The Low Countries. Jaargang 15

Dutch-Jewish Documents in the Diaspora
The Coppenhagen Collection in Oxford

Anyone interested in the history of Dutch Jewry will immediately turn to Amsterdam University and the great riches of its Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. Outside Amsterdam (or Mokum, as it is known in Yiddish), other important Jewish collections are held in provincial libraries throughout the Netherlands (that is, the Mediene). In Leeuwarden, for example, there is the Dr L. Fuks Collection, which holds a unique collection of books in Yiddish as well as in Hebrew, printed before 1800. In Enschede, the beautifully restored synagogue houses the impressive EU Regional Centre for Jewish History and Culture. And in Middelburg, the provincial library has mounted a very interesting exhibition to commemorate the Amsterdam rabbi and scholar Menasseh ben Israel (1604-1657), who established the first Hebrew printing press in Amsterdam.

In 1655 Menasseh came to London on an embassy to Cromwell, to negotiate with him for the readmission of the Jews into England, and today the Dutch connection to Anglo-Jewish history is still evident to those who visit the old Bevis Marks synagogue of the Sephardic community or the so-called ‘Dutch synagogue’ in Sandy Row near Liverpool Street Station. From Holland too, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, came the Wiener Library, which to this day remains one of the world's most important library resources for the study of Nazism and the Holocaust.

A further unique resource available today is the Coppenhagen Collection, which has recently been acquired by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. This collection was built up by three generations of the Coppenhagen family in Amsterdam, Isaac (1846-1905), Haim (1874-1942) and Jacob (1913-1997). The central theme of the collection they built up over almost one and a half centuries, and which miraculously survived the Second World War, is the history and culture of Dutch Jewry and the Holocaust in the Netherlands.

The Coppenhagen Collection contains more than 30,000 books, including an extremely valuable collection of rare seventeenth-century Hebrew books printed in towns in different parts of the Dutch Republic. Here we find rabbinical editions of the Torah as well as Christian editions of the Hebrew Bible, and also, for example, a Sefir Terillim (Psalter) printed by Plantin in Leiden in 1592 and a Hebrew alphabet printed by

[p. 275]

Johannes Drusius in Franeker in Fryslân (where there was a university until 1811). There is also an almost complete collection of the Hebrew books printed and published in Amsterdam by Menasseh ben Israel, as well the books he wrote himself. All this makes a very important contribution to the history of the Hebrew book and Hebrew printing in the Netherlands. It is no coincidence that it was Jacob Coppenhagen who, in 1990, published the definitive Menasseh ben Israel bibliography in Jerusalem.

In addition, the collection holds many important books, journals, photographs, pictures, prints, leaflets. pamphlets and other archive materials on Jewish life in the Netherlands, which the Nazis tried so hard to destroy. Extensive holdings of newspaper cuttings and articles can be accessed through a file index holding some 300,000 entries. A large section consists of archive boxes holding very rare materials on Dutch anti-semitism, and on many other topics such as the unique collections of prayers against the cholera or prayers of the Jewish community for the well-being of their patrons, the House of Orange. There are also important holdings of Yiddish printing and extensive documentation on the many smaller Jewish communities that existed all round the Netherlands before the war. Jacob Coppenhagen was himself a musician, so the collection also contains some very interesting holdings of Hebrew and Jewish music and of Jewish cabaret. All this constitutes a veritable treasure trove for researchers interested in Jewish life in the Netherlands.

In 1970 the Coppenhagen family emigrated to Israel, and from there the collection has now come to Yarnton Manor, in the countryside near Oxford, where it was officially inaugurated in January 2007. Housed in a completely new, purpose-built, state-of-the art library building in the grounds of the manor house, the collection takes its place amidst other important library holdings such as the Jacobs, Loewe and Montefiore collections. And through the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies it is also fully integrated into Oxford University's library and research systems.

To facilitate further study of this important collection, the first - and massive - task is now obviously the conservation and systematic ordering of the rich materials contained in this collection, as well as the development of an online catalogue.

Secondly, the fact that the collection will now remain together as a whole in Yarnton Manor offers a great opportunity for research, as this will make it possible to study it as a record of how over the past hundred and fifty years learned Dutch Jews in Amsterdam devoted themselves to studying the religion, culture, history and languages of the Jewish community as well as their interaction with and treatment by the Dutch society in which they lived.

Last, but certainly not least, it is to be hoped that in the years to come scholars working in Dutch and Jewish Studies will find their way to this unique resource. Without doubt, the holdings of the Coppenhagen Collection provide materials for a series of very interesting Anglo-Dutch-Jewish monographs and PhD dissertations - not just on the history of Yiddish in the Netherlands, or on the tradition of Jewish publishing from Menasseh ben Israel to the present, but certainly also on Dutch anti-Semitism and on the Holocaust in Holland.

Reinier Salverda

For a description of the Coppenhagen Collection see the website of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies: users.ox.ac.uk/~ochjs/library/news.html

References

Ben Barkow. Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library. London, 1997.

J. Bethlehem, Gids voor onderzoek naar de geschiedenis van de Joden in Nederland. Amsterdam, 2000.

J.H. Coppenhagen, Menasseh ben Israel, Manuel Dias Soeiro, 1604-1657. A Bibliography. Jerusalem, 1990.

A.K. Offenberg et al., Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. Treasures of Jewish Booklore marking the 200th anniversary? of the birth of Leeser Rosenthal, 1794-1994. Amsterdam, 1996.