Germany in the holy land: Its involvement and impact on library development in Palestine and Israel

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Abstract

For more than a hundred years - from the 1840s until the 1950s - the German library tradition exerted an influence on the development of libraries and librarianship in Palestine and in the State of Israel. The cornerstone of this German involvement was the establishment of the Royal Library in Jerusalem in 1847. This library, the first scholarly library in Palestine, was planned and established according to the best German scholarly library tradition. Features of the eighteenth-century Göttingen University Library served as its model. The plans and activities connected with the establishment of a Jewish national library and a system of public libraries in Palestine in the twentieth century drew upon contemporary ideas of the Althoff reforms in scholarly libraries and upon ideas of the reform movement in popular libraries. As a result, concepts and procedures typical of the German library tradition were introduced into the leading libraries, such as the Jewish National and University Library, in Jerusalem, and the Municipal Library in Tel Aviv. The majority of the academic staff of institutions of higher learning in Palestine, until the fifties, was graduates of universities belonging to the German cultural ambience. They had brought with them the teaching and research methods utilised in the institutions where they had formerly studied taught or conducted research. This had an accelerating effect on the development of seminar and departmental libraries in the country's libraries, and thus strengthened the trend of decentralisation in the university libraries. German library tradition is perceived as a part of the German national cultural heritage. The immigrants, who came to Palestine after the Nazi's rise to power, had been imbued with this cultural heritage, and they continued to preserve it in their new homeland. Consequently, most of them were consumers of German culture and had a decisive impact on the widespread distribution of German books in private collections, public and scholarly libraries and in commercial lending libraries from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s. Copyright © Saur 1999.

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APA

Schidorsky, D. (1999). Germany in the holy land: Its involvement and impact on library development in Palestine and Israel. Libri, 49(1), 26–42. https://doi.org/10.1515/libr.1999.49.1.26

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