Review of Jason Lustig’s A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture

What is most unique and generative in Lustig’s text is his comparative approach to Jewish archives, showing how the style of archiving and the location of a given archive make a political and social argument. Throughout all Lustig’s case studies is a long-standing aspiration for a “total archive of Jewish history” which aspired toward an encyclopedic completeness across paper, microfilm, and digital media, an urge which can be found both before and after the Holocaust. ^{8 8} Lustig, A Time to Gather, 83. A Time to Gather tells a complex narrative of Jewish archives before and after the Holocaust, with a focus on archives in Germany, Israel, and the United States. The first chapter covers the ambitions of the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden as a combination of various German Jewish archives with an aim toward completeness after its establishment in 1903 and its later capture by the Nazis in 1943. The second chronicles the establishment of the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem in 1939 (renamed the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in 1969), with its leaders’ ambitions of total archiving “rooted in a German Jewish cultural context and notions of professional archival practice.” ^{9 9} Lustig, A Time to Gather, 79. This chapter begins to engage with some of the high stakes questions of the book: after a crime such as the Holocaust, is reparation to be found in returning property to the country of origin itself or in distribution to locations with larger Jewish populations such as Jerusalem? The third chapter, the most compelling of the book in my view, discusses Jacob Rader Marcus’s founding of the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. The American historian Marcus had spent time in Germany learning “with the Gesamtarchiv’s Jacob Jacobson and studied at the University of Berlin and the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums alongside Alex Bein,” a central figure of the Jewish Historical General Archives and long time state archivist of Israel. ^{10 10} Lustig, A Time to Gather, 85. Unlike Bein and Jacobson, Marcus was as interested in photocopies as originals and saw documents primarily as information. His concept was of what he would term “‘omniterritoriality’ which tied the notion of Jewish dispersal with the security in keeping copies of archives in far-off places under the specter of atomic war.” ^{11 11} Lustig, A Time to Gather, 91. The fourth chapter discusses several intensely contested attempts to reestablish Jewish archives in Germany after the Holocaust. The fifth and last chapter of the book brings us to the digital age, covering the amalgamated archive of the several institutions contained in the Center for Jewish History in New York City and particularly the recent projects of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research to digitize material across the New York collection and the former archive in Lithuania, lost following the Holocaust. The process around YIVO has been particularly significant in its making possible, through digitization and collaboration across institutions, a reunion of archival material that had been separated for many years. For understanding the place of YIVO in relation to other Jewish archives, Lustig’s book is significant. There is also important precedent in Lustig’s book for other digitization projects of similar ambition, such as the Yiddish Book Center’s aim to digitize all Yiddish books. What is particularly helpful for the scholar interested in the archivization of Yiddish sources is the recognition of how much these issues connect to the broader question of Jewish archives.

There are many further strengths to Lustig’s book. His narrative is at once geographically diverse and surprisingly consistent, with many figures appearing in multiple instances. His own archival research is meticulous. He identifies a genuine and consistent aim toward totality — a singularly representative resource — in Jewish archives, one seen to the present. His provocation to consider these as “community-based” archives is significant and opens important possibilities toward comparative approaches to teaching Jewish archives alongside, for example, LGBTQ+ or African American archives. ^{12 12} For two parallel projects see: Cait McKinney, Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020) and Laura Helton, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024). To form a Jewish archive (as opposed to a German Jewish, Israeli, or Yiddishist archive) is thus intrinsically to work across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Returning to October 7, one wonders how much we should consider the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History and the National Library in Israel together at all. The narratives the two institutions are archiving are both framed as Jewish but are told in different locations and languages. Should there be an effort to gather the two together or should their particularity be preserved? The approach of Jewish and minoritarian ‘omniterritoriality’ proposed by Marcus feels most helpful. ^{13 13} On this, see Caryn S. Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York: NYU Press, 2005) and Melissa Weininger, Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2023). An argument made by Alex Bein for sending many documents from Hamburg to Jerusalem was that they “could only be appropriately put to use in Jerusalem, where they would be alongside the archives of hundreds of other Jewish communities and at the disposal of scholars who could work with the Hebrew-language documents.” ^{14 14} Lustig, A Time to Gather, 132. In the years since Bein wrote, as Jewish diasporic life has evolved and possibilities of travel have evolved, more Hebrew and Yiddish speaking scholars flow between Israel, the United States and beyond to research original documents. As well, digitization allows for access outside of the archive’s direct communities. Just as the cities of Jerusalem and New York are polylinguistic, so can be their Jewish archives. Local networked archives, across various countries and through digital supplementation along the model offered by YIVO, seem to offer the most possibility for creating a portrait of Jewish life today for future generations and for ensuring that the communities included will be able to have access. Perhaps now is the time to embrace archival dispersion.