One item that Karp’s widow Deborah, an English literature medievalist, has refused to put up for auction is a pair of lions of Judah probably carved by a German-trained coppersmith in the late nineteenth century. Karp found this treasure in a refuse dump outside a synagogue under demolition in Kansas City, Missouri, where he served as a rabbi in the 1950’s. These lions, willed to New York’s Jewish Museum, will also be featured at a Judaica show later this year at the New York Museum of Folk Art.
Karp, who graduated from Yeshiva College and was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, brought to his collecting pursuits an encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish bibliography, enabling him to identify major finds. To be sure, Karp was not the only scholar of his era equipped with vast erudition to assess ancient Judaica. Other historians and librarians also were familiar with bibliography, bindings, printing records, library holdings and the like. But what set him apart was that his knowledge bridged both great literary worlds – the span of Jewish publishing going back to medieval Europe, North Africa and Spain as well as the entire field of Jewish Americana.
At the time of his death, Karp was the only scholar in the world whose knowledge encompassed both vast bibliographical subjects. He was as much at home with the culture of eighteenth century Jewish Amsterdam (at the time the center of international Jewish book publishing) as he was with the five hundred-member Charleston, South Carolina Jewish community of the same era.
Thus, Karp’s unrivaled knowledge of Judaica bibliography, combined with his populist approach to collecting (meaning his willingness to get his hands dirty unearthing a treasure at the bottom of some neglected book pile) explains why he accumulated a collection worth millions today.
But in fairness to the modern-day neophyte Jewish book collector – especially one operating on budget as sparse as Karp’s was – it is impossible to amass anything approaching what Karp put together beginning in the 1930’s. He understood that he appeared on the scene at a period auspicious for a Judaica collector, and never denied the need to spend fortunes more today for, say, the 1796 first edition of Sefer Likutei Amarim, the fundamental exposition of Chabad chassidic philosophy, or for a sixteen volume calf-bound pocket Renaissance Hebrew Bible printed in Paris in 1543 by Robert Estienne the Elder (two of the items from Kraft’s library that were sold at the auction).
In terms of timing, two Jewish social transformations were underway in mid-20th century America that brought to the fore Karp’s cleverness as a collector: Suburbia was on the rise, and in moving to their new homes Jews routinely disposed of memorabilia from grandparents that had been gathering dust for decades in unopened boxes. Similarly, many of the immigrants coming to Israel to build new lives did not take seriously the old books and other religious Judaica they brought with them.
What the American and Israeli social transformations shared was a greater emphasis on secular lifestyles, which caused people to look more askance on the religiously oriented ancient books and memorabilia they’d inherited. Where would these unwanted volumes, scrolls of Esther, nostalgic biblical scenes and menorahs be disposed of?
The Jewish book dealers on the Lower East Side and Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim served as outlets for this abandoned Judaica. Those merchants, with their haggard persona and meagerly appointed stores, are long gone. But some forty and fifty years ago, Abraham Karp scoured their unadorned shelves, their basements and storefront sales. This was a time when serious Jewish book-collecting hardly existed and would-be collectors were unable to match Karp’s prodigious homespun knowledge.