The ‘size’ of facts served a dream of information recombination, and was served bythe card form. Other advocates of Zettelkasten like Johann Jacob Moser (1701–1785)remarked that fairly small facts meant the mass of information was broken down to itsindividual components and thus could be constantly reshuffled in a ‘game of cards’(Krajewski, 2011: 53-5).

Muchrecent scholarship on card indexes and factuality falls into one of two modes: first,scholars have excavated early modern indexes, catalogues, and the pursuit of ‘facts’to demonstrate information overload prior to the contemporary ‘information age’ as wellas the premodern attempts to counteract the firehose of books and other information(Blair, 2010; Krajewski, 2011; Mu ̈ ller-Wille and Scharf, 2009; Poovey, 1998;

Deutsch himself never theorized his index, treating it – like hiswhole focus on ‘facts’ – at face value.

Moreover, card indexes give further form to Bruno Latour’s meditations on writing: ifLatour described writing as a kind of ‘flattening’ of knowledge, then card indexes, likevertical files, represent information in three dimensions, making ideas simultaneouslyimmutable and highly mobile, and the smallness of ideas and ‘facts’ forced to fit onpaper slips allowed for reordering (Latour, 1986: 19-20).

However, the miniscule size of ‘facts’ did not neces-sarily reflect Deutsch’s adherence to any theory of information. Instead, it indicated hispersonal interest in distinctions of the smallest scale, vocalized by his motto ‘de minimiscurat historicus’, that history’s minutiae matter.

he spoke of the ‘historian’s credo’ that ‘the factscrubbed clean is more eternal than perfumed or rouged words’ (Marcus, 1957:466).17

Gershom Scholem’s card catalogue of mystical texts and termswhich has been furnished with its own reading room at the National Library of Israel;

The two sections of the index, then, went different ways: when Marcus opened‘branches’ of his archive in Los Angeles, New York, and Jerusalem, he microfilmedportions of his archival collections and also the Americana part of Deutsch’s cards. Bycontrast, the remaining cards were left to languish at Hebrew Union College’s Cincinnatilibrary.

Moststriking, though, was Marcus’ appropriation of Deutsch’s cards when he extracted thoserelating to America, installing them in the reading room of the American JewishArchives where they remain to this day.

As a graduate student, hemaintained a card index of his own. When Marcus’s friends wrote of his travels abroad,they declared that ‘When we think of that card index by now we shudder. What propor-tions it must have assumed’. 18

Shortly after Deutsch’s death thealumni of the Hebrew Union College purchased his index for the seminary’s library.15

It is reminiscent ofPierre Nora’s suggestion that physical objects and especially the written word constitute‘archival memory,’ a secondary or ‘prosthesis’ memory (Nora, 1989: 14).

Simultaneously, it showcases how little actually has changed with therise of digital platforms, where some scholars have sought to build software edifices toemulate card index systems or speak of ‘paper-based tangible interfaces’ for research(Do ̈ring and Beckhaus, 2007; Lu ̈decke, 2015).

Certainly, computerizationmight seem to resolve some of the limitations of systems like Deutsch’s, allowing forfull-text search or multiple tagging of individual data points, but an exchange of cardsfor bits only changes the method of recording, leaving behind the reality that one muststill determine what to catalogue, how to relate it to the whole, and the overarchingsystem.

In 1905 – just as Deutsch began his index inearnest – the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (General or Total Archive of the Ger-man Jews) was established under the leadership of Eugen Ta ̈ubler, who developed aprogram to collect all the files of German Jewry. This dream of archival totality was lateradopted explicitly and implicitly by a number of Jewish archival efforts in Austria, theUSA, and the state of Israel, where the Jewish Historical General Archives (since 1969the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People) tried to create what its formerdirector Hadassah Assouline termed a ‘central repository of Jewish historical material inthe world’ (Lustig, 2017: 110-25). 14

As a result, hisindex is simultaneously a relic of research and a reminder of the pitfalls of all such effortsto create systematic knowledge, regardless of the underlying technology – paper, digitalor otherwise.

One might then say that Deutsch’s index devel-oped at the height of the pursuit of historical objectivity and constituted a tool ofhistorical research not particularly innovative or limited to him alone, given that the useof notecards was encouraged by so many figures, and it crystallized a positivistic meth-odology on its way out.

R. G. Collingwood’s critique of what hecalled ‘scissors and paste’ history – meaning both those who uncritically cited earlierworks, and the use of scissors and paste to cut apart sources on index cards

Just as with hisinterleaved volumes of Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden,

Card indexes were a tool to manage information overloadand enabled one to move and recombine letters, words and ideas – which led WalterBenjamin to describe the explosion of the book into its fundamental components,recorded on cards, so that they could be recombined (Benjamin, 2016[1986]: 43).

Beyond the realm of historians, advocates called card indexes ‘the only portable,elastic, simple, orderly and self-indexing way of keeping records’, and the practice wascommon enough that Gustave Flaubert parodied the unending and ultimately futilepursuit of all knowledge in his 1881 satire Bouvard et Pe ́cuchet (Dickinson, 1894).

Fred Morrow Flingwrote effusively of the ‘manifest advantages’ of the ‘card system of note taking’

Herbert Baxton Adams’ model of ahistorical seminar room suggested it have a dedicated catalogue;

(Boyd, 2013; Burke, 2014; Krajewski, 2011: 9-20, 57; Zedel-maier, 2002)

20th-century enterprises like Herbert Field’s‘Concilium Bibliographicum’, a system of zoological research

And it constitutes an important but overlooked signpost in the 20th-centuryhistory of information, as ‘facts’ fell out of fashion but big data became big business.

in 1917 he celebrated his fifty-thousandth card with an article titled ‘Siyum’, referencing the celebration upon conclud-ing study of a tractate of Talmud (Deutsch, 1917b).

The fact that Deutsch’s students saw their teacher’sindex as a monument to his historical genius

At once intended as a foundationfor a systematic history of the Jews, it was deeply unsystematic; meant to be a means ofproductivity, in the end Deutsch was essentially unproductive.

Deutsch’s index and his ‘facts’, then, seemedto his students to embody a moral value in addition to epistemological utility.

Deutsch’s close friendJoseph Stolz, writing of the Chicago rabbi Bernard Felsenthal (1822–1908) who hadpenned a history of that city’s Jews and was instrumental in the 1892 formation of theAmerican Jewish Historical Society, noted that Felsenthal ‘was not the systematic orga-nizer who worked with a stenographer and card-index’ (Stolz, 1922: 259).

One student’s rabbinical thesis, also completed that year,opened with the declaration: ‘We must not forget that History is a Science. Its facts cannever be doubted. One may indeed, differ as to the interpretation of facts but neverdispute the fact per se!’ (orig. emph., Holtzberg, 1916: Introduction).

He tried to show that this‘favorite topic’ of his, ‘insistence on exactness in chronological dates’, amounted tomore than a trifling (Deutsch, 1915, 1905a). Deutsch compared such historical accuracyto that of a bookkeeper who might recall his ledger by memory. ‘People would look uponsuch an achievement’, he reflected, ‘as a freak, harmless, but of no particular value, infact rather a waste of mental energy’ (Deutsch, 1916). However, he sought to show thatthese details mattered, no different from how ‘a difference in a ledger of one centremains just as grievous as if it were a matter of $100,000’ (Deutsch, 1904a: 3).

Anecdotes’, he concluded, ‘havetheir historic value, if properly tested’ – reflecting both his interest in details and also theneed to ascertain whether they were true (Deutsch, 1905b).

Bruno Latour has reflected, information is more malleable when it is not too large(Daston, 2002; Latour, 1986: 19).

Deutsch’s index was created out of an almost algorith-mic processing of historical sources in the pursuit of a totalized and perfect history of theJews; it presented, on one hand, the individualized facts, but together also constitutedwhat we might term a ‘history without presentation’, which merely held the ‘facts’themselves without any attempt to synthesize them (cf. Saxer, 2014: 225-32).

one finds in Deutsch’s catalogue one implementation of what LorraineDaston would later term ‘mechanical objectivity’, an ideal of removing the scholar’s selffrom the process of research and especially historical and scientific representation (Das-ton and Galison, 2007: 115-90).

the bottom right of each card was adorned with abbreviated citations,often more than one.

He was especially enamored with cross-references, which weremarked in red type;

If he initially wrote hiscards by hand, the vast majority were typewritten with Hebrew words written in blankspaces when required.

In one way, the cards’ uniform size and format was part of Deutsch’sdream to produce a systematic method of research and writing.

In another fashion, Bush described a ‘memory index’ that would work ‘as wemay think’, by which, cryptically, he meant not artificial intelligence but the capabilityto retrace the paths of the reader’s thought process.

Deutsch’s index, then, did not constitute the systematic and overarching view ofJewish history and contemporaneous Jewish issues that Deutsch had initially hoped tocreate. Instead, it was much more personal. It reflected his singular reading regime, and itworked with a certain shorthand: In later years Deutsch often just cited ‘Yiddish papers’or ‘Daily papers’, and in some instances he referred to ‘private information’. The cards,topics, and sources provide a sense of the specific information that interested Deutsch.

Further, very few cards areout of order, suggesting that Deutsch may not have extensively removed sets of cards toshuffle them into novel patterns, as returning them would probably have resulted in out-of-place items.

There is also very limited metadata. Many of the cross-references, referencing cardslike PIUS X or GERMANY, 1848, to give just two examples from this set, provoke one towander the corridors of cards searching for what Deutsch had in mind.

Further, Deutsch triedto instill a certain chronological, geographical and thematic method of organization. Butthis arrangement is also a stumbling block to anyone who might want to use it, includingDeutsch. ACCUSATIONS AGAINST THE JEWS (489 cards), for instance, presents an array ofevents organized not by date but in a surprisingly unsystematic alphabetical order. Insteadof indicating when such accusations were more or less prevalent, which could only beindicated by reorganizing cards chronologically, the default alphabetical sorting, whichshows instances in disparate locations like London (in May, 1921) alongside Sziget,Hungary (from 1867), gives the impression that such anti-Jewish events were everywhere.And even this organization was chaotic. The card on Sziget is actually listed under‘Marmaros’, the publication with which the card’s text began, and an immediately pre-ceding card is ordered based on its opening ‘A long list of accusations . . . ’, not thereference to its source: Goethe’s Das Jahrmarketsfest zu Plundersweilern.

one recognizes in the tactile realitythat so many of the cards are on flimsy copy paper, on the verge of disintegration with eachuse.

All this was listed in alphabetical and chronological order over a total of about 50boxes,

Altogether, one finds an interminable assortment of facts on almost anytopic, with major sections relating to blood accusations and blood libels, fiction andliterature, the Passover Haggadah, memoirs, mixed marriages, orthodoxy, Palestine,periodicals, and universities, but also obscure topics including hunting, Russian Jewishdwarfs, and myths and magic.

He sometimes pasted newsprint cuttings to present a statistical chart or inserted

Examining the cards, it becomes clear that the index constitutes not a mythic totalhistory but a specific set of facts and data that piqued Deutsch’s interest and whichreflected his personal research priorities (see Figure 2).

Deutsch himself pointed to criticswho called him a ‘chiffonier’ or historical rag-picker, though he defended his ‘incon-venient though undeniable facts’ (Deutsch, 1916). A number of contemporaries recog-nized the limits of his interest in individual facts. ‘I get the impression’, one figure put it,‘that the charm of the facts of history, was so great for Deutsch, he lost himself socompletely . . . in the study of them, that he was never altogether able to say he is throughwith studying them and that he is ready for writing’ (Schulman, 1922). One review ofDeutsch’s Scrolls (1917), which collected some of his scattered articles, reflected thatthe articles lacked organization. ‘In order to obtain value,’ the reviewer insisted, ‘factsmust be organized . . . Isolate a fact as one isolates a germ in the laboratory, such a factbecomes worthless for historical purposes’ (Leiber, 1917).

his oft-stated motto ‘de minimis curat historicus’.

If in 1908 itcontained 10,000 cards, by 1917 it had ballooned in size to 50,000 items, reaching60,000 in 1919 and nearly 70,000 at the time of Deutsch’s death in 1921 (Deutsch,1908b, 1917b; Brown, 1919: 69). It seems that Deutsch consistently produced 5,000cards per year (about 20 per workday) for the final 13 years of his life.

e called on his fellow rabbis to submitnotecards with details from their readings. He proposed that a central office gathermaterial into a ‘system’ of information about Jewish history, and he suggested theypublish the notes in the CCAR’s Yearbook.

Lamenting that ‘I have only two eyes, and, unfortunately cannot use themso as to read two books at the same time’,

Deutsch’s focus on facts was commonplace among professional US historians atthis time, as was his conception of the ‘fact’ as a small item that could fit onto the sizeof an index card (Daston, 2002).

Deutsch was not especially innovative. When he wrote that ‘first we must know, andafterward we may reason’, he channeled Johann Gustav Droysen’s distinction betweenKritik (source criticism) and Darstellung (historical narration) (Droysen, 1858).

Deutsch wrote often of history’s ‘scientific’ nature and inductive approach, leading toan almost positivistic method. ‘From individual facts’, he wrote, ‘one ascends to prin-ciples’, continuing: ‘Facts have to be arranged in a systematic manner . . . First we mustknow, and afterward we may reason’. This ‘systematic’ arrangement, he believed, sepa-rated the historian from the mere annalist or chronicler (Deutsch, 1900b: 166).

Deutsch created his index in the context of a range of encyclopedic activities. In 1897,the Central Conference of American Rabbis asked Deutsch to create a two-volume ency-clopedia, and he soon joined a similar effort by Funk and Wagnalls under the direction ofIsidore Singer. As the main editor for historical topics, Deutsch helped publish 12 volumesof the Jewish Encyclopedia from 1901 to 1906. In these same years, Deutsch produced acalendar of Jewish anniversaries in the monthly Die Deborah (1901), reprinted in 1904 inthe Hebrew Union College Annual (as the ‘Encyclopedic Department’) and as a standalonevolume (Deutsch, 1904a, 1904b).

Colleagues made a similarmove by calling Deutsch a ‘bor sud she-’eino me-’abed t.ippah’, a ‘cistern that neverloses a drop’. This oft-repeated designation simultaneously linked him to the

And the boys at the college [sic] call him Dr. Dates’.

Max Raisin (1881–1957),reflected that lessons often devolved into ‘reading several events with dates out of alittle notebook’ (Raisin, 1952: 147; Hertzman, 1985: 83-8).

‘He knows everything that’s happened fromB’reshis [Genesis] to today’, it went, ‘and it really isn’t work to him – it’s merely play’,a sentiment later expressed when one colleague wrote of Deutsch’s ‘game of cards’(Margolis, 1921).3

Consequently, instead of a curiousbut otherwise useless exercise and a delusional preoccupation with accumulating indi-vidual facts, closer examination shows that Deutsch’s index represented a certainforward-facing openness to new ways of managing information, and instead of theephemera of an obscure and mostly forgotten scholar, one finds a project with surpris-ingly far-reaching repercussions.

Scholem’s, given their own reading room at the National Library of Israel.

eutsch suggestedthat personal memory was untrustworthy and admitted it was no match for the writtenword, and his index enabled him to store information in a way recalling Derrida’sdiscussion of archives as prostheses of memory (Derrida, 1995).

Walter Benjamin termed the book ‘an outdated mediationbetween two filing systems’

A monument to the temple of truth taken to an illogical extreme, it might seemplainly outmoded.

The index frames a figure who may at first glanceseem a curious or even comedic caricature of a certain positivist historical tradition, butone who also imparted to his students a sense of the magnitude of Jewish history, andwho straddled a mechanical pursuit of individual ‘facts’ with a certain attention to novelmethods and visions of comprehensively encyclopedic information.

Without fail, obituaries commented on theindex and declared the colossal Zettelkasten either a great gift to scholarship or alter-nately ‘mere chips from his workshop’, which marked an exceptional effort but ultimateinability to look beyond the details. 1

This imposing cabinetof curiosities

In one instance, Deutsch bound interleaving pages in HeinrichGraetz’s Geschichte der Juden – the masterful eleven-volume work published from1854 to 1876 by Deutsch’s onetime teacher at Breslau’s Ju ̈disch-Theologisches Seminar– so he could fill it with errata and supplementary notes.