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

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

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.

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.

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).

Deutsch (Gotthard) Papers. 1859-1922 (bulk 1900-1920). [MS-123]

So there is nothing exaggerated in thinking that Barthes would havefinally found the form for these many scattered raw materials (indexcards, desk diaries, old or ongoing private diaries, current notes,narratives to come, the planned discussion of homosexuality) ifdeath had not brought his work and his reflection to an end. Thework would certainly not have corresponded to the current definitionof the novel as narration and the unfolding of a plot, but the historyof forms tells us that the word ‘novel’ has been used to designate themost diverse objects.

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.

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

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.

‘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