Schmidtke, SabineSabineSchmidtke2026-06-142026-06-142026-06-14Sabine Schmidtke, “A Library Gathering Dust: Abraham Shalom Yahuda’s Quest to Recover His Property from Berlin, 1913-1931,” Notes from the Archives (blog), 14 June 2026, https://nfta.hypotheses.org/2143https://nfta.hypotheses.org/2143https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12111/10749Sabine Schmidtke, “A Library Gathering Dust: Abraham Shalom Yahuda’s Quest to Recover His Property from Berlin, 1913-1931,” Notes from the Archives (blog), 14 June 2026, https://nfta.hypotheses.org/2143This study traces the prolonged efforts of scholar Abraham Shalom Yahuda to recover his personal library, manuscripts, antiquities, and study materials from Berlin after his departure in 1913. Yahuda, a British national teaching at the Lehranstalt (Hochschule) für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, left for Madrid on a lecture invitation and never returned, as World War I broke out and he was classified as an enemy alien. His property—books, manuscripts received from his brother in Cairo, and Egyptological research notes—remained stored at the Lehranstalt's library and attic. During the war, Yahuda mobilized an extraordinary diplomatic network including British, French, and Spanish ambassadors to retrieve his scientific materials from the Spanish Embassy in Berlin via Switzerland. After the war, his former colleague Ismar Elbogen assisted him but faced severe obstacles including export bans, customs regulations, and high export levies on books and manuscripts leaving Germany. The Lehranstalt's caretaker Josef Hirsch managed the physical storage, cataloguing, and eventual dispatch of the boxes between 1923 and 1931. The paper documents how portions of the collection were gradually retrieved—some shipped to Madrid in 1915, others during the 1920s—while the final seventeen boxes were dispatched to London only on 29 October 1930. It further notes that Yahuda's later account to collector Alfred Chester Beatty overstated the disorder of his materials and understated how much had already been recovered. The study draws on four categories of primary sources: Yahuda's German-language diary, correspondence with Elbogen, letters with caretaker Hirsch, and diplomatic correspondence in English and French. Overall, the paper illuminates the intersection of wartime displacement, scholarly property rights, bureaucratic obstruction, and the personal anxieties of an academic fearing intellectual theft of his unpublished discoveries.en-USAbraham Shalom YahudaLehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des JudentumsBerlinIsmar ElbogenBlog0000-0002-6181-5065