Rescue or Theft? Zosa Szajkowski and the Salvaging of French Jewish History after World War II.

SZAJKOWSKI, Zosa; FRENCH Jews; LIBRARY materials; ARCHIVAL materials; THEFT; RECONSTRUCTION (1939-1951); HOLOCAUST, 1939-1945; JEWISH history

From 1940 to 1961, the Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski (1911-78) illicitly moved tens of thousands of documents from France to the United States. There, he used them as the basis for scores of scholarly articles, eventually selling them to American research libraries. Should Szajkowski be remembered as a rescuer or a thief? This article argues that neither of these terms fully fits what he did. Rather, Szajkowski was a morally ambiguous figure who began to remove Judaica from Europe when Jewish life there was most threatened but continued even after the situation returned to normal. A rescuer who certainly became a thief, Szajkowski's story makes greater sense when placed in the context of the shifting balance of power within the Jewish world that took [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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