union college
Recently Published Documents

This chapter introduces another model of total archives, Jacob Rader Marcus’s American Jewish Archives, founded in 1947 at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. The AJA offers a counterpart to the Jerusalem archives considered in chapter 2. In the course of his time directing the AJA, from 1947 to 1995, Marcus developed another type of total archive, but one that represented an ideal of diaspora and dispersion as Jewish values and archival virtues. The process of gathering archives to Cincinnati reflected Marcus’s personal perspective on the history of America’s Jews, in particular by looking at it from a western-hemisphere perspective, through his efforts to gather materials from the earliest Jewish settlements in the Caribbean and South America. In addition, he created an archive of copies, looking to gather as much as he could in duplicate rather than in the original.