Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in polnischen Archiven 1: Ehemalige preußische Provinzen: Pommern, Westpreußen, Ostpreußen, Preußen, Posen, Grenzmark Posen-Westpreußen, Süd- und Neuostpreußen. München: K.G. Saur, 2003. XLIV + 632 S. EUR 138.00 (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-598-11649-0.
Reviewed by Jill Wooten (Department of History, Washington University)
Published on H-German (June, 2005)
Forschung fr die Forschung: a Jewish Archival Guide
In Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in polnischen Archiven, editor Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and her co-editors Annekathrin Genest and Susanne Marquardt bring together a massive collection of archival documents on the Jews in the former Prussian provinces now housed in Polish state and city archives. The book, published on behalf of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and in collaboration with the Leo Baeck Institute in Berlin, was inspired by the six volume series Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in den Archiven der neuen Bundeslnder (1996-2001), also edited by Jersch-Wenzel, along with Reinhard Rrup. It is the first volume in a future series intended to stimulate research on the combined history of Germans, Jews, and Poles in East Central Europe. The region's complicated history, along with the limited access to Polish archives before 1990, have contributed to the neglect of its voluminous archives on the part of non-Polish scholars. The current volume, along with a forthcoming volume on Silesia to be released in 2005, hope to correct this oversight by providing German researchers a better idea of what sources, particularly German ones, are housed there.
In the introduction, Jersch-Wenzel contrasts the historical situation of Jews in Pomerania and East Prussia with Jews in the newly annexed parts of Poland, including Posen. In the eighteenth century, the constraints of Prussian absolutism and its stress on economic utility limited the settlement of Jews in East Prussia and Pomerania to wealthy Jews able to obtain Schutzbriefe. The power and resistance of local guilds further limited the economic activity of Jewish merchants. In contrast, Poland was a place of economic opportunity for large numbers of Jews who migrated there during the early modern period to become traders, merchants, and economic middlemen for the Polish nobility (szlachta).
Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in polnischen Archiven is an indispensable research tool for any German scholar planning to do archival work on the Jewish community in the eastern provinces of Prussia. Its representative overview of sources from the nearly 1.5 million German and 1.8 million Polish documents in these provinces will aid scholars in determining which regional archives have material appropriate to their interests.
The coverage of the archives in each province corresponds to its size and its history under Prussian rule. Jersch-Wenzel stresses how the different political situations in the east Prussian provinces influenced demographic patterns. Whereas Jews in the older provinces of East Prussia and Pomerania lived almost entirely in cities where they spoke German, in Posen Jews remained in smaller market towns where they retained linguistic and cultural difference by speaking Yiddish. The region's comparative lack of restrictions and high level of communal autonomy encouraged the creation of larger communities.
Section A provides a representative overview of Jewish sources in Pomerania, East and West Prussia, South and New East Prussia, and Posen. It includes both large archives in provincial capitals and smaller branches. Divided by provinces and then further subdivided alphabetically by cities, the section derives its method and organization from the Polish archives themselves. To aid the researcher, each subsection begins with a brief history of both the region and the archive. Also provided is practical information, including each archive's address, e-mail, and hours of operation.
In addition to listing the local call number for each item, the editors also create their own numbering system to facilitate use of its three indexes of people, places, and institutions. Particularly useful is a guide to Polish and German names for towns and cities (pp. xxxvii-xliv). Section B takes a closer look at the large collection of Jewish archives in Posen. It is an archival experiment (an "exemplarisches Vorgehen," p. xxvii). That this more in-depth exploration is, with 2,000 pieces, only 25 percent of the available inventory, speaks to the sheer volume of Jewish sources available in Polish archives.
In order to locate pertinent sources, the editors encourage their readers to use this volume in conjunction with the Polish State archive's online database SEZAM (http://baza.archiwa.gov.pl/sezam). Unlike a published work, an online resource is constantly updated. SEZAM, however, is tough for the non-Polish speaker to navigate. It was also quite difficult to match up any listings or inventory numbers in Quellen zur Geschichte with those in SEZAM.
One of the main complications this volume and researchers in general face is the problem of language. This is perhaps an unavoidable dilemma when addressing a linguistically distinct minority living in an area that was already multilingual. The bilingual German/Polish headings for each section are helpful, especially for a German speaker working in Polish archives. The attempt to be multilingual, however, can tend to obscure important information about the language of the document. Jewish sources in Poland are primarily in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, and German. While some documents in Hebrew and Yiddish are designated in parentheses, the volume does not provide the original Hebrew or Yiddish or even transliterations. Through historical knowledge and archival experience, one can hazard a guess as to the language of a source, but many times it is hard to tell. In large part this difficulty results from the inconsistency of earlier finding aids, which listed the item either in its original language or in Polish translation. Because the present volume is largely based on the information in such finding aids, it inherited some of these shortcomings.
Nonetheless, the editors do a decent job of harmonizing the methods of a disparate archival system with obvious historical gaps. The final section brings into clearer focus the effects of early-twentieth-century history on Jewish archival sources. Entitled "A Digression (Exkurs): An Attempt to Reconstruct the Communal Archives of the Jewish Community in Bromberg (Bydgoszcz)," Section C assembles the extant communal archives of Bromberg, a mid-sized city on the Vistula River first gained by Prussia during the First Partition in 1772. In the late nineteenth century, Bromberg had a Jewish population of less than 2,500. From this interesting exercise, we see in miniature the degree to which the tragic history of Central and Eastern Europe destroyed and moved not only people and communities but also documents. The records of the Jewish community of Bromberg are in five places. Some remained in the State Archive in Bromberg; others made their way to the New Synagogue in Berlin or to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Still other pieces managed to find their way to the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow or to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. For each East Central European city, the story of its Jewish archives and where they eventually ended up is different. Hopefully in the near future we will have taken full stock of these archival sources. This guide is a step in the right direction.
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Citation:
Jill Wooten. Review of Jersch-Wenzel, Stefi; Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in polnischen Archiven 1: Ehemalige preußische Provinzen: Pommern, Westpreußen, Ostpreußen, Preußen, Posen, Grenzmark Posen-Westpreußen, Süd- und Neuostpreußen.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10685
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