A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust by Elisabeth Gallas (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust by Elisabeth Gallas Kathy Peiss Elisabeth Gallas. A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust. Translated by Alex Skinner. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 416 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000252 A Mortuary of Books is a significant new study of the rescue and restitution of looted Jewish books in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Elisabeth Gallas builds on a rich and growing scholarship that explores the response of Allied policymakers, the American military government, and Jewish organizations to cultural devastation. A revised version of her 2013 book, translated from the German, A Mortuary of Books examines the Jewish groups that came together after the war to make a compelling legal and moral claim upon heirless looted books. At the same time, Gallas uncovers the profound meaning of these books for the Jewish intellectuals and scholars who worked tirelessly to save them. She begins with the establishment of the Offenbach Archival Depot, the key American military installation for the salvage of looted and displaced books, supervised by the army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section. Gallas focuses, however, on Jewish organizing and lobbying efforts in the United States, Great Britain, and Palestine, an effort that began during the war. Although the groups did not always see eye to eye, in the end they formed Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR), which the US government recognized in 1949 as the legal successor agency to handle orphaned and unidentifiable Jewish books. In three years, they distributed nearly 500,000 volumes and between 8,000 and 10,000 ritual objects. Together the United States and Israel received the bulk of these works, with the remainder allotted to Great Britain and other countries with Jewish populations. Only a small number went to Germany and none to Eastern Europe. Gallas highlights the innovative legal arguments used by JCR and its predecessors. Following long-standing policy, the Allies recognized only nation-states in restitution cases; they had no precedent to follow in the case of European Jews, whose communities had been destroyed and property stolen in Germany and German-occupied countries. Jewish legal experts argued that the restoration of Jewish heritage and communal life could not occur within the existing national framework for restitution. They argued instead for the recognition of a transnational Jewish collectivity as a legal, political, and cultural entity. The struggle over Jewish books was a formative, if largely unrecognized, moment in the evolution of ideas about transitional and restorative justice. An unusual coalition of Jewish scholars and intellectuals led this effort, which helps explain why there was such intense, even obsessive attention to books at a time of dire need among surviving European Jews. They included Salo Baron and Hannah Arendt, as leaders of the JCR; Gershom Scholem, who collected for the Hebrew University and collaborated with Arendt; and Lucy Dawidowicz, representing the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and laboring to identify YIVO books at Offenbach. Gallas eloquently [End Page 460] traces how their deep belief in the need to rescue Jewish cultural heritage shaped their immediate postwar aims and long-term intellectual work. The rescuers perceived books not only in material but also symbolic terms. Animating books with human qualities, they likened looted volumes to the murder of European Jews. "Saving these books," Rabbi Herbert Friedman of the United Jewish Appeal observed, "amounted to saving the People of the Book" (56). The books simultaneously memorialized the Jewish past and served as a spiritual and cultural foundation for the living. They represented historical continuity and rupture, not only as a matter of time, but also place. This is apparent in the shifting meaning of the term "reconstruction," which initially referred to the restoration of European Jewish culture, but by 1946 signified a Zionist and diasporic vision of the Jewish future. Yet the transnational Jewish collectivity was a construction, held together despite tensions over who should receive the books. JCR's American leaders believed US institutions should be a major beneficiary, given the nation's large Jewish population and the military's role in preserving them. Scholem and Judah L...