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This chapter follows the history of the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, founded in 1939 and opened in 1947, which in 1969 changed its name to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. This archive sought to bring Jewish archives from all over the world to Jerusalem under the banner of what they termed the “ingathering of the exiles of the past.” Its leaders, including Alex Bein and Daniel Cohen, who spearheaded the effort to gather materials from Europe, hoped to draw upon the legacy of European Jewry and thereby place Jews around the world within a sphere of Israeli cultural hegemony. In this archive, one finds an extension and intensification of the Gesamtarchiv’s dream of a total archive of Jewish life—and a powerful instance showing both its possibilities and the problems of fundamentally reframing the Jewish past.

This chapter introduces another model of total archives, Jacob Rader Marcus’s American Jewish Archives, founded in 1947 at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. The AJA offers a counterpart to the Jerusalem archives considered in chapter 2. In the course of his time directing the AJA, from 1947 to 1995, Marcus developed another type of total archive, but one that represented an ideal of diaspora and dispersion as Jewish values and archival virtues. The process of gathering archives to Cincinnati reflected Marcus’s personal perspective on the history of America’s Jews, in particular by looking at it from a western-hemisphere perspective, through his efforts to gather materials from the earliest Jewish settlements in the Caribbean and South America. In addition, he created an archive of copies, looking to gather as much as he could in duplicate rather than in the original.

The introduction presents the book’s core argument that twentieth-century Jewish archives were not just about the past but also about the future: We can look to a process whereby Jews turned increasingly toward archives as anchors of memory in a rapidly changing world. Jews in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine all sought to gather the files of the past in order to represent their place in Jewish life and articulate a vision of the future. It situates these projects in the history of community-based archiving and archival theory and methodology, as well as Jewish history at large. It also dives into the ways we can see archive making as a metaphor for the broader patterns in modern Jewish history, as Jews sought to gather the sources and resources of their culture both before the Holocaust and especially in its aftermath.

This chapter considers the overall impact of the twentieth-century proliferation of archive activities in Jewish life and the rising paradigm of total archives in particular. By looking at the development of Jewish archiving in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine, we see the concrete manifestation of the impulses of a “time to gather” in Jewish cultures around the world. These efforts represent a kind of community-based archives, but also the internal tensions: What happens when there is a widespread understanding of the value of archives, and they represent resources of cultural capital worth fighting for? This conclusion also places the history of Jewish archives and the struggles to “own” the past in the broader context of the emerging information society. Altogether, this history indicates contentious struggles over what it means to have control over history in its most practical terms.

Recent conflicts throughout the Middle East and North Africa illustrate that the bifurcation in the international legal regime between those instruments that apply to armed conflict and those that apply to the movement of cultural objects, primarily during peacetime, has severely hampered our ability to protect archaeological sites from looting and has necessitated several sui generis legal instruments, including three UN Security Council resolutions. In addition, questions sometimes arise as to whom and to where cultural objects should be returned following situations of armed conflict and occupation, highlighting a tension between territorial principles that determine a sovereign State’s authority over cultural objects found within its territory and the strong cultural connection that links minority or excluded groups with disputed heritage objects. This chapter thereby points out two areas in which intersections are lacking—the intersection between instruments that regulate armed conflict and those that regulate international movement of cultural objects, and the intersection between cultural heritage law and human rights law. The chapter proposes that if these disparate sources of law could be integrated, more effective protection could be given to cultural heritage during armed conflict and there would be movement toward harmonization of rights of minority groups to cultural heritage and of States within the framework of international law.