Library of the Lost Books – 26th February 2025
Wonderful to welcome students, colleagues, researchers and friends of the library to another exciting Library of Lost Books workshop at LBC on Wednesday 26th February.
The project to rediscover books stolen by the Nazis from the Berlin Hochschule, and reunite them in a virtual library has really captured the imagination of our workshop participants. Each session brings new discoveries from the LBC library’s collections and new insights and questions about the significance of this material and its history. With many returning participants, we considered the motivation behind the Nazi theft and retention of Jewish books rather than their destruction as well as the role of chance in the survival of individual volumes.
We have been repeatedly surprised by the variety of topics covered by the books we are exploring, going far beyond the Hebrew bible or any narrow definition of Jewish Studies. Particularly compelling at our recent session was the very first volume of the Proceedings of the Hebrew University presented to the Hochschule library as gift from the Jewish National Library, Jerusalem in 1926, a year after its founding. Ninety-nine years later the National Library of Israel is one most important repositories for Jewish culture in the world, with an extraordinary new building recently opened in Jerusalem. It was remarkable to see the intertwining histories of these two libraries and moving to consider their very different fates.
Another book which revealed the interconnectedness of Jewish communities and scholarly institutions was a Celebration of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Cambridge Hebrew Congregation printed at the University Press in 1909. Many of our participants have personal connections to the city and university and it was fascinating to trace this book’s journey from the banks of the Cam to Berlin and back to London, England today. The connections run deeper: this copy was presented it to the Hochshule library by Israel Abrahams, renowned scholar and founder of Liberal Judaism and the text written by Herbert Loewe whose son Raphael taught at Leo Baeck College. A number of the books we are working with we know are likely to be from the Hochshule but this one LBC Library Assistant Felix stumbled upon by chance and it is particularly exciting for the library team to be tracking down more books that celebrate the college’s inheritance from the Hochschule and reveal so much of progressive and Anglo-Jewish history.
For more picture from this exciting event, see the gallery below. If you’re interested in getting involved with the Library of the Lost Books project, email our Library team at library@lbc.ac.uk today.
