This prize-winning book tells the story of how passion for Jewish history and the trauma of the Holocaust, combined with a sense of grievance and pecuniary self-interest, came together to create the “The Archive Thief.” That thief, Zosa Szajkowski, was responsible for illegally transferring hundreds of thousands of documents from France to the United States in the aftermath of World War II. Leff artfully combines a biographical narrative of Szajkowski—a figure long notorious among scholars of French Jewish history and, until now, largely shrouded in rumors and mystery—and an investigation into the implications of his thefts on the shaping of the historiography of French Jews in the post–World War II years. The book also tackles the complicated practical, moral, and ideological issues involved in the recovery of European Judaica after World War II, and, in so doing, asks larger questions about historical ownership and the very act of archiving.

Szajkowski began his career as an amateur historian after emigrating from Poland to France in the early 1930s. It was at this point that he forged a life-long link with YIVO, whose historical department was then located in Paris. After the French defeat, YIVO leaders were able to “pull off the impossible” and secure Szajkowski's inclusion on the Emergency Rescue Committee's list of 2,000 of the most prominent writers, artists, and anti-Nazi activists in France. Szajkowski volunteered for the US army soon after his arrival in New York and, in May of 1945, was sent to occupied Germany as a translator for the Allied military government. It was during this period that he began to work with other Jewish scholars and the US army to begin the task of restituting looted Judaica to its rightful owners. The problem, however, was to determine who those rightful owners were.

Official US policy was to return all looted material to its country of origin. Most Jewish individuals and organizations, by contrast, argued that it would be a great injustice to repatriate the patrimony of the Jewish people to countries that no longer had any Jewish populations to speak of. Army officials gave their tacit agreement to this argument by turning a blind eye as Szajkowski and others—including prominent intellectuals such as Gershom Scholem, Salo Baron, and Hannah Arendt—sent recovered Judaica to Jewish cultural institutions in both Palestine and the United States, with the bulk of the material going to YIVO in New York City.

This large-scale consensus that the Jewishness of both these materials and their murdered owners did—and should—trump their attachment to their lands of origins, Leff argues convincingly, helped to bolster a nationalist understanding of Jewishness in the aftermath of the war. Furthermore, the fact that a large portion of the material legacy of Europe's Jews is now located outside of Europe has inevitably tended to insert European Jews into “the history of the Jewish people” and, in turn, to obscure them from the histories of the countries from which they came.

In circumventing official US policy and sending looted Judaica outside of Europe, Szajkowski's actions were in line with the actions and moral convictions of both his fellow Jewish intellectuals and the reigning American military authorities. By the late 1940s, however, he was no longer participating in “salvage operations,” but rather engaging in outright theft. Szajkowski continued to make his permanent home in the United States, but returned to France frequently for research trips over the course of the 1950s. During these trips, he stole thousands of documents of all kinds, many of them lacerated from bound books and collections. He was finally convicted in absentia of theft after being caught red-handed stealing documents from the city archives in Strasbourg in 1961 and never returned to France. He continued to use the reams of stolen materials that he had acquired to publish scores of scholarly articles, however, and then went on to sell off the documents to numerous prominent Jewish cultural institutions in the United States, including Brandeis University, Hebrew Union College, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Yeshiva University. These materials, in turn, created rich archival sources for the study of French Jews in the United States, sparking interest in the field among a whole generation of researchers.

While Szajkowski's primary motive was to make his research trips more efficient, Leff argues, his conviction that French Jews’ historical records would be safer outside of their own country provided him with an “ideological alibi” for his activities. His motivation for selling, by contrast, was crassly material. He often broke up document collections rather arbitrarily and sold them off to different buyers to maximize profit and avoid detection. Furthermore, by the end of his life, Szajkowski was both stealing and selling purely for profit, as evidenced by the tragic end of his career as an archive thief in 1978: he was caught stealing documents at the New York Public Library and committed suicide before he could stand trial.

While rumors of Szajkowski's thefts began circulating among Judaica librarians and archivists almost as soon as he began visiting their collections in the late 1940s, they were reluctant to call in the authorities to deal with the problem. This reluctance stemmed in part from sympathy with an aging Holocaust survivor and fear of the negative press that the story of a Jewish thief in French archives might generate. It also stemmed from trepidation about exposing the fact that American institutions had purchased the stolen documents. In the 1950s, French Jews were dependent on the financial aid of American institutions, which were in a newly powerful position to shape Jewish opinion the world over.

For the institutions that bought from Szajkowski with “no questions asked,” these materials were a godsend in a competitive postwar race among American libraries and archives to enlarge their collections. As Leff's very fine analysis of the motives of the buyers makes clear, however, their decision to turn a blind eye to the origins of these materials also fit in with a larger ideological world perspective—which Szajkowski shared—that Jewish history in Europe had come to an end. As a result, they saw little interest in preserving the material heritage of Europe's Jews in Europe. The fact that 75 percent of France's Jews had, in fact, survived the war made little difference. Neither Szajkowski nor the American Jewish archivists and librarians who bought his stolen goods had confidence in the French Jewish future, and thus felt morally justified in facilitating the relocation of these materials to the “safe haven” of the United States.

This line of thinking represented a form of cultural imperialism, as it stood in sharp contradistinction to most French Jews’ decision to remain in France, to rebuild their community, and to keep their archives with them. Arguably, this disparaging American attitude has continued through to the present day, as exaggerated accounts of “massive Aliyah” and “endemic antisemitism” form almost the entirety of coverage of France—home to the world's third-largest Jewish community—in the American Jewish media.

Leff ends her book by reflecting on the problematic nature of the very act of archiving itself. While archives are intended to preserve our records of the past in an objective fashion, they are, in fact, the results of historical circumstances and choices of categorization that inevitably shape the histories that we write. Perhaps the most important contribution of Leff's book, relevant to the academic discipline of history as a whole, is that it points to the importance of writing the history of the archives themselves into the history of the stories that they tell.