European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction: JCR books in the BHI Rare Books Collection

Marginalized, seized, branded as outcasts, forced into hiding, coerced to do the will of their captors, and destroyed: millions of pieces of European Jewry – artifacts, art, religious objects, and books – endured a sort of cultural holocaust that mirrored the plight of six million European Jews. When Allied forces moved across German-occupied territories in 1945 they discovered looted Jewish cultural works squirreled away into various storehouses in Germany and across Europe. Some items had been seized by the Nazis and set aside for special research institutes established to study “the Jewish Question.” Others had been concealed by those who wished to preserve them