Contested Heritage

The essays collected in this volume explore the history and fate of Jewish European cultural property in the aftermath of World War II. This history of Jewish heritage on the old continent has a peculiar trajectory. It unfolded over centuries of Jewish presence in Europe, which has ever been accompanied by multiple expressions-both religious and secular-of a vivid and diversified cultural life, to be found in synagogues, yeshivas, rabbinical seminaries, as well as in museums, communal archives, libraries, and art collections. Their historical development testifies not only to the variety of intellectual and spiritual traditions of European Jews but also to their unique entanglement with European culture. While Jewish culture in Europe grew and developed over centuries, the Nazi regime took only a few years to obliterate it. During twelve years of Nazis, first in Germany and later on in wide parts of occupied Europe, Jewish cultural property was plundered, dispersed, and largely destroyed. Only a small part of the material manifestation of Jewish culture survived past 1945. Some materials had been transferred outside Europe already in the interwar period, when their owners decided to migrate voluntarily. Some collections came to Palestine, the United States or, to lesser extent, other centers of Jewish exile in the 1930s, along with those who were forced into a hasty flight from their increasingly hostile homelands. Finally, a significant number of artifacts were discovered in Germany and the formerly German-occupied territories by the Allied armies and local populations at the end of the war. Ironically, these objects most often survived as a result of the vast and systematic looting processes that the Nazi administration had orchestrated. Yet the majority of them was heirless-their legal owners perished in the Holocaust and their former institutional homes had been destroyed. The future of these remains was settled by the postwar restitution organizations, such as the Hebrew University's Committee for the Salvaging of Diaspora Treasures (Orot ha-Golah) and Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., in the late 1940s. As a consequence of their work, the bulk of these cultural remains was not returned to their places of origin, now emptied of most traces of prewar Jewish life.

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