Zosa Szajkowski and the Theft of History: Identity, Historiography and the Holocaust

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

The tragic history of Zoza Szajkowski (1911-1978) is many ways the story of a Historian, Chronicler or even a Memory Keeper who learnt or drew the wrong lessons from his own life experiences. The subject of a full lenght monographic study by Lisa Leff, Szajkowski, a Jew displaced from Europe who migrated to Paris as a young boy with his parents and siblings only to see all his close relatives die in the German concentration camps. The Holocaust took a terrible toll both in lives and in the capacity of the human mind to remember its horrors. And Zoza decided, for good or for evil, that the cultural treasures of Judaica in Europe are not safe and USA is the land that could protect Jewish Histrical artifacts particularly documents, manuscripts, organized archival material and memorobilia.  And to that end he embarked on a proffession of crime, stealing historical material from Libraries, Archives and Institutions and selling them to some of the most prestigous Universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis and several Jewish Institutions in Israel and New York.

The Holocaust offers a contranst between two distinct approaches to History. Raul Hilberg in his monumental, Destruction of the European Jews following the trend of Franz Nuemann appraoched the study of the systematic extermination of Jews and several other peoples and groups from the perpetrators set of institutions and in the course of 3 huge volumes succeeded in bringing the unspeakable into the light of History. The documents when placed in the right set of historical frameworks and stuctures speak eloquently. Indian histrorians, being ideologues rather than trained historins, seldom follow such an example and so we have drivel marinated in post colonial garbage masquerading as serious history. They must learn   a lesson from Raul Hilberg. Another approach is the collection of Testimonies of Eye Witnesses particularly of those who survived the extermination camps. Testimonies offered a set of sources that enabled the historian to prove the "Collective Guilt" imposed on the Germans after World War I. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners is a good example of the second approach. Here it is better to be a hedgehog rather than a fox. The War against the Jewish Population of Europe resulted in an almost total destruction of the collective and communal life lived by the Jews in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and France. It is in the middle of this destructive war that Zosa Szajkowski decided that he could rescue Jewish Cultural Property and smuggle it to safety in the US.play his chosen role as the Saviour of Jewish Heritage. The Germans had looted Synaggues, Homes Libraries and Museums of books, manuscripts, records and documents. Zosa who arrived in Paris as a GI and with the ability to speak read write French Yiddish and German was tasked with the job of dealing with documents and cultural treasures left behind by the fleeing German Army. And seeing the horrors of the Holocaust he decided to appropriate the documents books and artifacts and sent them to US. Obviously the US Army and the Occupational Forces and their authorities winked, if not colluded with this dubious export of what Zosa thought were ownerless art and other objects of high cutural value.

After his return to USA he continued to make periodical visits to France and embarked on a serious career as an "archive thief". In 1961 he was caught red handed in Strausbourg but was allowed to escape. And in 1978 he was once again caught this time in New York Public Library and was handed over to the plice. Two days later he died by suicide taking all his secrets with him to the grave.

The life of Zosa obviously raises certain vital questions. Were the Institutions which bought the stolen documents complicit in the crime? Did he steal the documents as an act of defiance against the crimes committed against the Jews and wanted the memory of the Chosen People to be preserved? Does extreme identification with a religious or ethnic group innures the Historian to cerain ethical question about the purpose of writing History? Did Zosa in his own warped fashion anticipate the recrudesence of antisemitism in Europe and North America making exiles f the Jews nce again. Bth in USA and Europe there are definite signs of the revival of anti semeticism. The answers to these questions will never be known. The author has raised some of these questions in her fascinating study.

The post War confusion offered Zosa a number of opportunities to ransack and gather Jewish Cultural Material from Paris and other parts of France. To Zosa, a world that watched as he rationalized, silently as the European Jews were led to their death in German gas chambers will not hesitate to turn a blind eye should a similar ocassion arise and so the logic of Holocaust justified the unconventional route that he took. Be that as it may the rules governing the restitution of cultural property did not distinguish between Jewsa and other nationalities and there was every possiblity of the material belonging to dead Jews being returned back to the country of origin and this of course negated the whole tragedy of the Holocaust. While Raul Hilberg, the meticulous chronicler of the Sholah, was keen to answer the questin,how did Germany a modern western state transform itself into a murder organization, Zosa was not animated by large meta historical questions. His purpose was more immediate salvage as much as he could of the heritage still left and take it to USA which he felt was a safe zone. In a simialr manner, Leon Poliakov was intrumental in collectingGestapo records which came in useful as evidence in war crime trials which opened after the defeat of Germany.

This book makes a ood read. But there is the poignant tale of a dedicated scholars, historian, memory keeper going bad, horribly bad. Had USA treated him better coud the tale have been different. Who knows?

From Sacred Trash to Written History; The Cairo Geniza and the Historian

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life f Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World by Elizabeth Lambourn is based on the India Letters found in the Geniza at Fusat in Old Cairo. Before dealing with this book, there is the facinating intellectual adventure relating to the discovery and decipherment of the records found in the Geniza, a place where any document or relic bearing the Hebrew paryer is deposited so that it is not defiled. It is an extremely salutary experience for an Indian historian like me who has worked on the Medieval History of South India to read about the great feat that lay behind the study of the Geniza Documents. The history of Israel has been a most tragic one particularly in the 20th Century when Germany perpetrated the horror of the Holocaust and it is no wonder that the study of the Jewish past/history became a passion for some historians, particularly S D Goitein whose magisterial history in five volumes the Mediterranean Society is the most elaborate and comprehensive analysis till date.

The Ben Erza Synagogue in Old Cairo is the place where it all began. Two twins, sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margret, while on a trip to the Sinai brought back to England some scraps of old documents to the leading scholar of Jewish theology and literature, Solomon Schechter, the Lecturer in Talmudic Studies at Cambridge. He at once regognized the fragments as being the oldest manuscript evidence of the Jewish prayer Ben Sira which Protestant critics of the Old Testament had dismissed as a compsition from the Second Temple Period roughly around the time of the Roman Empire. Solomon Schechter dismissed such interepretations stemmeing from the hermenutical method of Higher Criticism practiced in Germany and later in England as tinged with anti Semeticism as it denied the Prophetic Tradition underlying Jewish historiography, If a fragment of the ancient text could be broght tolight this controversey could be laid to rest. Off he went to Cairo and in 1896 when Cairo was under French and British political control, e succeeded in removing 190,000 documents from the Geniza nd transported them to the Univerity of Cambridge which hosts the worlds largest collection of these documents.

Soloman Schechter held Rabbnic Judaism in high esteem and was keen on studying early Jewish texts dealing with Ritual, Liturgy and Paryer. Indeed the early study of the Geniza was entirely devoted to Jewish liturgy and Ritual. Whlie the Geniza records written in Hebrew script and Arabic language contain a large number of documents dealing with Law, Social Customs, Contracts with Merchants and shipers, Marriage Contracts, Divorce settlements, Lists of Dowries,merchant correspondence etc, they facinated early Rabbanic scholars as they also ontained religious advice on such mundane issues as: Can Jews have sex  on Sabbath,? Can slave girls be laid? Questions that are quaint by today's standards but in an age infused with religion such questions were deeply meaningful. The Rabbis were audacious inventors of History and hence there was a great deal of real and imagined history in their religious opinions. Schechter was disdainful of the scholarship of his day and in a letter to a friend even said that Christian scholarship on the Nation of Israel is "higher anti semiticism". The same can be said of the scholarship from several white countries including USA which demean and humiliate an Old Civilization like India in rder to further their geo political ends and objectives. India Phobia is now the ruling idelogy of white Social Sciences. And in rejecting the Christian view, he was al negating the work of the Oxford School of Judaic studies. In the initial years of the 20th century, the Geniza was exploited almost entirely for textual criticism and for Talmudic sudies. Te turn to social and economic history came when S D Goitein entered the field.

S D Goitein (1900 -1985) like his more famous contemporary, Fernand Braudel studied the Mediterranean but from the Cairo end which was the refuge of Jews from Tunisia, Sicily, Spain and North Africa. Braudel's longue duree was his abstract division of time and temporality in the famous triptych of Geographical Time, Structural Time and Individual Time. S D Goitein measured time with the rhythym set by the fortunes of the Jewish people as they reponded to the challenges of the Reconquista, the Faimid Conquest, the Crusades and the Ottoman Conquest of Egypt. Each age brought its own set of challenges and the Geniza was a palimpsest inscribed with the trials of the moment. For a Historian who was a witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, the  medieval world would certainly appear more civilized and appealing and this perhaps expalins the fact that Goitein dedicated almost his entire life t the study of the Geniza. The last volume was published the day before he died in 1985. 

S D Goitein was a Monravian Jew who was educated in Hungary where he learnt Arabic, Hebrew and the Talmud from the leading scholars of his day and at the age of 24 he migrated to Israel. He taught at the Hebrew University and was considered for the post of Minister for ducation by that great hero, David Ben Gurion. The loss to the world of politics was certainly a fortune for the world of Historical Scholarship. Goitein in his methodology was a practioner of "thick description" one that brings the past alive by a close and systematic examination and analysis of empirical evidence, documents, arifacts, records etc. He was conscious of the position of jews as non muslims in an Islamic society: their life was full of "horror, dread and misery" and indigenus people f India can relate to this as India was under savage Mughal rule and before that the rule of the Turks and Afghans. The jews were dhimmis, peope of the Book unlike the indigenus people of India whose status was less than a dhimmi. Indian ideologues writing thie Party sponsored fairy tales for their faithful ignore the horrendous suffering of the indigenous people and of course, India cannot have a Historian of such towering eminence as S D Goitein.

The document on the left is the one that started S D Goitein on his life long intellectual adventure. This is the document which Elizabeth Lambourn analyses in her rather turgid post colonial cultural materialist exposition on the List of items of Luggage carried by Abraham from the coast of Mangalore back to Egypt after a stay of eleven long years in India. He must have landed on the Aabian Sea coast crossed the Desert and then sailed down the Nile to reach Cairo. In all he discovered 21 fragments in all which he published in his book on the India Trade and Indian ideologues use these documents to speak of the Cosmopolitan arena of the Malabar and the Indian Ocean. This trade with Malabar was in the hands of Tunisian merchants who lived in Egypt and traded with ports all alonf the Arabian Sea coast. This particular letter belongs to the 11th century when good commerical relations existed between India and the Red Sea. In a moment of epihany almost like that of Gibbon, Goitein writes: The idea for this book was conceived by me on September 17, 1954 while in Oxford, searching the treasure of the Bodleian Library. Soon he realized that the Indian trade was part of the larger commercial nexus radiating from the Mediterranen Sea and hence he had to venture far into the North African Mediterranean, not too distant fom that of Phillip II. 

This trader ran a bronze factory at Mangalore and ran what appears from the documents a successful venture. The Geniza Records display a wide variety of scripts, languages and scribal skills. An interesting feature was the durability of the documents. There were sveral instances when douments whose primary text lay in the 9th or 10th century contained writing from 2 or even 3 centuries later. Since paper was scarce, old documents continued to be used long after theyhad server their primary purpose. Therefore the Geniza was not an archive. It was merely the place where documents were shifted without the thought of reuse. Goitein was a firm believer in Israel and its Destiny and was therefore an honest historian not given to distortions like South Asian "historians" for whom the past is only a political artifact. He said; I regard my work as that of a Histrian and philologist not that of expounder of socio economic or political theories".

There cannot be a more searing indictment of Marxian pretentions than this statement.

Part II will deal with Abraham's Luggage