קונגרס העולמי ה-18 למדעי היהדות

Archival Digitization and Continuing Debates over Jewish Cultural Heritage

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The struggles over who can “own” archival materials are heightened by the fact that original records and historical documents are usually one-of-a-kind. Today, though, technological developments might seem to make previous debates moot: If we can make high quality digital duplicates, what does it matter who has the originals?

This paper will consider the impact of digitization on the debates over who controls the archives of Jewish history. It will begin by briefly overviewing the postwar struggle over who might “own” the archives of Jewish history in the context of the restitution of Nazi-looted archives. Then, the paper will present two recent cases—the fate of the archives of the Jewish community of Vienna, and the efforts to digitize the Cairo Genizah—to think through how digitization has changed the nature of these debates.

In the case of the Vienna archives, the materials were sent to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem in the mid-twentieth century, but since about 2000 the Viennese Jewish community has tried to regain their original archives. To resolve the dispute, the files were digitized in order to “return” them. For the Cairo Genizah, the Friedberg Genizah project has worked to digitize the entirety of the Cairo Genizah corpus in order to “recreate” the original Genizah collection. In both of these cases, we see how digitization offers the possibility of virtual reunification. However, as the paper will argue, these developments are not necessarily a major break from the past. We can see digitization as a continuation of microfilming (albeit a major improvement upon it), and also suggest that the possibilities of digitization do not mitigate the underlying issues of archival ownership, but actually magnify the possibilities of monumental collecting, which offers the tantalizing fantasy that one can collect everything.