Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books

by Mark Glickman

Stolen Words is an epic story about the largest collection of Jewish books in the world—tens of millions of books that the Nazis looted from European Jewish families and institutions. Nazi soldiers and civilians emptied Jewish communal libraries, confiscated volumes from government collections, and stole from Jewish individuals, schools, and synagogues. Early in their regime the Nazis burned some books in spectacular bonfires, but most they saved, stashing the literary loot in castles, abandoned mine shafts, and warehouses throughout Europe. It was the largest and most extensive book-looting campaign in history.

 

After the war, Allied forces discovered these troves of stolen books but quickly found themselves facing a barrage of questions. How could the books be identified? Where should they go? Who had the authority to make such decisions? Eventually the military turned the books over to an organization of leading Jewish scholars called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc.—whose chairman was the acclaimed historian Salo Baron and whose on-the-ground director was the philosopher Hannah Arendt—with the charge of establishing restitution protocols.

 

Stolen Words is the story of how a free civilization decides what to do with the material remains of a world torn asunder, and how those remains connect survivors with their past. It is the story of Jews struggling to understand the new realities of their post-Holocaust world and of Western society’s gradual realization of the magnitude of devastation wrought by World War II. Most of all, it is the story of people —of Nazi leaders, ideologues, and Judaica experts; of Allied soldiers, scholars, and scoundrels; and of Jewish communities, librarians, and readers around the world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, World War II, War, Books About Books, Germany

344 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2015

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

We have all heard about the looting of Jewish Art, jewelry, furniture, the appropriation of real estate and business by the Third Reich as they rounded up and marched Jews away to killing fields or to the death camps...but I had never heard about the books, the great renown Jewish libraries which held some of the earliest books created by scribes, and some of the earliest printed texted in Europe. WE had all been told about the book burnnings, of which there were many, but I hadn't known that the Nazis actually collected millions and millions of Jewish books, and scrolls and archives which they looted from libraries and private homes, schools and synagogues. Two competing Nazi organizations the Rosenberg for the Mohe Schule and the Himmler for the RSHA fought over who could get to books and artifacts before each other.
To understand the sheer volume of texts one has to understand how the spoken and written word is valued within Jewish culture, where worn out and damaged texts are saved in special vaults, never destroyed. Given the hundreds and hundreds of years of a very robust Jewish diaspora spread through out Africa, Southwest Asia and Europe and Russia the cumulative collection of scrolls, tablets and books on vellum then parchment then paper was immense. To understand the history of Judaism through out this period and the number of scholars and philosophers, poets, storytellers, Jewish printing houses and the long history of anti-Semitism is to understand the many journeys these pages traveled across continents when exile and pograms drove Jews periodically across Europe and Asia and back again.
It is ironic how the Nazis were determined to slaughter every Jew within their reach yet put so much effort into saving their books and texts as they were sure by studying these they could have a rational scholastic reason to absolve them of the genocide they were creating.
This book covers the journeys of these book and collections once they came into Nazi hands, and the tragic loss of millions to bombing, fires and the vagaries of war or disappeared behind the Iron Curtain often to be lost or destroyed. General Lucas Clay was in charge of the occupied areas and was pivotal in securing the materials found in his sector by Archivists tasked with scouring Europe for collections. The heroes and heroines who worked to save texts from destruction and to catalog and to recover and work on ways to fairly redistribute the books of questionable and unknown origin to survivors and the post war Jewish communities.
This is written in a manner that I found intriguing, but the stories of books have always captivated me. To imagine a hand scribed manuscript that had been cherished and studied and read surviving from the 5th century through the journeys of the diaspora and still exist today after being looted and moved through countries in the midst of war and through storage depots and rediscovery, and recovery to be shipped to a new library where scholars and the Jewish community can access it...amazing. The sadness of knowing that the books survived and that the readers were no more.

[Ionia · Rating 5 out of 5]

We've all heard that the Nazis burned Jewish literature, and it has been well portrayed in films and books such as "the Book Thief," but Mark Glickman really sheds light on this tragedy a lot more fully with "Stolen Words."

If you are interested in the period surrounding the Nazi Regime's power and the many things that happened within the Jewish community at the time, then this will be an irresistible book for you. The author took care to not only tell the story of what happened to the literature and why, but to relate it to the many other events and happenings going on during the period.

I was fascinated by the account of how the books were returned to their rightful owners and how those people reacted when they were. This is a look at a side of history mostly ignored and a peeling back of the layers of everyday knowledge that most books and films focus on.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone looking to learn more about this subject. This book is emotional and moving--even though it is non-fiction.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher and provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

[Caron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! I really liked this book, and not just because my husband wrote it... That connection brought the book to the top of my reading list for sure, but I was really surprised how much I learned about the subject, after thinking I already had a pretty good working knowledge about the Nazis and the Holocaust. There are many stories told well, and lots of opportunities to learn interesting historical fact, without feeling like you are reading a textbook. I followed this book with a novel that shared a theme, "Broken for You" by Stephanie Kallos, and this was a fortuitous choice and added to the enjoyment of both. Now, to be a good wife and promote my wonderful author, Rabbi husband, please get his book! It's available from the publisher University of Nebraska Press, or I can set you up with a signed copy--just contact me, also Amazon, Kindle and on Audible (narrated by the author).

[Robert Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Draws you in. Could not stop reading

This author takes a seemingly boring, narrow, obscure topic and weaves an amazing narrative. Glickman elegantly links both the distant past with the Holocaust, detailed events of the post-war period up to and including 2012. Well written - you will not regret. Well footnoted

[Lorri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books is a book of sobering brilliance.

[Joels Davidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rabbi Mark Glickman delights once again with his latest book Stolen Words. This book recounts the saga of an overlooked group of survivors. The Jewish people are known as the People of the Book. For millennia we have cherished the written word. Before the era of printing, scrolls were painstakingly compiled. Much love and care was put into the composition of documents. The generous contents of the Cairo Genizah indicate that Medieval Mediterranean Jews were often loathe to part with writings, even with those of a mundane nature.
Rabbi Glickman leads the reader into the saga of Jewish books that survived the savage Nazi onslaught by recounting his acquisition of a rare copy of the Laws of Rabbi Isaac Alfasi. Inside he discovered a strange marking which puzzled him. The stamp bore the legend “Jewish Cultural Reconstruction”. Some more digging opened up an entire portal into a story not often told, of near despair and hope, of destruction and reconstruction and finally renaissance.
The Nazis were determined to get their hands on all the literary treasures of the Jewish nation. If their Jew-hating forbears were in the habit of looting and burning the precious holy books of the Jews, the Nazis had other plans. In Glickman’s words, “Nazi Germany worked hard not to destroy Jewish books but to save them”…They weren’t interested in editing or censoring..they wanted to study the volumes in their original form…they weren’t scared of Jewish books; they were fascinated by them…their efforts to preserve Jewish literature would have been utterly baffling to European leaders of the past..
The question, of course is, why? Why were the Nazis determined to preserve the Jewish literary riches?
Since the days of Luther, Goethe and Kant, the Germans were a bookish and book-loving people. For instance the Frankfurt Book Fair which began in the Middle Ages still continues going strong today.
The Nazis were not interested in Jews, they were however, paradoxically, very interested in all things Jewish. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, a grandiose scheme was hatched whereas several different Nazi agencies under the directorships of Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler were to to collect all Jewish items and eventually sort them and exhibit them in what was to become the “Museum of the Extinct Jewish Nation”.
By sequestering the Jewish material, the Nazis would not only accomplish the complete destruction of the flesh and blood Jew, but would also be in full control of everything that shaped his identity and in fact made a Jew a Jew. In fact Glickman writes that the Nazis were even interested in the Yiddish language; a linguist named Franz Beranzek argued that Germans should “reclaim” the study of Yiddish, claiming that it was actually a dialect of German and it could reveal “the racial and unique cultural foundation of Jewry”.
Tons of books and precious ritual items were looted from both Municipal as well as private-owned libraries (such as the famed Strashun Library in Vilna), from the centers of Ashkenazi Jewry to Sephardic points, (such as Salonika, Greece, known as “Jerusalem of the Balkans”), precious and priceless items; incunabula and documents from the Cairo Genizah, (including pages from the ancient- thought to be lost -hebrew Book of Ben Sira), that once belonged to the private library of Baron Edmund Rothschild, were shipped to various depots in Germany (Especially to the town of Offenbach) and other parts of Nazi-occupied eastern Europe.
The Nazis selected Jewish scholars to sort and organize what amounted to the detritus of a millennium of Jewish history of European Jewry. These Jews, scholars and librarians in their “former lives”, often risked their lives to hide and smuggle out their wares. But it wasn’t only Jews who undertook these risky endeavors; a courageous Muslim curator at the Bosnian National Museum, for instance, spirited the famed magnificent Sarajevo Haggadah to safety.
The devastation of war resulted in the permanent disappearance of many of these items but there were still tons of them left once the smoke cleared in 1945.
Various organizations, from Israel, The UK, and the US, sent scholars to asses the items that were sitting in warehouses now under American military administration. Great Jewish historians and scholars like Salo Baron, Gershom Scholem, and Lucy Dawidowicz spent hours poring over books and manuscripts and sometimes resorted to subterfuge in order to spirit the documents out of the lands that had become so drenched with Jewish blood.
The book abounds with interesting facts and anecdotes. For instance:
*In 1559, partly to quell the rise of Protestant sedition, Pope Paul IV issued something called Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books). It included the Talmud as well as other Jewish books. Later Popes issued revised lists but as late as 1948 Pope Piux XII issued a final version which included large sections of the Talmud, and the writings of Maimonides. It wasn’t until 1965 that Pope Paul VI abolished the list altogether.
*In Medieval times destruction of what was deemed objectionable Jewish material was also accomplished via less radical means than burning. In the late 13th century, King James I of Aragon introduced the Jewish book censor, history’s first official censor of Jewish books-Glickman informs us- was a Dominican priest by the name of Raymond Martini (or Ramon Marti). Many documents that have come down to us from that period show instances where texts, that were find offensive by the church, were simply blacked out with ink or cut out.
It is worth noting a great irony of history here. By engaging in intense study of Jewish texts (in order to refute them but also often attempting to demonstrate the truth of the Christian faith from within them), the Dominican did the Jewish people and the world of scholarship a great favor; he inadvertently left us a wealth of ancient Jewish material that was otherwise lost of censored into oblivion. According to Alexander Fidora in his THE LATIN TALMUD AND ITS INFLUENCE ON JEWISH-CHRISTIAN POLEMIC, Martini completed (in ca. 1280) his magisterial Pugio fidei (‘Dagger of Faith’) containing innumerable citations from the Talmud and further rabbinical writings proving that the Messiah had already come. Unlike his earlier work, the Capistrum Iudaeorum (‘Muzzle of the Jews’),where he also included Latin quotations from the Talmud, here he first cites the texts in their original language and then provides Latin translations, which in their entirety constitute a considerable corpus that is also deserving of our close attention.
The last page of Stolen Words features a photo which provides the story with a fitting bookend. It shows Rabbi Glickman with his edition of Alfasi-the one that propelled him on this journey- surrounded by curious Jewish youngsters. Words can never truly be stolen.

[Katrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books" by Mark Glickman is a complex, somewhat narrative view of not only the burning and theft of Jewish books, but the entire Jewish relationship with literature. This rich exploration of Jewish history is interspersed with stories about books that refused to burn (who knew it was so difficult to burn a stack of books?) and detailed accounts of how and why Nazis gathered Jewish literature. No matter how much you think you know about the Jewish Holocaust, it's unlikely you know this side of it. Well-researched and engaging, I highly suggest this book to history buffs and book enthusiasts alike.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only an account of the Nazi plundering of Jewish books but an incisive and illuminating account of the relationship between Jewish culture and the written word. Meticulously researched, the author explores the many avenues involved in the systematic theft of the books, the ambivalent attitude many Nazis had to these works, and the enormous, and often perilous, efforts individuals made to preserve them. He also explores the considerable and complex efforts made after the war to reunite books with their original owners. I found this book totally compelling, a real page-turner, shocking, of course, but also very moving at times. Highly recommended.

[Doreen Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Received from Netgalley. This book just blew me away. So insightful and moving. I would recommend this one.

[Josie Glausiusz-Kluger · Rating 5 out of 5]

The history of Jewish books is a history of love. Jews love and treasure their books, especially THE book: The Torah, the Hebrew Scriptures. As Mark Glickman writes in his absorbing book, “Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books:

"There has long been a special place for books in the Jewish heart. From the very dawn of Jewish existence, Jews relied on books as essential sinews, binding Jews to God, to friends and neighbours, and to other Jews in faraway lands and times other than our own. Even after the advent of printing, Jews continued to cherish books as some of our most precious possessions.”

But the history of Jewish books is also the history of their destruction. To cite just one instance, on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year of 1553, “thousands of Hebrew books were heaped into a huge pyre in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori and set aflame. The city is said to have been inundated with shouts of glee and cries of anguish.”

The Nazis notoriously burned books, too. In 1933, the Nazis burned both ancient and modern Jewish books in public squares throughout Germany, accompanied by boot-pounding songs and straight-armed Nazi salutes. Often, Glickman writes, the fires were difficult to start, for books don’t burn like kindling--they burn like logs. “Some Jews hid at home as their books went up in flames,” Glickman writes. “Others watched from afar and wept.”

And yet, after only about three weeks, the book-burning fervor in Germany had died out, Glickman notes. It was replaced by a lesser-known, and far more vast, plundering of Jewish books: tens of millions of books that Nazi soldiers and civilians emptied from Jewish communal libraries, individuals and schools across the territories they conquered. They stored their loot in castles, abandoned mine shafts and warehouses, planning to display them in a museum devoted to the culture of a people whom they tried - and almost succeeded - to extinguish.

Glickman tells the story of this ransack and robbery in a very engaging way and moving way. Most powerful is his recounting of the “sorting” and “selection” of the millions of books belonging to the Jewish community of Vilna. Conscripted Jewish workers were instructed to set aside the most valuable 30 percent for shipment to a storage facility in Frankfurt; the remaining 70 percent would be sent to a nearby pulp mill and destroyed. Many books never made it through the process: they were spirited away to hiding places in attics, cellars and caverns throughout the city of Vilna.

Most inspiring is the author’s description of the books saved from the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO) in Vilna: “the finest collection of eastern European literature under any roof anywhere.” Spearheading the “sorting efforts,” were two poets: 29-year-old Abraham Sutzkever, and 32-year-old Shmerke Kaczerginski. Again, they were ordered to retain the most valuable 30 percent of the books; the remainder were to be destroyed. Instead, the “Paper Brigade” would often secretly hide books in their clothing, heading back to the ghetto with book-laden pants, jackets and skirts.

In a profoundly moving passage, Glickman writes that “whenever their Nazi overseers weren’t looking, the Jewish workers stopped sorting the books and began reading them instead--sometimes aloud, in impromptu poetry and prose recitals. After the war, Sutzkever and Kaczerginski each published volumes of poetry that they had written during the Holocaust. They wrote most of the poems while ‘slacking off,’ from their assigned tasks at YIVO.”

Sutzkever buried volume after volume of Jewish literature in dirty tunnels and caverns beneath the Vilna Ghetto. Much of the looted material did survive. In 1995 and 1996, Glickman writes, many of the surviving books were shipped to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, where they remain today.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2011, I retired after working in the book industry for nearly four decades. One of my bucket list items for retirement was a trip to Israel which I took with my wife, son and daughter-in-law in 2011. It changed my life.

Not that I became more religious (I am Jewish) but I wanted to know about Jewish history. I have read many books since then about Jewish history and The Holocaust. Included in those books are Rabbi MARK GLICKMAN’s two books – SACRED TREASURES OF THE CAIRO GENIZAH (reviewed previously) and his newest book STOLEN WORDS – The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books.

Most people have heard about The Holocaust which included the systematic murder of 6 MILLION Jews (and millions of others) by the German Nazis from 1933 to 1945. Many people know about the looting and theft of thousands of artworks by the selfsame Nazis (see the movie or read the books about the Monuments Men and Women). But what most of us do not know, me included, was the theft of millions of books, documents, manuscripts and Torahs by the Nazis.

One thing about the Nazis, officially known as National Socialists, was their meticulous attention to detail. At first, in the mid-1930s, the Nazis burned the books. Then they decided to collect the books so they could study the history of Jews in greater detail and make their elimination more rational. The collecting of books and how they were re-distributed after WWII is the primary subject of STOLEN WORDS.

After the war, most of the owners of the books, documents and Torahs could not be found because they were dead or destroyed. What was to be done with this massive literary treasure? Rabbi Glickman offers some fascinating stories about that aspect of post-war Europe. Included in the restoration process were a diverse group of people such General Lucius Clay and philosopher/author Hannah Arendt.

Another part of the book deals with the reason why books and words are so important to Jews around the world. Jews believe that books, documents and other printed material should not be destroyed but instead should be kept in perpetuity in a “genizah” (a storage room in a Jewish house of worship) or buried in a Jewish cemetery.

This is a wonderful story well told by the author. Bibliophiles, WWII history buffs and especially Jews should read this book.

GO! BUY! READ!

[Sandy Brehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This dense and scholarly work is an intense analysis of the intentional theft and decimation of the Jewish libraries across Europe in the years of Nazi Holocaust. It offers comprehensive descriptions of the way in which Jewish books and other literature and documents preserved the history of Europe across centuries in rich detail. The ironic dissonance of a military-political force industrialized to eliminate Jewish people was also intentionally stealing and studying their culture and history.

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you love books? Mark Glickman loves books and that passion comes through in this narrative. And if you list to the audio version, you'll hear the passion in the author's own voice.

As Jewish kids we studied the Nazis and the Holocaust. Many of us were touched by tragedy, our own family stories, or by those of our neighbors and classmates. This book gives a depth of understanding to the precious value of a single aspect of that dark time. More than the depravity of our enemies, it illumines our printed treasures, and the miracles rising from the ashes of war and inhumanity.

[Brenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative and methodical, though dry. Excellent reference.

[Elizabeth Rynecki]

I read so much about Holocaust era looted art and know about the Nazi plunder of books, but had never read such a detailed account of what happened to books both during and after the war. Stolen Words is about the Nazi looting of books, but it's also about the stories of books saved, and the struggle to establish restitution protocols after the war. Glickman's deep love of books shines through and his passion for telling the stories of both collections and particular volumes of interest propels the story forward.

[Terri]

The more you read about the Nazis the more you find out how evil they were.

[The Jewish Book Council]

Review by Philip K. Jason for the Jewish Book Council.

[Maphead · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for any bibliophile.

[Ann]

To buy.