A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture by Jason Lustig (review)

Reviewed by: A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture by Jason Lustig Ari Joskowicz Jason Lustig. A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 280 pp. The publication of Jason Lustig’s book A Time to Gather makes clear that Jewish studies is finally experiencing its own archival turn. Building on the [End Page 478] momentum generated by other recent works in the field, Lustig’s book marks a new stage in this scholarship, with its sweeping analysis of Jewish efforts to build monumental document collections during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. An intellectual and cultural history of some of the largest Jewish archival repositories in Germany, Israel, and the United States, Lustig’s volume demonstrates how the archives that scholars consult to unearth sources about the ideas and ideologies animating modern Jewish life are themselves an expression of these very same impulses. Lustig’s central contention is that the Jewish archives he studies were engaged in a shared project that also pushed them into competition with one another, as each developed ambitions of total collecting. The first chapter charts the origin story of that modern ambition by covering the establishment of the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, which the German Federation of Jewish Communities founded in 1903 to bring together the collections of Jewish institutions across the German Empire. Mirroring German nationalist understandings of the unified history of German territory, these collections sought to centralize communal documents produced across the new empire. Focusing on this geographic and territorial ambition, Lustig carefully reconstructs the thinking and ideologies behind the Gesamtarchiv’s and later archives’ efforts to gather in one institution traditional forms of written documentation of Jewish history. These aspirations were front and center in the efforts of the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, the subject of the second chapter. Mirroring the larger project of a Zionist ingathering of exiles, the General Archives aimed to reproduce that mission for a wider range of historical records. Archivists and administrators shaped by the German tradition sought to create an even grander version of a total archive that would bring the documentary traces of Jewish life from Jews around the world to Jerusalem. Its later name, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, underlines this claim. Founded at the dawn of a new age in archival technology, the Central Archives engaged in a massive project of microfilming whenever physical documents proved difficult to acquire. The American Jewish Archives, the focus of chapter 3, represent a concurrent post-Holocaust effort in the United States. Under the visionary leadership of Jacob Rader Marcus, the archive developed a hemispheric vision of collecting in the Americas. It also emphasized the role that decentralized copying of material would have for the production of historical knowledge. In fact, Marcus frequently claimed that he preferred copies to originals. Such an approach was fundamentally different from the desire of postwar German cities to retain original documents of decimated or extinguished communities, the subject of chapter 4. In this chapter, Lustig traces several contentious debates surrounding these materials, including those triggered by the failed attempts of a select group of non-Jewish and Jewish activists to keep Jewish archives in Worms and Hamburg. Overall, the General Archives in Jerusalem were successful in these conflicts, removing most communal archives to Israel and, later, undermining attempts to build a competing central archive of original or microfilmed copies in Germany. Chapter 5 examines efforts to create digital archives out of dispersed collections that had never been unified in this form physically. Driven by new funding [End Page 479] needs and opportunities, as well as aspirations to yield new technologies for large-scale endeavors of conservation, the foundation of the Center for Jewish History in New York, YIVO’s Vilna collections, and the project to unite fragments of the Cairo Geniza brought together disparate sets of collections under a single virtual roof. This last chapter is a fitting and remarkable conclusion to Lustig’s tightly argued survey of the total collecting efforts of different modern Jewish institutions. It beautifully demonstrates how impulses to combine documents in single repositories create...