Metadata: Archives of Private Provenance
Collection
- Country:
- Switzerland
- Holding institution:
- State Archive of Aargau
- Holding institution (official language):
- Staatsarchiv Aargau
- Postal address:
- Entfelderstrasse 22, CH-5001 Aarau
- Phone number:
- +41 62 835 12 90
- Email:
- staatsarchiv@ag.ch
- Reference number:
- NL .A
- Title:
- Archives of Private Provenance
- Title (official language):
- Archive privater Herkunft
- Date(s):
- 1800/2020
- Date note:
- 1800 to the present day
- Language:
- German
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Physical condition:
- good
- Scope and content:
- The archives of Private Provenance contain the estates of individuals and families and cover mainly the period from 1800 until today. Apart from some isolated documents in the holdings of Augustin Keller, Udalrich Joseph Schaufelbühl and Johann Caspar Ulrich there is also a smaller file in the holdings of the Pestalozzi Children's Village about Hungarian Jews from the year 1987. From a Jewish point of view the archive of Florence Guggenheim (1700-2000) is especially worth mentioning. [NL.A-0095; NL A-0145; NL.A-0173; NL.A-0266/0078/16; NL.A-0329]
- Archival history:
- The "Florence Guggenheim Archive on the History, Language, Ethnology of the Jews in Switzerland and the Genealogy of the Surbtal Jews" (“Florence Guggenheim Archiv zur Geschichte, Sprache, Volkskunde der Juden in der Schweiz sowie zur Genealogie der Surbtaler Juden“; FGA) was located in the library of the Jewish Community in Zurich until it was taken over by the State Archive of Aargau. It was organised as a legal foundation. In the course of the reconstruction of the library it was decided to transfer the holdings to a public archive. The documents were taken over by the State Archive on 15 March 2013 as a donation from the Jewish Community of Zurich (ICZ).
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
Florence Guggenheim was born on 30 August 1898 in Bern and died on 14 February 1989 in Zurich. She was a resident of Oberendingen (now Endingen). She was the daughter of Adolf Grünberg and Doris née Willstaedt, a businesswoman. In 1928, she married Henri Guggenheim, a horse dealer. She studied pharmacy at the ETH Zurich from 1918 to 1923 and received her doctorate in 1928. After her marriage, she devoted herself to historical and linguistic research and various public activities. In 1919, she was co-founder and from 1950 to 1970 president of the Association for Social and Cultural Work in Judaism, which early on fought the rising antisemitism and championed a cosmopolitan Judaism. Guggenheim also held the position of general secretary of the Landesverband Jüdischer Frauen für Palästinaarbeit (National Association of Jewish Women for Palestine) (later the Swiss Wizo Federation) from 1930 to 1936, chaired the Bund Schweiz. Israelit. Frauenvereine (Federation of Swiss Jewish Women's Associations) from 1936 to 1938, and worked for the Jewish refugee aid during the Second World War. Beginning in 1939, she conducted linguistic studies on Surbtal Yiddish and saved the Swiss Jewish idiom from oblivion by recording audio documents. From the 1930s, she also participated in the establishment of the Jewish Library in Zurich and set up an archive on Jewish culture. She wrote numerous historical and linguistic publications and also supplemented and edited the two-volume “Geschichte der Juden in der Schweiz vom 16. Jh. bis nach der Emanzipation“ (History of the Jews in Switzerland from the 16th century until after emancipation), written by Augusta Weldler. Guggenheim has gained international recognition as an outstanding specialist in Jewish culture. Her scholarly work was awarded the Salomon David Steinberg Foundation Prize for Literature in 1972 and an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Zurich in 1979.
After the foundation of the Canton of Aargau in 1803, the Registrar of the State Chancellery in Aarau was responsible for organising and archiving the files produced by the new legislative and executive authorities. In the early years, these were housed in one of the lower rooms of the old town hall, which had been made available to the cantonal government by the Helvetic authorities. In the 1820s the archive moved to the new government building in the front suburb. In 1959, the State Archive and the Cantonal Library moved into a new building designed especially for them. The organisational separation of the two institutions in 1967 was also spatially completed in 1998 when the State Archive moved to the new Buchenhof administration building. The move to the new building brought about a marked improvement in internal operational processes. The archive users have a modern and purpose-oriented working environment in the Buchenhof.
- Access points: locations:
- Aargau
- Switzerland
- Finding aids:
- An online finding aid is available, although the information is often rudimentary.
- Links to finding aids:
- https://www.ag.ch/staatsarchiv/suche/suchinfo.aspx
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Museum Hohenems
- Author of the description:
- Severin Holzknecht; Jewish Museum of Hohenems; 2020
