Full Circle: Following a Journey of a Book from the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies

The virtual library

At the Library of Lost Books, each book is a traveler, making its way through time and space. The provenance marks – stamps, labels and handwritten notes inside the book – are the milestones of the book’s journey. It would be amazing if we could follow the journey of each book from the moment it leaves the publishing house to its current location. Unfortunately, that is not the case for the vast majority of the books from our virtual catalog. For all of them, World War II became the turning point in their journey, dividing their story into “before” and “after”. Most of the books looted by the Nazis have yet to reappear, leaving both their “after” stories a mystery to us. Our ideal goal would be to find all of them and determine every possible station on their way.

There are two major states of books in our virtual library: missing and resurfaced. It is exactly what it says on the tin: the former are the ones that were looted and never came back; the latter have been discovered at various libraries across the world. If you look closely, you might also

notice a small selection of Featured books. These are the books that we first had considered missing, but found them as our research progressed. Therefore, the status of the books changed to resurfaced.

Let’s take a look behind the scenes of our provenance research and follow the journey of one of the featured books. We’ll see which tools are the most helpful, what are the steps we take when dealing with the book, and how you can do the same.

Missing and resurfaced: terminology broken down

What does it mean for the book to go from Missing to Resurfaced? To answer that question, we need to ask another two: where do we get our missing books list from? How do we know which books belonged to the Higher Institute?

Unfortunately, no catalog of the Higher Institute’s library survived the war. There are, however, secondary sources which provide a sneak peek into this enormous collection of books. Over the years, the Higher Institute published a yearly report on its activities, which also included a list of hundreds of books received by its library, either purchased or donated. Among the donors were some of the most famous figures of Jewish intellectual life in Europe. Sometimes the books were donated in bulk by the families of a deceased intellectual. In many cases, authors themselves donated their freshly printed books to the Higher Institute, which shows that its library was definitely considered one of the primary addresses for any book related to Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, religious studies and many other topics.

The information in the annual reports is often too concise and not always 100% correct, so thorough additional research is needed to determine the exact bibliographic data for each of the books and form a dataset. Later, this dataset is uploaded to our website and becomes part of our virtual library. The books are marked as missing, since we don’t know what happened to them. The last station we can be sure about is 1942, when the books were looted by the Nazis. But what happened next? Were the volumes destroyed? Or were they transported to the Nazi “research” libraries? Are they now at a university library or in some private collection?

Die hebräische Sprache: a book rediscovered

Leo Metmann, the famous Jewish educator, founder of the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium and one of the founders of Tel Aviv city, published his dissertation Die hebräische Sprache : ihre Geschichte und lexikalische Entwicklung seit Abschluss des Kanons und der grammatischer Bau des Verbums in der Gegenwart in 1904 in Jerusalem. In 1908, another edition was released by the same publisher, Abraham Moshe Luncz. According to the Higher Institute’s annual report, Metmann sent it to the Higher Institute in 1912, together with another of his books. At that point, no further information was known about the book, so in terms of the database, we considered it missing.

A screenshot from the Library of Lost Books: Die hebräische Sprache by Leo Mettman.

Using our virtual library, anyone can look up any of the books in their closest library (here is the list of the missing books). That’s what I did: when I came across Leo Metmann’s book in the annual report, I looked it up at our library at LBI Jerusalem. By a lucky coincidence, the copy that we hold is indeed the one that belonged to the Higher Institute! But how did I determine that?

The various provenance marks inside the book.

Metmann’s book contains about a dozen various provenance marks, each of them representing a stop on its complicated journey. The Higher Institute stamp, its signature and various other signs indicate that it was, indeed, part of the Higher Institute’s library. So, unless the library held another copy of the same edition, chances are high that this is the exact book that appears in the annual report, and the missing book turns into a resurfaced one.

The provenance marks also help us follow the previously unknown part of the book’s journey. The Reich Security Main Office’s (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) handwritten signature tells us that after being looted in 1942, the book was processed by the forced laborers in Berlin between the fall of 1942 and the summer of 1943, when some of the books were taken away to the depots. The books that survived until the end of the war were then salvaged by different parts of the Allied Forces. The books that could not have been restituted were given over to the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR) – this is what happened to this book as well, as the JCR label demonstrates.

JCR label on the flyleaf

And finally, 115 years after the book’s publication in Jerusalem, it made a full circle and returned to Jerusalem, resurfacing at Leo Baeck Institute.

The Higher Institute stamp next to the LBI stamp.

A screenshot of the map demonstrating the trajectory of Die jüdische Sprache’s travel: you see it enter Berlin and leave it years later.

The sequence of events that Die jüdische Sprache went through

Can I do the same?

You don’t need to be physically near a library to find a missing book. Many libraries have online catalogs, some of which even include digitized versions of books. All you need to do is go through our list of missing books and try and find any of them at a library of your choice. If the copy you find – either physically or digitally – has a Higher Institute stamp or any other Higher Institute provenance mark (here’s a checklist to help you in your research), congratulations, you have found a lost book of the Higher Institute of Jewish Studies! Let us know, and we will update the book’s status to Resurfaced.