Jewish Antiquarian Bookshops in Nazi-Occupied Netherlands
Combining approaches from provenance research and cultural history, my project will closely examine the exemplary cases of four Jewish-owned antiquarian bookshops in the Netherlands from the mid-1930s to the postwar period with an emphasis on the years of the German occupation (1940–1945). Two of the bookshops were long-established Dutch businesses: Antiquariaat Meijer Elte (The Hague) and Menno Hertzberger’s Internationaal Antiquariaat (Amsterdam). The other two were reestablished in Dutch exile after their owners had fled Nazi Germany: Erasmus Boekhandel en Antiquariaat by Abraham Horodisch (Amsterdam) and Ludwig Rosenthal’s Antiquariaat (The Hague). Their preserved business records as well as other archival sources in both Germany and the Netherlands document how the German occupation authorities gradually dispossessed these antiquarian booksellers of their businesses by passing numerous regulations aimed at removing Jews from Dutch economic life.
The project explores different cases of changing ownership of books on the backdrop of the war and the Holocaust. They range from refugees who cannot avoid selling their private libraries on their way into exile, often doing so with the aid of Jewish antiquarian booksellers, to the confiscation of the latter‘s warehouses, all the way to books being plundered from the households of deported Dutch Jews. Some of these books can still be found in public German libraries today.
In this constellation, books appear in shifting roles as private property and cherished collector’s items, sometimes connected to family history, as well as goods carrying economic value and mediums of knowledge that the parties involved were keen to obtain. One leading research question will be how the people linked to the four antiquarian bookshops saw their own lives affected by the books that passed through their hands and what meaning they attributed to them.
