Book of the Day: No one imagined where the Nazi book-burning would lead.

In one of his first books, America’s great Jewish historian Jacob Marcus considered the political situation in Germany during the advent of Nazism. Surveying the scene from German unification in 1871 forward, Marcus was confident German Jews would adapt and thrive under the newly installed Hitler, a 1935 review in Foreign Affairs summarized. Few at that time could foresee what was to come; Marcus felt the long-established and highly-intellectual Jewish community could flourish there in all seasons. Marcus, who had obtained his PhD in Berlin just a decade earlier, wrote The Rise and Destiny of the German Jew as a summary, and commemoration of Jewish contributions to life in Europe’s most intellectual nation.

Marcus, like many in Germany and abroad, was a rational man who could not imagine a state pursuit of, not just the irrational, but the inconceivable, by utterly calculating, rational means. A fascinating review in The Tablet begins to uncover how the Nazis planned to rewrite history by destroying it:

The aftermath of the Holocaust sometimes feels like a violent river whose waters have taken decades to recede. First there were the survivors. Then there was the property to be reckoned with. Then, and continuingly, the art. Now the books are coming into sharper view. 

In his recent book on the Holocaust, A World Without Jews, Alon Confino uses the word “bibliocide” to describe the public burning of books that began with the work of banned (and far from exclusively Jewish) authors in May 1933. The Reich’s focus soon narrowed to Jewish texts, culminating in the widespread destruction of Hebrew Bibles ordered by Hitler in November 1938. In addition to setting fire to 1,400 synagogues and shattering Jewish shop windows—the particular act that gave Kristallnacht its name—Nazi storm troopers relieved synagogues throughout Germany of their Torah scrolls, which they took into the streets. Sometimes they trampled, kicked, drowned, or burned them; sometimes they forced Jews to. Spectators dressed up in the robes of rabbis and cantors and danced around the fire while military bands provided music to muffle the sobs of distraught onlookers. “The Nazis showed panache in announcing their identity by burning books, before they burned people,” Confino observes dryly. 

A parallel story was unfolding alongside all this flamboyant bibliocide, however. As early as 1937, even before Kristallnacht, officials of an agency known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA (Reich Security Head Office), planned to establish a library of Jewish books and began looting volumes from rabbinical seminaries throughout Germany. A second agency, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, was active outside of the Reich’s borders and occupied itself with collecting artwork, ritual silver, and musical instruments; it also had a special unit dedicated to the vacuuming up of Jewish books. Some of these were to supply material for the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, which was founded by the Nazis’ chief racial theorist, Alfred Rosenberg, who intended to tell the “true” history of the Jews in Germany with the aim, in time, of justifying the Final Solution. 

Rosenberg’s institute landed in the former Rothschild Library in Frankfurt; when the Allies began bombing the city in 1943, much of the library was transferred to the village of Hungen, where in 1945 six different repositories were later discovered to house 1,200,000 items. Between 1939 and 1945 it is estimated that the Nazis seized nearly 3 million books.

Michael Frank describes how attention is only beginning to turn to the fate of Jewish libraries, and, in particular, the lost treasures of the Roman ghetto. After the sudden relocation of everyone there, the books disappeared, and have never been found.

Dr. Marcus (1896-1995) was “the first trained historian of the Jewish people born in America and the first to devote himself fully to the scholarly study of America's Jews. Through the American Jewish Archives, which he founded in 1947, and through a parade of books—culminating in a magisterial, three-volume history entitled The Colonial American Jew: 1492–1776 (1970) and an even larger four-volume history of United States Jewry: 1776–1985 (1989-93), completed in his tenth decade of life—he defined, propagated, and profession­alized his chosen field, achieving renown as its founding father and dean,” the AJA website remembers.

Henry Bemis Books is pleased to offer Marcus’ celebration of German Jews’ contributions to western civilization, a book that, over time, has been a testament to never giving in, and never forgetting.

Marcus, Jacob R., Ph.D., The Rise and Destiny of the German Jew (Dept. of Synagogue and School Extension of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1st ed., 1934). Hardcover, no dust jacket, octavo, 417 pp.

Very good condition. Inscribed by the author on the front paper. Rare. HBB price: $45.

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