The library of the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies is an academic reference library that was established in 1966 when the Institute was founded as one of the first specialist Jewish libraries in Germany after the Second World War. With a total of around 18,000 volumes of standard and specialist literature in Hebrew and non-Hebrew, including extensive historically valuable holdings, it is a small but important and internationally recognized specialist Judaic library that provides the Institute's staff and students with the specialist literature they need for teaching, research and study. It is open to the public and can be used by anyone by appointment.

Large parts of the private library of the Cologne bookseller Kalman Schlesinger, who lived in Jerusalem after 1933, served as the foundation stone of the library and were purchased in the years 1972-1975 with the support of the German Research Foundation and private donations. It contains around 100 prints from the period before 1800, 30 of which are early Hebrew prints from the 16th century, including some from the early modern centers of Hebrew book printing, Venice, Padua and Mantua.

The Schlesinger Collection brought original manuscripts from the 16th to 18th centuries from North Africa to the Martin Buber Institute, mainly liturgical poetry and mysticism with some unpublished material from medieval Hebrew poetry, as well as letters from Jewish personalities from the fields of science, culture and religion from the 19th and 20th centuries. Among them are originals from Nobel Prize winner Shmuel Josef Agnon, Abraham Berliner, Salomon Buber, Rav Naftali Zwi Jehuda Berlin, Isaak Chajes, Israel Davidson, Joseph Eschelbacher, Isaak Dov B. Markom and Moritz Steinschneider.

The library of the Martin Buber Institute focuses in particular on rabbinical and Talmudic literature, medieval religious and spiritual history, especially philosophy and mysticism, halakah, liturgical and secular poetry and, as a special collection area, the history of medicine. In recent years, the collection has been expanded in the field of Jewish social and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries. These include numerous first editions of works by important Jewish authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Max Nordau, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen; a collection of German-language Zionist writings from the period 1890-1948 as well as more recent standard and specialized literature on the subject of persecution and the Shoah and the history of modern Israel.

If you have any questions about our holdings and our collection, please do not hesitate to contact us.