The German Archive of the Hebrew Habima: Bureaucracy and Identity

The administrative archive of Habima, nowadays Israel’s nationaltheater, resides at the Israeli center for the documentation of the performingarts at Tel Aviv University. The majority of the documents, which date from the1920s and early 1930s, were written in German, and involve prominent GermanJewish businessmen and intellectuals. This archival corpus is surprising, be-cause the profile of Habima is generally associated with the Eastern European-Soviet theatrical heritage and with the revival of Hebrew. This article seeks topresent the nature of this collection and to reevaluate its contribution to thestudy of German Jewry as well as to the history of Hebrew theatre.