Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith

12. Libraries with and without Walls

12 Libraries with and without Walls In the last decades of the nineteenth century, local associations preserved historical landmarks, scholars and educators popularized Jewish history in lectures and public celebrations, and libraries furthered the dissemination and preservation of the common heritage. Earlier, in 1861, Abraham Geiger noted that “the most eloquent witness for the respect of the spiritual work is the foundation and maintenance of a library . A library provides not only nutrition for the spirit, but is also a monument to the spirit where our ancestors are gathered. . . . A library pictorially represents for us the ties of times, where gray antiquity is intertwined with the bright present.” By the end of the nineteenth century , these words were again cited in the report of the Jewish community library in Berlin.1 A library represented not only continuity with the past but was a site of memory that testified to the increasing dissemination and canonization of works by Wissenschaft’s scholars. During the 1890s, community leaders and members of the Association for Jewish History and Literature propagated the establishment of Jewish libraries to secure knowledge about a fleeting Jewish past.2 With the creation of the so-called Lesehallen (reading halls), the number of Jewish libraries steadily increased.3 The Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeindebund, Masonic lodges, Jewish communities, and other Jewish societies subsidized the Lesehallen, which were primarily located in 132 urban centers like Breslau, Berlin, Frankfurt a. M., and Hamburg.4 In addition, efforts were made to bring these libraries to the rural areas. The Frankfurt a. M. lodge, for example, had a travel library from the beginning of the twentieth century.5 There, Jewish book collections were open to the public in the Lesehalle, the Frankfurt lodge, the Monte fiore Society, the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (Association for the defense against anti-Semitism), and other Jewish educational institutions.6 In Berlin, readers had access to the community and Bet Midrash libraries, the Jüdische Lesehalle und Bibliothek (Jewish reading hall and library), the library of the Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund, the library of the Masonic lodges, as well as those of smaller societies like the Academic Society for Jewish History and Literature.7 Borrowing privileges were often restricted to paying members, while nonmembers usually read books in the reading room.8 In the case of the library of the Jewish Community Council in Berlin, the young Gershom Scholem only needed to provide a note from his mother before he could use the collection.9 Although the opening hours of some community libraries were fairly restricted, the library of the Henry-Jones Lodge and the reading hall in Berlin were open during the week and on the weekends, and were especially popular on Saturdays.10 By and large these libraries were extensively used; in 1899, approximately 50 users frequented the Berlin reading hall daily, while about 200 patrons borrowed books from the library throughout the year.11 From 1906 to 1910, more than 300 readers used the library yearly and checked out close to half of the collection, while the reading room had over 20,000 visitors per year.12 In 1907, the considerably smaller reading hall in Frankfurt a. M., which possessed only 1,232 volumes, had 144 users check out books 1,496 times, while 5,704 readers used the library.13 The collections of the various libraries usually contained a significant number of scholarly and popular histories of the Jews, and next to literature and popularscienti fic works, these books were frequently taken out.14 The libraries aimed at gathering all relevant Jewish texts. Berlin’s Jewish school library, for example, had amassed by the end of the 1880s “one hundred volumes in which all of the stories of the Jewish past and present, biographical accounts of famous men of Judaism, descriptions of Jewish travelers . . . in short everything, that could arouse the children’s feelings.”15 While this rhetoric appealed to an image of completeness , the question of which books to regard as essential in light of the rapidly expanding production of newspapers, periodicals, and historical works became increasingly difficult if not impossible to answer. Libraries with and without Walls 133 Often donations, rather than planned acquisitions, made up libraries’ holdings.16 Moreover, funding restrictions affected the sizes of their collections. Whereas the Jewish reading hall boasted a collection of 7,200 volumes in 1910, association libraries in Danzig and Bochum contained 600...