Peoples of the universe, please attend carefully.

And yet, across the network of state archives in France—the nation’s pride, a treasure trove of government and private papers—troubling gaps are visible in the papers in which Jews are mentioned. A few important French synagogue collections seem riddled with holes as well. At the same time, surprisingly large collections of rare French Judaica turn up in the special collections departments of university libraries such as Brandeis University (Waltham, Massachusetts), Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Hebrew Union College (Cincinnati, Ohio), the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (New York), and Yeshiva University (New York), as well as in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (New York) and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem). Why are these documents no longer in France if French Jews largely opted to remain in France after the Holocaust? How did they wind up dispersed so widely across the globe?

The answer is an open secret. If you ask one of the more seasoned archivists, librarians, or researchers working in any one of these institutions, you are likely to hear some talk of international intrigue. At the center of the intrigue is a peculiar individual: the historian Zosa Szajkowski (Shy-KOV-ski, 1911–1978), a pioneer in the field of French Jewish history. Szajkowski wrote scores of articles in the field, most on topics no one had ever researched before and many of which are still considered indispensible decades after they were written. Beyond his scholarly work, Szajkowski was also a devoted collector of French Judaica. He began his collecting in the late 1930s when, impassioned by Jewish history, he solicited donations from French Jews who had materials of historical interest among their family papers. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, wracked by grief and determined to facilitate the writing of an objective history of catastrophe, he gathered evidence of the persecution from Jewish leaders in Paris and from the wreckage of bombed-out buildings in Berlin. Many Jews in France and the United States saw his collecting of those papers as a heroic effort to preserve the evidence for posterity.

But in time, this rescuer became a thief. Most of the documents he acquired in the 1950s—mostly pertaining to Jewish history in France since the seventeenth century—he stole from the archives. Some were taken from state archives, where he stealthily evaded the gaze of the archivist in the “panoptical” reading room, often cutting old documents out of bound volumes to evade detection. Others were stolen from the private collections of synagogues and private Jewish libraries, institutions that had only recently begun to recover from what had happened in the years of Nazi occupation. In both types of institutions, archivists were betrayed by someone they had come to trust as a professional scholar and, in many of these cases, as a fellow Jew. After Szajkowski’s betrayal, they took steps to protect their collections from further losses, but they were only ever able to recover a tiny fraction of what had been taken.

The results of Szajkowski’s collecting, particularly if we count the legal together with the illegal, are staggering. Between 1940 and 1961, Szajkowski acquired tens of thousands of documents about Jews from various sources in France and brought them to New York. After he finished his own work with the documents—they were used as evidence in his articles—he sold them to the American and Israeli research libraries and archives where they are now housed. Although few acquisitions records remain, many of these documents bear marks of Szajkowski’s handling, including notations made in his handwriting. To the degree that it is possible to trace the collections of French Judaica held outside of France, most of them appear to have been purchased from Szajkowski in the 1950s and 1960s.

Given France’s checkered history with regard to the Jews, it is hard to know how to evaluate Szajkowski’s collecting overall. Was he simply a thief who destroyed the integrity of the French archives, preying on the disorder the Nazis had left in their wake? Or was he a hero who rescued Jewish papers from a country where on more than one occasion in the past two hundred years, calls for the expulsion of the Jews rang loudly across the land, and in even more recent times, French officials facilitated the deportation of more than 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps?

The librarians were upset, but not wholly surprised. Szajkowski was a strange man, and he had been acting quite erratically. Moreover, over the years, they had heard talk of Szajkowski’s sticky fingers in libraries and archives. Working with the library’s security man, they called in the police. Two undercover officers were on hand to watch Szajkowski the next time he came to the library. They stopped the thief outside the door just after closing time and demanded to look inside his briefcase, where they found several of the rare pamphlets. The officers arrested Szajkowski and locked him up overnight at a local precinct.

In the morning, the police returned to the library and asked Dienstag to accompany them back to Szajkowski’s apartment to search for additional materials from the library’s collections. They found nothing they could identify as library property and quickly learned why: The document dealer had already sold his booty directly to the Harvard University library. In haste, Leonard Gold, chief of the Jewish Division, made his way to Cambridge, where he was able to recuperate the stolen materials—now mutilated, as Szajkowski had cut off the ownership stamps before selling the materials.

The whole affair bore an uncanny resemblance to Szajkowski’s capture in Strasbourg in 1961, but this time it ended differently. Even though the police had let him go after searching the apartment, the historian must have felt that there would be no escape, no chance of starting over. He could not hide what had happened from his wife, who had seen him come home with the police. He could not hide what had happened from his employers at YIVO, who would have to fire him once they got the news. And perhaps worst of all, he would lose his access to the libraries he needed most. Shamed, disgraced, and exposed as a thief, Szajkowski was utterly ruined. On September 26, 1978, he drowned himself in the bathtub of a room at the Hotel Taft in midtown Manhattan.

Szajkowski’s funeral would bring out many of the scholars and librarians among whom he had worked for three decades in New York. Abraham Duker, the long-time managing editor of Jewish Social Studies, arranged the service, and Arthur Hertzberg delivered the eulogy in Yiddish. The American Jewish scholarly elite paid its respects to a man whose financial, professional, and psychological insecurities had driven him to steal from some of their most respected scholarly institutions, and to sell to them too.

Szajkowski had conducted his distasteful business with a passion that had grown increasingly pathological with the passing of the years. But his passion was not the kind of “archive fever” or irrational compulsion that Philippe Dollinger, the Strasbourg municipal archivist, had imagined when he confronted the thief in 1961. Szajkowski’s thefts were carried out systematically over many decades, and the decision to undertake them was based on rational calculation. Indeed, Szajkowski profited from the thefts in more ways than one. They provided him with the documents he needed for his research and the money he needed to devote himself to it.

Of course, Szajkowski’s business depended on the existence of buyers for his stolen books and documents and a readership for his scholarly work. His calculations were correct. The Jewish scholarly establishment was indeed appreciative of both the goods he had to offer and the scholarship he produced. Moreover, in most instances, they chose to look the other way when confronted with evidence of his misdeeds. The evidence was apparent to many who worked closely with him over the years. His YIVO colleagues had been whispering about him since the late 1940s. Librarians at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and the New York Public Library had been asked to return stolen documents to France in 1950 and yet continued to buy from him in later years. The American Academy for Jewish Research (then run by Salo Baron) had been informed of Szajkowski’s thefts in Strasbourg in 1961, just a year after it had admitted him to its ranks. None of these institutions ever censured Szajkowski publicly. Even the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris—one of his earliest victims—never barred him from its library. Only two institutions, the Strasbourg Municipal Archives and the New York Public Library (notably, both public institutions), ever turned their cases over to the police.

For the private Jewish institutions, public relations issues played an important role in their decision-making. A Jewish criminal stealing from Jewish institutions might lead to the kind of bad press that is best avoided if at all possible. Pity for a poor man, a survivor and refugee who struggled to make ends meet, was an important factor as well. According to Ezekiel Lifshutz, Szajkowski’s longtime supervisor at YIVO, librarians had long looked the other way when they realized what Szajkowski was doing in order to protect this “psychologically unbalanced person” and fellow Jew from disgrace. But at the same time, most of these scholars and librarians appreciated what Szajkowski had to offer, to both Jewish scholarship and Jewish libraries and archives. Since World War II, the Americans and Israelis who supported Szajkowski understood European Jewish life to be largely a thing of the past. As such, they were committed to rescuing whatever they could of its history for preservation, study, and the building of unparalleled collections of Judaica from all over the world.

Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Elijah Wood and Viggo Mortensen all taking the piss out of Orlando Bloom for going on about a cracked rib too much, while Orlando Bloom desperately tries to wriggle out of talking about it (special mention to Elijah Wood’s “oh it hurts, babes, and I can’t ride the horse, babes” and Viggo Mortensen’s “they can be very fragile, elves, especially the…Mirkwood strain…”)

Ian McKellen commenting that “they never did find any suitable underwear for Gandalf…”

Dominic Monaghan going on and on about how Viggo Mortensen apparently had a crush on one of the Rohirrim extras (who like a lot of the Rohirrim extras was a woman in a fake beard) while Vigoo Mortensen just mutters “one could perhaps say something about Mr. Monaghan’s…proclivities…”

Dominic Monaghan’s imitation of John Rhys-Davies ordering food at a restaurant for the whole cast. “You have partridge? BRING THE PARTRIDGE!”

John Rhys-Davies talking about an incident with the Lothlorian boats and saying “if an elf and a dwarf are in a boat…and…the boat goes under…let us say that the blame was not placed on the elf” while Orlando Bloom splutters “he’s a big guy, man!” 

Elijah Wood talking about how the hobbit actors shared a trailer with Ian McKellen and sometimes they would hear inarticulate bellows of protest from his side when they played loud music in the mornings

Viggo Mortensen talking about how, while filming with those same boats, Kirin Shaw (Elijah Wood’s scale double) started telling him “if the boat tips over…save yourself…I can’t swim.” 

Elijah Wood describing how Sean Astin would try to direct the helicopters to land while they were on location, while the other three hobbits were screwing around and throwing pinecones at each other

Christopher Lee recounting how he had so much trouble going up some steps in Orthanc with his long robe that he stopped in the middle of the scene and said, “I cannot get up these goddamn steps, Peter.”