The Institute works to encourage the study of the history and culture of Eastern Jews
"not only in fulfillment of an obligation from the past, but also out of the clear recognition that this is crucial to the daring mission to unite the Tribes of Israel, and to make the values of each Tribe part of the legacy of the entire nation" (Izhak Ben-Zvi, July 27, 1960)
Many years before the establishment of the Ben-Zvi Institute, Izhak Ben-Zvi worked tirelessly to collect and document material about Jewish communities in the East, North Africa and all over the non-Ashkenazi Jewish world: communal registers, rare manuscripts and other documents from and about these communities. In 1944, after Ben-Zvi left his post as the Secretary of the Va’ad Haleumi, the members of the Vaad Haleumi and the Histadrut agreed to establish a fund under his leadership to found an institution which would study the Jewish communities in the East.
Ben-Zvi wanted the new institute to be affiliated with the Hebrew University. And indeed, on June 29, 1947, the University’s senate decided to establish “The Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East”, which would later be called “The Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East”. On December 2, 1947, Izhak Ben-Zvi founded the Institute with the authorization of the Hebrew University’s Executive Committee.
A three-member academic committee was formed to oversee the Institute’s academic activities: Prof. Gershom Scholem, Head of the University’s Institute of Jewish Studies; Prof. Leo Aryeh Meyer, the Head of the University’s Institute of Oriental Studies and Prof. Shlomo Dov Goitein, also a member of the Institute of Oriental Studies, whose research interests overlapped with those of the new Institute. In its first meeting, the committee discussed the Institute’s plan of action and the fields in which it would be active. Izhak Ben-Zvi, who took part in the meeting as the Head of the Institute, defined the Institute’s role thus:
To study the history, legal status, financial and social roles played by Jews in the Ishmaelite diaspora in the Middle East and to save their cultural riches from being lost, especially in today’s political climate. With this aim in mind, the Institute will work to collect historical documents related to the history of the Jews in the East and preserve, study and publish them.
In its first years, the Institute employed Dr Haim Zeev Hirschberg as a research fellow and as Izhak Ben-Zvi’s right-hand man. Meir Benayahu was employed as the Institute’s secretary, administrative manager and research fellow. Ben-Zvi himself was head of the Institute, but insisted that this be an unpaid position.
The mass immigration to Israel after the War of Independence and the uprooting of the Jewish communities in the East and in the Muslim world moved scholars to issue an urgent call to save these communities’ historical and spiritual legacies. These voices, urging to speed up the Institute’s activities, were also heard in the Institute’s academic committee. To this end, Ben-Zvi visited the immigrants’ camps in Aden in December 1949 and reported the urgent need to save manuscripts, books and other documents which had been packed in crates and were about to be sent to Israel. In these years two centers for collection and documentation were formed at the Institute: one to photocopy documents related to the Eastern Jewish communities in the great libraries in Europe and America; the second to collect testimonies about documents from immigrants from Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Bulgaria and other Eastern and Sephardic communities.
The documents which were collected and kept at the Institute served over the years as the basis for studies and research about the political, economic and cultural lives of the Jews in the East and the Maghreb, past and present. The Heads of the Institute and its scholars worked to study and preserve the cultural treasures and languages of these communities which were at risk of losing the continuity of their traditions. At the same time, the new conditions in Israel and the “melting pot” policy threatened to blur the cultural and social uniqueness of the various communities and blot out their traditions.
Several chronological and geographical delineations were laid down to guide the Institute’s rationale. In an article by Ben-Zvi in Davar, Ben-Zvi defined the geographical scope of the Institute’s work as including Jewish groups living around the Mediterranean Sea, other far-flung groups such as the Jews in India, the Jews in Ethiopia and a few congregations in the eastern and western hemispheres. In the first volume of Sefunot, the Institute’s first journal, published in 1957, Izhak Ben-Zvi set down the chronological boundaries of the Institute’s activities: the Institute would study “the Eastern communities from the end of Middle Ages until our days”.
Ben-Zvi’s death in 1963 marked the end of an era in which the academic literature about Eastern communities had been much enriched. In 1969 the Knesset passed the Yad Ben-Zvi Law which set out its aims thus:
- To deepen knowledge and awareness of the continuity of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel and with this aim in mind, to encourage the study of the history of the Yishuv.
- To promote the study of Jerusalem.
- To promote the study of the history of Jewish communities in the East.
- To reflect the character of Izhak Ben-Zvi as President of Israel and his activities in the Zionist movement, the Labor movement, the Yishuv and the State.
The chronological and geographical definitions of the Institute’s activities changed over the years. In the first issue of the Pe’amim journal, published in 1979, an article by Prof. Shaul Shaked, Head of the Institute at the time, underscored the equal importance of “all historical periods and all fields of study, and the emphasis of characteristics common to all the Eastern communities, especially those from Muslim countries, and the unique characteristics of each community which are reflected, among other things, in their different languages”.
Another development which influenced the Institute’s activity was the growing interest in the study of the Cairo Geniza. This interest was a direct result of S. D. Goitein’s work: one of the Institute’s founders, Goitein nurtured an entire generation of scholars in the 1960s and 1970s who carried out wide-ranging research into this treasure trove of documents and published studies depicting a “Mediterranean Society” – the title of Goiten’s masterpiece which appeared in English between 1967 and 1988. One of the results of this development was the establishment of the Society for the Study of the Judeo-Arabic Culture in the Middle Ages in 1984.
Another impetus for a further development of this field was the opening of the collections of Jewish and Geniza manuscripts in the National Library in St. Peterburg, collections which were rich in manuscripts in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew. Following the opening of these collections, the number of publications by the Institute associated with this material grew. It was the Institute’s reputation in this field which attracted the interest of the Friedberg Geniza Society. The cooperation and collaboration between the two organizations gave rise to the publication of a series of important studies in Judeo-Arabic, and to the publication of the Ginzei Qedem journal by the Institute.
Another example of the Institute’s wide-ranging activities in regard to the exploration of cultural issues is the Irano-Judaica project – a series of international conferences, the proceedings of which were published in seven volumes. These studies deal with the ties between the Jews of Persia and the surrounding environments in regard to language, literature and philosophy, from the Akhmanid period through the biblical period and up until the present times.
As well as the expansion of the study of the Middle Ages, the study of Jewish communities in the East in the modern period also grew. The best example of the Institute’s activity in this field is the Kehilot series: a series of 15 volumes, each dedicated to a different community in the East in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Israel Prize, awarded to the Ben-Zvi Institute in 1985, commended the Institute’s library, which holds the literary and rabbinical literature of Jewish communities in the east, literature written about these communities, and an important collection of manuscripts which has furnished and continues to furnish many scholarly studies. The Prize was also given in recognition of the lectures held by the Institute in which the general public is introduced to the work of scholars in the field. The Prize Committee praised the Institute’s growing avenues of research in new directions such as Jewish languages, literature, philosophy, popular culture and daily life.
