Collections

Simon Dubnow personally compiled this unique historical collection of documents relating to Jewish history from 1890 onwards. This collection can be viewed on microfiche in the library of the Dubnow Institute. The documents are in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, and to a lesser extent in English, German, and Spanish, and they belong to the so-called Dubnow Collection  at the YIVO Institute in New York. A finding aid is available online.

In the early summer of 2005, the Dubnow Institute was endowed with the private and professional library of the Israeli historian Jacob Toury, who had passed away in 2004. This estate represents the largest and most valuable donation that the Dubnow Institute has received to date. The donated library encompasses about 1,000 titles in German, English, and Hebrew, including multivolume works and encyclopedias. Around two thirds of the collection consists of books on Jewish history, with the remaining third consisting of works on European history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection is of great scholarly value and eminent intellectual importance, as it documents the research interests and readings of a significant social historian of German-Jewish history. The focus of the collections is on Jewish history in Germany from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries: Numerous works are dedicated to the legal emancipation of Jews as well as the social, political, economic, and cultural developments that changed their lives in the nineteenth century. Another prominent focus of the collection lies on the history of Zionism and of Jewish diplomacy. A final thematic focus lies on the Nazi persecution of Jews and the Holocaust. Many of the works, especially those dating from the first third of the twentieth century, are both rare and valuable and their use is therefore extremely restricted. The collection includes such rare and valuable books as Ma’ase Tuvija (The Work of Tuvija), a Hebrew scholarly compendium of the early Haskala printed in Jeßnitz in 1721, which was penned by the Jewish doctor Tuvija Hacohen, one of the first Jewish students of the University of Frankfurt (Oder). The collection was gifted to the DI by Gideon Toury, a professor at Tel Aviv University, and his son Jacob Toury. The exceptional significance of this donation is acknowledged by its special presentation: The collection is displayed in its entirety in the lecture hall of the institute in custom-made bookshelves. The books can be viewed on request in the reading room.

The library of the Dubnow Institute includes the research estate of Annerose Kemp, the focus of which is the women’s rights activist and pedagogue Henriette Goldschmidt née Benas (1825–1920) Following her training as a kindergarten teacher, the pedagogue Annerose Kemp née Weber (1936–2013) worked as a lecturer of pedagogy and preschool education at the Pedagogical School in Leipzig, where she later became the head of studies in the field of pedagogy. Beginning in the late 1970s, she conducted intensive research on Henriette Goldschmidt, her impact on the women’s education movement in Leipzig, and the Women’s Higher Education Institute and its successor institutions. She also explored the family history of the Goldschmidts and the Benases. Kemp’s research estate has been held in the collection of the Dubnow Institute library since 2014. It includes 33 files containing around 2,750 documents from her estate (about 6,500 pages in all) as well as 110 books from her working library.