Klau Library

The Klau Library belongs to that rare category of institutions where the history of a people and the history of knowledge merge into one. The central library of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), it was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, at the very moment when North American Reform Judaism was being invented, and grew to become one of the largest repositories of printed and manuscript Jewish thought in the Western world. The Klau Library in Cincinnati is a Jewish research library located in Cincinnati; it holds one of the largest collections of Judaic and Hebraic printed material in the world and is the most important of the four libraries in the library system of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

To tell the story of the Klau Library is to follow a thread running from the first generation of American Reform rabbis to the contemporary legal debates over the custody of a shared heritage. It is also to traverse the diasporas themselves: the Europe of cantors and incunabula, the Italy of Esther scrolls, the China of Kaifeng, the America of the first Jewish communities. This work seeks to restore that trajectory by honestly distinguishing what the archive establishes, what tradition transmits, and what remains conjecture. Where the documentary sources are firm, we say so; where the institutional narrative precedes proof, we point it out.

The founding of the Klau Library is inseparable from that of the Hebrew Union College itself. The library was established at the same time as the Hebrew Union College in 1875. The College, in turn, is the work of one man and one project: the Hebrew Union College was founded in Cincinnati in 1875 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. Cincinnati is no indifferent place: it is the cradle of Reform Judaism in North America.

The institution belongs to an exceptional span of time for the American Jewish world. Founded in Cincinnati in 1875 by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the Hebrew Union College is the oldest Jewish seminary in the United States and has trained rabbis for American congregations for nearly one hundred and fifty years. From the outset, a library intended to support this rabbinical teaching could not be confined to scholarly use: it had to gather the documentary "record" of an entire civilization. It is this ambition — to assemble the whole record of Jewish thought and experience — that would dictate the acquisition policy for a century and a half.

The library thus grew alongside the seminary's prestige, accumulating scholarly volumes, periodicals and, very early on, rare items. It is distinguished by its universalist vocation: not merely to serve one religious orientation — that of the Reform movement — but to embrace every era and every expression of the Jewish tradition, from the ancient Near East to modernity.

The library's material history is marked by two decisive milestones in the twentieth century. The first is almost symbolic: in 1931, the library moved into its first independent building, becoming the first Jewish library in the world to occupy its own edifice. This event consecrated the transition from a collection attached to a seminary to a fully fledged heritage institution, endowed with its own architectural existence.

The second milestone fixed the name under which the institution is known today. In 1961, the library moved into its current home and was renamed the Klau Library. This name honors a patron: formerly called the Hebrew Union College Library, it was renamed in 1961 in honor of David W. Klau of New York, who was a member of the institution's board. The history of the buildings continued at the turn of the millennium: the edifice underwent significant renovations in the 2000s, complemented by the construction of a dedicated pavilion.

These relocations are not mere real-estate incidents; they reflect the continuous growth of a collection that had become too vast for its successive walls, and the recognition, by the community and its benefactors, of the exceptional value of what it preserved.

The scale of the Klau Library places it among the very foremost Judaic libraries in the world. The Klau Library of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion is one of the most comprehensive Jewish libraries in the world, with more than half a million volumes, and holds the largest collection of printed Judaica in North America. According to another institutional source, it would even constitute the largest collection of Judaica and Hebraica outside the National Library of Israel.

The breakdown of holdings gives the measure of this density. The collection currently contains roughly 600,000 printed books, 1,200 current periodical subscriptions, 2,500 manuscript codices and several thousand manuscript pages, 19,000 reels of microfilm, 100,000 digital images derived from manuscripts and early printed works, 3,300 sound recordings, and 14,000 works in the rare book room. To these are added non-book collections — maps, slides, bookplates, stamps, games.

The thematic strengths sketch a remarkable intellectual map. The collection's particular strengths include ancient Near Eastern studies, non-American archives, the Bible, Kabbalah, calendars, early Christianity, history, American Judaica, Maimonides, philosophy, Rabbinica, Responsa, Spinozana, humor, and Yiddish. The mission underlying this whole is explicitly totalizing: to collect, preserve, and provide access to the total record of Jewish thought and experience.

The heritage core of the Klau Library lies in its rare holdings, and first of all in its incunabula — those books printed before 1501, in the earliest days of typography. The Klau Library holds approximately 143 incunabula, including 70 Hebrew incunabula; these books date back to the very beginnings of modern printing. Possessing seventy Hebrew incunabula places the institution within a very narrow circle of repositories worldwide, for Jewish production from this period, scattered and fragile, has survived only in rare copies.

The manuscript holdings extend this excellence. The rare book holdings include important collections of incunabula and sixteenth-century Hebrew imprints, as well as archival and literary manuscripts, among them the unique Sino-Hebrew collection. The treasure room houses pieces whose singularity is attested: the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection comprises rare incunabula, illuminated manuscripts, biblical codices, communal registers, legal documents, and scientific treatises.

A few objects crystallize the richness of the diaspora represented here. According to the institutional account, one would find among them a fifteenth-century Spanish Bible bearing Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed in its margins, as well as an eighteenth-century Purim scroll commemorating the survival of the Jews of Padua after an attack directed against their ghetto. These pieces, through their provenance, make the library a mirror of the Sephardic and Italian dispersions.

If there is one collection that embodies the alliance of memory and archive, it is the Eduard Birnbaum collection of Jewish music. Its origin lies in a life devoted to safeguarding a threatened sonic heritage. Eduard Birnbaum was a cantor in Königsberg in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; an inveterate collector of rare books and manuscripts, he assembled one of the largest manuscript collections of Jewish liturgical music. Its acquisition by the institution is precisely dated: the collection was acquired in 1923–1924.

The importance of the collection is today recognized at the highest level. The Eduard Birnbaum music collection is acknowledged as the largest and most important gathering of manuscripts and archives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European Jewish music in the world. Its material substance has been described as follows: the Eduard Birnbaum collection brings together manuscript scores from 1825 to 1860 and more than 300 books; it gathers manuscript and printed synagogue music scores dating from 1710 to 1910, and it also contains audio recordings from the early twentieth century.

What makes this collection exemplary of an "intersection" between living tradition and scholarly documentation is its author's method. Birnbaum was an ardent collector of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century synagogue music; beyond accumulating scores and manuscripts, he sought out and recorded biographical information on important musicians, composers, and hazzanim, and he interviewed leading hazzanim in order to document their liturgical and para-liturgical musical practices. Chant transmitted orally from generation to generation is thus fixed here, dated, attributed: memory becomes archive without ceasing to be memory.

Few libraries make the geographic breadth of the Jewish world so tangible. The Klau Library preserves one of the rare material testimonies of the Jewish community of China. The library holds manuscripts, Torah scrolls, and other materials from Kaifeng, including a bilingual Sino-Hebrew siddur. The singularity of this collection is underscored by the institution: the Kaifeng manuscripts include Torah portions, prayer books, and the only known manuscripts containing both Chinese and Hebrew characters. It is also said to preserve the list of members of the Kaifeng congregation under the Ming dynasty, a precious document for the history of this Far Eastern diaspora.

At the other end of the world, the library has devoted itself to documenting the Jewish presence in America exhaustively. All American books printed up to 1875 relating in any way whatsoever to the Jews are sought for the rare book collection. This policy makes the American Judaica holdings a reference instrument for the history of the earliest communities of the New World, complemented by the preservation of the Jewish press: the library houses the Lucille Klau Carothers American Jewish Periodical Center, which preserves on microfilm some 900 newspaper and journal titles. Alongside these holdings, the library possesses leading collections in Spinozana and Christian Hebraica, drawing a portrait of Judaism grasped both from within and in its dialogue with the surrounding world.

The recent history of the Klau Library is marked by a crisis that reveals, by contrast, the value of its holdings. Beginning in 2022, structural difficulties weakened the seminary as a whole. When the College first announced its intention to close the rabbinical program in 2022, officials cited a record deficit of 8.8 million dollars, against a backdrop of a marked decline in student enrollment.

These financial tensions had direct repercussions on the library's heritage. WCPO's I-Team reported that representatives of Sotheby's, the auction house, had visited the Klau Library and appraised the collection. The prospect of a sale prompted a strong internal reaction: the team also reported obtaining a copy of the letter from the former director of libraries announcing his resignation, motivated by the pressures exerted to sell rare books.

The matter took on a judicial dimension at the state level. The Ohio Attorney General brought proceedings against the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2024, following reports that the school was considering selling rare books from the Klau Library's collections. A negotiated outcome eventually emerged: the Hebrew Union College and the Ohio Attorney General announced that they had reached an agreement in a dispute over the rare books and manuscripts of Cincinnati's Klau Library. This episode illustrates a profound question: does a heritage of global interest, held by a private institution, constitute a common good that the community has the right to protect? The Ohio litigation, in effect, ruled in favor of preservation in situ.

The trajectory of the Klau Library mirrors that of American Judaism itself: born in 1875 with the first rabbinical seminary in the United States, it acquired the world's first dedicated Jewish library building in 1931, received its present name in 1961, and weathered in the twenty-first century an existential crisis that ultimately reaffirmed the inalienable value of its holdings. Between these dates, it assembled a collection whose coherence rests on a singular ambition: to preserve the total record of a dispersed civilization.

Its Hebrew incunabula, its codices, the Birnbaum collection, the Kaifeng manuscripts, and its American Judaica are not juxtaposed curiosities; they form a cartography of the diaspora, from the ancient Near East to Ming China, from the Italy of the ghettos to the America of the pioneers. In this, the Klau Library transcends its function as a university library: it is a place where transmitted Memory — the song of the cantors, the recollection of vanished communities — meets the archive that fixes and conveys it. The contemporary controversy, far from weakening this observation, confirms its reach: what some sought to disperse, the community chose to keep united.