Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in den Archiven der neuen Bundesländer (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 632 Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Reinhard Rürup. Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in den Archiven der neuen Bundesländer. Munich: K. G. Sauer, 1999. Vol. 3: Staatliche Archive der Länder Berlin, Brandenburg, und Sachsen-Anhalt. Pp. xxvi + 588. Vol. 4: Staatliche Archive der Länder Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, Sachsen und Thüringen. Pp. xxiii + 702. Archives are peculiar places. They collect documents and combine them in a modern historiographical bricolage that gives the single item its status as a source. With the publication of volumes 3 and 4 of their archival guides to Jewish history as it is chronicled in the archives of the new German states, entitled Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in den Archiven der neuen Bundesländer (Sources for the History of the Jews in the Archives of the New Federal States), Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Reinhardt Rürup have carried out an exhaustive assemblage. These guides are the fruits of the combined labor of the Leo Baeck Institutes and the Institute for Historical Science of the Technische Universität Berlin. With two more guides scheduled to appear, the project, which is financed by the German interior ministry (Bundesinnenministerium), will list in entirety the rich collections of states, regions, cities, communities, churches, and other institutions. Among the thousands of documents that chronicle mainly 19th- and 20th-century Jewish history (with a particular emphasis on the Nazi era), one of the guides also inventories collections such as the internal Jewish sources for Mecklenburg covering the period from 1750 to 1938. Browsing through the works, one also comes across sources for diverse subjects, from Jewish book publishing in Saxony to the personal archives of Rudolf Mosse, as well as the various collections of local communities. The deliberately open title of the volumes, "Sources for the History of the Jews," signals, moreover, that historians of German Jewry are not the only scholars who will find these volumes helpful. As they did in the series' first two volumes, Jersch-Wenzel and Rürup have carefully prepared these collections, which will certainly lead to many more studies. The useful and substantial indices, arranged according to person , place, and institution, offer a fairly easy way of perusing the material. Yet one wonders if future archivists and historians will soon find a way to present this type of material in a more accessible and less cumbersome fashion. In the end, the indices provide only limited access that could be improved significantly if one were able to push the "find" key, which is rapidly becoming a not merely familiar, but standard, means of tracking information. University of SouthamptonNils Roemer ...