Many of us know Lea Goldberg primarily as a poet and children’s author. But she was also a playwright, painter, editor, translator, teacher, and literary scholar. She produced a myriad of classic Hebrew poems and stories, many of which remain present and popular in Israeli culture to this day.
It’s for this reason that it’s somewhat surprising to learn that she also wrote “The Samaritan Translation of the Pentateuch [the Torah] – A Study of the Manuscript Source”. Not exactly the usual fare of her poems and stories, nor the Shakespeare and Moliere plays she translated into Hebrew. But this was indeed one of her first works.
Specifically, it is her doctoral thesis, written in German. In it, she studied medieval manuscripts in order to compare the Onkelos translation of the Jewish Torah into Aramaic with translations of the Samaritan Torah into the same language.
Her subject was chosen for her by her supervisor, Professor Paul Kahle of the University of Bonn in Germany, where she studied in 1932-1933. She very much liked Prof. Kahle, a world-renowned scholar of biblical linguistics, but she was less thrilled with the subject she had been tasked with researching. Prof. Kahle got her photocopies of Samaritan manuscripts from the University of Cambridge and elsewhere, which she analyzed in order to understand the character of known translations of the Torah.
After Goldberg made Aliyah to the Land of Israel in 1935, the Bonn University Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies printed and distributed her study as part of a series of publications by the institute. A number of copies of her thesis ultimately reached the collection of the National Library of Israel. All the copies are identical – except one which contains various stamps and marks hinting at a long and complicated journey. This unusual copy intrigued me, so I decided to try and understand what it had been through.
The cover page of this copy features a square stamp with writing in German. The stamp belongs to the “The Institute for Research on the Jewish Question” (Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage) of the “Reich Institute for the History of New Germany” (Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands).
The institute was founded in 1935, and had opened a research division to study the “Jewish question” in the city of Munich. As a “research institute,” its directors tried to build up a respectable library, most of which was looted from Jewish libraries in Nazi Germany.
In the years before WWII, institute director Walter Frank tried to build up a professional library containing a collection focused on the Jewish question, and he would not suffice with shelves laden with random Jewish books. During the war, the collection had between 25,000 and 30,000 books, which even included a number of incunabula – rare early printed books, produced in the first few decades after the invention of the printing press. The institute collected first editions and various printings of the literature of the Jewish sages, Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah codex, the Shulchan Aruch law code, and the literature of Jewish movements including Hasidism, Haskalah, Karaism, and Zionism.
Despite support from the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, the institute suffered from financial instability, making it difficult to maintain the collection. Frank wanted to get his hands on the important Jewish library in Frankfurt, and when he failed, he tried to get ahold of other libraries in Berlin and Breslau. The library staff took care to stamp all of its books with the institute’s seal. The institute had two stamps: One was rectangular and simply presented the institute’s title, while the second was circular and featured the Nazi eagle emblem, the Reichsadler. Each book was also given a serial number made up of a Latin letter and a number, glued to the corner of the book. The copy of Lea Goldberg’s thesis also had one – T552.
Despite its efforts to accumulate as many looted Jewish books as possible, the institute’s library had difficulty competing with stronger bodies such as the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and the Advanced School of the Nazi Party (Hohe Schule der NSDAP) which had its own “Institute for Research on the Jewish question” in Frankfurt. These different Nazi bodies looted millions of books from institutions and personal collections throughout Europe during the war.
A substantial number of looted books were discovered after the war by American forces, who transferred the stolen items to a large warehouse in the city of Offenbach, near Frankfurt. There, they were cataloged with the aim of returning them to the countries they were stolen from. As part of the process, some of them were given the warehouse’s stamp.
In 1947, American forces found the books looted by Frank’s library and transferred them to Offenbach. Among these books was a copy of Lea Goldberg’s doctoral thesis. Workers at the Offenbach warehouse added their own circular stamp, making the cover of the thesis a kind of symbolic battleground between the Nazis and the Allies. At first, the Americans didn’t know what to do with the half a million or so books in the warehouse, including Goldberg’s work. Who should they return them to? Who were they stolen from?
In general, this is how the Offenbach warehouse operated: The books whose prior ownership was unknown remained in the warehouse. In 1949, the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction organization sent representatives who were given the responsibility of distributing the remaining books.
The Hebrew University’s “Committee for the Salvaging of Diaspora Treasures” was among the leading components of the JCR. The Hebrew University and its library – which later became the National Library of Israel – sent representatives to Germany to help catalog and select items from those remaining at the warehouses. Ultimately, some 200,000 books were sent to the young State of Israel.
For the next twenty years, representatives of the National Library, sometimes in tandem with the Ministry of Religions, worked to bring hundreds of thousands more books to Israel. The National Library kept those items which were missing from its collection, and the rest were sent to other institutions in Israel.
Each and every book handled by the JCR contains a label with the organization’s logo, informing the book’s readers that it was originally stolen by the Nazis. Lea Goldberg’s book contains such a label, which is very familiar to staff at the National Library of Israel. Once the National Library received the book, the Library’s own stamp was also added. We don’t know if Goldberg herself ever saw this particular copy of her work, but she certainly knew of the National Library’s efforts to bring Jewish books from Europe to Israel after the Holocaust.
How do we know? In the early fifties, Goldberg wrote the play Lady of the Castle (Hebrew), whose debut performance took place in September 1955 at the Cameri theater. The play tells of two Zionist emissaries from the Land of Israel who arrive at a castle in the middle of a European forest one stormy night. There, they discover a young Jewish girl and try to convince her to come with them to the Land of Israel. The two emissaries are Dora Ringel, a representative of the “Youth Aliyah” movement who is seeking out children who survived the Holocaust, and the librarian Michael Zand, who is sent by the National Library to bring back books stolen by the Nazis to Israel.
The figure of Michael Zand is reminiscent of Shlomo Shunami, who for many years served as one of the National Library’s senior librarians. Aside from his extensive work as a librarian, Shunami also travelled across Europe to seek out books from Jewish libraries and private collections which survived the Holocaust. In most cases, the owners and users of these collections and libraries were murdered by the Nazis and their helpers.
In some cases, the only testaments to their lives and their communal institutions are these books, some of which serve as silent monuments of paper on the shelves of the National Library of Israel.
