Leo Frank Trial Collection, 1909-1961

The Leo Frank Trial Collection at Brandeis University documents one of the most notorious capital-punishment cases in early twentieth-century America. Leo Frank, a pencil-factory superintendent in Atlanta, Georgia, and a northern Jew, was at the center of a murder trial and lynching that continues to reverberate almost ninety-five years later.

Frank was born in Texas in 1884 but spent his formative years in Brooklyn. He attended Cornell University, graduating with an engineering degree in 1906, and married Lucille Selig, a Georgia native, four years later. The Franks lived in Atlanta, where Leo was the superintendent of the National Pencil Factory and active in B’nai Brith.

In April of 1913, a young employee of the National Pencil Factory named Mary Phagan was found murdered. Frank was accused and convicted based on circumstantial evidence; the trial was widely considered a mockery of justice, with crowds shouting “hang the Jew” outside the courtroom. Frank was sentenced to death. While he was in prison, new evidence came to light; in response to this and to widespread public outcry and petitioning (represented in the collection at Brandeis), Governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison. Slaton’s decision instigated a mob—composed in part of prominent individuals including a former state governor—to kidnap Frank from prison and lynch him on August 17, 1915. Commemorative postcards were printed displaying Frank’s hanging body. The events surrounding the Leo Frank case were instrumental in the founding of the Anti-Defamation League; they also spurred the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Leo Frank Trial Collection at Brandeis includes letters written by Leo Frank, the majority of them from prison, as well as correspondence to and from his wife, Lucille, and correspondence to and from Governor Slaton, Frank’s lawyer, and others. The collection also contains related articles, pamphlets, and legal documents. Within these categories are letters of support, death threats to Governor Slaton, petitions on behalf of Frank, news clippings, thank-you letters from Lucille Frank to various supporters, and anti-Semitic as well as pro-Frank publications.

At the heart of the collection is the correspondence. Many of Leo Frank’s letters to his wife describe the day-to-day needs and doings of prison life, the state of his health, and his affection for her. In the last letter contained in the collection from Frank, he writes to his mother-in-law after an attempt on his life was made by another inmate: “I hope you did not yesterday or today hear the rumor I heard—viz: that I was dead. I want to firmly and decisively deny that rumor. I am alive by a big majority.” This letter was written on August 4, 1915, two weeks before Frank was murdered.

Some of the letters express support for Frank and affirm his innocence. One letter to Frank in prison, postmarked April 20, 1915, did not reach him before his death. In it, a person signing himself “A Friend of Connelly’s” wrote: “Sir I know in my very heart and soul that it was Connelly that killed the Phagan girl…” It goes on: “the white folks never did treat me good so I need not cair [sic] whether you live or die but before me and my god Connelly [sic] killed Mary Phagan as true as death he did.” Jim Conley, the pencil factory’s custodian and an early suspect in the case, gave damning testimony that ultimately sealed Frank’s conviction. (Many years later, Conley’s lawyer proclaimed his belief in Frank’s innocence.)

Other letters express outrage at Governor Slaton for commuting Frank’s sentence. On June 24, 1915, a letter to Slaton expressed the vow of “a body of reliable citizens” of Fulton County “to kill you regardless of time or your where-abouts, we expect to hang you by the neck with a rope until you are dead and riddle your body with bullets, no matter where you go, or where you stay, we intend to kill you and then kill Frank…” The letter is signed “Yours to destroy, The life takers.”

After Leo’s death, Lucille’s entry in her daily planner read: “My darling is buried; what has life for me now?” The following month, she wrote a letter to Thomas Loyless about her husband. “I only pray that those who destroyed his life will realize the truth before they meet their God—they perhaps are not entirely to blame, fed as they were on lies unspeakable, their passions aroused by designing persons….” she wrote. “But those who inspired these men to this awful act, what of them? Will not their conscience make for them a hell on earth, and will not their associates, in their hearts, despise them? … If there is a God—and I know there is—truth will prevail.” It was another seventy-one years before Leo Frank was pardoned by the State of Georgia, in 1986.

The Leo Frank Trial Collection is widely used by researchers from all over, including theater groups preparing for performances of the musical Parade, students researching the history of anti-Semitism in America, documentary filmmakers, and many others.

The Leo Frank Collection was donated to the University in 1961 by Harold E. and Maxine Marcus. These materials were given to them by Mrs. Lucille Frank, widow of Leo Frank, and the aunt of Harold Marcus. Mrs. Frank was a life member of the Brandeis University National Women’s Committee (BUNWC) and died in 1957. The Marcuses were also active donors to the University (starting in the 1950s), and Mrs. Marcus was a founding member of the Atlanta Chapter of BUNWC and a permanent member of the National Board.

Finding aid to the Leo Frank Trial Collection, 1909-1961

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 manuscript and correspondence

A year after his first novel appeared, Joseph Heller got a query from his Finnish translator, who needed to solve the following riddle: “Would you please explain me one thing: What means Catch-22? I didn’t find it in any vocabulary.”[1] By 1974 the translator could have consulted Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (2nd College Edition), which classifies “catch-22” as a common noun. Yet only an uncommon author could coin so indispensable a term, and indeed much about his book is unusual. It was the first novel Heller ever tried writing, and though the first chapter had been published in a journal in 1955, six more years were needed to finish the book. Had he known how long it would take, Heller later remarked, he might not have started writing it.[2]

Catch-22 never came close to making the New York Times bestseller list, and at first lived precariously as a word-of-mouth “cult” novel. But as the military intervention in Vietnam gained momentum, as that disaster helped to spawn a counterculture, the novel became a phenomenal popular success, guaranteeing that Heller would never need to dig for quarters out of car seats. A decade later Catch-22 was more popular than immediately after publication, and dwarfed the later, growing success of other serious novels that had appeared around the same time-—like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963). In fact, Catch-22 has become one of the most popular novels ever written, with perhaps twelve million copies sold in hardcover and paperback.[3] Such phenomenal success makes Heller’s manuscripts and correspondence archived at Brandeis University of unusual value and interest. The original manuscript of Catch-22, written on yellow legal pads, is frequently used by students and scholars interested in its myriad corrections and editorial changes.

Catch-22 is populated with “characters whose antics were far loonier than anything ever seen before in war fiction—or, for that matter, in any fiction,” literary scholar John Aldridge observed. From Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos down to Norman Mailer, war novels were supposed to be written in the vein of spare, austere “documentary realism.”[4] But what was Heller getting at? Was he joking about the most horrifying of all themes, turning on laughing gas to get rid of the stench of death? The characters he had invented were mostly cartoons, and some were grotesque. The situations were outlandish. Lip-readers might well have inferred that the men who defeated the Axis in the most awful of wars were uncomprehending buffoons whose commanding officers were either mad or moronic. Infantry platoons were often celebrated as rainbow coalitions, yet why would the protagonist of Heller’s novel be an Assyrian and the chaplain an Anabaptist? No wonder then that Aldridge claimed that critics and other readers had to learn to become more sophisticated, to fathom the striking originality of Heller’s novel.

Yet private correspondence with Heller, available in Brandeis Special Collections, cannot be perfectly squared with Aldridge’s argument. Many of Heller’s fellow writers were quick to understand and to welcome what he accomplished. From Here to Eternity (1951), for example, barely resembled Catch-22. Yet James Jones praised it as “a delightful and disturbing book. Its weird comedy is marvelous, and underneath this on an entirely different level, its pathos for the tragic situation of the men is equally fine.” Two years after it was published, Dos Passos himself, then a conservative and a Republican, also spoke highly of so subversive a text. The author of The Young Lions (1948), Irwin Shaw, also raved about Heller’s new novel. The legacy of John Steinbeck includes The Moon is Down (1942), set in World War II; no American novelist did more for social realism. Yet the Nobel laureate realized that Catch-22 merited re-reading, that “a good book” the first time around proved to be “loaded with things that must be come at slowly…. My wife says she knows when I am reading Catch-22 because she can hear me laughing in the next room and it is a different kind of laugh.”[5]

Old-fashioned sorts of writers were thus quick to pick up the radically disorienting portrayal that this first novel was presenting. This essay would be incomplete, however, if it did not mention the impact that Catch-22 exerted on a 23-year-old unknown whom Heller’s agent claimed was “the only other genius” she had the privilege of representing. From the future author of another novel set in World War II, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Candida Donadio received the following letter: “You thought I’d LIKE it. Jesus. I love it. I won’t tell you how much, or why,” Thomas Pynchon wrote, “because I always sound phony whenever I start running off at the mouth like a literary critic. But it’s close to the finest novel I’ve ever read….Who is this guy Heller.... [?]”[6]

This guy also received unsolicited fan mail from Nelson Algren (“the laughter is hard-won… Thanks for writing Catch-22”), from novelist and political activist Jeremy Larner ’58 (“I read every word of Catch-22 with great delight and ended up scared and moved and happy”), from the British drama critic Kenneth Tynan (“a bloody masterpiece”), and from Stephen Ambrose, who would become a prolific military historian: “For sixteen years I have been waiting for the great anti-war book which I knew World War II must produce. I rather doubted, however, that it would come out of America; I would have guessed Germany. I am happy to have been wrong.” In some ways, Ambrose added, Catch-22 is superior even to All Quiet on the Western Front (1929).[7] The enthusiastic appreciation of other writers Heller earned at the outset.

Such responses are even more striking when the structure of his novel is considered. If reduced to plot summarization, Catch-22 is rather thin. It recounts the conflict between a bombardier and a superior officer over how many missions should be flown. Rearranged in chronological order, Catch-22 seems rather uneventful: three missions to Avignon, to Bologna, and to Ferrara have all occurred before the time of the first chapter, and M & M Enterprises has been formed. As characterizations, Heller’s three dozen servicemen do not exactly bulge with the three-dimensionality that is often credited to the finest fiction. Most—but not all—are caricatures, and even what protagonist John Yossarian looks like is sketchy. For all of its scale, this novel lacks lyrical descriptions, or precise evocations of the natural world, or metaphysical depth.

Yet by this book we as well as our posterity are likely to know Heller, the way we also know Cervantes and Swift and Voltaire—which is by one book, and only one book. The cauterizing humor and pungent politics that Heller stirred together have been enduring enough, after nearly half a century, to catch the reader’s attention; and that’s some catch, that Catch-22.

description by Stephen J. Whitfield, Max Richter Professor of American Civilization, Department of American Studies

Finding aid to Joseph Heller Collection, 1945-1969

[1]Markku Lahtela to Joseph Heller, April 12, 1962, folder I.ii.9, Joseph Heller Collection, Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections, Brandeis University; Sam Merrill, “Playboy Interview: Joseph Heller,” reprinted in Conversations with Joseph Heller, ed. Adam J. Sorkin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 173.

[2]George Plimpton, “Joseph Heller,” and Chet Flippo, “Checking in with Joseph Heller,” in Conversations, 115, 234.

[3]George Mandel, “Literary Conversation with Joseph Heller,” and Seth Kupferberg and Greg Lawless, “Joseph Heller: 13 Years from Catch-22 to Something Happened” (1974), in Conversations, 68, 122; Sarah Lyall, “For Joseph Heller, It’s Finally Catch-23,” International Herald Tribune, February 17, 1994, 20.

[4]John W. Aldridge, “The Loony Horror of It All—-Catch-22 Turns 25,” New York Times Book Review, October 26, 1986, 3, and “Catch-22 Twenty-Five Years Later,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 26 (Spring 1987), 381.

[5]James Jones to Nina Bourne, October 9, 1961, folder I.ii.20; Georges Cuibus to Joseph Heller, July 13, 1964, folder I.ii.10; Art Buchwald to Max Schuster, September 1961, folder I.ii.12; John Steinbeck to Joseph Heller, May 7, 1963, folder I.ii.17, Joseph Heller Collection.

[6]Thomas Pynchon to Candida Donadio, November 2, 1961, folder I.ii.15, Joseph Heller Collection.

[7]Nelson Algren to Joseph Heller, December 7 [1961], folder I.ii.11; Jeremy Larner to Heller, March 28, 1962, folder I.ii.29; Kenneth Tynan to Heller, July 26, 1962, folder I.ii.14; Stephen E. Ambrose to Heller, January 23, 1962, folder I.ii.3, Joseph Heller Collection.

Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America

Originally published as a series of pamphlets in 1751, the first collected edition of Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America by Benjamin Franklin was the fourth publication of his groundbreaking experiments in this field. It is clear that the work was written with the intention of conferring with like scientists working overseas, not of publishing its findings. The original publisher of Franklin’s experiments was one such colleague, an English Quaker named Peter Collinson, who produced the pamphlets “without waiting for the ingenious author’s permission so to do,” as he wrote in the preface to the first edition. Collinson explained that he published the work because it would be an “injustice to the public, to confine [the letters] solely to the limits of a private acquaintance.” The collected one-volume edition was the first published with the consent of Franklin and was edited, revised, and expanded by him. One of these rare first collected editions is currently housed in Brandeis University’s Special Collections, part of the Bern Dibner Collection on the History of Science.

The title Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America may give the impression that the book is solely an exploration of Franklin’s work with electricity. In fact, the book covers an assortment of topics, including mathematics, natural phenomena (such as theories on the source of aurora borealis, hurricanes, and shooting stars), economics, population growth, and the 1752 outbreak of smallpox in Boston.

The book also evinces some of the iconic Franklin wit and charm celebrated in American folklore, most evident in the correspondence to a “Miss S–n” (Miss Stephenson) whose letters are the most familiar and affectionate in style (“Adieu, my little philosopher”). Even Franklin’s affinity for turkeys comes out in the book—although there is also mention of an experiment in which Franklin delivered an electrical shock to a turkey, finding as a result that turkeys killed by this method “eat uncommonly tender.” In the process of this experiment, Franklin inadvertently discovered, from personal experience, that a human could withstand a higher-voltage electrical shock than he had previously thought. It was in this book that Franklin published some of his most famous discoveries and inventions, such as the Franklin stove and the experiment with the key and kite.

The presentation of Franklin’s experiments with electricity in the form of correspondence gives the reader insight into more than just the details of his experimentation; it reveals the course that led to his status as the first internationally known American scientist. The letters begin with Franklin’s humble thanks to Collinson for the equipment that allowed him to begin his experiments: “your kind present of an electric tube, with directions for using it, has put several of us on making electrical experiments, in which we have observed some particular phaenomena [sic] that we look upon to be new. I shall, therefore communicate them to you in my next, though possibly they may not be new to you, as among the numbers daily employed in those experiments on your side the water, ’tis probable some one or other has hit on the same observations.” While Franklin supposes in these early letters that his discoveries have long since been known to and accepted as truth by European scientists, it becomes clear throughout the detailed letters that Franklin was not lagging behind Europeans working in the same field but was rather at the forefront, influencing their experiments. Franklin includes a letter informing Collinson that his experiments were recreated—at the request of King Louis XVI—by French admirers of Franklin’s work. What starts as the unassuming account of a lay scientist ends with Franklin’s acceptance into the scientific intelligentsia.

description by Nora Epstein, undergraduate student in European History

Radical Pamphlet Collection

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new generation of American radicals protested the Vietnam War, proclaimed black power, and demanded women’s liberation. Partly in response to the era’s political ferment, the Brandeis University Special Collections library began to collect radical literature from throughout the twentieth century. The resulting Radical Pamphlet collection contains over four thousand documents that help illuminate the history of transatlantic radicalism, especially Anglo-American labor radicalism, during the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century. Not limited to national politics, the collection includes a large number of radical documents from the state and municipal level. With its primary emphasis on radicalism in the first half of the twentieth century, especially the period between 1930 and 1950, the collection complements Brandeis University’s Hall-Hoag collection of Extremist Literature in the United States, which holds similar material for the period between 1950 and 1990.

Containing a wide array of printed materials including pamphlets, magazines, journals, books, and campaign advertisements, the collection holds an especially extensive catalogue of British and American Communist Party literature published between the 1930s and 1950s (highlighting the Party's response to the Great Depression, World War II, and the war's aftermath).

The material produced by American Communists shows the way the party tried to attract African Americans and women by emphasizing (what were then considered) its radical positions on gender and racial equality. At the same time, the materials show how the Party attacked its socialist enemies and vigorously defended Stalinism and the Soviet occupation of Eastern and Central Europe.

Civil libertarians, who defended the rights of communists and radicals as they faced repression from both state and federal authorities, are also well-represented in the collection. The collection contains a number of pamphlets defending civil liberties during the McCarthy Era, but also holds many pamphlets produced by the American Civil Liberties Union from the 1920s through the 1950s.

In addition to pamphlets and political tracts, the collection also holds a number of radical and artistically inventive magazines from the first half of the twentieth century, including Mother Earth, Americana, The Masses, The New Masses, Class Struggle, and Labor Defender.

Complementing its focus on left-wing radicalism, the collection holds a number of documents related to right-wing anti-communism. These include published reports from state and federal House Un-American Activities Committees and pamphlet collections such as the staunchly anti-communist “The Truth about Communism.”

Chronologically, the collection shows the trajectory of American radicalism during the twentieth century, from its height during the Popular Front of the 1930s to its relative decline during the McCarthy era to its rejuvenation with the movements of the New Left during the late 1950s and 1960s.

As a whole, the collection provides invaluable insights into the intellectual, political, and social worlds of twentieth-century American radicalism.

The Radical Pamphlet Collection finding aid is available here.

description by Julian Nemeth, graduate student in American History

Léon Lipschutz collection of Dreyfusiana and French Judaica

A fascinating and varied set of documents, the Léon Lipschutz collection of Dreyfusiana and French Judaica is a font of information for those interested in French history and Judaic studies. While the majority of the collection is made up of materials specifically related to the Dreyfus Affair—an explosive, all-encompassing, and monumental episode in French and Jewish history—there is also a small but notable group of documents that focus more generally on Jewish life and intellectualism in France from the late 1700s to the mid-twentieth century.

Several items in this collection, while generally classifiable under the headings of Dreyfusiana and French Judaica, will be of import as well to students of literature, biblical studies, numismatics, and modern politics. One item in the collection dates from the French Revolutionary period: a letter written by revolutionary leader Christophe Saliceti to his colleague Garrau. In the letter—dated according to the Republican calendar—Saliceti champions the cause of a Jewish woman.

The guide to the collection, written by Léon Lipschutz, is key to understanding its contents. Mr. Lipschutz spent much of his life in Paris studying and collecting Dreyfusiana and Judaica and donating his acquisitions to various institutions. In his guide he does not merely list the items in the collection but organizes and analyses them, providing cogent information and insight that will be useful to both the lay reader and the expert. This erudite documentation is more than a mere index; it is a source of critical scholarship.

The Léon Lipschutz collection is composed primarily of Dreyfusiana. In general, the material can be divided into four series: books, letters/manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and photographs. Ranging in date from the initial days of the Affair in 1894 to well into the twentieth century, the material follows the way the Affair and its aftermath continued to play out in France and abroad, long after many of the major players had died.

The Dreyfus Affair is a matter so complex and vital to recent French history, politics, and culture that it has been the subject of innumerable plays, movies, newspaper reports, essays, and scholarly texts. The event may be summarized as follows: In 1894 a young and successful Alsatian Jewish captain in the French military named Alfred Dreyfus was accused of sharing French military secrets with the Germans. This accusation was based on flimsy evidence backed up by a military establishment terrified of looking weak in the face of treason. The main piece of evidence was the “bordereau”—a ripped-up piece of paper offering information on French artillery developments, found by a French spy in the German embassy. By dint of poor handwriting analysis, this list was erroneously attributed to Dreyfus. Additional evidence was either trumped up or fabricated entirely. In short order Dreyfus was convicted and sentenced to Devil’s Island by a military tribunal.

France, terrified from its recent defeat at the hands of the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, imploded in fury over this ostensible act of treason and quickly divided into pro- and anti-Dreyfus camps. While many aspects of French culture at the turn of the twentieth century laid the groundwork for the national debacle that was to become the Dreyfus Affair, a widespread anti-Semitism was a major factor. While Dreyfus’s professional success and his wealthy Alsatian background made him an easy scapegoat and target of hatred, it was the fact of his being a Jew that was the most damning piece of evidence of all. The Lipschutz collection includes several postcards and cartoons from the Dreyfus Affair that are blatantly anti-Semitic.

Émile Zola, the famous author and ardent supporter of Dreyfus, wrote “J’accuse!” a scathing open letter to the French president, which, with the help of Georges Clemenceau, was published on the front page of a major newspaper. The letter virulently attacked members of the government and military leadership, implicating them in a massive conspiracy against Dreyfus. Zola’s hope, which came to fruition, was that this letter would bring to light previously hushed-up details of Dreyfus’s case and force a retrial. One of the ways in which the French military attempted to protect itself was to declare a law of amnesty, making it virtually impossible to prosecute any of those who had been involved in the initial false conviction, forgery of documents, and cover-up. Clemenceau wrote a forceful argument against this law of amnesty. The Lipschutz collection contains the handwritten manuscript draft of this piece by Clemenceau.

While Dreyfus was not exonerated until twelve years after the case, the appearance of “J’accuse!” stood as a pivotal moment in the Affair and in French and Jewish history. As Jacques Chirac, president of France, noted in a public address to the families of Dreyfus and Zola, given on the centennial of the appearance of “J’accuse!”:

“…a man stood up against lies, malice and cowardice. Outraged by the injustice against Captain Dreyfus, whose only crime was to be a Jew, Émile Zola cried out his famous “I Accuse...!”. Published on January 13, 1898 by L’Aurore, this text struck minds like lightning and changed the fate of the Affair within a few hours. Truth was on the march.”1

While his effort on behalf of Dreyfus was both noble and effective, Zola was not left unscathed by the resulting chaos and personal attacks. The Lipschutz collection contains several letters by Zola, one of which is especially affecting, about the pressures and distress he and his wife were suffering as a result of their involvement in the Affair:

“Truly, the news which comes to me each morning in my solitude makes me despair. The crime passes all imagination. I have the darkest forebodings. I feel the ultimate attack is on its way. And what a dreadful debacle for our poor country! All that you write to me is correct—if there is no sudden awakening it will be the end of a nation. My wife is still very unwell… Do not give out my address here to people, because I desire more than ever to lock myself away, to disappear.”2

Zola was not the only member of the French intelligentsia to become involved in the Affair. In fact, with some notable exceptions, the majority of the intellectual elite in France was in the Dreyfusard camp. The Lipschutz collection contains a handwritten draft of L’Anneau d’améthyste by Anatole France, famed French author and winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature. While this novel does not touch upon the Affair, two other of his works do (Monsieur Bergeret and L’Île des Pingouins), and France himself was an ardent Dreyfusard who signed Émile Zola’s “J’accuse.” To the scholar interested in this manuscript, which allows virtual access to the author’s thought process, Mr. Lipschutz has given as well his own informed analysis of the draft and the way in which it relates both to the final published novel and to other discussions of France’s work.

This is but one small portion of the Lipschutz collection, which will be useful to scholars in a myriad of disciplines. The entire collection has been digitized and will ultimately be available online, accompanied by transcriptions and translations. From essays on Jewish communities around France, to personal letters to and from the Dreyfus family attorney, to studio photographs of close to one hundred people associated with the Affair, the Lipschutz collection is a treasure trove of artifacts from recent French and Jewish history.

1. translation by Jean-Max Guieu, Georgetown University; see Dr. Guieu's "Chronology of the Dreyfus Affair" webpage at http://tinyurl.com/mamgeq

2. translation by Surella Seelig and Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University

description by Surella Evanor Seelig, Archives & Special Collections Assistant and PhD candidate in the Comparative History program

Johannes Buxtorf, Christian Hebraist (1564-1629)

The phenomenon of Christian Hebraism—that is, Christian interest in Jews and Jewish literature—dates back at least to Jerome (d. 419/420). Some Christian Hebraists, motivated by conversionary and polemical interests, wanted to convince Jews that a true understanding of Scripture would lead to their conversion to Christianity. Others sought to understand the culture of Jesus’ time. Such well-known scholars as Pico della Mirandola believed that the form of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah supported a belief in the Trinity, and Christian Kabbalah flourished during the Renaissance. Christian humanists, recognizing the antiquity of Judaism and its divine origin, studied Hebrew alongside the other classical languages of Latin and Greek.

Interest in Hebrew continued to grow, and scholars produced polyglot Bibles with Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek, often side by side. Attention was paid to the traditional Jewish understanding of the Bible. The King James version of the Bible was translated in England by Christian Hebraists.

Johannes Buxtorf the Elder (1564-1629) was one of the greatest Christian Hebraists. His contributions ranged from Bible to rabbinics to what we today would call ethnography. Our Special Collections Department houses original editions of five of his works.

In 1525, Daniel Bomberg printed in Venice the Rabbinic Bible, which included the Bible’s Hebrew text and Aramaic translation along with the work of a number of traditional Jewish commentators; this standard format is used by Jews to this day. Buxtorf edited the text of the Hebrew Bible and its Aramaic translations as well as the text of the Hebrew commentaries. His revised edition of the Rabbinic Bible, reprinted many times, made the traditional Jewish understanding of the Bible available to a wide variety of Christian writers. Its influence is noticeable in the works of John Milton and Isaac Newton.

Buxtorf produced an important Hebrew grammar, the Thesaurus Grammaticus Linguae Sanctae Hebraeae. First printed in 1609, it was revised several times, with one edition produced by Buxtorf’s son, Johannes Buxtorf the Younger (1599-1664), also an important Hebrew scholar. The work, originally written in Latin, was translated into a number of vernacular languages and often appeared in abbreviated form, as in the grammar Epitome Grammaticus Linguae Sanctae Hebraeae.

Buxtorf's guide to Biblical and Rabbinic Aramaic, Grammaticae Chaldaicae et Syriacae, made it possible to understand difficult rabbinic texts. It was an important resource for the average scholar, who would learn on his own or with a tutor.

Buxtorf had his own Hebrew library. Knowing the importance of providing basic bibliographic guidance to others, he produced one of the earliest bibliographies of rabbinic literature—Biblioteca Rabbinica. This work was a major step in the development of more advanced bibliographies and its influence was felt for several centuries; it was of great value to Jewish scholars as well.

Space does not allow a full listing of works written by Buxtorf. One work, however, stands out among the rest—Synagoga Judaica das ist Juden Schul, first published in German in 1603. It was later translated into Latin and other languages and also revised. The title of the English translation is The Jewish Synagogue, or an Historical Narration of the State of the Jewes [sic] At this Day Dispersed Over the Face of the Whole Earth, in which Their Religion, Manners, Sects, Death and Burial are Fully Delivered, and That out of Their Own Writers.

This was not simply a work of ethnography. Buxtorf asserted that the source of Jewish religious authority, beliefs, and practice was not the teachings of Moses, but rather the teachings of the rabbis. Christians followed the Bible, the word of God. Jews followed the Talmud, which was full of errors, superstition, and hypocrisy. Buxtorf read widely and quoted frequently, giving his work an air of scholarship and accuracy. However, the information he presented was clearly biased and distorted. Although sometimes overt, the distortions were often subtle. In general, Jewish beliefs and practices were seen to be materialistic and superstitious. However, Buxtorf did believe that most Jewish practices were not offensive and that Jews were not a danger to Christians.

Buxtorf was often quoted as an authority on Judaism and therefore had a profound influence on how Jews were understood in his time and the centuries that followed. He was fascinated by Jewish culture, yet even his great knowledge did not allow him to overcome many traditional prejudices about Judaism. Buxtorf did not include blatantly anti-Semitic fabrications such as the blood libel, though he did claim that Judaism was a distortion of the true biblical religion as found in Christianity. In his view, Judaisim was full of superstition and error and many of its rituals had shallow and materialistic goals.

Despite these biases, Buxtorf made major strides in the understanding of Hebrew philology and in rabbinic bibliography. His works on the Bible made the text more accessible and his writings on Aramaic were of great importance in the understanding of rabbinic texts. Like many great scholars, he left a mixed legacy.

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1. To access online versions of some of Buxtorf’s works and their translations, conduct the following author search in LOUIS, the Brandeis online catalog: Buxtorf, Johann, 1564-1629.

2. Secondary works:

Burnett, Stephen G. From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century. Leiden, New York, Koln: E.J. Brill, 1996.

Christian Hebraism: The Study of Jewish Culture by Christian Scholars in Medieval and Early Modern Times. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library, 1988. [Exhibition catalog]

Manuel, Frank E. The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

3. For a rejoinder to Buxtorf’s Synagoga Judaica, see Historia dei Riti Ebraici, Vita e Osservanze degli Hebrei di Questi Tempi by the great Italian Jewish scholar Leone Modena (1571-1648). The Brandeis library owns the 1707 edition of the English translation. This edition and an online version of the translation can be found in LOUIS by conducting the following search: Modena, Leone History of the Present Jews Throughout the World.

description by Jim Rosenbloom, Judaica Librarian

The First Bookplate

The Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections at Brandeis has the distinction of holding an example of the earliest known bookplate, which comes from the collection of Brother Hildebrand (Hilpbrand) Brandenburg of Biberach. Scholars date the bookplate to the 1470s, and it must have been completed by 1480, at which time Hildebrand, a Carthusian monk, donated his collection, accompanied by these bookplates, to his monastery in Buxheim.

The convention of pasting a bookplate, also known as an ex libris (“from the library of…”), into the volumes in one’s personal library began in Germany in the late fifteenth century and only gradually spread to France, Italy, England, and the rest of Europe. Even after the advent of printing and the beginning of mass production of books in the latter part of the fifteenth century, the possession of large libraries long remained the privilege of the elite. Thus bookplates, which signified the ownership of volumes or functioned as gift plates to record the giver of a large donation, tended to be heavily armorial in nature, constructed around the family crests of their noble owners. This phenomenon is akin to the production of armorial bindings, in which the books owned by a particular noble family would all be bound in identical leather, with the arms of the owner elaborately blazoned on the cover of each volume. One striking example of this style of binding may be seen in Brandeis’s copy of Brief animadversions on amendments of…the institvtes of the lawes of England, which was once part of the royal library of King Charles II and is beautifully bound in red morocco gilt, with the king’s arms gilt-stamped upon both the front and rear covers.

These elaborate displays of ownership, whether appearing on the book’s cover or inside in the form of a bookplate, gradually replaced the earlier custom of ownership inscriptions found, particularly in manuscripts, either inside the front cover or at the close, following the colophon. These often begin Iste liber pertinet… (“This book belongs to…”), as seen in this fine example, originally pasted into Bartolomeo de Sacchi di Piadena’s Bap. Platinae cremonensis, de vitis ac gestis summorum (Coloniae, 1540). [The fragment containing the inscription is now catalogued independently as Manus 33.]

Bookplates provide a unique resource for scholars, as they enable them to trace the history of particular volumes as well as map the transmission of texts in the early days of printing. The history of the ownership of a book, known as its provenance, often provides information as to who may have been reading what books, and has even enabled the intellectual reconstruction of famous libraries, both of individuals and institutions. It can be invaluable for a scholar to piece together the resources a particular author, scientist, or historian had at his or her disposal when composing his or her own work, and a bookplate can be an important tool in this process. In the rare book market, particularly important bookplates can dramatically raise the value of volumes, and books that have always remained in private hands rather than in institutions and are accompanied by a well-documented provenance, which may include evidence drawn from bookplates, are particularly desirable for collectors.

With a famous plate such as that of Hildebrand of Biberach, it is possible to trace the history of the volume nearly from the time of its composition. Our copy of this bookplate is found in a manuscript of Part III of the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas, one of the most important texts of the medieval period. This large folio volume (32 x 22 cm.) contains 157 paper leaves with the text written in two columns in a single cursive gothic hand. It is ruled in lead, with running titles and chapter headings, and contains moderate abbreviation and rubrication throughout. The decoration of the manuscript is fairly undistinguished except for a single large historiated initial containing a man’s face, floral decoration, and a dragon on f. 85r. The text is bound in its original doeskin (sheepskin?) binding over oak boards, with a vellum label and manuscript title on the spine and brass bosses present on the front and rear covers, along with intact vellum straps with brass hardware. Three of the original bosses are now missing, and there is some significant worm damage to the cover, which is common in doeskin bindings.

The manuscript was composed around 1460, and thus Hildebrand or Hilpbrand Brandenburg of Biberach was likely its original owner. From the wealthy Brandenburg family, Hildebrand was a Carthusian monk in a monastery near Buxheim, Germany, who, around the year 1480, donated a number of books, including this one, to the monastery library. Accompanying the donation, in each volume Hildebrand pasted a bookplate or gift plate that indicates him as the donor of the book. It depicts an angel bearing a shield, which displays the Brandenburg crest, “azure charged with an ox argent, ringed sable,” as Egerton Castle describes it in English Bookplates (33). These plates are wood-block prints that he then colored by hand, and in many texts they are accompanied by a short inscription by Hildebrand identifying the contents of the volume.

Much of the life of the manuscript was thus spent in the hands of the Carthusians, for the monastery at Buxheim held the manuscript until the sale of its collection in 1883, more than 400 years after the original donation. This small and austere order is often recognized as being the most rigorous in the Roman Catholic tradition. Carthusian monks discern a particular vocation or charism for solitude, and while living as part of a monastic community, a brother “will pass the greater part of his life in his cell where he prays, works, takes his meals, and sleeps,” except at appointed times when he joins the community in praying the divine office or celebrating a communal mass.[1] This solitude is compounded by a vow of silence, such that the brothers speak to one another only at meals and on occasional walks outside of the cloister. There is no television or radio in the monastery, and no visitors are permitted, other than close family members of the brothers, who may come on set days, twice a year. The recent highly-acclaimed film Into Great Silence chronicles the lives of the monks of the great monastery of the Carthusians, La Grande Chartreuse, high in the French Alps, where the order was founded in 1084.[2] (Connoisseurs of fine liqueurs may also recognize this monastery as the source of Chartreuse, a spirit distilled from over 130 herbs and flowers, whose early-seventeenth-century recipe is a closely guarded secret, known only to three of the monks at any given time; the sale of this liqueur provides a major source of support for the order.)

As the original owner of this manuscript and the creator of its bookplate was a Carthusian, the laborious task of hand-coloring each bookplate and writing a description of each volume on the front flyleaf takes on a new light in the context of his monastic vocation. The monastery at Buxheim was an important and influential center of learning in the Carthusian order, and its library became renowned. Several partial lists of the library contents from various time periods are extant, and a recent project sponsored by Yale University is currently attempting to recreate the library in digital form, with links provided to each volume from the collection. The Buxheim shelfmark, number 144, which functioned like a call number to denote this book’s place in the library, is still visible in red at the base of the spine of the manuscript. Its actual location on the shelf at Buxheim is depicted as part of the Yale project and may be accessed online, http://www.cls.yale.edu/buxheim/1755/shelf81-160.html, while the full website may be found here: http://www.cls.yale.edu/buxheim/. Yale dean and bibliographer William Whobrey, who directs this project, goes so far as to argue that the influence of Hildebrand’s famous bookplate from Buxheim may be seen in the angel that guards the entry to the Arts of the Book collection in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.[3]

While the library at Buxheim provides several important examples of very early bookplates of the late medieval and Renaissance periods, including the Hildebrand plate, the use and importance of bookplates is by no means confined to the early years of printing, but continues to the present day, as new designs constantly grace institutional and personal collections. The Brandeis Library places a simple plate with the Brandeis seal (a gesture, perhaps, to the noble armorial origins of the bookplate) accompanied by a quote by Rashi in each volume it purchases, and students and faculty at the university have quite likely come across this plate in their reading. Those who donate books to the university have the option of including an individualized bookplate in those volumes, which can range from a simple acknowledgement of a gift or a dedication in honor of a family member or friend to elaborate personalized gift plates for important collections—the modern equivalent of Hildebrand’s first plate, which accompanied the donation of his collection to his monastery.

Several of these are quite striking, including that of Charles and Ruth McKew Parr. In one example, from a history of Mexico published in 1554, the McKew Parr personal bookplate appears on the left, pasted inside the front cover, while opposite, on the front flyleaf, is the gift plate recording the presentation of the collection to Brandeis University. Also visible along the hinge is a thirteenth-century manuscript fragment that has been used to reinforce the binding.

The Fischoff collection also has a very distinctive bookplate that marks the donation of Betty Fischoff’s collection by her son Ephraim to the Brandeis library. As you can see in this example, this plate has been pasted in over an earlier bookplate, an ex libris that records this volume as once part of the collection of Albert May Todd. In another Fischoff book, her plate is present opposite the inscription of an early owner, which reads Sum Joannis Burchardii a payer(?) / Anno 1560 (“I am Johann Burchard…”) followed by the injuction Caveas deponere loco, which, loosely translated, means, “Beware of taking this book from this place.”

On some occasions, it is possible to compile the full history of a very old manuscript, and the Thomas Aquinas manuscript once owned by Hildebrand of Biberach is one of those rare examples where a complete record of the provenance exists. Tracing a book through the centuries gives some idea of its continual importance—as a valuable piece of scholarship, as an important religious text, as an historical artifact, as a work of art, and finally, as a resource for students and scholars, particularly in the Brandeis community, who represent the next entry in the long history of this manuscript.

Language: Latin.

Date: c. 1460.

Title: Summa Theologica : Pars Tertia ; incipit: Questio p[ri]ma de c[onveni]entia incarnationis.

Creator: Aquinas, Thomas, Saint ; Unknown.

Place of creation: Germany.

Physical description: Paper, 157 leaves ; 32 x 22 cm.

Summary: Catholic Church theology. Part three of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the single most important theological work of the later Middle Ages.

Note: Folio. Written in a single hand in a cursive gothic script ; 2 columns of varying numbers of lines (40-70) ; writing block is 220 x 64 mm. Ruled in lead ; red initials, running titles, and chapter headings. One large decorated initial on f. 85 r. (a man’s face, floral decoration, and a dragon) ; hand-drawn colored bookplate pasted to front free endpaper. Bound in original blind-stamped doeskin (sheepskin?) over heavy wooden boards ; vellum label and manuscript title to spine ; brass bosses and intact brass and vellum clasps to front and rear cover, 3 of original 10 bosses now missing ; some worm damage to cover (common with doeskin) ; housed in quarter leather box. Originally owned by Hildebrand or Hilpbrand Brandenburg of Biberach (c.1460-1480) ; his bookplate, the first on record, on front flyleaf : an angel bearing an escutcheon displaying the Brandenburg crest, azure charged with an ox argent, ringed sable. Gift of Hildebrand to the Carthusian monastery at Buxheim, Germany. Sold 20 Sept. 1883 in Munich by Graf Hugo von Waldbott-Bassenheim to J. Rosenthal(?) [not identified in sale]. Sale of E.P. Goldschmidt, Cat. XV, n.3 to Thomas Henry Foster of Ottumwa, IA, 1928. Foster collection sold at auction, Parke-Bernet Galleries, NY to Peter H. Brandt of NYC for $120.00, 30 April-1 May, 1957. Gift of Peter H. Brandt, c. 1959. De Ricci I, 723. Faye and Bond, 188.

Former Call #: Ms. 9

Call #: Manus 9

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[1] http://www.chartreux.org/en/frame.html

[2] See the New York Times review of Into Great Silence here: http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/movies/28sile.html

[3] See Yale Bulletin and Calendar article at http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/v31.n13/story9.html

description by Adam Rutledge, Senior University Archives/Special Collections Assistant and PhD candidate in English and American Literature

Charter of the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary

This large and elaborately illuminated vellum document is an establishment charter known as a "patent of erection" for a chapter of the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary, one of the largest devotional societies in the Roman Catholic Church. Confraternities, also known as sodalities, are religious counterparts to secular clubs and are most often associated with Roman Catholicism, though similar societies also exist among the Anglican and Orthodox branches of Christianity, as well as within a small number of Protestant denominations. The Confraternity of the Holy Rosary, governed by the Dominican Order, is organized around commitment to a specific devotional practice: that of praying the Rosary at least once per week.

This prayer is quite ancient in form, and is generally held to have been written and promulgated by St. Dominic himself as an antidote to heresy and sin in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. Organizations devoted to the regular recitation of the rosary are documented as early as the 1470s, and numerous later popes commended the practice as an excellent devotion and granted benefits to members of this confraternity. These various pronouncements were collected and formalized most recently in the late nineteenth century in the "Apostolic Constitution on the Rosary Confraternity," issued by Leo XIII in 1898.[1]

The Rosary is the most popular form of Marian devotion and is traditionally defined in the Roman Breviary as "a certain form of prayer wherein we say fifteen decades or tens of Hail Marys with an Our Father between each ten, while at each of these fifteen decades we recall successively in pious meditation one of the mysteries of our Redemption."[2] Thus the "Hail Mary" prayer is recited 150 times while praying the Rosary:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

To aid in the counting of the numerous recitations of these prayers, a small device resembling a beaded necklace developed, with each individual bead representing one iteration of the Rosary prayer and divisions placed at the end of each "decade." Like the prayer, this counting device is also known as a "rosary" or as "rosary beads." Three of these rosaries are depicted in the illuminated miniature on this manuscript, which is discussed in detail below.

The opening lines of the manuscript provide important information about its history and provenance. The text begins with an invocation in large letters, set off by its own green border, which reads (letters in brackets are elided in the manuscript):

IN NOMINE S[ANCTI]S[SIMAE] TRINITATIS, Patris, & Filii, & Sp[irit]us S[ancti], & ad laud[em] & gloriam B[eatissi]mae Dei Genit[rix] V[irginis] M[ariae] pia[m]q[ue] venerationem D.P.N. Dom[ini]ci Sac[ri] Rosarii Authoris atq[ue] Institutoris Fr[ater] Antoninus Cloche Sac[ri] Th[eologi]ae Prof[esso]r, Ord[inis] Praedic[torum] humilis Mag[ister] Gen[eralis], & Ser[vu]s.

IN THE NAME OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and for the praise and glory of the most blessed Mother of God the Virgin Mary, and the pious veneration of D.P.N. Dominic, the author and founder of the Holy Rosary. Brother Antoninus Cloche, Professor of Sacred Theology, Master General and servant of the humble order of preachers.

The text thus indicates that this charter was given under the auspices of Antoninus Cloche, one of the most important master generals of the Dominican Order, who led the Dominicans from 1686 until his death, at age 92, in 1720. Cloche is not invoked as simply the symbolic author of the document, as his signature may also be found in the lower left corner of the text, with the date on which the charter was issued, the 20th of May, 1710. The body of the text also appears to indicate that this new chapter of the confraternity is being established at a monastery in the diocese of Nocera (Latin Nucerinensis) which is in Perugia, Umbria, Italy, though additional study is needed to determine the precise location of this branch of the sodality.

The document itself measures 39 x 51 cm. and includes an elaborate three-quarter floral border edged in green, nearly 7 cm. wide, in colors of blue, pink, orange, red, and yellow, which features a large central illuminated medallion. The text is written in Latin in a fine early-eighteenth-century secretarial hand with moderate abbreviation, and opens with an elaborate invocation set off within its own border, while the body of the text begins with a large illuminated initial "O" bordered in black and depicted on a background of green. The manuscript is rather dirty and faded in some places, though the colors generally remain vibrant and the text is eminently readable. The edges also are somewhat ragged, with small holes and tears on all sides, generally confined to the outer margin, though in two places impinging on the illuminations; in no place is the text affected by this damage.

The most significant artistic aspect of the manuscript is the presence of a fine illuminated miniature in the upper margin. There, the floral border includes an elaborate central medallion (6 x 8 cm.) surrounded by additional floral patterns, which contain an image of Mary holding the infant Christ, flanked by St. Dominic and an unidentified female Dominican saint. Mary is depicted hooded and crowned, robed in blue and pink, holding a rosary in her right hand while in her left she holds the infant Christ. Christ, with a celestial halo, is clothed in red and also holds, in his left hand, a rosary. The pair is shown elevated within a third large rosary, of which each bead is represented as a pink rose, the entirety of which functions almost as a window, as it were, through which the two Dominican saints below may look upon the Mother and Child. In this way, the metaphor of the rosary as a window to Mary and Christ is made literally manifest in the illumination.

St. Dominic (1170-1221), founder of the Dominican Order and author of the Rosary, is represented kneeling below and to the left of Mary and Jesus, tonsured and in the black and white Dominican habit, left hand lifted to the Virgin and Child and right hand clasped to his chest, with the traditional iconography of a dog carrying a torch visible at his feet, looking out from behind his robes. This latter association likely derives from a pun on the Latin term for a Dominican friar, Dominicanus, which rather resembles domini canus, "dog of the Lord." The Golden Legend reinforces this imagery, reporting that Dominic's mother dreamed during her pregnancy of giving birth to a dog holding a torch in his mouth with which he would burn the world ("And his mother, tofore that he was born, saw in her sleep that she bare a little whelp in her belly which bare a burning brand in his mouth, and, when he was issued out of her womb, he burnt all the world").[3] This image later became the symbol of the Dominican Order.

On the right of Mary and Jesus kneels a female Dominican saint, robed in the traditional white and black habit, her right hand extended up to Mary and Jesus while with her left she supports a large wooden cross, which reaches from the ground before her to over her right shoulder. Her precise identity remains unclear, as many Dominican saints may be depicted in this manner, though it is possible that she represents St. Rosa of Lima (1586-1617), whose name suggests an affinity with this confraternity ("St. Rose"), though it is not clear that there is any hint of the crown of roses that often accompanies her image. A second possibility is that the depiction represents Catherine of Siena, another Dominican tertiary saint, who is often represented in a similar manner.

The historical importance and fine, readable penmanship of this manuscript, combined with the stunning border and its extraordinary central medallion make this a particularly excellent selection from the Brandeis holdings, and one which has only recently been made available for scholarly study.

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[1] Thurston, Herbert, and Andrew Shipman. "The Rosary." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 13. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 1 Apr. 2009 (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13184b.htm).

[2] ibid.

[3] The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, vol. 4. Compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, 1275. First Edition Published 1470. Englished by William Caxton, First Edition 1483, Edited by F.S. Ellis, Temple Classics, 1900 – available online at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/goldenlegend/gl-vol4-dominic.html.

description by Adam Rutledge, Senior University Archives/Special Collections Assistant and PhD candidate in English and American Literature

Helmut Hirsch Collection

Brandeis University houses a number of special collections that focus on anti-Semitism, Jewish resistance to persecution, and radical social movements in the United States and Europe. One such collection is the Helmut Hirsch Collection, donated to Brandeis by Hirsch’s surviving sister, Kaete “Katie” Hirsch Sugarman. Comprised of correspondence, notebooks, diaries, artwork, poetry and other writings, photographic scrapbooks, and memorial publications, the collection documents the life and trials of a young German Jew who opposed the Nazi regime during the 1930s.

Helmut “Helle” Hirsch (1916-1937) was a German Jewish youth executed by the Nazis on June 4, 1937. While the facts surrounding the case remain murky—Hirsch was tried and convicted in secret—what is known is that Helmut Hirsch was involved in a plot to bomb the Nazi headquarters at Nuremberg and possibly the office or printing plant of Der Stürmer, a German anti-Semitic newspaper.

Born and raised in Stuttgart, Germany, Helmut Hirsch was the elder child of Marta Neuburger Hirsch and Siegfried Hirsch; his sister, Kaete, was one year younger. Hirsch demonstrated a precocious creativity at a young age and he was an excellent artist and draughtsman; included in his collection are sketches, paintings, ink drawings, paper cutouts, block prints, comic strips, illustrated poems, and art books that he produced as a child and adolescent.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prevented Hirsch from attending university in Germany and he moved to Prague at the age of nineteen to enroll as an architecture student at the Deutsche Technische Hochschule (German Institute of Technology). While in Prague, Hirsch became involved in the Black Front, a group of German expatriates and former Nazi party members who actively opposed Hitler. Hirsch was introduced to the group’s leader, Otto Strasser, by his mentor, Eberhard Köbel, whom he knew from his former Jewish youth group, Deutsche Jungenschaft.

By the time Hirsch’s family joined him in Prague in 1936, he was actively involved in the underground activities of the Black Front, a secret he never shared with them. In December of 1936 Hirsch informed his parents that he would be going skiing with a friend; in fact, he was planning on returning to Germany to carry out the bombing of key Nazi targets. It appears that Hirsch may have wavered in his commitment to the plot, for rather than go directly to Nuremberg as planned, he took a detour to Stuttgart to meet a friend. What Hirsch did not know was that German agents had likely been infiltrating the Black Front for some time and the Gestapo was waiting to arrest him when he re-entered Germany. He was captured in Stuttgart.

Hirsch was tried in secret before the so-called Volksgericht (People’s Court) in Berlin in March of 1937; he was sentenced to death for “preparation of high treason and criminal use of explosives endangering the public”[1]—despite the fact he was not carrying any explosives when the Gestapo apprehended him. By the time he was sentenced, Hirsch had been missing for three months and his family had no idea what had happened to him. It was only when his family heard his death sentence announced on the radio (March 20, 1937) that they learned of his fate. They immediately began to make appeals for his release and even sought the help of relatives in the United States.

Compounding the tragedy was the fact that Helmut Hirsch was technically an American citizen, because his father—who had lived in the United States as a young man—had been a naturalized American citizen. However, due to a bureaucratic error, Siegfried Hirsch’s American citizenship was revoked some time after he returned to Europe. By the time Helmut was born, he and his family were considered to be “stateless persons.” It was only when Hirsch was imprisoned that his family fought to reinstate his father’s as well as his own American citizenship, which was formally granted in April of 1937. However, neither this action, nor the diplomatic efforts of U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd, was able to secure Hirsch’s freedom. The day before his execution, Hirsch wrote this final letter to his family from his jail cell [translated from the German]:

June 3, 1937

Berlin-Ploetzensee

Dear Mother, dear Father,

I have just been told that my appeal for clemency was turned down. I must die then.

We need not say anything any more to each other. You know that in these last months I have really found the way to myself and to life. Real beauty must stand before unswerving honesty. You know that I have lived every moment fervently and that I have remained true to myself until the end. You must live on. There can be no giving up for you. No becoming soft or sentimental. In these days I have learned to say “yes” to life. Not only to endure it but to love life as it is. It is our own inner gravity, the force by which we have entered life.

It must help you in some way that I know I have finally reached my own inner image and feel complete. And in this feeling is much of our time and our world.

The only way I know how to thank you is by showing you until the last moment that I have used all your love and goodness towards becoming a whole being of my time and my heritage. Do not think of the unused possibilities, but take my life as a whole. A great search, a foolish error, but on its path to finding of final truth, final peace.

Please care for Vally[2] as for a child. I embrace you, dear mother and you, my father, once more for a long, long time. Only now have I realized how much I love you.

Yours forever,

Helmut.[3]

The Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department is most grateful to Katie Hirsch for donating her brother’s important papers to Brandeis University, and for translating a portion of the materials into English. The remaining translation will take place over time.

For additional information about the Helmut Hirsch Collection, please see the exhibit on our website at http://tinyurl.com/apw8kt.

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[1] “Secret Document in the Name of the German People” [photocopy], undated. From the Helmut Hirsch Collection, Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, Brandeis University.

[2] Helmut Hirsch’s girlfriend, Valerie Petrova.

[3] From the Helmut Hirsch Collection, Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, Brandeis University.

description by Karen Adler Abramson, Associate Director for University Archives and Special Collections

Abraham Lincoln documents and ephemera

On April 15, 1865, newspapers were given the awful task of announcing the assassination of the sixteenth president of the United States: Abraham Lincoln. The night before went down in history with one gunshot. John Wilkes Booth, an actor and confederate, mortally shot President Lincoln at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., jumped from the balcony, and yelled, "sic semper tyrannis" ("thus always to tyrants") as he fled the scene. One must wonder, on this bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, at the final meaning of the words Booth uttered. Booth's intended meaning-that tyrants shall always perish at the hands of the righteous-is flipped on its head, as it is Booth who has been remembered as tyrant and not the much-beloved President Lincoln. However, at the time of Lincoln's death, Booth was not alone in his hatred of the president. The divisive nature of the Civil War and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation precipitated several earlier threats, and a band of conspirators acted with Booth on that fateful night.

Only a short three months later, on July 7, 1865, four of the conspirators, Mary Surratt, Lewis Payne, George Atzerodt, and David Herod, who worked with Booth, were hanged in Washington D.C. at Ft. McNair. The public hanging was witnessed by thousands, including women and children. Photographs of the conspirators hanging, like these from Brandeis Special Collections, taken by Alexander Gardner, were reproduced in newspapers and as souvenirs. Surratt, the most remembered of the conspirators, was the first woman condemned to death by the federal government. According to the Washington Post, the spot where they were hanged is now a tennis court.1

Though documents like the newspaper announcing Lincoln’s assassination and photographs of the conspirators hanging are now collectors’ items, more interesting perhaps are the contemporaneous memorabilia produced following his death. Lincoln’s visage has graced all types of goods, from the copper cent to bookends to postcards. The collection of Lincoln memorabilia at Brandeis includes many of these posthumously produced objects. We also hold some more unusual pieces, like a small sewing box “made of wood which grew near Alloway Kirk on the banks of the Doon,” referring to the River Doon at the town Alloway Kirk; a miniature book, Addresses of Abraham Lincoln, printed by Kingsport press in 1929, measuring 1.5 by 2 centimeters and containing four of Lincoln’s more famous speeches; a silhouette modeled on the Lincoln cent made entirely out of “worn out paper money destroyed at the U.S. Treasury”; and a carte-de-visite printed by Boston-based illustrator G.W. Tomlinson dating from 1865 and depicting George Washington crowning Lincoln with laurels. In addition to the types of objects showcased here, our holdings include letters written by Lincoln when he was living in Springfield, Illinois, as well as many printed photographs, lithographs, and engravings of Lincoln, his generals, and his family.

As a part of the bicentennial celebration of Lincoln’s birth, the Robert D. Farber Archives & Special Collections department is lucky to be able to present not only this Special Collections Spotlight on our own Lincoln holdings but also a physical exhibit of Lincoln memorabilia collected by Brandeis alumnus Brian Caplan ’82, which opens on February 10 with a celebration in the Treasure Hall from 5-9 p.m. The exhibition will be on display in the Archives & Special Collections exhibit space through June of 2009.

1 Sarah Mark, “Tracking an Assassin,” The Washington Post, 14 April 1995.

description by Katie Hargrave, Archives & Special Collections assistant and graduate student in Cultural Production

The Walter F. and Alice Gorham Collection of Early Music Imprints

The development of music printing at the onset of the sixteenth century changed the European musical world. Before Petrucci’s first printed collection in 1501, written music was available only to those who had the time or the money to copy it by hand. With the advent of printed music, new works could be disseminated quickly and across great distances.

An even greater boost to the publication of music came with the development of type that contained both the note and a complete set of staff lines. Petrucci’s beautiful publications depended on a laborious process in which the staff lines, notes, and text were each laid down with separate impressions, requiring painstaking precision. The new type enabled a single-impression process, making affordable music available to many more customers. The interrupted lines and blocky presentation were a small price to pay for greater availability. The educated classes could now emulate the nobility, purchasing the latest compositions and making music in their homes. Lovers of music—amateurs in the best sense—perfected their skills in singing and playing. Composers, freed from their dependence on courtly posts, could now profit directly from their work and also improve their job prospects through enhanced reputations (though patrons were still a necessity).

The second half of the sixteenth century saw a flowering of music publishing; the market for chamber music helped drive the growth of the madrigal and motet as forms well suited to home music-making, for both voices and instruments. In order that a group of singers or instrumentalists could easily read the notes, music was commonly published in separate partbooks, one book for each vocal or instrumental line. Since there was no conductor, a full score was unnecessary, and any one of the participants could supply the tactus—the pulse that keeps the parts together. The number of people who could participate in the music-making was determined by how many could see to share a part.

Any one publication, therefore, was made up of several partbooks, each one a thin pamphlet with no more than a paper cover. To protect and preserve them, the buyer could seek out a binder to make a more permanent cover. It often made sense to bind together several partbooks from different publications into a larger volume, each volume representing one voice or instrument. This highly practical system had one drawback: since the individual parts of one publication were not physically attached to one another, it was inevitable that over time these partbooks would become separated. Today it is rare to find a complete set of sixteenth-century partbooks intact. However, single partbooks do occasionally become available on the rare books market. Brandeis is very fortunate to have several of these books in its Gorham Collection.

The Walter F. and Alice Gorham Collection of Early Music Imprints was established in 1998 and is overseen by Darwin Scott, Assistant Director for Research and Instruction Services (Creative Arts and Humanities) and music subject liaison. In addition to treatises on the theory and performance of music, the collection includes eight partbooks, ranging from slim publications to large bound collections. These books contain parts to hundreds of pieces from the second half of the sixteenth century, published by some of the most influential printing houses of Italy and northern Europe. Brandeis scholars can work directly with the original texts, observing at close hand the details of printing and binding, watermarks and marginalia, that help to inform our understanding of the dissemination of music during this great flourishing of polyphony.

The tenor partbook from Giovanni Piccioni’s Il quarto libro de madrigali à cinque voci is an excellent example of how such a book would look before being taken to the bindery. The pages are sewn together and protected by a multicolored paper cover. The book contains the tenor parts to twenty-one madrigals. Although at least eight books of his madrigals were published in Venice during his lifetime, no modern editions of Piccioni’s music have yet been undertaken beyond one charming piece from a contemporary anthology. This book, the fourth of Piccioni’s madrigal collections, was brought out in 1596 by Angelo Gardano, a prolific Venetian publisher who produced almost 1000 publications over the course of his career.

The bass partbook for the Canzonette à tre voci of Orazio Vecchi and his student Gemignano Capilupi contains the lowest part for thirty-four light and amorous trios. The canzonetta was a short, strophic song which, in Vecchi’s words, “did not bring great fatigue of mind.” In addition to the three vocal parts there would originally have been a fourth partbook containing tablature for a lutenist. Since the lute part doubles the voices, these pieces lent themselves to a variety of combinations from unaccompanied vocal trio to solo voice and lute. This kind of flexibility probably made for excellent sales for Angelo Gardano, who published this collection a year after the Piccioni.

Despite the felicity of this early partnership between master and student, undertaken when the younger musician was only twenty-four years old, Vecchi and Capilupi were not to remain friends. Capilupi’s jealousy over his master’s reputation eventually led him to cause Vecchi’s dismissal as maestro di capella at Modena Cathedral. When the older man died a year later, his rival succeeded to his posts both there and as musical director to the Duke of Modena. While Vecchi’s name is still known today, however, Capilupi’s fame has not weathered the passage of time.

The bass partbook in the Gorham Collection contains some contemporary annotations, including an additional verse to one of the songs, Chi scuopra oggi. Though the poetry does not fit the music as elegantly as the original text does, it gives us a compelling image of the man who once held and sang from this book. What caused him to add a verse to a song extolling the beauties and virtues of the fictional Clori? Who was his inspiration? Did he sing these words for her?

The Gardano printing house was founded in Venice in 1538 by Angelo’s father Antonio. Antonio (originally Antoine) had moved from France to Venice in the 1530s. He was a composer in his own right and was acquainted with many of the leading musicians working in Italy. One of these was the Netherlandish composer Adrian Willaert, who was born around 1490 and died in Italy in 1562. Willaert was one of the most influential composers and teachers of his time, numbering among his students the madrigalist Cipriano de Rore and theorist Gioseffo Zarlino (a print of whose influential Le istitutioni harmoniche also resides in the Gorham Collection).

Although Willaert’s works had appeared in anthologies, it was the monumental collection Musica Nova that exemplified the significance of his work. The book was unusual in its time for containing both sacred and secular music. We can divine the influence of this publication from the fact that it is referred to in over a hundred extant documents from the period. Duke Alfonso d’Este subsidized the printing of this seminal work in 1559, for which Gardano devised a new format. His previous publications had been oblong, but this one is an upright quarto. He also introduced a newly designed typeface and decorated initials for this publication. The clarity of the newly-cast type is striking when compared to earlier publications.

Gardano reused this deluxe design for a five-volume compilation of motets, the Novi Thesauri Musici, in 1568. The Gorham Collection contains a bound volume comprising the altus partbooks for the complete Novi Thesauri along with Willaert’s Musica Nova. Altogether this volume represents over 300 motets in addition to the 25 madrigals that make up the second half of Willaert’s book. Enhancing the collection are a number of handsome woodcuts.

In 1611 the Gardano firm passed to a third generation. Angelo’s daughter Diamante and son-in-law Bartolomeo Magni retained the illustrious name. Starting in that year, the printing house brought out six volumes of madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo.

Those who know Gesualdo’s name today are likely to associate him with two things: chromaticism and murder. The Italian nobleman, who lived from 1561 to 1613, was early viewed as a dilettante, but earned the name of musician through his many publications, most notably the six volumes of five-part madrigals. His visibility increased after the assassination of his first wife and her lover, as did his “mad passion” for music, and this was further enhanced by his connections with the court of Ferrara after his marriage to Leonora d’Este. As a prince, he was not constrained by economics to write music that would widely please, freeing him to push the boundaries of the madrigal with chromatic alterations and rhythmic surprises. The Gorham Collection boasts the only complete set of Altus partbooks to his madrigals in this country. Similar volumes that appear to have been their original partners are held in other U.S. libraries. The partbooks are bound together in contemporary vellum and inscribed with “Principe del Venosa” on the front cover. Below, a page from his sixth book of madrigals illustrates Gesualdo's chromatic lines.

Allesandro Gardano, Angelo’s brother, worked side-by-side with him in Venice after their father’s death in 1569, but after six years he withdrew his assets from the firm and set up a separate shop. In the early 1580s he moved his press to Rome, where he focused on nonmusical editions, though he also published a number of sacred works by some of the leading Italian musicians of the day. Among these was the Roman composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose writing has for centuries been held up as the ideal of polyphonic style. In 1591, the year of his death, Allesandro brought out a new and expanded edition of Palestrina’s first book of masses, containing works for four, five, and six voices. The alto partbook in the Gorham collection provides students with a remarkable opportunity to study these works at close hand.

Like that of the Gardano family in Venice, the name Gerlach was associated with printing in Nuremberg. When Katherina Berg married Theodor Gerlach in 1565 she was already an experienced printer, as well as a widow twice over. Gerlach, who had probably been employed as a printer by her late husband, continued to run the company until his death in 1575, after which Katherina ran the firm on her own for another seventeen years. Among their many publications they brought out a number of large collected editions of individual composers, among whom Orlando di Lasso figured prominently.

Lasso (1532–1594) was a prolific composer widely known and admired in his day. In 1568 he issued the first of many volumes of motets under the title Selectissimae cantiones… (“The choicest sacred songs, which are commonly called motets, partly altogether new, partly never before printed in Germany”). Brandeis owns a copy of the Quintus partbook of this work. Included in this book is a sacred contrafactum of a chanson first published nine years earlier; a piece that had begun life as a bawdy song was recycled as a joyful Alleluia.

Nearly twenty years later this book was reissued in a revised and expanded form, under the title Altera pars Selectissimarum cantionum. The Gorham collection is fortunate to own a copy of the Altus partbook from this print, beautifully bound in leather with two other Lasso works. In combination with the Quintus partbook of the original print, Brandeis students can thus study two parts for some of the same pieces. Below are images of pages from these two prints showing the Alleluia, vox laeta with its original French title identifying its secular roots.

Probably the most compelling source of polyphonic music in the Gorham Collection is a hefty volume of Superius partbooks from the 1550s and ’60s, bound in tooled leather and stamped with the date of 1571. The remnants of brass closures are still attached to the cover, and tiny leather tabs are affixed to the first page of each book.

The first six partbooks in the volume are anthologies of motets published in Antwerp by Hubert Waelrant and Jan de Laet under the title Sacrarum Cantionum. Together they give a vivid snapshot of mid-century Franco-Flemish sacred music. Thomas Crecquillon, a member of the royal chapel for Emperor Charles V, died shortly after these anthologies were published. His work is well represented in these partbooks. Vidit Jacob scalam, pictured below, is a setting of the story of Jacob’s dream from Genesis 28: “Jacob saw a ladder, the top of which reached to heaven and angels descending on it.” The ladder (“scalam”) is illustrated by the opening scale, while the ascending and descending notes give a vivid picture of the angels going up and down. This kind of “word-painting” is most vivid in its original notation, where the diamond-headed notes are printed in close proximity, not interrupted by barlines or spaced according to their durations as they would be in a modern score.

Bound among the sixteen partbooks in this volume is one that has no title page; it has been identified as XIX Cantiones 4 & 5 vocum of Gallus Dressler, published in 1569. Brandeis senior Al Hoberman spent the fall 2008 semester researching this composer, whose work has yet to be brought out in a modern edition. Working from a microfilm of a complete set of partbooks, Hoberman has reconstructed one of the motets, Fasset eure seele mit gedult, pictured below.

Most of the motets in this collection are on Latin texts, but three of them are in German. Dressler was a Philippist—a follower of a liberal sect that splintered from the Lutherans—who taught and wrote extensively about music theory and the expressive setting of text. His humanist leanings are demonstrated in his choice of a biblical text that focuses on personal responsibility.

In 1569 Clemens Stephani, a contentious poet, editor, and bookseller from what is now the Czech Republic, published in Nuremberg a collection of fifteen settings of Psalm 128 for four to six voices under the title of Beati Omnes. The list of composers whose works are included ranges from some of the most well-known of the day to others who were already considered old-fashioned, and includes some so obscure that they appear in no other publication. The idea of collecting settings of the same text by many composers was uncommon and may have reflected Stephani’s Protestant zeal for education and moral uplift that is reflected in his literary publications. He was unable to hold any position for long because of his “poisonous, blasphemous tongue” and died penniless in 1592. This unusual collection is found just before the untitled Dressler partbook midway through this volume.

The works in this collection range from books by some of the most prominent composers of the day to some of the most obscure. Surprisingly, two different copies of Giaches de Wert's first volume of motets also appear here. One of these was printed in 1569, and the other—tucked in towards the end—is from the original 1566 printing. The appearance of two printings of the same book within this large collection of prints is quite curious. It lends to the impression that this splendid volume was compiled by a collector who was more interested in amassing an impressive anthology than in examining its contents in depth. One imagines a man with more money than he could keep track of sending his agent out to buy up all the latest sacred music. Perhaps the bookseller saw this as an opportunity to offload a few items from his remaindered list. This volume, richly bound and clasped and shelved alongside its companion partbooks, must have been a part of a handsome private library, or perhaps it was compiled for the court. One wonders how many of the hundreds upon hundreds of pieces it contains were ever read through in the household for which it was obtained. How many hands has it passed through since, and when did it become separated from its companions?

The partbooks in the Gorham collection represent a rich source of repertoire in its original notation. In the autumn of 2008 the Brandeis Early Music Ensemble undertook a project to perform representative works from each of these volumes. They again performed some of these works in a presentation at the Rapaporte Treasure Hall in the Goldfarb Library on Friday, January 16^th, 2009, where audience members had the opportunity to see some of these books in person and read from facsimiles of the original notation. Sarah Mead, director of the Early Music Ensemble, provided comments on the works to be performed.

See a catalog listing of the Gorham collection works here.

Description by Sarah Mead, Associate Professor of the Practice of Music and Director of the Early Music Ensemble

Hall-Hoag Collection of Extremist Literature in the United States

In a Boston Globe article from May 7th, 1967, independent collector, archivist, and researcher Gordon Hall is quoted: “What I do is essentially engage them eyeball to eyeball. Confrontation on a daily basis. No one else does it.” [1] Hall was speaking of his interactions with the extreme left- and right-wing groups whose materials he painstakingly collected for the better part of his life. A portion of these materials is among the Hall-Hoag Collection of Extremist Literature in the United States held by the Brandeis Special Collections Department. This summer, I had the pleasure of spending dozens of hours combing through Hall’s collection of over 5,000 objects, performing minor preservation work on the materials and creating a digital finding aid to the collection. Presented here are a few of the interesting finds from the 42 linear feet of materials.

Gordon Hall was an American soldier in the Pacific theater of World War II. During his time in service, he was introduced to many left-wing political ideas while fighting against the fascist ideology that would later come to resemble some of the writings of right-wing groups in America. Though he never finished high school, his studious nature made him curious about both sides of the political and religious coin, and his investigations into the history and aims of political organizations began. In the same Boston Globe article he wrote: “communism is bad, but this [anti-Semitism and racism] are just as bad. As far as I can see, there are two extremes worth fighting and I guess that’s what I really want to do.” [2] The materials in the collection date from the late 1940s through the early 1980s. Together, they act as a barometer of the political climate during the postwar period.

As with all archival collections, the materials tell us as much about their time as they do about our own moment. Such materials as the Manion Forum Organization brochure demonstrate the importance of the media and street organizing in creating a movement. Not unlike the campaigning in this most recent presidential election cycle by thousands of volunteers, the tools of the Manion Forum Organization, a conservative club “concerned about liberals, socialists, and communists,” were radio and television advertisements, the distribution of printed materials, and door-to-door volunteers. The brochure’s graphics of countless modest homes are paired with the caption: “The Manion Forum Penetrates Millions of American Homes Every Week.” The map on the opposite side shows the potential reach of radio, television, conservative clubs, and campus radio networks across the U.S.

Similarly, the Student Voice newspaper dated February 25, 1964, includes two stories that seem quite relevant in today’s political climate. The paper discusses an effort coordinated by the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) to register African American voters in Georgia. The effort resulted in “‘at least 100’ attempts to register to vote” throughout Southwest Georgia. On the facing page, two white businessmen stand with the Atlanta NAACP president with signs of economic frugality, noting “wear old clothes this Easter” and “Easter frills or Freedom. You cannot have both now.”

The striking graphics employed by various organizations are themselves interesting. Throughout the collection, several right-wing organizations employ the well-worn Liberty Bell motif; a few of these include the Liberty Bell Press from Missouri, which investigated communist activity within the U.S.; the publication Through To Victory, a Christian anti-communist organization; the Liberty Belles, a female-only organization interested in reining in government power and spending as well as eradicating communism, socialism, and anarchism; and The Liberty Bell, an anti-Semitic publication.

Though some of the materials are independently well known, like the Weather Underground publication Prairie Fire, together this collection is an invaluable gathering of materials relating to extremist movements within the United States. Several are shocking, and all are sectarian. This cursory glance does little justice to the breadth of the collection; more materials were on view at the Archives & Special Collections Show and Tell event on March 5, 2009. For more information, please contact the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department at ascdepartment@brandeis.edu.

See the Hall-Hoag Collection finding aid here.

description by Katie Hargrave, graduate student in Cultural Production

[1] Boston Globe. May 7, 1967. pp. 28-35.

[2] ibid, 29.

Walt Whitman Collection

Journalist, critic, and feminist Margaret Fuller wrote an essay in 1846 entitled “American Literature; Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future.” Its first line read, “Some thinkers may object to this essay, that we are about to write of that which has, as yet, no existence.” Walt Whitman (1819–1892) took up the implicit challenge (as well as explicit ones from other pens, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson’s) and, nine years later, brought out the first edition of his landmark work in verse, Leaves of Grass. The moment was a defining and pivotal event in the history of that which, in the minds of some arguably unimaginative thinkers, did not yet exist; this much is clear to us over 150 years afterwards, but the Whitman we know today is, of course, not the Whitman we knew then. History is tidy only in retrospect. His answer to Fuller’s call was immediately if not universally recognized, but as his reputation evolved over the first hundred years following the work’s first publication, our understanding, like the continual revisions to which he subjected the poems, of the way in which he answered that call has dilated and expanded in directions as unpredictable and provocative as Whitman himself. We can only take stock of that understanding—and attempt to say something useful about it—if we return to and look closely at the texts and artifacts that document it. Brandeis University’s Department of Archives & Special Collections is fortunate to have acquired an interesting and varied assortment of these over the years; our collection affords a broad range of impressions to be had in service of this effort.

In September of 2008 we held a Show-and-Tell event showcasing a representative selection of our Whitman texts and artifacts; we were terrifically pleased to see so many visitors and regret only that we could not display more as a result of space limitations. We inherited custodianship of these materials from several different sources: some were independently obtained or came as part of larger groups of items that were not all directly related to Whitman; many comprise the collection donated to us by Mitchell Slobodek, one of Brandeis’s early benefactors; and several items came to us via the legacy of Professor Milton Hindus, one of the university’s thirteen original faculty members and a renowned Whitman scholar. The items range from first editions of landmark volumes of Whitman scholarship and early confrontations in print of “the Whitman controversy” (or, more accurately, controversies) to numerous early and fine press editions of his poetry and prose, both in book form and in the oftentimes much more difficult-to-find periodicals.

The first edition of Whitman’s major poetic work, Leaves of Grass, was published in 1855 at his own expense, and bore only his image—no name. Though we unfortunately do not have one of these, we are lucky enough to have a copy of the second edition, published in 1856. From the first to the last of the six editions of Leaves of Grass, the structure and layout of the book was invested (to the extent that he could influence them) with as much significance by Whitman as the words themselves. We are reminded of this when we consider his lifelong involvement with printing shops and binderies; he was even known to have set the type for many of his publications himself. The editions in our collection allow this attention on Whitman’s part to the whole work to be examined in careful detail, alongside the work done in a similar spirit by printers of later generations in the form of skillfully and beautifully executed fine-press volumes. Though these later examples, one of which is—amusingly enough—bound in grass, cannot be said necessarily to have lent expression in every case to Whitman’s particular vision of the ideal fusion between the word and its vehicle, it is certainly true that many of them aim at a realization in illustration and form of the themes the poet addressed throughout his career.

Leaves of Grass, though his best-known work, was not the only form in which Whitman published his poems—nor were the poems, however famous, the only thing he wrote. We have in the collection a wide array of other editions of his poetry and prose, including rare early printings of Drum-Taps, Rivulets of Prose, and November Boughs. Also, we are tremendously lucky to be in possession of a proof sheet for his “Passage to India”—this poem was written in 1868 and published in 1871, first as a separately bound supplement to Leaves of Grass and later incorporated into it.

Whitman’s only book-length work of fiction, the temperance novel Franklin Evans; or, the Inebriate: A Tale of the Times, was written and published in 1842 while he was working at Park Benjamin’s printing house in New York. He came to regret having written it later in life, calling it “damned rot” and claiming (perhaps in jest) to his friend Horace Traubel that he actually wrote the novel under the influence of alcohol. As critic William Lyon Phelps pointed out in 1924, “it sounds like a burlesque on a temperance tract.” It was not one of those works to which Whitman tirelessly worked to attract attention; much to his later chagrin, he did not have to, as the novel proved to be one of his life-long bestsellers. We have a very attractively bound edition of it from 1929.

During his lifetime, Whitman’s work was already being brought out in translation and in foreign editions. We have a selection of these from both before and after his death, including French, German, and Italian versions of Leaves of Grass as well as some examples of publicity in foreign-language periodicals. Alongside these can be found a rich gathering of early and late scholarship, covering Whitman’s relationship to Lincoln, his oft-commented-upon interest in opera, and his voluminous correspondence, among many other subjects; these are fascinating as a group for the perspective they provide in developing our contextual understanding of the ways in which we have understood this “poet of democracy,” in consideration of which we began this posting.

Unfortunately, in the space of such a necessarily brief note we cannot hope, once again, to acquaint you with the full range of artifacts in our collection, but we invite you to visit our website in the coming months to peruse the online exhibit we are building from these materials; we anticipate this being ready some time in December or January, and it will include many more digitized images than those you see here.

description by Daniel V. Donatacci, PhD candidate in English and American Literature

World War I and World War II Propaganda Posters Collection

Brandeis University’s World War I and World War II Propaganda Posters Collection includes nearly a hundred different images illustrating scores of different wartime topics. Initially inspired by the examples in western European countries, the creation and production of visually stunning, applicable pictorial publicity immediately gathered a substantial level of artistic involvement and industrial application in the United States.

World War I created greater demands on both physical and human resources on an international scale than had ever been thought necessary before. The war was first and foremost one of industrial competition, in which the manufacture of arms and munitions became essential; it was a war in which recent inventions like the airplane and the machine gun were used with deadly effect, and a new invention, the tank, was introduced. Additionally, it was necessary to engage the will of the entire population. Information pertinent to the war was needed and had to be supplied by traditional means, such as newspapers, proclamations, and notices; newer media were also required, like film and pictorial posters, which were able to persuade as well as inform. Gaining popularity quickly, by 1914 posters were as well established as press advertising. To be sure, it would have been folly for governments to have neglected such a successful medium.

Indeed, governments exploited posters. They were used to call for recruits (“Join the Navy: The Service for Fighting Men”), request loans, make national policies acceptable, spur industrial effort, channel emotions such as courage or hate (“Beat back the Hun”), urge conservation of resources (“Food is a Weapon: Don’t Waste It!”), and inform the public of food necessities and food substitutes. Charitable organizations, such as the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the YWCA, requested financial support for fighting men and civilian casualties. The posters in Brandeis Special Collections include outstanding examples of all these types, as well as some more specialized posters, such as “All Together: Enlist in the Navy,” which depicts sailors from different countries.

As befits a democratic nation, the majority of the images were aimed at ordinary citizens, reflecting back to them their strength, thriftiness, and common humanity—all of which encouraged the viewer to identify with the down-to-earth attitude of the laborer, who would work hard and spare a portion of his earnings for the war effort. In 1919, The Poster Souvenir Edition interviewed Gerrit A. Beneker about his poster “Sure! We’ll finish the job!” for Victory Liberty Loan. He said of the painting, “I took a working man as my hero [who was] known to every man, woman, and child in the country.” Also, food administration posters made a play on the sacrifices of the troops in Europe to motivate the people at home to contribute as much as they could spare (“They are giving all. Will you send them wheat?”). Visually and textually, the war effort at home was likened to that of the front. Men and women were portrayed as, and encouraged to be, active citizens.

It must be noted, however, that the United States was an immigrant country, and notions of the nation were potentially unstable. The government therefore promoted national unity through labor, service, and the family in slogans such as “Together we win.” Additionally, some posters specifically appealed to immigrants themselves who were asked help in the cause. For example, C.E. Chambers depicts newly arriving immigrants via boat, gazing at their new homeland with the Statue of Liberty in the background and a red, white, and blue rainbow arching over the golden silhouette of Manhattan. The most striking aspect of the American poster, however, is the Yiddish text. The translation is as follows:

“Food will win the war! You came here to find freedom Now we must help to defend her We must supply the Allies with wheat Let nothing go to waste. United States Food Administration.”

The war effort was often articulated within a language of freedom, progress, and happiness.

In the United States, certain illustrators were so popular that they played a dominant role in the production of war posters even though they had not previously been identified with poster art. For example, artist James Montgomery Flagg created a self-portrait for his depiction of Uncle Sam, one of the most widely reproduced images in history (over five million copies are said to have been printed). Cheerful glamour was contributed by Howard Chandler Christy, whose “Christy Girl” enticed men to fight or to buy liberty bonds (“I Want You for the Navy”). In addition, the poster collection at Brandeis includes such other famous artists as Adolph Treidler, Edwin Howland Blashfield, Harrison Fisher, Casper Emerson Jr., Henry Patrick Raleigh, and Haskell Coffin, among others.

Although the posters are now seen out of their original context, it should be noted that they were often used as part of a bigger campaign, together with personal appearances by politicians and celebrities, pageants, press advertisings, flag days, and the introduction of popular songs, as well as in oversized formats that occupied billboards (such as “Joan of Arc Saved France” and “Teufel Hunden,” seen here).

Nevertheless, to look at a group of war posters together, as in this Spotlight, is to get an understanding of the immediate response they inspired. Their overzealous patriotism would not be possible today; personal appeals—“I want you,” “What did you do?”—were widespread. These posters, too, give a many-sided image of war and its effects: the fatigued soldier, the despair of victims, and apocalyptic scenes of cities such as in Joseph Pennell’s painting “That Liberty Shall Not Perish From The Earth: Buy Liberty Bonds—Fourth Liberty Loan,” which shows enemy fighter planes bombing New York harbor and decapitating the Statue of Liberty. The aim of these posters was to show the disruption of normal, everyday life.

Most important, these posters are valuable as historical documents. One’s idea of World War I is darkly colored by knowledge of corpse-ridden battlefields and the appalling conditions of trench warfare. These posters give some flavor to the period as it was experienced by civilians. If one is astonished at the psychological approach of recruiting posters in this period, that is primarily due to a historical misunderstanding that posters can help to correct. In these posters exist old feelings one could not know in any other way.

Amazingly, although the United States entered the war rather late—April of 1917—it produced more propaganda posters than any other single nation. During the interwar period and World War II, other countries, particularly Germany, were inspired by American propaganda posters due to their positive effect on the nation’s citizens. Interestingly, the latter part of the twentieth century saw manufactured propaganda posters that were used to protest wars as much as they were used to support them, if not more. Even today, the poster is the exemplary medium that appeals to the most modern phenomenon: the masses.

World War I and World War II Propaganda Posters finding aid

Description by Aaron Wirth, Archives & Special Collections Assistant and PhD candidate in the Comparative History Program

photos by Maggie McNeely

Identifying a Renaissance Manuscript

While we were recently moving a series of rare items in the Brandeis Archives & Special Collections department, a small leaf of paper was discovered, which, from a cursory analysis of the paper and handwriting, likely dates to the sixteenth century. When an item such as this is donated or discovered, the task becomes to identify the item and determine, to the greatest degree possible, its age, rarity, provenance, and scholarly or historical importance. Because this manuscript was not immediately identifiable as being connected to any of the books with which we were working, our only information had to come initially from the manuscript itself. (You may enlarge the image below by clicking on it.)

This item is a small paper fragment, about 16 x 6 cm. in size, on the recto of which are several lines of Latin text written in black ink with some red embellishments in two distinct gothic hands. The verso also includes remnants of text in two very small hands and is heavily damaged, apparently from having been pasted to another surface, and thus is entirely unreadable. While some small amount of text on the recto has also been lost, the text in the center of the leaf, written neatly in a very readable gothic hand with moderate abbreviation, may be transcribed as follows:

Iste liber pertinet [c]o[n]ventui cruciferor[um] in valle S. Mathie al[ia] nigrepaludis dicto sito in territorio meroden[sis] prope dueren. Et [c]o[n]tinent in eo – [1] Sap[ientis] platine omnia opera ; [2] Iustin[us] de omnib[us] regnib[us] terraru[m] ; [3] [Text lost] de rebus romanibus.

In the Latin transcription above, the letters in brackets are those that have been elided in the text of the manuscript. This type of abbreviation was quite common in Latin manuscript documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and would have been attractive both as a time-saving technique for those who laboriously copied out manuscripts by hand and as a way of saving space, since writing materials such as paper and vellum were somewhat scarce and expensive resources. The abbreviations on this leaf are quite moderate and pose no difficulty for the translation:

This book belongs to the convent of the cross-bearers in the valley of Saint Matthias, otherwise called the valley of the black swamp, situated in the territory of [Him]merod, near Düren. And it contains in it: (the three following titles).

As is clear from the text, this item is thus a kind of early bookplate, a leaf of paper pasted into the front of a book that identifies its rightful owner: in this case, a community of monks. This, then, explains both the remnants of paste on the heavily damaged verso and the damage to the recto, likely done during the process of removing this label from a book. Handwritten bookplates of this sort are not necessarily unusual, and Brandeis Special Collections even has one example of a hand-drawn bookplate inside a medieval manuscript, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas [Special Collections – Rare – Manus 9], seen below.

After transcribing and translating the text from the bookplate, the next task is to try to identify the monastic library where it originated. The text itself mentions a “Convent of the Cross-bearers” situated in the “Valley of St. Mathias...in the territory of Himmerod, near Düren.” Düren is an ancient German city, located on the Rur river between Cologne and Aachen, whose origins date to the time of the Roman Empire. In the early middle ages, Düren was under the authority of the Romans and then the Franks, but by the thirteenth century it was a prosperous free city that held sway over the surrounding lands. On the edge of this sphere of influence, about 100 km. (60 mi.) south of Düren in the Salm river valley, is the Abtei Himmerod, or Himmerod Abbey, a Cistercian monastery that is almost certainly the place from which this bookplate comes. Himmerod Abbey was founded in the twelfth century by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the influential monastic reformer and preacher of the second crusade, who was later canonized and given the title “Doctor of the Church.” With reformist zeal, he, with the founding monks of the abbey, sought out a lonely, barren valley where the monks could, in penitential prayer and labor, live out their vocation of communion with God.

This location corresponds to the information on the bookplate in several important points. First, the valley was well known as untamed marshland at the time of the monastery’s founding, thus accounting for its description as a “black swamp.” In addition, the monks report on their website (www.abtei-himmerod.de) that the monastery was founded as a Kloster der Heiligen, a “Convent of the Holy,” the modern German equivalent of the “Convent of the Cross-bearers” described in this manuscript. In the Renaissance, the abbey became an important center of learning, and in 1506 a large library was constructed; thus, a sixteenth-century bookplate fits this timeframe well. We can therefore say with some confidence that this library once housed this bookplate and the text it accompanied.

Now that the provenance of the item has been determined, the next project is to locate the text to which the label initially adhered. This would seem to be a daunting task, to find a single text that matches with this manuscript among the thousands of volumes in Special Collections. However, our manuscript again gives us a clue. The text mentions three books, the first being the Sap[ientis] Platine Omnia Opera, the collected works of Bartolomeo Sacchi de Platina. Among the works in the Spertus Collection of Hebraica, Judaica, and Early Printing is the Bap. Platinae Cremonensis De vitis ac gestis summorum pontificum, an edition of the works of Bartolomeo Sacchi de Platina published in 1540 in Cologne, Germany, just 40 km. (25 mi.) from Düren.

The volume is bound in its original brown leather-covered oak boards, blind-stamped with a decorative border and several small roundels, some depicting the lamb and flag symbol of John the Baptist. The volume also boasts brass clasps for securing the text closed, and leather tabs indicate the divisions between books, making the volume easy to navigate. The text is printed in black with hand-drawn red embellishments and includes copious marginal notation in a sixteenth-century hand. On the title page is a crest with the biblical motto sicut lilium inter spinas (as a lily among the thorns).

The book shows heavy wear, and both covers are, unfortunately, detached. Possibly as a result, the original endpapers have been removed from the front and rear covers, perhaps explaining how the book label came to be separated from the volume. The connection between the bookplate and this book becomes virtually certain, however, when we notice that several printed pages from the De vitis ac gestis have been replaced by manuscript leaves, either because of damage to the printed text or because the owner desired to insert a correction or emendation. The handwriting on these leaves precisely matches the bold, dark hand in the center of the bookplate, as may be seen in the images below.

As mentioned above, the bookplate also includes several additional lines of text, which appear in a second hand both above and below the writing thus far transcribed. They appear to indicate that this book was transferred, at some point, to a second monastery, though unfortunately the name of this new location has not yet been identified. The name of the donor, however, remains clear, and these lines may be transcribed and translated thus:

Iste liber pertinet Conventui Cruciferorum [remaining text unreadable].... Iam titulo donation[i]s [p]ertinet a[d] Hermannu[m] Josephum Br[?] Judicem aquisgrani

This book belongs to the Convent of the Cross-bearers [remaining text unreadable]..... Now the honor of this donation belongs to Herman Joseph Br[text lost], Judge of Aachen.

All of the information recorded above is taken into account in preparing the finding aid entry for this manuscript, which may then be used by the Brandeis community and outside scholars to locate the item. The finding aid entry is appended below, and a quick glance shows how the research and description above is incorporated into this final stage of our process: preparing a catalogue record of the manuscript.

Language: Latin.

Date: c. 1540.

Title: [Book Label : Himmerod Abbey, Germany]

Creator: Unknown.

Place of creation: Himmerod Abbey, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

Physical description: Paper, 1 leaf ; 6 x 16 cm.

Summary: A label once affixed to a book belonging to the monks of Himmerod Abbey in Germany. The text reads:

Iste liber pertinet [c]o[n]ventui cruciferor[um] in valle S. Mathie al[ia] nigrepaludis dicto sito in territorio meroden[sis] prope dueren. Et [c]o[n]tinent in eo – [1] Sap[ientis] platine omnia opera ; [2] Iustin[us] de omnib[us] regnib[us] terraru[m] ; [3] [Text lost] de rebus romanibus.

[This book belongs to the convent of the cross-bearers in the valley of Saint Matthias, also called the black swamp, situated in the territory of [Him]merod, near Düren. And it contains in it (the three following titles)].

Himmerod Abbey, founded in 1134, was the fourteenth monastery founded by Bernard of Clairvaux, and the first he established in Germany. Beginning in the twelfth century, it was a “convent of the Holy,” here rendered in the Latin as [c]o[n]ventui cruciferorum. As described in the history of the convent, the founding monks decided to build their monastery in the valley of the Salm river, relatively close (c. 100 km. [62 mi.]) to the important city of Düren (L. Dueren), because they wished for the seclusion and penitential hardship of living in the untamed swamp that covered this region. In this manuscript, the scribe writes of the abbey being “in the valley of Saint Matthias,” a quite pleasant name for the place, but called by others, it seems, nigrepaludib[us], or “the black swamp.” In the Renaissance, the abbey was an important center of learning in the region, and a library was dedicated at Himmerod in 1506, from which this label most likely comes. The label was almost certainly initially fixed to the Bap. Platinae Cremonensis, de Vitis ac Gestis Summorum of Bartolomeo de Sacchi di Piadena (Coloniae, 1540) [Temporary Call #: Spertus 51], which is the first work listed on the label. The names of the other texts mentioned do not appear in this volume and have not yet been matched to any standard texts, but it may well be that they are casual references to works that would be familiar to a scholar of the period. The second is likely the Historiarum Philippicarum of Marcus Junianus Justinus, or Justin, the famous Roman historian. There are three additional lines of script on the manuscript, written in a later hand, which appear to refer to a subsequent owner, apparently another abbey. While the name of this abbey has not been deciphered, the name of the donor is partially readable:

Iste liber pertinet Conventui Cruciferorum [remaining text unreadable].... Iam titulo donation[i]s [p]ertinet a[d] Hermannu[m] Josephum Br[?] Judicem aquisgrani

This book belongs to the Convent of the Cross-bearers [remaining text unreadable]..... Now the honor of this donation belongs to Herman Joseph Br[text lost], Judge of Aachen.

For more information, see Abtei Himmerod at www.abtei-himmerod.de.

Note: Small paper fragment, initially likely pasted to the inside cover of a book, and damaged from its removal ; almost certainly from Bartolomeo de Sacchi di Piadena’s Bap. Platinae Cremonensis, de Vitis ac Gestis Summorum (Coloniae, 1540) [Temporary Call #: Spertus 51]. Written in black with some red embellishment in two gothic hands. Verso also includes remnants of text in two very small hands, heavily damaged and thus entirely unreadable. The Maurice and Badona Spertus Collection of Judaica, Hebraica, and Early Printing. Gift of Maurice and Badona Spertus.

Call #: Manus 33

description by Adam Rutledge, Senior University Archives/Special Collections Assistant and PhD candidate in
English and American Literature

Photos of Himmerod Abbey www.abtei-himmerod.de

McKew Parr Collection: Magellan and the Age of Discovery

The McKew Parr Collection was donated to Brandeis in 1961 by Connecticut State Senator Charles McKew Parr and his wife, Ruth. Comprised of nearly 7000 items, the McKew Parr Collection, titled “Magellan and the Age of Discovery,” was one of America’s premier private collections devoted to the era of exploration, the period from the mid-fifteenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries. Of these items, almost 1000 books and several hundred pamphlets of particular rarity and value are housed in the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, while the remaining volumes, consisting mainly of mid-twentieth-century scholarly works on exploration, are held in the open stacks.

McKew Parr began compiling the collection to support his research on the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, which he eventually published in a 1953 biography entitled So Noble a Captain: The Life and Times of Ferdinand Magellan [G286.M2 P3], renamed in the second edition Ferdinand Magellan, Circumnavigator [G286.M2 P32 1964]. After publishing the first edition of this work, McKew Parr decided to make these materials available to the larger scholarly community, and to that end he converted an outbuilding on his Connecticut estate into a library “for the use of accredited students and other qualified persons.” Included here are images of both the exterior and interior of the McKew Parr Library in Chester, Connecticut, the latter showing McKew Parr reading at one of the library tables.

The third image shows the title page of a catalog for the library, dedicated by Charles McKew Parr to one of the other major early donors to the Brandeis Library, Mr. Bern Dibner. Materials in the McKew Parr Collection are primarily in Spanish and Portuguese, but include some English, French, Dutch, and Latin texts as well. The collection is of primary interest to those wishing to consult contemporary accounts of European exploration and colonial history, especially that of Spain and Portugal, as well as anyone wishing to examine the treatment of these issues in early twentieth-century scholarship.

McKew Parr considered these materials a working collection; that is, he gathered them primarily for their scholarly interest rather than for their rarity or monetary value, and thus, upon donating the collection to Brandeis, it was his wish that the majority of the materials be made easily accessible to students for use in their own research. To this end, the Special Collections Department is in the process of digitizing some of the more fragile items in the McKew Parr Collection through the Open Content Alliance in collaboration with the Boston Public Library. Thus far, several dozen volumes have been made publicly available in electronic format and may be viewed online at http://www.archive.org/details/opencontentalliance under the search heading “McKew Parr.” One of these texts, Noticias de Portugal, Offerecidas a el Rey N.S. Dom Ioao o IV, a seventeenth-century account of Portuguese economic conditions, has already been downloaded nearly 400 times in the eight months since it was first made available, indicating the scale of the scholarly interest in many of these items.

The nearly 1000 rare items from “Magellan and the Age of Discovery” held in Special Collections include almost 300 volumes published before 1850, most of which are contemporary accounts of the process of exploration and colonization. These often first-hand descriptions of colonial encounters and the administration of European holdings abroad have proven fascinating to scholars and collectors alike and are thus extraordinarily valuable. Many of these are worthy of special mention, including the following two very fine seventeenth-century texts that illustrate different strengths in the collection.

The first is the Conquista de las Islas Molucas (1609) [Rare McPar DS674 .L4 1609], written by Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, a Spanish historian and poet who took holy orders and was later appointed royal chaplain and historiographer of Aragon.

This particular text was commissioned by the Council of the Indies to commemorate the Spanish recapture of the Moluccan Islands of Ternate and Tidore in 1606. It was very well received upon its initial publication, and continues to be an important source for research into Spanish and Portuguese exploration in the East Indies, the conquest of the Philippines, and the history of the spice trade, especially since Argensola consulted numerous primary sources in the archives of the Indies when writing this work. Our volume is bound in its original brown leather over paper boards, though the spine has been rebacked in brown leather gilt and the endpapers replaced. The text itself is very finely printed, with numerous ornamental head- and tail-pieces and woodcut initials, and an especially fine engraved title page. This page, pictured below, illustrates, within an elaborate architectural border, an allegory of the Spanish conquest of the Moluccas. The amazon queen “Maluca” is depicted seated astride a crocodile, wearing a feather headdress and holding a sword in her left hand while in her right she raises a horn of plenty filled with the fruits of her lands. Her gaze is directed upward to where a rainbow is shown containing the royal crest of Spain, shimmering in the light, signifying, with the word simul, the fact that the sun never sets on the Spanish empire. In the background is an active volcano, of which there are several on these islands, and seashells are strewn before her feet.

The second text is El Devoto Peregrino, y Viage de Tierra Santa, written in Spanish by Antonio del Castillo and first published in Madrid in 1654. This popular traveler’s account of a journey to the Holy Land was reissued in many later printings, including the Paris edition of 1666 held by Brandeis [Rare McPar DS106 .C35 1666]. The volume is in its original binding of quarter red leather over green marbled boards with a paper label containing a manuscript title on the spine. The title page includes a small vignette of Jerusalem, and there are numerous engraved head- and tail-pieces and ornamental initials throughout.

Antonio del Castillo was a Franciscan friar sent by his superiors to the Holy Land in the first part of the seventeenth century. From there he travelled to Alexandria, Egypt, and several other countries in the Middle East. In this volume, he describes his visits to Jerusalem, Nazareth, Jaffa, and the mountains and desert of Judea, with particular emphasis on the holy places he encountered there. The final portion of the book is given over to an account of the liturgy at the various important churches he visited, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

Most striking in this volume are the numerous folded plates illustrating various aspects of the friar’s travels, particularly two enormous printed maps of Jerusalem, one representing the city as it might have looked in the first century (Descriptio Ierusalem quomodo florvit tempore D.N. Iesu Christi [Plan of Jerusalem as it flourished in the time of our Lord Jesus Christ]), and the second portraying the city as it looked in the early seventeenth century (Novae Ierosolymae et locorum circumiacentium accurata imago [Accurate image of the new Jerusalem and of the places nearby]). Both of these maps are fascinating in their detail, with more than a hundred individual sites singled out for additional description in each instance. These include, in the first, the entire Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross, with all fourteen Stations of the Cross illustrated in miniature on the map, culminating in a depiction of the crucifixion and the tomb of Jesus in the bottom left corner. In the opposite corner, Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, is shown hanging from a tree. In addition to such obvious Christian imagery, care was also taken to depict the Jewish character of the city in the first century. The map features, among other places, the Palatium Davidis et Regum Iude (The Palace of David and the King of the Jews), and an intricate depiction of the temple, complete with the Holy of Holies (Sanctum Sanctorum), in which the Ark of the Covenant is shown guarded by two cherubim. There are dozens of additional sites illustrated on this map, which may be seen in more detail by clicking on the image to view a larger version of the scan.

The second map (below) depicts the city from the opposite side, looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, which is to the east of the city. The first striking difference is the accurate depiction of the Muslim holy sites, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, atop the Temple Mount in the center of the image. This map was likely produced from sketches of the city made from atop Mount Olivet, and thus is probably relatively accurate in its portrayal of the appearance of the city in the early seventeenth century. As in the first map of the city, numerous locations are singled out for special mention, including, for example, the Tomb of Isaiah (Isaiae Sepulchrum) to the left of the Temple Mount and Bethlehem off in the distance in the upper left of the image. Like the first map, this one may be seen in more detail by clicking on the image, which will enlarge the scan.

These maps are only two of the many detailed engravings in this volume, which include smaller maps and images embedded in the text, such as the below depiction of the town and surroundings of Bethany, as well as additional large folding plates with architectural depictions of important churches in and around Jerusalem, including a plan of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, complete with a depiction of the Stigmatization of St. Francis in the upper right corner, as the church was one of the sites administered by the Franciscans. These images also may be enlarged for closer inspection by clicking on them.

This description covers but two of the nearly 7000 volumes in the Brandeis “McKew Parr Collection: Magellan and the Age of Discovery,” which includes a vast array of resources for the scholar of colonial history and the history of Europe and European expansion in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Records for materials in the collection may be viewed through the LOUIS electronic catalogue, and for more information, please consult the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department.

description by Adam Rutledge, Senior University Archives/Special Collections Assistant and PhD candidate in English and American Literature

Sacco and Vanzetti collections

The case against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti is among the most widely known and debated criminal trials in United States history. On April 15, 1920, two paymasters from the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company were shot and killed in an armed robbery on the streets of South Braintree, Massachusetts. Though robberies of this kind were by no means exceptional during the post–World War I period, this particular case garnered worldwide attention as an example of egregious injustice. Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, were tried, convicted, and ultimately executed for the crime, despite what many considered to be flimsy evidence against them. The case created an international outcry in the defendants’ behalf and was seen by many as part of a larger movement in this country to crack down on immigrants and radicals during the postwar 1920s.

Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial and execution (which took place on August 23, 1927) have inspired a great number of plays, artworks, poems, and books over the years. The Brandeis University Special Collections holds four separate collections on the subject: the Gardner Jackson Collection, the Mrs. Walter Frank Collection, the Tom O’Connor Collection, and the Francis Russell Collection.

Perhaps among the most interesting objects in these collections are the cast-plaster death masks of Sacco and Vanzetti from the Mrs. Walter Frank Collection. These are the original death masks made following the men’s executions. According to letters between Gardner Jackson, the director of the Sacco-Vanzetti Memorial Committee, and Margaret S. Huntley, a secretary for the New York Sacco-Vanzetti National League, the masks were placed on display at meetings held by activist groups that had fought for the defendants’ release.

Among the other materials in the Sacco and Vanzetti collections is a rare videotape of Sacco and Vanzetti’s funeral procession and surrounding demonstrations on the Boston Common. Gardner Jackson wrote to Margaret Huntley, “All motion pictures of the case were ordered destroyed... by the Department of Justice. Quantities of news films of the events had been taken. They were all destroyed—a fierce piece of censorship. The film in question escaped destruction.”

Likewise, the Gardner Jackson Memorial Room, located in Brandeis University’s Goldfarb Library and dedicated on April 19, 1970, houses an aluminum cast of a proposed but never erected monument designed by Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, famed for the sculptures of Mount Rushmore. Gardner Jackson, a journalist by profession, was a member of the committee to place the bas-relief memorial on the Boston Common. A quote by Governor Robert Bradford in the New York Times (1947) helps to explain the plan’s rejection: “I can see no useful purpose in stirring up the bitter passions and prejudices of twenty years ago, particularly at a time when the whole world is striving for unity, not discord.”

The Sacco and Vanzetti collections at Brandeis University shed light on the case and the public’s strong reactions to it. Though Sacco and Vanzetti were exonerated in 1977 by Governor Michael Dukakis, the subject of their guilt or innocence remains contested to this day.

description by Katie Hargrave, graduate student in Cultural Production

Gardner Jackson Collection, 1896-1965

Mrs. Walter Frank Collection, 1927-1963

Tom O'Connor Collection, 1920-1965

Francis Russell Collection, 1921-1965

Three Books of Renaissance Cryptography and the Secret of Shakespearean Authorship

Due to the generosity of Samuel Nass, Brandeis Special Collections has in its holdings three interesting volumes of Renaissance cryptography: the Cryptographia of Johannes Balthazar Friderici, a French translation of the work of Johannes Trithemius, and the important ninth book of the Systema Integrum Cryptographiae of Gustavus Selenus. All three are rare and important examples of a craft that became quite popular in the Renaissance, and one of the volumes has the added distinction of being cited as a central piece of evidence in the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.

Friderici’s classic treatise on cryptography was first published in 1684; it contains a survey of the field, including information on ciphers in letters, gestures, signs, and music, as well as instructions for the preparation and use of invisible ink. (It is perhaps only a coincidence, however, that a book with such instructions is housed in Special Collections quite near a seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century volume whose pages are all curiously blank.) Brandeis’s copy of the Cryptographia is from the 1685 edition, the second of four editions of the text. It is bound in original decorated red paper boards with a modern brown cloth spine and gilt title. The text is in German, printed entirely in black letter, with the title page done in red and black. The book includes a fine engraved added title page and several additional plates by Friedlein, as well as numerous letter-set and woodcut illustrations within the text, showing the various cryptographic systems. The volume is complete except that it lacks, apparently, one folded plate, likely originally present between pages 198 and 199.

The second volume is the Polygraphie, et Universelle Escriture Cabalistique de M.I. Tritheme Abbé, a French translation with commentary by Gabriel de Collange of the work of the Würzburg abbot Trithemius, whose Polygraphia was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Catholic Church in 1609. It is bound together, with continuous pagination, with Collange’s own Tables et Figures Planispheriques. Trithemius was rumored to be a magician, and his three volume Steganographia, which appears to be concerned with black magic, did nothing to repair this reputation. However, a decryption key to the first two volumes was published in 1606 and showed them to be actually concerned with steganography, that is, the study of hidden messages, as the title claimed. The binding is of later unadorned vellum with red speckled edges and replaced endpapers, and the text is in black and red and features fine woodblock head- and tail-pieces and initials throughout. It opens with an engraved title page with a full border that includes, in the upper margin, the royal arms of France, while the following page contains a full-page engraving of the translator of the Polygraphie and the author of the second work, Gabriel de Collange. The colophon is also especially worthy of note, as it includes a large engraving of a unicorn clutching an escutcheon, under which is the enigmatic Biblical motto Dilectus quemadmodum filius unicornium. Psalmo XXVIII. [“Just as the beloved son of unicorns. Psalm 28 (Verse 6).”] Most interesting, however, is a series of large instrumenta present within the body of the text (from f. 252 r. to f. 273 r.), each consisting of a moveable wheel which turns to create various alignments of letters or symbols for creating coded messages. The scanned pictures of the instrumenta and several of the engravings may be enlarged by clicking on the images.

The third volume donated by Nass, and perhaps the most famous due to its importance to several prominent adherents to the “Bacon theory” of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, is the Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae, Book IX of Gustavus Selenus’s work on cryptography. Gustavus Selenus, which roughly translates to “man of the moon,” is the pseudonym of the book collector August, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1579-1666), the founder of a famous library that bears his name in Wolfenbüttel. The original aim of Duke August in writing this tome was to elucidate the writings of Trithemius, including those found in the Polygraphia. However, this soon morphed into an effort to create an encyclopedic account of the science of cryptography as it was then practiced, which was the first attempt to provide a comprehensive account of this field. This book—and, indeed, the entire library compiled by Duke August—is also of interest for its influence on the philosopher Leibniz, who served as librarian of the collection just a few years after the death of the duke (1676-1687).

The volume is a folio (30 x 19 cm.) bound in full contemporary blind-stamped vellum with a manuscript title on the spine. The covers also show the remnants of four later green cloth straps, only one of which is now intact. The text includes an engraved title page and one additional full-page engraving on p. 341, as part of a chapter on using coded art to communicate messages, and there are numerous additional tables, diagrams, and illustrations throughout. The printing is especially fine, with numerous engraved head-pieces, tail-pieces, and initials. The work ends with a codex including a large crest with the charming motto per aspera ad astra – “through harsh lands, to the stars.” This copy is in relatively good condition, though the paper on which the volume is printed has browned somewhat, a common affliction of this text due to the poor quality of paper employed in German-speaking countries during the Thirty Years War. It has been called the first encyclopedia of cryptography, as described above, and it certainly aims for a full description of the science, with chapters on everything from simple inverted and transposed alphabet codes to accounts of cryptography in music and the visual arts. A large schema detailing the relationship of various parts of the field to one another is included on a folding plate just before the first chapter of the book (pictured below).

However, it is not this schema but rather the title page that has attracted the most interest in this volume; several scholars have claimed that hidden within the engravings is the key to discovering the real author of the Shakespeare plays. Theories as to the identity of the “true” author of the Shakespeare corpus have long been a part of the study of the poems and plays and have often been expressed by well-respected scholars of Elizabethan literature, especially during the early decades of the twentieth century. While interest in the topic has died down somewhat in academic circles, in 2007 Mark Rylance, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre from 1995-2005, caused a bit of a stir by issuing a “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare,” which was accompanied by a list of prominent doubters of the past, including Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Walt Whitman, and Charles Dickens. As Walter Arensburg writes in his Preface to The Cryptography of Shakespeare, “the controversy as to the identity of the author of the Shakespeare plays and poems has involved three kinds of evidence, historical, stylistic, and cryptographic” (Arensberg, vii). Cryptographic evidence certainly takes precedence in Sir Edwin Durning Lawrence’s 1910 work, Bacon is Shakespeare, in which he devotes a special chapter to this work, focusing especially on codes and symbols he finds hidden in the large engraved title page:

The great (i.e. First) Folio of Shakespeare was published in 1623, and in the following year, 1624, there was brought out a great cryptographic book by the ‘Man of the Moon.’ This book was issued as the key to the Shakespeare Folio of 1623, under Bacon’s instructions, and in the year following the publication of the Great Folio.

Examine first the left-hand picture, you see a man, evidently Bacon, giving his writing to a Spearman who is dressed in actor’s boots. Note that the Spearman has a sprig of bay in the hat which he holds in his hand. This man is a Shake-Spear, nay he really is a correct portrait of the Stratford house-holder, which you will readily perceive if you turn to Dugdale’s engraving of the Shakespeare bust. In the middle distance the man still holding a spear, still being a Shake-Spear, walks with a staff, he is therefore Wagstaffe. On his back are books – the books of the plays. In the sky is seen an arrow, no, it is not sufficiently long for an arrow, it is a Shotbolt (Shakespeare, Wagstaffe, Shatbolt, of Camden’s ‘Remains’).

On the right of the title-page you see that the same Shake-spear, whom we saw in the left-hand picture, is now riding on a courser. Now glance at the top picture on the title page, note that the picture is enclosed in the magic circle of the imagination, surrounded by the masks of tragedy, comedy, and farce. The engraving represents a Tempest with Beacon lights; no, it represents ‘The Tempest’ of Shakespeare, and tells you that the play is filled with Bacon lights (in the sixteenth century beacon was pronounced Bacon); ‘Bacon great Beacon of the State.’

At the bottom of the page in the centre Bacon is sitting at his writing desk composing his dramas; at his side the actor from Stratford with a mask and in Bacon’s clothes being led by strings as Bacon’s puppet. Both are ‘covered by one cap’ which signifies that they have a secret agreement.

Readers may make up their own minds as to the viability of this theory by comparing Lawrence’s explanations to the images pictured on the title page of this volume.

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Friderici, Johannes Balthasar. Cryptographia, oder, Geheime schrifft-münd-und würckliche Correspondentz, welche lehrmässig vorstellet eine hoch-schätzbare Kunst verborgene Schrifften zu machen und auffzulösen. (Hamburg: Gedruckt bey Georg Rebenlein, in Verlegung des Autoris, 1685)

4to. (20 cm). [4] ff., 280 pp., 5 (of 6) plates; lacking the folded plate.

Collange, Gabriel de. Polygraphie, et Universelle Escriture Cabalistique de M.I. Tritheme Abbé. (Paris: Jaques Keruer, 1561)

4to. (24 cm). [18] ff., 300, [1] pp., 13 instrumenta.

Selenus, Gustavus [pseud.] / August, Duke of Braunschweig-Luneburg Cryptomenytices et cryptographiae libri IX. In quibus & planissima Steganographiae à Johanne Trithemio... magicè & aenigmaticè olim conscriptae, enodatio traditur. Inspersis ubiquè Authoris ac Aliorum, non contemnendis inventis. (Lunaeburgi: exscriptum typis & impensis Johannis & Henrici fratrum, der Sternen bibliopolarum lunaeburgensium, 1624)

Folio (30 cm). [18] ff., 493, [1] pp., 5 folded plates.

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For more information, see:

Arensberg, Walter Conrad. The Cryptography of Shakespeare, Part 1. (Los Angeles: Howard Bowen, 1922) [Main Library - Stacks PR2944 .A6]

Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae is available online in .pdf format from the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, www.billheidrick.com/Orpd/Trith/index.htm.

Durning-Lawrence, Edwin, Sir. Bacon is Shakes-peare. (NY: John McBride, 1910) [Main Library - Stacks PR2944 .D82]

Polygraphie, et Universelle Escriture Cabalistique de M.I. Tritheme Abbé is displayed as part of the online exhibit “The Fantastic in Art and Fiction,” from the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of the Cornell University Library.

Scheid, Nikolaus. "John Trithemius." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 2 Jun. 2008 www.newadvent.org/cathen/15062a.htm.

description by Adam Rutledge, Senior University Archives/Special Collections Assistant and
PhD candidate in English and American Literature

Victor Young Collection (39 linear feet)

The Victor Young Collection at Brandeis includes more than one hundred musical scores and LP recordings as well as awards (including an Oscar and Golden Globe), clippings, photographs, and memorabilia. Donated to Brandeis by Young’s family, the collection is frequently used by musicologists and other researchers.

Victor Young (1900–1956) was an American composer, arranger, conductor, and violinist who wrote and directed music for many Hollywood motion pictures in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Born in Chicago, Young lived for much of his childhood in Poland, where he studied violin; in 1917 he became a violinist with the Warsaw Philharmonic before returning to the United States and embarking on his career as a music director and composer.

Having worked in the 1920s as a vaudeville violinist, a theatre concertmaster, and the assistant musical director for the Chicago-based Balaban and Katz theatres—where he arranged music for silent film accompaniment—Young was displaced temporarily by the coming of sound film into radio and recording work. In 1935 he was wooed to Hollywood by Paramount Pictures, most likely on the basis of his work at the Balaban and Katz chain, which the studio owned. For the rest of Young’s life he wrote and directed music at Paramount, including scores for Love Letters, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Shane, and many films by key Paramount directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Preston Sturges, and Mitchell Leisen. However, several of the best-remembered films in Young’s filmography were produced elsewhere, as the composer also worked at Columbia (Golden Boy), Republic (Johnny Guitar), and director-producer John Ford’s independent Argosy Pictures (The Quiet Man, Rio Grande), among others. Along the way he racked up twenty-two Academy Award nominations—four each in 1940 and 1941—before finally winning a posthumous Oscar for Paramount’s Around the World in 80 Days in 1956.

Critics and scholars have long noted that Young’s compositions are distinguished especially by a gift for melody, and indeed, his scores often produced hit songs, such as “Stella by Starlight,” a theme originally from The Uninvited. This skill proved to be a marketing bonanza for Paramount, as when Peggy Lee’s recording of the title song from Golden Earrings became a jukebox standard, advertising the film well in advance of its theatrical release. But in certain ways, Young’s reputation for straightforward tunefulness worked against him; had his scores been less easy on the ears, he might have more readily attracted serious attention in a critical climate that often holds sentimentality under suspicion. Even a fellow Hollywood composer, Miklós Rózsa, could refer to Young’s “Broadway-cum-Rachmaninoff idiom” with implicit scorn, contrasting this “accepted style” with the bolder experiments he saw himself pursuing.[1]

In the most extended critical discussion of Young to date, William Darby and Jack Du Bois identify the composer’s other distinguishing trait as “adaptability.”[2] Indeed, his genre-spanning filmography reveals a striking chameleonic skill, as do his impersonations of national and ethnic idioms: Irish in The Quiet Man, Spanish in For Whom the Bell Tolls, “Gypsy” in Golden Earrings, countless others in the Oscar-winning Around the World in Eighty Days, which must have been a dream project for Young for this very reason. While versatility of style (along with speed) was one of the basic job qualifications for a studio composer, Young seemed to submerge his personality more thoroughly than others. (The authorial fingerprints of a Korngold, Herrmann, or even a Steiner score are bold by comparison to Young’s.) Yet this is part of what made him an exemplary studio-system composer of the classical Hollywood era, and what makes him a crucial figure still for film-music studies: his mastery of the system’s demand for effective yet unobtrusive music to give a final polish to its products. A quotation in a 1955 Chicago Sun-Times article sums up Young’s musical aims in terms that also neatly convey something of the man’s uninhibited personality: “Writing a movie score is like a boy sitting in a balcony with a girl: He must be forceful enough to impress the girl—but not loud enough to attract the usher!”

Other literature on Victor Young:

Kathryn Kalinak, How the West was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).

Scott D. Paulin, “Piercing Wagner: The Ring in Golden Earrings,” in Wagner and Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander Gilman (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).

W. Anthony Sheppard, “An Exotic Enemy: Anti-Japanese Musical Propaganda in World War II Hollywood,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (2001): 303-357.

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[1] Miklós Rózsa quoted in Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 96. Young “worked at a time and for a studio where nothing experimental or outlandish was wanted or even tolerated.” Tony Thomas, Music for the Movies, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1997), 50-55.

[2] William Darby and Jack Du Bois, American Film Music: Major Composers, Techniques, Trends, 1915–1990 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1990), 267-302.

description by Scott D. Paulin, Department of Music, Dartmouth College

photos and scans by Maggie McNeely

Victor Young Collection finding aid

Sermones Thesauri Novi de Tempore, 1496, bound in Hebrew manuscript

The adage “never judge a book by its cover” could have been coined to describe the work we are highlighting this month: Sermones Thesauri Novi de Tempore, by Peter Paludanus, Patriarch of Jerusalem (died 1342), published in Nuremberg by Anthonium Koberger in 1496.

Peter was a French theologian and archbishop. Among his works are commentaries on all the books of the Bible and on Thomas Aquinas. He devoted most of his life to scholarship, but he did go on several important missions for the pope, who in 1329 consecrated him Patriarch of Jerusalem. He negotiated with the sultan in Egypt over the status of the Holy Land, but did not succeed in winning it back for Christianity. Around 1332 King Philip of France made him head of a group of high-ranking clergy charged to investigate the religious views of the pope, who was cleared by them of all false charges.

Our book is a collection of Peter’s sermons. Works printed through 1500 are known as incunabula (singular incunabulum, also called incunable). The word means “swaddling clothes,” connoting the early stages of printing.

As interesting as this book is for its content, what is particularly fascinating is one of its physical features. Its outside binding is not what one might expect: it is a folio from a medieval Hebrew manuscript. The reuse of manuscripts was common in the Middle Ages; thousands of manuscripts in Latin and Greek were “recycled.” Sometimes the original ink was erased and a scribe wrote a different work on the parchment. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, folios from manuscripts were also used for binding books.

Hebrew manuscripts shared this fate. Undoubtedly, some Hebrew manuscripts were confiscated by the Church or by secular authorities, but in some cases they might have simply gone the way of all manuscripts, which lost their uniqueness in some people’s eyes after the invention of printing.

Over 8,000 fragments (almost all of them folio-sized rather than in small pieces) from Hebrew manuscripts have been discovered in book bindings in Italy alone, as well as about 2,000 in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Spain. They date from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. Many of them, particularly those in Italy, have been preserved and studied in recent decades. It is ironic that what would seem to have been a very cavalier, and perhaps sometimes disdainful, attitude toward these manuscripts might actually have saved some of them from destruction.

One collection of such Hebrew manuscripts, found in Italy, can serve as an example of the subjects treated in these manuscript fragments: biblical text 33%; biblical commentaries 15%; Talmud and related works 8%; rabbinics 28%; philosophy and mysticism 7%; dictionaries and grammars 3%; medicine, geometry and astronomy 3%; liturgy 2%. The many Talmudic fragments are of particular importance for establishing the accurate text. Other unknown or missing works can be at least partially put together. This has already led to important scholarly discoveries.

The particular manuscript folio used to bind our work is taken from the liturgy of the morning Amidah for Yom Kippur. The major part is a liturgical poem by Meshullam ben Kalonymus entitled El be-Rov Etsot Tiken. Meshullam (tenth to eleventh centuries) was a member of one of the leading rabbinic families of Italy and a major scholar and poet. Many of his liturgical poems are still recited on Yom Kippur, including Amits Koah, which tells the story of the Yom Kippur service in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem.

For additional information about the reuse of Hebrew manuscripts and the recent research on them, see Mauro Perani, “The ‘Italian Genizah,’” at http://www.morasha.it/zehut/mp06_italian_ghenizah.html.

description by Jim Rosenbloom, Judaica Librarian