Must Every People Have an Archive? Jewish Archives, Self-Definition, and State Power

In 1903, the German-Jewish archivist Ezechiel Zivier proposed the founding of a Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (General or Total Archive of the German Jews), explaining that “every people has an archive.” Zivier’s pronouncement reflected a growing awareness of archives among professionalizing archivists and historians as well as everyday people, and indicated the archive’s importance as a mechanism for self-definition. For nation-states as well as emerging national and religious minorities, archives often served, alongside institutions such as the national theater and museums, as a signifier of legitimacy.

As archives increasingly become a subject for historical study, we must critically analyze the legacy of the archives and the state, and the way their relationship has shaped the historical discipline. The questions historians ask today differ radically from those of Leopold von Ranke, with his notion of the supremacy of foreign policy, but the archive continues to be the institution that, perhaps more than any other, is most closely associated with modern historical practice. This presentation will consider how archives have remained relevant even with the changing relationship between history and the state, through the examination of the important case study of Jewish archives.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Jews created archives within a variety of national and ethnic schemes, such as the Gesamtarchiv, which was dominated by the essential synthesis of Germanness and Jewishness, YIVO (the Yiddish Scientific Organization in Vilna), which reflected a Yiddish linguistic nationalism, and efforts by scholars in Jerusalem to establish a national archive of the Jewish Diaspora. These archives’ wide ranging conceptual and state frameworks, from integrationist to statist, present an opportunity to analyze the ties between archive, people, and state power; I will examine how Jewish archives both emerged from and challenged the paradigm of state archives and a historical discipline in transition.