“After the war there was nothing left. Everything had been stolen, and for that reason we weren’t allowed to keep Hôtel Colbert. I mean, there were no books to preserve. But then, slowly, we started rebuilding the collection, and at the end of the 1950s we were able to open the library in this apartment, which we were given by the city,” Kaplan tells me.
The Turgenev Library was never able to rebuild the collection into anything comparable to what it had before the war. Yet the library, as soon as it had been reinstated, took on its role as a freestanding, oppositional literary scene in relation to its home country. During the Cold War, Russian literature by authors blacklisted in the Soviet Union once again began to be collected. Today the library has no ties with Russia and survives on a small annual grant from the city.
“It’s enough for the rent and a few books. But this has always been an impoverished library. People have always worked here without getting paid for it. It’s part of the culture. I think we can survive as we go into the future. We have already survived most things,” says Kaplan in her Russian-accented French, and smiles at me.
She goes back to the gray metal cupboard. The worn books on the shelves don’t look like much, but they hold a special value for Kaplan. These few books, 112 to be precise, are the only volumes from the original Bibliothèque Russe Tourguéniev to be returned out of the 100,000 that disappeared. She pulls out a pale gray book that was once black and opens the flyleaf. I can’t read the title in the Cyrillic script, but the stamp of the library is in French, with its old address on rue du Val-de-Grâce.
“There was a rumor that the Germans took this library so they could give it to Stalin—as a gift of friendship. That was while Germany and the Soviet Union were allies. But it never happened like that. Alfred Rosenberg was very interested in this library. After all, he spoke Russian and had studied in Moscow. So they took it.”
[ 9 ]
THE LOST LIBRARY
Rome
The air is cool in the Centro Bibliografico. I follow the librarian, Gisèle Lèvy, a cheerful woman with a large mop of curly hair, down the stairs and into a room with white-painted concrete walls. Even before I step into the room, I pick up that distinctive smell of old library: dried leather, vellum, ink. On the shelves are sturdy volumes in dark brown leather, which rather reminds me of twisting, ancient tree trunks. Then, wedged between them, yellowing bands of parchment, like old silver birches. Some of the books seem to be in a century-long process of disintegration—bindings slowly coming away from the spines, thread poking out like dry ligaments; leather, split and crumbling in layers. Each book documents a unique decay. Volumes that were printed at the same time have parted ways. Some are pining away; others are aging more daintily.
The Centro Bibliografico is in a house from the 1700s on the west bank of the Tiber in Rome, not far from the Ponte Sisto. It is a cultural center belonging to the Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane (Union of Italian Jewish Communities). In order to get inside I have to make my way through locked doors that function more or less like security gates. It is not an unfamiliar experience. Every Jewish center, synagogue, library, and museum that I have visited on this trip has had similar security systems in place: surveillance cameras, sluice gates, suspicious glances, and questions. The security routines are sometimes a little like those at airports, with metal detectors, X-ray scanning machines, checking of bags, and sometimes frisking. Jewish institutions in Europe have become fortresses. The insight gives one an unpleasant sense of historical continuity. On the other side of the Tiber, not far from here, lies Rome’s Jewish ghetto, established in the 1500s. A small area of no more than seven acres, it was surrounded by high walls, inside of which lived Rome’s Jewish population. The inhabitants were given leave to move outside the ghetto by day, but they had to go back before dark fell, when the ghetto gates were locked. This continued every night for over three hundred years, until liberation at the end of the 1800s. Down in the cellar at the Centro Bibliografico, Gisèle Lèvy searches the shelves for a book.
“Here it is,” she says.
She does not lift out one of the impressively large tomes, just a little vellum book about the same size as the palm of her hand. Carefully she opens it, with a slight splintering sound. An entire section is missing in the middle, as if something has taken a big bite out of it. “It’s probably a mouse that’s been feasting on it. Mice have always liked books. Whenever I go to old libraries I usually see mice scampering off. And then I scamper off too,” Lèvy says, laughing.
“It’s a Tanakh, a Jewish Bible, printed in Amsterdam in 1680. We don’t know so very much about this book, apart from the fact that it belonged to a family called Finzi, who lived in Florence,” says Lèvy, showing me the inside cover where someone has written “Finzi” and “Firenze” in ink.
The little mouse-eaten book is somewhat of a mystery. It came back to Rome about ten years ago after it had turned up in the little town of Hungen, outside Frankfurt. After the war the book ended up with the only Jewish survivor in Hungen, Jeremias Oppenheim. The book was handed over to an Italian delegate at a conference on plundered property in Hannover in 2005. It is unclear how it ended up with Oppenheim.
“You can see the stamp here,” says Lévy, and shows me a small, ornate stamp, faded and yellow, across the spine of the book, with the Italian text “Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico Italiano.”
The Jewish congregation keeps its written, literary legacy at the Centro Bibliografico. The most valuable part of the collection hails from the Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico Italiano, a library belonging to a rabbinical school founded in 1829.1 The school, one of the oldest rabbinical schools in Italy, is still active, although there are not so many students anymore.
A small, mouse-eaten Tanakh, a Jewish Bible, which came back to Rome in the early 2000s. The library of the priceless Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica is still missing without a trace, in spite of repeated attempts to track down the collection.
“I can count them on my fingers. They attend normal schools in the daytime, and then they come here afterward, or sometimes at the weekends.”
The Collegio Rabbinico’s library consists of a large collection of Jewish works from the 1500s and on. It includes many books from renowned Jewish-Italian printers such as Soncino, De Gara, Bragadin, Bomberg, and Vendramin. But there are also Jewish books here from other presses in Jewish cultural centers such as Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Thessaloniki, and Vilnius. The rabbis of the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano traveled all over Europe to purchase books for the collection. Lèvy shows me a shelf with the Talmud in a sturdy ten-volume set. Age has given a marbled patina to the light brown leather. “It’s an extremely rare edition from Basel, printed in 1580,” she tells me.
The Centro Bibliografico’s historical collection consists of 8,500 volumes. Some are from minor Jewish congregations around Italy; these disappeared when Italy was unified in the 1800s and Jews were given the freedom to move to cities such as Venice, Florence, or Rome. Lèvy shows me several shelves of books of this kind, from places like Pisa, Sienna, and Pitigliano, a small town in Tuscany that was once known as Little Jerusalem on account of its flourishing Jewish community.
The collection at the Centro Bibliografico tells the story of the Italian Jews. It is a story not only expressed on the bound page—but also one that has left exterior traces.
Gisèle Lèvy pulls out a bulky leather-bound volume from a shelf and opens the front flyleaf, which is absolutely covered with words, sentences, symbols, and squiggles in ink. Mere jottings, but nonetheless beautiful—layers upon layers of words and signs.
“They did not have very much paper in the olden days, so they used books for note-taking. Some of these names were the people who owned the book. But it also functioned as a diary. Here it says, ‘My son was married last week.’ And here it says”—Lèvy points at another scrawl—“‘On this day my grandson had his brit milah.�
��”2
The book, from 1745, contains notes from several generations of a family of Sephardic Jews from Pisa.
“The book was printed in Amsterdam; it was common for Sephardic Jews in Italy to purchase their books from there.”
In the early 1900s, the Biblioteca del Collegio Rabbinico Italiano was housed on the upper floor of the large synagogue on Lungotevere de’ Cenci, on the other side of the Tiber, a building that stands out in the cityscape because of its Babylonian-Syrian architecture. It was constructed at the end of the 1800s in memory of the ghetto, as a symbol of the new-won freedom of the Roman Jews. Yet there was also another library in the synagogue, which was both older and more valuable than that of the Collegio Rabbinico—a library that was lost without a trace during the war, belonging to the Jewish congregation in Rome: the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica. The collection contained the literary, religious, and cultural legacy of the oldest Jewish congregation in Europe. Among other things, the collection included manuscripts about Jewish intellectual and religious life in medieval Rome—also a large collection of incunabula, including rare works brought by Sephardic Jews from Spain.3
It was a library that bore the cultural hallmarks of the Roman Jews. Unlike most of the world’s Jews, the latter did not have their origins with either the Sephardic Jews or the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The first Jews reputedly arrived in Rome as early as 161 BC, sent by Judas Maccabeus, the leader of the Maccabean Revolt, who was seeking the support of Rome against the Seleucid Empire. A Jewish community with several synagogues was established in Rome well before the birth of Christ.
Later, when Rome’s imperial ambitions reached into the eastern Mediterranean, Judea was conquered and brought into the fold of the empire. In the centuries that followed, the Jewish population rose up on a number of occasions—with catastrophic consequences. Rome responded to rebellions mercilessly and with pathological brutality.
Many of those who were not killed in the wars were enslaved. Others chose to leave war-torn Judea to settle in other parts of the empire, or emigrate to the east into Persia. Before long the Jews who had chosen to stay in Judea were in the minority. Jerusalem, from which all Jews were forbidden, was replaced by the pagan Roman city of Aelia Capitolina. In Jewish history, the expulsion of Jews is regarded as the beginning of two thousand years of the Jewish Diaspora. However, in academic research the Diaspora is regarded as a considerably longer and more complicated process. Judea’s strategic position between Europe, Asia, and Africa has meant that the region, for thousands of years, has endured invading armies of Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Turks. The migration and dispersal of the inhabitants of this war-ravaged area has been in progress for a very long time.4
The early Jewish community in Rome grew. Other congregations appeared all over Italy, often made up of freed slaves. In the high medieval period the Italian Jews developed a rich literary culture, not least through their contacts with Sephardic Jews in Spain. The translations of Jewish-Arab thinkers also had a great influence on Christian culture. One of the most important of these was Maimonides, usually regarded as the most significant Jewish philosopher in the medieval period. Maimonides sought to demonstrate that the philosophy of Aristotle could be reconciled with the Judaic faith. This greatly influenced the theologian Thomas Aquinas, who similarly tried to integrate the philosophical system of Aristotle with the Christian faith.5
At the same time, during the high medieval age, an increasingly repressive and anti-Semitic policy was taking form in the Catholic church. A leading role in this was played by Innocent III, one of the most powerful, influential popes, who proclaimed the Fourth Crusade and set in motion a ruthless persecution of “heretics” in Europe. In 1215 he convoked one of the most important synod meetings of the medieval era, the Fourth Lateran Council, where amendments were made to canonical law. In the meeting it was decided that Jews would be barred from holding public appointments, as their crime against Christ made it inappropriate for them to make decisions on behalf of Christians. Jews were also to wear clothes that clearly distinguished them from Christians. At a later meeting it was agreed that Jews should be made to wear a cloth badge on their breast of half a hand’s-width. Innocent III’s decree of 1215 was the origin of the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear under the Nazis, seven hundred years later.6
Innocent III’s successors pursued the same line, including his cousin Pope Gregory IX, who in 1234 asserted with the doctrine perpetua servitus iudaeorum that Jews should be banned from all political life and live in political slavery until Judgment Day, which in principle removed any opportunity for Jews to exert social influence until the 1800s. Gregory IX formally established the Inquisition, primarily to clamp down on religious sects such as the Cathars—and also Jews.7
In the 1500s, thousands of Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal sought refuge in Italy and the Vatican state. They were initially welcomed, thanks to more tolerant popes. Many of the arrivals were translators, poets, and teachers—including the historian Samuel Usque, author of the book damaged by the bullet in Amsterdam. Pope Leo X gave the Italian Jews permission to print the Talmud. But the Jewish community in Rome only had a short time to catch its breath. By the mid-1500s, the Counter-Reformation had taken form within the Catholic church, and there was a drive to defend the true faith against heretical Protestantism. The spiritual defense gave rise to a more intolerant religious climate, which was also directed against Judaism.
The first attack was on Jewish literature, which had flourished in Italy at the beginning of the 1500s, with many Jewish book printers. On the day of the Jewish New Year, September 9, 1553, the pope ordered the confiscation and burning of all editions of the Talmud and related texts. In a papal bull, the Talmud was branded as blasphemous against the Christian faith. In the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, the Inquisition built a large pyre of books and writings confiscated from Jewish homes in the city. Book burnings also took place in Ferrara, Florence, and Venice, all centers of Jewish printing. Thousands of editions of the Talmud were consumed by the flames. In Rome, no books in Hebrew were printed for hundreds of years.8
Jewish literature was stymied by Inquisitional censorship, and traces of these events can be found in the cellar of the Centro Bibliografico. Gisèle Lèvy shows me a book in which the Inquisition has crossed out sections in the text. “If for instance it said in a book, ‘Our God is the only God,’ this would be erased. There could not be anything written down which might be regarded as critical of the Catholic church. The Inquisition examiners were not usually themselves able to read Hebrew, but they used rabbis who had been forced to convert to Catholicism. So it was often the case that ‘Jews’ censored other Jews. It’s a very tragic story,” Lèvy explains.
Other books in the library also bear the signs of persecution. Lèvy takes out a book bound in vellum. The outer edges of the pages have a faint nuance of red, but what I notice at once are two columns of text written in longhand on the white cover.
“There were very many pogroms in Italy, especially in the Middle Ages, when synagogues were plundered and burned. At this time parchment was very valuable, so Jewish writings on parchment were stolen and sold to the church, which reused the material for writing or bookbinding,” Lèvy explains. The practice was particularly degrading, as they often used Torah scrolls. “The Torah is holy. One never throws it away; it is respectfully buried when it is worn out. Therefore, whenever Jews have been persecuted, it has always been important to save their Torah. It has almost been as important as saving human lives.”
According to Lèvy, in old libraries in areas around Bologna, Parma, Ferrara, and Ravenna, it is possible to find books bound with parchment still bearing clear signs of Hebrew writing. “These books are of great value to us, because the pieces of reused parchment are preserved fragments of a lost culture. Sometimes you can find books which have been made from the same parchment
source, and you can start assembling the parts to try to find out where it came from, and who wrote it.” The text on the parchment before us is written in both Hebrew and Ladino, the Spanish-Jewish dialect spoken by the Sephardim. “It’s very easy to see that a Sephardic Jew wrote this; the Hebrew text is very similar to Arabic in its style,” says Lèvy, running her fingers over the lines.
Yet another catastrophe descended on Rome’s Jews only two years after the book pyres in 1553. Pope Paul IV, in the papal bull known as Cum nimis absurdum, took away the rights of the Jewish community. According to Paul IV, it was “absurd” to let the Jews—who, as a consequence of the guilt that they had laid on their own heads, were sentenced to “perpetual slavery”—live among Christians and enjoy the same rights. Jews had to be made to see that they were “slaves as a result of their deeds.”9
Jews lost the right to own property, and were forced to go into unskilled jobs such as rag-and-bone collection, pawnbroking, or dealing in fish. Jewish men were made to wear pointed yellow hats, while the women had to wear shawls of the same color. Jews were forbidden from sharing dinners, engaging in amusement, or in any other way fraternizing with Christians. And on the Sabbath, falling on a Saturday, they had to go to church to hear Catholic homilies, the purpose of which was to encourage them to convert.
Cum nimis absurdum established Rome’s ghetto, which was placed between the Portico of Octavia and the bank of the Tiber, an area that was regularly affected by flooding. Sanitary problems and a lack of space meant that epidemics often raged in the ghetto. Almost a quarter of the inhabitants died in an outbreak of the plague in 1656.10 Rome’s ghetto, locked every night from the outside, was in actual fact a large prison.
The Book Thieves Page 18
