Jewish Chronicle library collection: Defence file

The collection consists of materials from the Jewish Chronicle’s library that deal with the defence against antisemitism. These include reports on antisemitic groups, individuals and incidents, as well as on the bodies that fought against them. There are letters to the Jewish Chronicle on defence, both from anti-fascist groups reporting occurrences of antisemitism, and from representatives of the far-right denying charges of anti-Jewish prejudice or exhibiting their antisemitism through hate mail. The collection also contains transcripts of German media reports on various Nazi leaders. About half of the collection is comprised of publications of far-right, antisemitic and nationalist groups (or those suspected of being such), as well as those produced by antifascist and Jewish organisations. 

Original order: most of the pre-war materials received a number from the Jewish Chronicle library, perhaps indicating the order of receipt into the library; the convention seems to have ended at some point after 1945. Some of the materials seem to have been organised into files arranged by geography. This order had been lost by the time the Wiener Holocaust Library received them.

The collection has been organised by type of material. This helps highlight the Jewish Chronicle's activity in the matter of defence.  It means that documents on individual organisations can be found in several files. Researchers interested in a particular group should look not only at the file containing the publications produced by that group but also the relevant reports (in particular, 2201/1/5 for far-right groups and 2201/1/1 for antifascist bodies, but also the other files in 2201/1) and correspondence (2201/2).

Catalogue searches should also reveal the locations of other relevant materials in the collection, and keywords highlight the organisations covered in a particular file. Individual files are generally arranged chronologiclly, except where indicated otherwise.