” http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/vilna/before/libraries.asp#!prettyPhoto.
4. On Khaykl Lunski, see Dina Abramowicz and Jeffery Shandler, eds., Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life before World War II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 260–64; and Itzik Nakhmen Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 78–81.
5. Exodus 31:18, 32:19, 34:28.
6. Ezra, 3:10–12.
7. Raphael Posner and Israel Ta-Shema, eds., The Hebrew Book: An Historical Survey (Jerusalem: Keter, 1975), 6.
8. Posner and Ta-Shema, The Hebrew Book, 4.
9. Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 68b.
10. See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002), 30–57.
11. Babylonian Talmud, Temurah 14b. Jerusalem Talmud, Gittin 60b; Peah 2:6, 17a and parallels. From Martin S. Jaffee, “A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word: On Discipleship, Transformative Knowledge, and the Living Texts of Oral Torah,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 525–49.
12. Tovia Preschel, “Amram ben Sheshna,” in Encylopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1973), 2:891–93.
13. Henry Malter, Saadia Gaon: His Life and Works (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1921), 137.
14. Book of Beliefs and Opinions, quoted in Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 38.
15. Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 111, quoted in Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud, 5.
16. Based on Shraga Abramson, Perush Rabbenu Hananel la-Talmud (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan, 1995), cited in Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud, 69.
17. Quoted in Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud, 76.
18. Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud, 134.
19. Talya Fishman, “The Rhineland Pietists’ Sacralization of Oral Torah,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 9–16.
20. Posner and Ta-Shema, The Hebrew Book, 85.
21. Joseph Jacob, “Typography,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906), xii, 295ff. Also Zeev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World: 1700–1900 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), 4.
22. Gries, Book in the Jewish World, 4. Also Posner and Ta-Shema (The Hebrew Book, 86) suggest that there were 50,000 editions of Jewish incunabula, but this number is certainly way off. Jacob (“Typography,” 295) states that there were “about 100” Jewish works produced before 1500, and Posner and Ta-shema’s more updated list puts the number at 175. I put the upper limit at approximately 200 to account for the possibility of lost titles.
23. David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 102–3.
24. Posner and Ta-Shema, The Hebrew Book, 97.
25. Posner and Ta-Shema (The Hebrew Book, 91) list the date as 1493; Gries (Book in the Jewish World, 4–5) puts the date of publication as 1504.
26. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry, 105.
27. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays in Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 91.
28. Gries, Book in the Jewish World, 25–26.
29. “Tsene rene,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Tsene-rene.
30. Ora Schwarzwald and Aldina Quintana Rodriquez, eds., Seder Nashim: Sidur Tefilot be-Ladino, Saloniḳi, ha-me’ah ha-shesh ‘esreh (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2012).
Epigraph: Heinrich Heine, “Almansor,” in The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version, trans. Hal Draper (Boston: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), 187.
1. Quoted in Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Sourcebook, 315–1791 (Cincinnati: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1938), 149.
2. The details of this book burning remain unclear. William Popper (The Censorship of Hebrew Books [New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1899]), for example, records the date as June 17, 1244; Yvonne Glikson (“Talmud, Burning Of,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik [Detoit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007], 19:482) puts it in June of 1242. Marcus (Jew in the Medieval World, 145) argues that burnings probably took place at both times. Similarly, the various sources differ in the number of books destroyed, estimates running from 14,000 to 20,000.
3. Popper, Censorship of Hebrew Books, 6–11.
4. Marcus, Jew in the Medieval World, 146
5. 1 Maccabees, 1:56–57, The Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha, expanded ed., rev. standard version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
6. Alfredo Mordechai Rubello, “Justinian Code: Corpus Iuris Civilis,” in Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 393–94.
7. “Medieval Sourcebook: Justinian: Novella 146: On Jews,” Fordham University website, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/novel146.asp.
8. William Popper, “Confiscation of Jewish Books,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906), 4:221–24.
9. Quoted in Fr. William G. Most, “Private Revelations and Discernment of Spirits,” http://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/maryd8.htm.
10. Popper, “Confiscation of Jewish Books.”
11. Yoel Kahn, The Three Blessings: Boundaries, Censorship, and Identity in Jewish Liturgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 46.
12. Popper, “Censorship of Jewish Books.”
13. Arlen Viktorovitch Blium, “The Jewish Question and Censorship in the USSR,” in The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation,” ed. Jonathan A. Rose (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 79–103.
Epigraph: Quoted in Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy, rev. ed. (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 116.
1. Leonidas E. Hill, “The Nazi Attack on ‘Un-German’ Literature,” in The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation,” ed. Jonathan A. Rose (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 14.
2. Peter Weidhass, A History of the Frankfurt Book Fair, trans. C. M. Gossage and W. A. Wright (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2007). Eliezer ben Natan mentions simply Frankfurt’s “fair of the non-Jews.” Its specific association with books emerged in the late fifteenth century.
3. Mein Kampf, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt.
4. Matthew Fishburne, Burning Books (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 36.
5. Fishburne, Burning Books, 34.
6. Fishburne, Burning Books, 39.
7. Fishburne, Burning Books, 37.
8. Hill, “Nazi Attack on ‘Un-German’ Literature,” 16
9. Fishburne, Burning Books, 40–41.
10. “Adolf Hitler: First Anti-Semitic Writing,” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Adolf_Hitler’s_First_Antisemitic_Writing.html.
11. Alan E. Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 11.
12. On Seraphim, see Steinweiss, Studying the Jew, 142–47.
13. Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People (New York: YIVO, 1946), 77.
14. Steinweis, Studying the Jew, 142–47.
15. On Kittel, see Robert P. Ericksen, “Theologian in the Third Reich: The Case of Gerhard Kittel,” Journal of Contemporary History 12, no. 3 (July 1977): 595–22.
16. Steinweis, Studying the Jew, 75–76.
17. Steinweis, Studying the Jew, 153–54.
18. David E. Fishman, “Like Embers Plucked from the Fire: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna,” in Rose, Holocaust and the Book, 67. Steinweis (Studying the Jew, 116) puts Pohl in Jerusalem from 1932 to 1934.
19. Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial (New York: Schocken Books, 2011), 48–50.
20. Werner Willikens, February 21, 1934, quoted in “Working Towards the Führer: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History 2, no. 2 (July 1993): 116.
1. Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (London: Bastford, 1972), 3.
2. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 14–15.
3. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 12–13.
4. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 13.
5. Alfred Rosenberg’s Memoirs, http://issuu.com/creact/docs/www.jurgenmarechal.nl, 9.
6. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 25.
7. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 29.
8. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (New York: Norton, 2008), 110.
9. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 34.
10. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 82–83.
11. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 100–101.
12. Fritz Nova, Alfred Rosenberg: Nazi Theorist of the Holocaust (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1986), 8.
13. Quoted in Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 102.
14. Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People (New York: YIVO, 1946), 22–25.
15. Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 47. Punctuation edited for clarity.
16. Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 49.
17. “Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 7, fifty-second day, Wednesday, 6 February 1946, Morning Session,” Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-06-46.asp.
18. Cecil, Myth of the Master Race, 98.
19. Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 99.
20. Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, 91.
21. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “Roads to Ratibor: Library and Archival Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 3 (Winter 2005): 395.
22. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B (Washington DC: Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, 1948), 1335.
23. Mark Neocleous, “Theoretical Foundations of the ‘New Political Science,’” in The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance, ed. Markus D. Dubber and Mariana Valverde (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 35.
24. Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 161–62.
25. Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation, 9.
26. Carl Tighe, “Six, Franz Alfred: A Life in the Shadows,” Journal of European Studies 37 (2007): 5.
27. Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation, 489n101; ci Preliminary Interrogation Report (ci-fir) No 102, Records Prepared for War Crimes Proceedings at Nuremberg, 1945–1947, http://www.fold3.com/image/232064362/#232064362/.
28. On Six’s work with the rsha library, see Dov Schidorsky, “The Library of the Reich Security Main Office and Its Looted Jewish Book Collections,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 42, no. 1 (2007): 21–47.
29. Schidorsky, “Library of the Reich Security Main Office,” 31.
30. Schidorsky, “Library of the Reich Security Main Office,” 29. Also see Dov Schidorsky, “Confiscation of Libraries and Assignments to Forced Labor: Two Documents of the Holocaust,” Libraries & Culture 33, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 347–88.
31. “Statement of Col. Robert G. Storey, 18 December 1945,” Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1947–49), 4:81, quoted in Donald E. Collins and Herbert P. Rothfeder, “The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and the Looting of Jewish and Masonic Libraries During World War II,” Journal of Library History 18, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 21.
1. On the Cairo Genizah, see Mark Glickman, Sacred Treasure—The Cairo Genizah (Woodstock VT: Jewish Lights, 2011).
2. Cambridge University, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, “Fragment of the Month: January, 2011,” http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/fotm/january-2011/index.html; Sem C. Sutter, “Looting of the Jewish Collections in France by the Eisatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg,” in Jüdischer Buchbesitz als Raubgut: Zweites Hannoversches Symposium, ed. Regine Dehnel (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2006), 123.
3. Michael Marrus, “France,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 505–19.
4. Donald E. Collins and Herbert P. Rothfeder, “The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg and the Looting of Jewish and Masonic Libraries During World War II,” Journal of Library History 18, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 27.
5. Sutter, “Looting of the Jewish Collections,” 126–31.
6. Patricia Grimsted, Descriptive Catalogue on Looted Judaica, 2nd ed. (New York: Conference on Material Claims against Germany, 2012), 332–34; Leonidas E. Hill, “The Nazi Attack on ‘Un-German’ Literature,” in The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation,” ed. Jonathan A. Rose (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 30.
7. “Report of Oberbereichsleiter Schimmer to Nuremberg War Tribunal, Document 176-PS, Part 01” [translation], in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 3, Documents 001-PS-1406-PS (Washington DC: GPO, 1947), 203–7.
8. Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, “Tentative List of Jewish Cultural Treasures,” supplement, Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (1946): 12–27; “Addenda and Corrigenda to Tentative List of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Axis-Occupied Countries,” supplement, Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (1946): 6–7.
9. Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, “Tentative List,” 22.
10. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Interview with Walter Lachman, July 31, 1992,” http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn509147.
11. I am grateful to Walter Lachman for providing me a copy of this inventory and to Ursula Behre for translating it.
12. Michael Sontheimer, “Retracing the Nazi Book Theft: German Libraries Hold Thousands of Looted Volumes,” Der Spiegel, October 24, 2008.
13. Sontheimer, “Retracing the Nazi Book Theft”; Tom Berg, “A Child’s Book, Looted By Nazis, Finds Its Owner,” Orange County Register, January 19, 2009; Melonie Magruder, “A Holocaust Survivor’s Childhood Book Comes Home,” Malibu Times, July 22, 2009.
14. Meir Michaelis, “Rome,” in Gutman, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 1300–1302.
15. Diacrone: Studi di Storai Contemporanea, “Olocausto: Seciale Diacronie—2012,” http://www.studistorici.com/2012/01/26/27-gennaio-giorno-della-memoria/.
16. Diacrone: Studi di Storai Contemporanea, “Olocausto: Seciale Diacronie—2012.”
17. Stanislao G. Pugliese, “Bloodless Torture: The Books of the Roman Ghetto under the Nazi Occupation,” in Rose, Holocaust and the Book, 51.
18. Isaia Sonne, “Scelta di Manoscritti e Stampe Della Biblioteca Della Universita Israelitica di Roma,” http://www.mosaico-cem.it/archivio/intervento/la-biblioteca-razziata-nel-1943-a-roma.
19. Diacrone: Studi di Storai Contemporanea, “Olocausto: Seciale Diacronie–2012.”
20. Diary of Rosina Sorani, http://www.studistorici.com/2012/01/26/27-gennaio-giorno-della-memoria.
21. Pugliese, “Bloodless Torture,” 51.
22. Giacomo Debenedetti, October 16, 1943; Eight Jews, trans. Estelle Gilson (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 33.
23. Michaelis, “Rome.”
24. Dario Tedeschi, “Research of the Roman Jewish Community’s Library Looted in 1943,” in Dehnel, Judische Buchbesitz, 248–49.
25. Yitchak Kerem, “The Confiscation of Jewish Books in Salonika during the Holocaust,” in Rose, Holocaust and the Book, 60.
26. “Emmanuel, Rabbi Isaac,” in Zikhron Saloniki: G’edulata v’Chorbana shel Yerushalayim d’Balkan, ed. David A. Recanati (Tel Aviv: Hava’ad L’hotza’at Sefer K’hillat Saloniki, 1972).
27. Joshua Eli Plaut, Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century: 1913–1983: Patterns of Survival in the Greek Provinces before and after the Holocaust (Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses / Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 64.
28. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “The ERR versus the RSHA: Patterns of Plunder and Migration of Books and Archives as Factors in Restitution.” I thank Professor Grimsted for providing me with this unpublished manuscript.
29. Solly Ganor, Light One Candle: A Survivor’s Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem, 2nd ed. (New York: Kodansha America: 2003), 208.
30. Josef Rosin, “Kaunas,” http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/pinkas_lita/lit_00542.html.
31. Ganor, Light One Candle, 21.
32. Ganor, Light One Candle, 21.
33. Grimsted, “Patterns of Plunder,” 4.
34. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “Roads to Ratibor: Library and Archival Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 3 (Winter 2005): 414–415.
35. Grimsted, “Roads to Ratibor,” 395.
36. Otto Dov Kulka, “Theresienstadt,” in Gutman, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 1463.
37. On the Theresienstadt library, see Miriam Intrator, “‘People Were Literally Starving for Any Kind of Reading’: The Theresienstadt Ghetto Central Library, 1942–1945,” Library Trends 55, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 511–22.
38. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, email message to author, July 8, 2013.
1. Abraham A. Foxman, Israel O. Lehman, et al., “Vilna,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Cecil Roth (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), 16:138–51.
2. David E. Fishman, Embers Plucked from the Fire: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna (New York: YIVO, 2009), 1–2.
3. Fishman, Embers Plucked from the Fire, 2.
4. Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2002), diary entry for February 28, 1942, 220.
5. See Fishman, Embers Plucked from the Fire.
6. Quoted in Fishman, Embers Plucked from the Fire, 3–4.
7. Fishman, Embers Plucked from the Fire, 4–5.
8. Fishman, Embers Plucked from the Fire.
9. Quoted in Lawrence Langer, Art from the Ashes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 570–71.
10. Rachel Pupko-Krinsky, “Laurel Trees of Wiwulskiego,” in The Root and the Bough: The Epic of an Enduring People, ed. Leo W. Schwarz (New York: Rinehart, 1949), 158.
11. I am grateful to Professor Barbara Henry of the University of Washington for her translation of this poem.
12. Pupko-Krinsky, “Laurel Trees,” 162.
13. I am grateful to Ann Brener of the U.S. Library of Congress for making me aware of the medieval imagery that this poem evokes.
14. David H. Hirsch, “Abraham Sutzkever’s Vilna Poems,” Modern Language Studies 16, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 38.
15. David E. Fishman, “Like Embers Plucked from the Fire: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna,” in The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, ed. Jonathan A. Rose (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 72.
16. Yehiel Szeintuch, “Kaczerginski, Shmaryahu,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 775–76.
17. “Avrom Sutzkever” (obituary), The Telegraph, February 16, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/7252012/Avrom-Sutzkever.html.
18. Rita Reiff, “AUCTIONS; 1400’s Bible from Prague,” New York Times, April 13, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/04/13/arts/auctions-1400-s-bible-from-prague.html.
19. Herbert C. Zafren, “From Hochshule to Judaica Conservancy Foundation: The Guttmann Affair,” Jewish Book Annual 47 (1989/1990): 10–11.
20. Douglas C. McGill, “Hebrew Books Sale Protested,” New York Times, June 19, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/19/books/hebrew-books-sale-protested.html.
21. CCAR Yearbook 94 (1984): 152.
22. Douglas C. McGill, “Hebrew Books and Manuscripts Sold,” New York Times, June 27, 1984.
23. Douglas C. McGill, “State Accuses Sotheby’s of Fraud in Selling of Hebrew Manuscript,” New York Times, August 14, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/14/arts/state-accuses-sotheby-s-of-fraud-in-selling-of-hebrew-manuscripts.html.
24. Michael A. Meyer, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion at One Hundred Years (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1976), 125–27.
25. Douglas C. McGill, “Ohio Professor Says He Was Smuggler of Hebrew Books,” New York Times, August 16, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/16/books/ohio-professor-says-he-was-smuggler-of-hebrew-books.html.
26. Zafren, “From Hochshule to Judaica Conservancy Foundation,” 20.
27. Unless otherwise specified, information about the Sarajevo Haggadah is from Geraldine Brooks, “The Book of Exodus: A Double Rescue in Wartime Sarajevo,” New Yorker, December 3, 2007.
28. For information on this story, see http://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/degrum/public_html/html/research/findaids/dg0812f.html. See also Louise Borden, The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H. A. Rey, illus. Allan Drummond (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
29. Dinitia Smith, “How Curious George Escaped the Nazis,” New York Times, September 13, 2005.
1. Almanach de Saxe Gotha, “House of Solms,” http://almanachdegotha.org/id102.html.
2. Joseph Driscoll, “Stolen Jewish Religious Data Is Recovered,” New York Herald Tribune, April 16, 1945, 13.
3. Jeremy Howard, “‘Schottenschift: A Quiet Mix’: Artists of the Scottish Diaspora, Their Integration with and Contribution to European Visual Culture,” in A Shared Legacy: Essays on Irish and Scottish Art and Visual Culture, ed. Fintan Cullen and John Morrision (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2005), 20. Driscoll lists Princess Solms-Braunfels’s husband as “Pitcairn Knowles”—no first name—and describes him as “an English national and a concert pianist,” but every other reference I have found describes him as a painter.
4. Robert Richards, “Nazi Art Loot Seized in Lair of Jew-Baiter: Treasure Uncovered by Brooklyn Boy Who Fled Hitler Race War,” New York World Telegram, April 9, 1945.
5. Violet Brown and Walter Crosby, “Jew Finds Hebrew Collection Nazis Stole in Lie Drive: Boro Lieutenant’s Discovery of Manuscripts, Paintings Avenges His Flight from Vienna,” Brooklyn Eagle, April 9, 1945.
6. National Archives and Records Administration, Records Concerning the Central Collecting Points (“Ardelia Hall Collection”): Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point, 1945–1952, “Monthly Report: Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, April 1945,” http://www.fold3.com/image/231965766/, 16.
7. National Archives and Records Administration, “Report of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas, Washington, 1946,” National Archives Catalog ID: 1518823, http://www.fold3.com/image/270463369/.
8. Driscoll, “Stolen Jewish Religious Data.”
9. “Geschichte, Sanierung, Räume: Entwicklung des Hungener Schlosses,” Schloss Hungen website, http://www.freundeskreis-schloss-hungen.de/geschichte.
10. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Stone to FDR, December 8, 1942.
11. Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hung in History (New York: Center Street, 2009).
Epigraph: Adele Tauber, “Seymour Pomrenze and the Spoils of War,” Heritage (Winter 2013), http://www.mydigitalpublication.com/display_article.php?id=1257685.
1. Chaya Pomrenze, personal interview with author, May 1, 2012.
2. Col. S. J. Pomrenze, “Offenbach Reminiscences: The Netherlands Experience,” William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, “The Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States,” JCR/JRSO[3] Pomrenze, 2.
3. Col. S. J. Pomrenze, “The Restitution of Jewish Cultural Treasures after the Holocaust: The Offenbach Archival Depot’s Role in the Fulfillment of U.S. International and Moral Obligations (A First Hand Account),” Association of Jewish Libraries, Rosaline and Myer Feinstein Lecture Series, 2002, 2.
4. Jonathan Mark, “The Monuments Men,” Jewish Week, October 23, 2012.
5. Pomrenze, “Offenbach Reminiscences,” 3.
6. Pomrenze, “Offenbach Reminiscences,” 14.
7. Mark, “The Monuments Men.”
8. Chaya Pomrenze interview.
9. “Offenbach Archival Depot Monthly Report, March 31, 1946,” 8.
10. Tauber, “Seymour Pomrenze and the Spoils of War.”
11. Dana Herman, “Hashevat Avedah: A History of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc.” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2008), 5.
12. Pomrenze, “Offenbach Reminiscences,” 10.
13. “Offenbach Archival Depot Monthly Report, March 31, 1946,” 54.
14. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938–1947 (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 312–13.
15. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time, 279.
16. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time, 323.
17. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time, 322, 324.
18. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 173.
19. Quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 172.
20. Herbert A. Friedman, Roots of the Future (Jerusalem: Gefen, 1999), 107–8.
21. Friedman, Roots of the Future, 108.
22. Quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 179.
23. Friedman, Roots of the Future, 112.
Epigraph: Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, supplement to “Tentative List of Jewish Cultural Treasures,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (1946): 6.
1. Weather Source, “Official Weather: New York NY, http://weathersource.com/account/official-weather?location=New+York%2c+ny&start-date=12%2f01%2f1946&end-date=12%2f01%2f1946&subscription-demo=1&sid=n687s8alab4rdcqabboduvf6i5&search=1&station-id=27638&latitude=40.7484&longitude=-73.9861.
2. Shoshana Baron Tancer, personal interview with author, March 9, 2014.
3. On Clay’s personality, see “Booknotes” interview with Jean Edward Smith, November 18, 1990, http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/15031-1/Jean+Edward+Smith.aspx.
4. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 133–34.
5. Israel Gutman and Robert Rozett, “Appendix 6, Estimated Losses during the Holocaust,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 4:1799. Gutman and Rozett list the prewar Jewish population of Europe as 9,796,840 and the Jewish losses as at least 5,596,029 and no more than 5,800,129.
6. Salo Baron, “Reflections on the Future of the Jews of Europe,” Contemporary Jewish Record 3, no. 4 (July–August 1940): 369, quoted in Dana Herman, “Hashevat Avedah: A History of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc.” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2008), 36–37.
7. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 39.
8. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 39–40.
9. Henry L. Feingold, The Jewish People in America, vol. 4, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream, 1920–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 261.
10. Cecil Roth, “The Restoration of Jewish Libraries, Archives and Museums,” Contemporary Jewish Record 7, no. 3 (June 1944): 253, quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 45.
11. Judah Leon Magnes, “‘Like All the Nations?’ (1930),” in The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, ed. Arthur Herzberg (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 444.
12. Magnes to Pinson, May 3, 1946, quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 60–61.
13. Robert Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 237.
14. Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, “Tentative List,” 1–103.
15. Liberles, Salo Wittmayer Baron, 238.
16. Salo W. Baron, “The Spiritual Reconstruction of European Jewry,” Commentary 1, no. 1 (November 1945): 4.
17. Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, “Tentative List,” 7.
18. Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, “Tentative List,” 5.
19. On the Danish proposal, see Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 66–80.
20. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 57.
21. Theodor Gaster to Dr. Luther Evans, December 30, 1945, quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 75.
22. Seymour Pomrenze to Salo Baron, 15 May 1946, quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 75n147.
23. OMGUS (Signed by Clay) to Adjutant General, War Department, Ref # WX-94368, National Archives and Records Administration, pub. # DN1924, National Archives ID # 4857882, HMS Entry Number A1 589, July 15, 1946.
24. To General J. H. Hilldring, Assistant Secretary of State, from Jerome Michael; Commission of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, letter, August 26, 1946, Library of Congress, Library of Congress European Mission Papers, Restitution of Unrestituted Materials File, Box 34.
25. Dr. Blattberg’s report on the conference with General Clay on 1 December 1946 at the Waldorf Astoria (lasted two hours), 3 December 1946, 361/C232/7, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati OH.
1. JCR certificate of incorporation, quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 129.
2. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 181.
3. Senator to Baron, August 31, 1947, quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 182.
4. Michael J. Kurtz, America and the Return of Nazi Contraband: The Recovery of Europe’s Cultural Treasures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 160–62.
5. Plunder and Restitution: Findings and Recommendations of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States and Staff Report, December 2000, chap. 5, “Restitution of Victims’ Assets,” http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/pcha/PlunderRestitution.html/html/StaffChapter5.html#anchor2702685.
6. David Jacoby, “Starr, Joshua,” in Berenbaum and Skolnik, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., 15:342–43.
7. Adam Dunn, “Nazis and the Mysterious ‘Gold Train,’” CNN, October 30, 2002, http://edition.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/books/10/30/gold.train/index.html; http://www.futureboy.us/fsp/dollar.fsp?quantity=350¤cy=dollars&fromYear=1945.
8. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 183–84.
9. Samuel C. Heilman, Portrait of American Jews: Last Half of the 20th Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 37–38.
10. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 190–91.
11. Kurtz, America and the Return of Nazi Contraband, 163–64.
12. Kurtz, America and the Return of Nazi Contraband, 164; Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 194–95.
13. On the Baltic Collection, see Kurtz, America and the Return of Nazi Contraband, 166–68; Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 267–68; Plunder and Restitution, chap. 6, “Heirless Assets and the Role of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc.,” http://pcha.ushmm.org/PlunderRestitution.html/html/StaffChapter6.html.
14. Cf. Elisabeth Young-Breul, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Curiously, even though Arendt’s spent six months in Europe working on behalf of JCR and continued leading the organization until her death in 1975, Young-Breul’s 563-page biography devotes only two pages and a few additional passing references to Arendt’s work with the organization.
15. Salo Baron, “Personal Notes: Hannah Arendt (1906–1975),” Jewish Social Studies 38, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 187–89.
16. Malachi Bet-Arié, “The Worms Mahzor: Its History and Its Paleographic and Codicological Characteristics,” in Worms Mahzor, ed. Malachi Bet-Arié (Vaduz: Cyelar, 1985), accessed from http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/mss/worms/pdf/1eng.pdf.
17. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 204–5.
18. Bob Fastovsky, personal email correspondence with the author, April 7–8, 2014.
19. Arendt to libraries receiving JCR books, September 1949, William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, “The Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, Yeshiva University.”
20. Heinrich Blucher to Hannah Arendt, December 8, 1949, quoted in Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, 1936–1968 (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 103.
21. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 211–14.
22. Salo Baron to Hannah Arendt, August 10, 1950, quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 222.
23. Shoshana Baron Tancer, personal interview.
24. Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 326.
25. Quoted in Herman, “Hashevat Avedah,” 280.
1. Devin Naar, interview with the author, February 29, 2012.
2. Avital Chizik, “Putin Refuses to Let the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Library Leave Moscow,” Tablet Magazine, September 30, 2013.
3. Ellen Barry, “In Big New Museum, Russia Has a Message for Jews: We Like You,” New York Times, November 8, 2012.
4. Meir Alfesi, “Putin Announces Books Return,” COLlive, June 13, 2013, http://collive.com/show_news.rtx?id=25714&alias=putin-announces-books-return.
5. Chizik, “Putin Refuses.”
6. Roberta Newman, “Reuniting YIVO’s Prewar Collections: Digitally,” Yedies fun YIVO: News from YIVO, November 8, 2013, http://www.yivo.org/blog/index.php/2013/11/08/reuniting-yivos-prewar-collections-digitally/; Lyudmila Sholokhova, personal email correspondence with the author, February 2014.
7. Jonathan Brent, “The Last Books,” Jewish Ideas Daily, May 1, 2013.
8. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 103–23.