Climbing Sinai

This entry is cross-posted at the JPS Blog.

Here’s an interesting, and controversial, bit of news:  According to the Telegraph, German-Jewish leaders are supporting an effort by historians to publish Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Germany, for the first time since World War II.  (I’m assuming that the edition would be in German, though the article didn’t say so explicitly.)  According to the Telegraph, this “scholarly edition would be accompanied by a critical introduction and footnotes challenging Hitler’s assertions under the proposal by Munich historians.”  So why has this become such a major issue now, over 60 years later?

The German state of Bavaria, in which Hitler wrote the mix of ideology and memoir while serving a four-year jail sentence for his failed 1923 coup attempt, has a 70-year exclusive copyright on publishing the book, which it has used to maintain an effective ban.

This copyright is due to expire at the end of 2015, leading to fears of a free-for-all among unscrupulous publishers.

Bernhard Gotto, spokesman for Munich’s Institute of Contemporary History, which has historians working on the scholarly edition, said this was why it was important that historians got in first with their critical editions.

“We do not want obscure publishers profiting from this book,” Mr Gotto said. “We think historians need this scholarly edition, which would lead to a demystification of the book.”

The German Finance Ministry has responded by insisting that it will try to find a way to extend the book’s copyright and prevent its publication.

Now, I’m not a fan of censorship by any means.  And while I can’t help but feel uneasy about the ready availability of hate literature, I do agree with the position of Stephen Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany:

“An aggressive and enlightening engagement with the book would doubtless remove many of its false, persisting myths.”

Additionally, in this day and age, Mein Kampf is readily available on the internet anyway, in every language imaginable.  So I think that we could definitely do with a critical, scholarly edition that would combat the book’s hatred and falsehoods.  This is pretty controversial stuff, though, so I’m not necessarily wedded to my own opinion.  Would anyone like to sound off on the issue?

-Naomi

This entry is cross-posted at the JPS Blog.

So I was doing my usual Google Blog Search this morning, looking for any interesting chatter on the net about Jewish books.  I was scrolling through, and there were the usual book reviews, the typical news articles with a mention of “books” here and “Jewish” there, yadda yadda yadda.  Then, all of a sudden!  I see: “Book Patrol: ‘Speak a Jewish Word and Make an Extra Sale’“.  Huh?

Curious, I clicked on the link, and found myself reading a fascinating article about a piece of ephemeral American Judaica (ephemera is any piece of written or printed material not intended to be preserved, like a pamphlet, letter, or flyer).  Stephen J. Gertz writes:

My girlfriend’s father died recently and in amongst his belongings she found a curious pamphlet.

The Joseph Jacobs Handbook of Jewish Words and Expressions.  For use of anyone calling on the Jewish trade… for making friends with Jewish merchants was issued in 1954 by the Joseph Jacobs Organization, an U.S. advertising agency that specifically targeted the Jewish market. It was created for any business interested in cultivating the Jewish trade, and Calvert Distillers co-opted it for use by its salesmen and distribution to the liquor store owners they called upon so that both could more effectively service their customers with a little schmear of Yiddish to grease the ethnic gears and help all concerned put a little extra gelt (money) in their pockets and mach a leben (make a living). It’s hands across the Old and New Testaments, brotherhood with a dollar sign.

He then goes on to relate the significance of this fun little pamphlet to the history of the Prohibition-era, and post-Prohibition, liquor business.  During the 1920’s, distillery inventories were warehoused and distributed through the few exemptions to the Volstead Act (which included, among a few other things, sacramental wine.  Kiddush, anyone?).

The original owners of these warehoused goods were issued government receipts and a lively trade developed for brokering the receipts which were sold by the original owners to raise cash, and then brokered for resale. Control the receipts, and you controlled the legal flow of booze in the U.S. The brokers and buyers of the receipts were, to a man, Jews.

Later, when the Volstead Act was repealed, distilleries needed significant capital to resume production.  Translation: these guys needed sugar daddies to meet the country’s pent-up demand for alcohol.  What a great business opportunity!  The result?

By the mid-1930s, Jews controlled the distilled spirits industry in the U.S., completely responsible for its finance, sales and marketing.

By the 1950’s (when this pamphlet was published), the industry was still run by Jews, but non-Jews were starting to enter the business in droves.  Clearly, at that time, knowing a little bit of Yiddish couldn’t hurt your career.

A fun, fascinating peice of Jewish history, to be sure.  This article is also a brief lesson in the value of ephemera:

Thus, this little booklet can serve as the cornerstone to a collection that can grow in many interesting directions. A far-sighted dealer could build a collection of American liquor business-related ephemera, perhaps with the Jewish slant and form a collection more valuable as a whole than in its parts and sell to a university, a Jewish or a liquor industry trade organization. An individual could do the same and gain much personal nachas (joy), something to really kvell (beam with immense, swollen pride) over having amassed a collection of material that has gotten little attention and, having done so, brought to light a slice of our cultural history and heritage heretofore passed over.

History isn’t only learned from books, folks.  You can read the whole, unabridged, article here.

-Naomi

This entry is cross-posted at the JPS Blog.

I’ve always had this nerdy thing for antiquarian books – I even once spent a summer working at a rare books and manuscripts library. So naturally I got pretty excited when I stumbled across this article earlier today.  The article was published a little over a year ago, on June 27 – I’d be curious to know what kind of progress has been made in the smuggling operation since then.

The Agence France-Presse reported from Jerusalem:

Some 300 rare and valuable books confiscated from Iraq’s Jewish community by Saddam Hussein’s regime have been secretly spirited into Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.

The books include a 1487 commentary on the biblical Book of Job and another volume of biblical prophets printed in Venice in 1617, the Haaretz daily said.

The volumes are part of a massive collection of books confiscated by the secret police of the executed Iraqi dictator and stored in security installations in the Iraqi capital until the US-led invasion of 2003.

Many volumes were damaged during the bombing of government buildings in the opening weeks of the war, and after the fall of Baghdad most of the books were sent off to be temporarily stored at the Library of Congress in Washington.

Others however ended up in the hands of private dealers.

“We bought them from thieves,” Mordechai Ben-Porat, an Iraqi-born Jew and the founder of Jerusalem’s Babylonian Jewry Heritage centre told the newspaper, adding that the foundation paid some 25,000 dollars (16,000 euros).

In the beginning, Ben-Porat sent an emissary to Baghdad who shipped the books directly to Israel, but once the Americans caught wind of his activities they forbade further shipments, forcing him to smuggle the rest, he said.

I think this article poses an interesting question: who is the rightful owner of these cultural artifacts?  Of course, it’s a little difficult to side with a repressive dictatorship, but still – are these Iraqi rare books, or Jewish rare books?  I think you can easily argue either side.  After all, Iraqi history isn’t just Arab, it’s also Jewish, Kurdish, Armenian, and even Christian.  (Sidepoint: this definitely brings to mind the Elgin Marbles debate, and the sticky issue of art and cultural repatriation in general.)

And to add another layer of difficulty to the debate – the article says that these books were purchased from theives, who stole them from private dealers.  Is this ethical?  Of course, we don’t know how those private dealers got their hands on the books.  But the question of rightful ownership is still very unclear.  What are your thoughts on the issue?

-Naomi