Cultural Reconstruction

A moving and reflective article by Leon Wieseltier on "Cultural Reconstruction" for the Jewish people, after their population, communities and heritage were devastated by the Holocaust. In it, he discusses a dialogue between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt, noted historians and philosophers of Jewish ancestry about a major enterprise to recover artifacts, and above all, books that had been left behind and scattered throughout Europe.


Here is an excerpt of a key passage:


In 1944, Arendt prepared a "Tentative List of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Axis-Occupied Countries" for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, and in 1948 she became executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, for whom she went on an extended fact-finding mission in Europe in 1949 - 1950, searching for Jewish ceremonial objects and, mainly, for Jewish books. [She catalogs these remaining cultural inheritances and documents the efforts to return them to the libraries they came from before the war.]


...


Arendt writes to Scholem about her investigations. He writes back to her with his characteristic ferocity of purpose. It makes no sense to restore the books to localities that have no more Jews. He wants them to be allocated to the place where Jews will use them--to Jerusalem. "I herewith file the claim of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with regard to the material in France." "I feel that the Bavarian archives should be allocated to the Hebrew University." He cannot understand why Hermann Cohen's library would be shipped anywhere else. He asks Arendt to send him the full list of the rare books at the huge depot in Wiesbaden. He insists upon the "priority rights" of the Hebrew University to "things which exist only in one copy," and to archives that "are of general Jewish historical significance." His goal is a living and self-respecting culture, which must be built on a foundation of books, and even manuscripts.


Jewish Cultural Reconstruction recovered 1.5 million Jewish books. What are 1.5 million recovered books, next to 6 million unrecovered people? It is a fair question, except that there was nothing petty or indecent about this bibliophilia. This was a campaign for the re-capture of a people's dignity. Its objective was to affirm the sovereignty of the Jews over their own resources. The book-hunt in the ruins was based on a proper understanding of the historical role, and the spiritual power, of the books that were hunted. They are the edifices of the Jews. I hold my palaces in my hands. My cathedrals are on my shelves. One loves books because one loves life. Is it possible any longer to grasp that books once meant so much? Does anybody still weep for lost books? It is an illusion that digitalization has made culture less vulnerable: it has invented a new method of erasure. I can morbidly imagine a day when they come for the Kindles, and the only way to save a piece of a culture will be to print out a book and take the paper into hiding, until hell passes. The common enemy of Scholem and Arendt was oblivion.


Oblivion comes in many forms. There is natural oblivion, the Ozymandian kind, the ordinary forgetfulness that secures the future against the disabling suspicion that everything has already been done; and there is unnatural oblivion, coerced oblivion, the apparently ineradicable desire to wipe some group or some culture from the face of the earth. A people that has suffered unnatural oblivion will find it hard to acquiesce in the natural sort, because it looks like disappearance by another name. It is said that the "memory" of the computer marks the end of oblivion. I think not: cyberspace, too, is a sinkhole. The only defense against oblivion is the human defense--the will to remember, to defy time, which must be nurtured with reasons. War is not the only circumstance that enjoins cultural reconstruction.