Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA)

Abstract¹

This article analyzes first provisional statistics on the availability of materials about the Shoah in the libraries of the world as an indicator of the global geography of Shoah knowledge and awareness. To estimate this global geography, we also asked how often people around the globe made use of the different language versions of the main Shoah article in the freely available internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Our data suggest two divergent trends: a pessimistic one, based on library holdings, which coincides with the still existing scientific divide between the Western developed countries and the rest of the world; and a more optimistic one, based on freely available information on the internet.

Based on the data of our research project covering 165 library catalogues (54 nationwide union catalogues, 81 national libraries, 16 legislative-assembly libraries, 14 libraries of international organizations) and the OCLC Worldcat, which by itself includes no less than 70,000 libraries in more than 170 countries, we found that there is indeed a huge global gap in Shoah library holdings. Some 69.3% of the global library presence of the leading peer-reviewed journal in the field, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in principle available to global publics, is encountered in libraries within the geographical distance of less than 1,000 miles from New York City or Brussels. We particularly analyze the lack of Shoah knowledge and awareness in many Muslim and Catholic countries. Apart from a special analysis of OCLC Worldcat data, we also use the data from eight Arabic and Iranian library networks and nine papal libraries in Rome.

We also present some multivariate analyses of the determinants of Shoah – related national library holdings in 81 countries.

The more optimistic tendencies suggest that compared to the share of the respective language group in total Wikipedia traffic, there was a relatively high download traffic in Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian, Persian, and French. The percentages of the global total Shoah Wikipedia article downloads were: English (37%), Spanish (11%), Portuguese (8%), German (7%), Japanese (5%), French (5%), Russian (4%), Italian (4%), Chinese (2%), Dutch (2%), Persian (2%), Arabic (1%), Polish (1%), Indonesian (1%), and Romanian (1%). We offer some policy perspectives on how to increase global Shoah knowledge and awareness by creating a scholarly high-quality open-access depository to be managed possibly by leading research institutions in Israel, and we discuss possible international best-practice models for such a possible open-access scientific depository.

For some time now there has been rising concern about disturbing trends pointing to the lack of Shoah knowledge and awareness in different countries of the world.² The New York Times, in an article published on April 12, 2018, spoke about the “Holocaust fading from memory.”³ As Julius Berman, president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), recently stated: “Without education, we risk the history of the Holocaust being distorted and otherwise denied and those who were murdered being forgotten. Effective education is paramount towards ensuring that what happened in the past does not repeat itself.”⁴

Our study analyzes these trends, which reflect the realities of the globalized scientific and electronic world of the 21^st century. These trends tell us how science, published to an increasing extent by the main transnational publishing corporations, is distributed across the geography of the libraries of our planet. Here we rely on international library holding data from 165 national union catalogues, national library catalogues, parliamentary libraries, and international organization libraries and on the OCLC Worldcat integrating on its own 70,000 libraries in 170 countries. We also analyze Wikipedia download statistics of the main Shoah article on Wikipedia in different languages around the world. These data suggest that there is an unmet interest in themes of the Shoah and also in reading about Israel among the global publics in our world, including in predominantly Muslim countries. If there are walls of ignorance, there are also many cracks in them.

Recent global opinion survey data⁵ about the global lack of Shoah knowledge and awareness serve as the necessary background to our empirical study.

The unequal global geographical distribution of Shoah library holdings is exacerbated by the challenges of the recent mass migration to the West from the countries of the global South, where this lack is most acute.

This article, then, will offer the following. After a short survey in the “Background” section of the limited existing international opinion data about knowledge and awareness of the Shoah,⁶ we discuss our methodology and then our results. We specifically look into the situation in the Arab countries and we also critically evaluate the dearth of Shoah library holdings in the global center of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican, and in its Pontifical Universities in Rome, notwithstanding explicit, published exhortations by the current pontiff, Pope Francis, to study the Shoah and to properly equip papal institutions of higher learning with adequate means of library holdings. We analyze some multivariate relationships of our library holdings data with standard economic, political, and social indicators, already presented in the pages of this journal,⁷ and we draw some tentative conclusions about how to increase international knowledge and awareness of the Shoah, especially based on the dissemination of high-quality open-access knowledge in the 21^st century, which is best suited to overcome the hitherto existing situation.

It is hoped that other researchers will take up our methodology to arrive at still more comprehensive results of their own.

Background

In the following, we will quickly summarize the results of the very few existing international opinion surveys on the perceptions of international publics about the Shoah.⁸

Ebert Foundation study: Widespread Shoah memory abuse in Europe (“Jews try to take advantage of having been victims”)

Among the more recent international surveys, the German political think tank Friedrich Ebert Foundation, generally associated with the German Trade Union Confederation and the Social Democratic Party (SPD),⁹ commissioned a major study on prejudice in eight European countries, based on national representative samples and state-of-the art multivariate social science statistics.¹⁰ In the following, we project their available very limited results about Shoah knowledge and awareness onto a summarizing image. Image 1 thus tells us nothing more and nothing less than the percentage of people in Europe saying that they (very much) agree with the opinion that “Jews try to take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era” (p. 171 of the study).

Image 1: The main result of the Ebert Foundation survey of opinions regarding the Shoah in eight European countries

This depressing single but very telling result about the abuse of Shoah memory in Europe is analyzed in the Ebert study in the framework of a multiculturalist reading of events, focusing on prejudiced anti-Semitic perceptions as being determined by the general group-focused enmity of a society (anti-immigrant attitudes, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim attitudes, sexism, and homophobia as well as prejudices against other identified groups) in the eight surveyed European countries. The study was based on telephone surveys of a representative sample of 1,000 subjects per each country. In the multivariate statistical study, “Group-focused enmity” describes the syndrome of interlinked negative attitudes and prejudices toward groups identified as “other,” “different,” or “abnormal” and assigned inferior social status. The study concludes that – in accordance with the results reported in Image 1 above – general group-focused enmity is widespread in Europe. In the survey, it is weakest in the Netherlands and strongest in Poland and Hungary. Three ideological orientations analyzed in the Ebert survey are strongly statistically associated with group-focused enmity: authoritarianism (an underlying attitude espousing law and order and discipline), Social Dominance Orientation (advocating social status hierarchies), and the rejection of diversity (a general rejection of cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity within a country). Based on multivariate analysis, group-focused enmity increases with age and decreases with education and income; and attitudes differ little between men and women. General political attitudes (left-right orientation, etc.) are relevant only to a certain degree. But respondents, the Ebert study argues, who describe themselves as tending toward the political right, and who feel politically powerless, wish for a strong leader, and support the death penalty, are “on average more prejudiced.” The most important factors mitigating  group-focused enmity, according to the study, are “trust in others, the ability to forge firm friendships, contact with immigrants, and above all a positive basic attitude towards diversity.” Religiosity, on the other hand, does not mitigate group-focused enmity. And “universalism plays only a small role in explaining tolerant attitudes.”

The CNN 2018 survey: A third of Europeans say that commemorating the Shoah “distracts from other atrocities today”

A similar 2018 CNN poll¹¹ revealed that a third of Europeans said that they knew just a little or nothing at all about the Shoah. The CNN survey interviewed more than 7,000 people across Europe, with more than 1,000 respondents each in Austria, France, Germany, Britain, Hungary, Poland, and Sweden. About one European in twenty has never even heard of the Shoah.¹² Half of respondents said they knew “a fair amount” about the Shoah, while only one out of five people said they knew “a great deal.”¹³ According to CNN, two-thirds of Europeans said that commemorating the Shoah helps ensure that “such atrocities will never happen again.”¹⁴ Half of Europeans said commemorating the Shoah helps fight anti-Semitism today. In another case of typical abuse of Shoah memory, a remarkable third of Europeans said that – in the words of the study –commemorating the Shoah “distracts from other atrocities today,” with even higher-than-average numbers of Germans, Austrians, Poles, and Hungarians consenting to such an opinion.¹⁵

The Claims Conference survey

Recent studies commissioned by the Claims Conference also revealed a rather shocking lack of knowledge and awareness about the Shoah in Austria, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann, more than 80 years after the Anschluss,¹⁶ and in the United States and in Canada. Eight percent of Austrians, 10% of Americans, and 3% of Canadians believe that it was not the terror apparatus of the Nazis but “the Jews” themselves who caused the Shoah! Only less than half of the surveyed publics in Austria (44%), the United States (49%), and Canada (46%) could correctly identify the number of the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah (question 13 of the Claims Conference study, March 2019).¹⁷ In addition, only 55% of Austrians could correctly identify the year 1938 as that of the Anschluss (question 20 of the study), making a real mockery of the efforts by successive Austrian governments, the media, and NGOs to honor, in the “commemorative year 2018” (“Gedenkjahr 2018”),¹⁸ the victims of the Nazi persecution, which began in Austria in March 1938. Thus, the efforts of the entire political system, the Austrian public broadcasting company, ORF, and the rest of the media to commemorate the events of 1938 were for all purposes practically lost on no less than 45% of the Austrian public.¹⁹

Global lack of Shoah awareness and Shoah denial: The ADL survey

Without question, the study with the most encompassing global coverage of the subject is the so-called ADL 100 study commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In its pathbreaking survey of global anti-Semitism,²⁰ the ADL came to the conclusion that Shoah denial is a global phenomenon. This conclusion has gone far too neglected in international research.²¹ From the many materials mentioned in the study, we provide the following comparative statistical table about Holocaust denial (Table 1):

Table 1: International Holocaust denial – data based on the ADL 100 global survey ²²

Country	% of people saying the number of Jews who died in the Shoah has been exaggerated or that the Shoah is a myth
Netherlands	4%
UK	5%
Denmark	6%
USA	6%
Belgium	7%
France	7%
Italy	7%
Germany	8%
Spain	14%
Ukraine	17%
Poland	19%
UK – Muslims	20%
Russia	21%
Romania	24%
Hungary	26%
Latvia	26%
France – Muslims	27%
Greece	28%
Argentina	31%
Germany – Muslims	31%
Italy – Muslims	34%
Belgium – Muslims	35%
Spain – Muslims	42%
Turkey	53%
Iran	62%

In the different world regions, the following are the percentages of people who say that they have heard about the Shoah but think it is either a myth or has been exaggerated:²³

Oceania                                                              0.8%

Western Europe                                              11%

Americas                                                           21%

Eastern Europe                                                24%

Asia                                                                    41%

Sub-Saharan Africa                                        44%

Middle East and North Africa                     63%

A further breakdown of these data reveals even more disturbing tendencies:²⁴

• 75% of Middle East and North African Muslims (compared to 55% of Muslims residing in Europe) hold anti-Semitic views.

• 64% of Middle East and North African Muslims (compared to 31% of Muslims residing in Europe) are aware of the Shoah but say it is a myth or has been greatly exaggerated by history.

In many Muslim and non-Muslim developing countries, low awareness of the Shoah is not the exception but the rule. The ADL data²⁵ referring to this speak for themselves:

 

Table 2: Low Shoah awareness in many developing countries – data based on the ADL 100 survey

	Shoah awareness (in % of total population)
Laos	9%
Indonesia	10%
Philippines	10%
Uganda	12%
Bangladesh	14%
Ghana	14%
Tanzania	15%
Côte d’Ivoire	17%
Vietnam	17%
Nigeria	19%

Table 3 summarizes the extremely high rates of Holocaust denial in the Arab world. For all practical purposes, three-fourths to four-fifths of the respondents must be classified as Holocaust deniers:

Table 3: Holocaust denial in the Arab world – data based on the ADL 100 survey

	Rates of Holocaust denial (in % of total population)
West Bank and Gaza	82%
Qatar	79%
Algeria	77%
Yemen	77%
Saudi Arabia	76%
Bahrain	75%
United Arab Emirates	72%
Kuwait	71%
Libya	70%
Jordan	70%

Thus, while the Ebert survey underlined the necessity to uphold multiculturalism and tolerance as a strategy against group-focused enmity, which leads toward anti-Semitism and the abuse of Shoah memory (see Image 1), the ADL 100 survey, by contrast, concluded that there is a clear global North-South and North-East dimension of Shoah awareness and that Holocaust denial is most severe in the Arab world. What, then, to do in Europe in a time of mass migration from precisely those countries, on which the ADL survey focused as the main global center of contemporary low Shoah knowledge and awareness and high Holocaust denial?

The Eurobarometer study

Instead of confronting these issues directly, the statistical apparatus of the European Union has been slow (to say the least) and even practically unwilling to react to these necessities. The opinion-survey instrument of the European Commission, Eurobarometer, in its sole available study on the subject,²⁶ only dared to ask respondents (N= 27,643) about their perceptions of anti-Semitism around them and dismally failed to ask Europeans about their real, existing anti-Semitic prejudices or their perceptions of the Shoah. In the following, we present – using the language of the Eurobarometer survey – the most important conclusions from this study.

• Half of Europeans (50%) consider that anti-Semitism is a problem in their country. However, a majority of respondents think so, according to Eurobarometer, in eight EU member states: Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, and Austria. Eurobarometer, in its report, also states that “around a fifth of Europeans (19%) have friends or acquaintances who are Jewish” and reports that “only around a third of Europeans (36%) believe that Antisemitism has increased in their country over the past five years.” All other respondents are of the opinion that anti-Semitism has “remained the same (39%), decreased (10%) or have no opinion (15%).”

• At least half of Europeans think that six of the nine manifestations of anti-Semitism are “a problem in their country.” The study says that “Holocaust denial is considered the most pernicious problem, followed by Antisemitism on the Internet, antisemitic graffiti or vandalism, and expressions of hostility and threats towards Jewish people in public places.” But the study shies away from an effort to study the real extent of Holocaust denial in contemporary Europe!

• More than four in ten Europeans (42%) are aware that there is a law against Holocaust denial in their country of residence. But the study fails to ask people in the 28 surveyed European publics whether or not they endorse the existence of such laws.

• Eurobarometer also states that more than four in ten Europeans (43%) think that the Shoah is sufficiently taught in schools of their country, but nearly the same proportion (42%) think the opposite.

• In view of the shocking ADL data about Muslim attitudes on Jews and the Shoah, presented above, Eurobarometer does not present any evidence on contemporary attitudes of Europeans on Jews and the Shoah that is disaggregated by religious denomination or religious practice of the respondents, and even reports that over half of Europeans (54%) believe that the conflicts in the Middle East have an influence on the way Jewish people are perceived in their country. A majority share this opinion in 13 EU member states, mainly in Northern and Western Europe.

• In order to determine the main ways in which anti-Semitism is expressed, respondents were asked whether they considered nine situations as a problem in their country. The list was as follows: (1) anti-Semitic graffiti or vandalism of Jewish buildings or institutions; (2) physical attacks against Jewish people; (3) expressions of hostility and threats toward Jewish people in the street or other public places; (4) anti-Semitism in the media; (5) anti-Semitism in political life; (6) anti-Semitism on the internet, including online social networks; (7) anti-Semitism in schools and universities; (8) people denying the genocide of the Jewish people, the Holocaust; and (9) desecration of Jewish cemeteries. At least half the respondents say that six of these situations are a problem in their country: 53% for “people denying the genocide of the Jewish people, the Holocaust”; 51% for “anti-Semitism on the internet, including online social networks,” “anti-Semitic graffiti or vandalism of Jewish buildings or institutions,” and “expressions of hostility and threats toward Jewish people in the street or other public places”; and 50% for the “desecration of Jewish cemeteries” and “physical attacks against Jewish people.” Forty-three percent of respondents believe that anti-Semitism in schools and universities is a problem in their country; 43% feel the same about anti-Semitism in political life and 41% think that anti-Semitism in the media is a problem.

In addition to our summary of the main, very limited, existing surveys of European and international opinion on Shoah knowledge and awareness, some other published studies underline the perception emerging from the ADL 100 data.²⁷ These studies all stress the necessity to continue research work on the issues, as indicated by Table 1 of our study.

Methodology and data

The methodologies presented here are an invitation to the global research community to undertake scholarly work of its own on the ways in which Shoah knowledge and awareness is transmitted by the communication channels of the 21^st century.

Finding out the correct search term to investigate global library holdings on the Shoah

We should make it clear at the outset of our study that there are very strong reasons to use the term Shoah and not Holocaust in library search profiles when searching for materials referring to the murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies.²⁸ First, the Hebrew word Shoah captures uniquely and at once the contemporary Jewish and international understanding of the events in Germany and Europe from 1933 onward, and it refers specifically and virtually without any possibility of error to the unique crime of the mass murder of European Jewry by the Nazi German regime. Searching in library catalogues for texts with the word Holocaust in the title would produce many items not referring at all to the suffering of European Jewry, while searching libraries for texts with the word Shoah in the title will give us a clue to the true library holdings linked to the specific contemporary understanding existing today in the state of Israel. Today, studies with the word Holocaust in the title but not dealing with the Shoah abound, such as books on the rape of Nanking in China by the Japanese,²⁹ on Columbus and the conquest of the modern world,³⁰ on the Rwandan Holocaust,³¹ and so on. These are only some of the world’s best-known titles, to judge by the library-presence ranking in the OCLC Worldcat.³²

 

To our knowledge, the writer and editor Yehuda Erez was the first to use the term Shoah in his article “With the Shoah in Europe,” published in December 1938. In it he stated: “We are horrified at the foundation by the shoah that is taking place upon the heads of German Jewry.”³³

The unequivocal clarity of the Hebrew language helps us find the library holdings that truly are devoted to the subject. We should also note here that we exclusively used the Latin transliteration of the Hebrew word and not its Hebrew original השואה, because for technical reasons the search profiles of many libraries would not allow us to do so. OCLC Worldcat currently lists 78,633 items with the title “Holocaust” and 62,653 items with the title “Shoah.”³⁴

Our results presented here are but a first impression of the tendencies which are at work; further research along the lines proposed here could establish much more thoroughly the global geography and sociology of Shoah knowledge and awareness.

Bibliometrics and Webometrics

In this context, bibliometrics³⁵ and webometrics³⁶ are two adequate powerful tools of modern science – in our case, social science – and they allow us to ask fundamental questions about the structure of international knowledge accumulation and dissemination³⁷ with practically no additional costs for the researcher, using existing and freely available international data.³⁸ All you need is the methodology, a laptop, a tablet or even only a smartphone, and an internet connection.

In many ways such a methodology might appear to be proxy or even “forensic” in nature. Yet, in fact, bibliometric³⁹ data from nationwide academic, national, and legislative-assembly library catalogues and international organizations reveal to us what a nation reads and what it does not read (except in open-access depositories on the internet; see below). The same applies to the institution being analyzed here as well, the Roman Catholic Church, and its libraries in its administrative center, the Vatican and the city of Rome.

Using such a startlingly simple methodology enables us to take an initial and thorough radar-screen look at the global geography of national and international scientific knowledge accumulation on a given subject, in our case the Shoah. Generally, international library holding data are a revealing and very up-to-date exemplification of what the political scientist Karl Wolfgang Deutsch (1912-1992) once called “the nerves of government.”⁴⁰

The Libcitation methodology

The methodology of counting the number of books available around the globe on a given subject or by a given author or institution was first developed by the Excellence in Research for Australia program by Howard D. White et al.⁴¹

The methodology developed was originally designed to estimate the global or also regional presence of themes, authors, universities, research institutes, or an entire scientific community around the globe. To apply this methodology, our project comprises an up-to-date collection of national library union catalogues, national library catalogues, legislative-assembly library catalogues, and international organization library catalogues.

The work of librarians is seen here to reflect in an almost seismological way the intellectual climate of a given academic institution or of an entire country or an organization.⁴² Add to this that a national library must be regarded as the “visitors” card of the book and media culture of a nation. Librarians using their scarce resources to order a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and withhold the availability of scientific journals or books dealing with Jewish history and the Shoah reflect the prejudices of a given academia, of a given institution like the Vatican, or of a major international organization. By their nonexistent library orders, they “voted” that the Shoah is beyond the perimeter of what is considered “important” in the book culture of a nation or of an organization. By contrast, also smaller numbers of holdings – especially in poorer countries – on the Shoah underline the global awareness of the Shoah.

Considering the harsh realities of what is generally referred to as the “Middle East,” we might add that librarians ordering copies of good and serious literature or even a subscription to a serious scholarly journal on the Shoah can be interpreted as a sign of hope that Arab publics and Muslim publics in general are beginning to question the omnipresent character of the “anti-Zionism” narrative surrounding them and the widespread Holocaust denial in this part of the world. In addition, 8,700 Farsi speakers, 7,200 Arabic speakers, and 6,100 Indonesian speakers now downloading the Wikipedia article on the Shoah each month are truly a hopeful sign.

Further analyses, hopefully to be inspired by this article, could also be based on the website statistics analysis tool Alexa.⁴³

The further subsections of our methodology section are directed at specialists and members of the international research community, and should serve the retrievability of our results and inspire further research. Readers not particularly interested in bibliometric and webometric methodology can skip over the following subsections and immediately begin to read our results.

Analyzing national union catalogues

Once a monopoly of the developed countries, today library union catalogues have greatly expanded into Eastern Europe and the developing world.⁴⁴ Easily available lists of the one-click internet access to these searchable library consortia now include:

• The website KVK – Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog,⁴⁵ developed by the librarians and internet technicians of Karlsruhe Technical University in Germany.
• The so-called ShareILL list. ShareILL is an international interlibrary loan and document delivery information center. It is designed, maintained, and sustained by members of the resource-sharing community.⁴⁶

The list prepared by ShareILL covers several countries, also included in the “Karlsruhe list,” but in addition, it offers access to a number of other national union catalogues. But we considerably expanded these existing lists with our own research, and today can analyze the library holdings of 55 national union catalogues including the catalogue of the European Commission in Brussels.⁴⁷ We weeded out all those library union catalogues which are listed in various sources but  unfortunately are not operative or even produce a high security risk for a computer system as shown by antivirus programs. Our research also revealed the drama of the nonexistence of a real nationwide library union catalogue for Germany, the European Union’s leading economy, which even today only offers a patchwork of different regional catalogues. Thus, we are able to provide reliable data about the Shoah–related library holdings in the encompassing library consortia of the following countries:

• Albania; Algeria; Australia; Austria; Belgium; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Brazil; Bulgaria; Canada; Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama); China; Costa Rica; Croatia; Czech Republic; Denmark; Egypt; Estonia; European Commission Libraries; Finland; France; Germany (different catalogues for Baden Württemberg; Bavaria; Berlin State; Hesse; Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern; North Rhine-Westphalia);⁴⁸ Hungary; Iceland; India; Israel; Italy; Japan; Jordan; Korea (South); Latvia; Lithuania; Luxembourg; Malta; Montenegro; New Zealand; Northern Macedonia; Poland; Philippines; Portugal; Saudi Arabia plus 24 Arab countries (Aruc Arab Union Catalogue); Serbia; Slovenia; Sweden; Switzerland; Thailand; Tunisia; Turkey; United Kingdom; Vatican

Analyzing the holdings in national libraries

A growing number of national libraries from around the world now offer free access to their library catalogues, not only in the developed Western countries but also in the new democracies of Eastern Europe, in Russia, and in the developing countries.⁴⁹ Easily available lists of the one-click internet access to these searchable library consortia again include the KVK – Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog.⁵⁰ The KVK catalogue thus offers access not only to a fair number of important union catalogues but also to the integrated holdings of national libraries. In our results, we also provide data about the Shoah-related library holdings at the Library of Congress in Washington,⁵¹ which is to be considered as America’s national library, and also the national libraries mentioned in the ShareILL list of national libraries.⁵² In addition, we used the one-click access to the digital national libraries of Latin America, available via the platform Iberoamerica digital, as additional information.⁵³ Also, the national library list provided by Wikipedia proved here to be rather useful in this context.⁵⁴ We also cross-checked these lists of national libraries with other well-known websites referring to this subject, augmented by our own internet research.⁵⁵ Our final consolidated list of the electronically available catalogues of national libraries around the world, specifically developed for this research project, now comprises 81 entries:

• Albania; Argentina; Australia; Austria; Azerbaijan; Bahamas; Belarus; Belgium; Bhutan; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Brazil; Canada; Chile; China; Colombia; Costa Rica; Croatia; Cuba; Cyprus; Czech Republic; Denmark; Ecuador; Egypt; Finland; France; Germany; Greece; Hungary; Iceland; India; Indonesia; Iran; Iraq; Irish Republic; Israel; Italy; Jamaica; Japan; Kazakhstan; Korea (South); Kuwait; Latvia; Liechtenstein; Lithuania; Luxembourg; Malaysia; Maldives; Malta; Mexico; Moldova; Monaco; Namibia; Netherlands; New Zealand; Norway; Oman; Panama; Peru; Poland; Portugal; Portugal; Romania; Russia; Saudi Arabia; Serbia; Singapore; Slovak Republic; Slovenia; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; Taiwan – China; Thailand; Trinidad and Tobago; Turkey; Ukraine; United Kingdom; United States; Uruguay; Vatican; Venezuela.

Analyzing the holdings in legislative assembly libraries

The catalogues of legislative assembly libraries are an important clue to what is on the minds of the lawmakers and their staff around the world. To find out these catalogues was not very easy.⁵⁶ To investigate the Shoah–related library holdings of international lawmaking bodies, we finally relied on a list provided by the Congreso Nacional de Chile⁵⁷ in the framework of the Chilean parliament’s international and global role in the Parliamentary Libraries section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).⁵⁸ Other links on the subject, still mentioned by internet search engines, such as those by the German Bundestag, are not operative anymore.⁵⁹ Further research on this subject could also cover the parliamentary libraries not yet included in our present project.⁶⁰ Our parliamentary library list, expanded by our own internet search for operative library catalogues of national lawmaking assemblies, now includes 16 countries plus the European Parliament. The countries covered by our research are:

• Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, European Union – European Parliament, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States

Analyzing the holdings in the libraries of international organizations

For our research, we also collected 14 operative library catalogues of major international organizations, showing huge differences between the approaches of these international organizations:⁶¹

• African Union; Asian Development Bank; Council of Europe; European Union; International Labour Organization; NATO; OSCE (OSCE Academy Bishkek); UN ECA Addis Ababa; UN ECLAC Santiago; UN ESCWA Beirut; UNESCO Digital Library; United Nations Geneva; United Nations New York; World Bank and IMF

The master lists of the libraries used – a key for possible further research

In order not to overburden our text with 165 website addresses, we provide our readers with a single and encompassing master list of the library catalogues used in our investigation in Appendix Table 1. This master list should facilitate further investigations by researchers using the methodology described in our essay (see Appendix Table 1).

Counting the books of the Vatican, including its universities and think tanks

Appendix Table 2 lists the library addresses of the Pontifical Universities in Rome by a first, and admittedly very limited international comparison. Our list is far from exhaustive, and further research on the subject could look into the Shoah–related library holdings of all the libraries of the dozens of Pontifical Universities around the world.⁶² Our list currently includes the library catalogues of the Pontifical Universities in the city of Rome itself in a fairly encompassing way:

• Biblioteca “Paolo VI” – Pontificia Facoltà di Scienze dell’Educazione “Auxilium” (the Papal Faculty of Educational Sciences)
• Pontifical Gregorian University “Gregoriana” (run by the Jesuits)
• Pontifical Lateran University “Lateranum” (run by the Dioceses of Rome)
• Pontifical Salesian University “Salesianum” (run by the Salesians)
• Pontifical University of St. Anthony “Antonianum” (run by the Franciscans)
• Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas “Angelicum” (run by the Dominicans)
• Pontifical University of the Holy Cross “Santa Croce” (run by the Opus Dei)
• Pontifical Orient Institute

The library catalogues of the Pontifical Universities used for our comparison at the relatively early stage of our research were the following important Pontifical Universities in Eastern Europe and Latin America:

• Papal University John Paul II, Krakow, Poland
• Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago
• Pontifical Xavierian University, Bogotá, Colombia
• Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Analyzing the data from the OCLC Worldcat – 70,000 libraries in 170 countries with 450 billion records at one click

Another approximation of global library holdings about the Shoah can be based on the global library network OCLC Worldcat.⁶³ The network was founded in 1967 at the Ohio College Library Center as a federation of just 54 Ohio colleges, while today it already brings together more than 70,000 libraries in more than 170 countries. As of May 2019, the collection comprised more than 450 million bibliographical records and nearly 2.8 billion library holdings. The OCLC thus catalogues a good part of the wealth of wisdom of humanity, published in 484 languages. Currently the share of documents published in the English language reaches 39%.⁶⁴ It is by far the largest library network in the world and it offers unique opportunities for research in all disciplines, including Shoah-related studies. Its full version, OCLC First Search, today is an indispensable tool for academic research, analysis, and academic strategy planning.⁶⁵

OCLC Classify is an open-access platform which ranks the data from more than 450 million bibliographical records, and nearly 2.8 billion library holdings in 484 languages, in 70,000 libraries across the globe according to their global library presence.⁶⁶

It must be emphasized at the outset that the geography of the global distribution of library holdings around the world reveals startling details about an enormous concentration of the limited access of global citizens to relevant scientific information. As a preliminary rule of thumb, one can start from the assumption, well tested with global access data to the leading journals of social science, that around 75% of the global library holdings of these journals are concentrated in the countries of the developed West.⁶⁷ Our article largely corroborates these findings.

Turning to the realities of the Middle East, one arrives quickly at the conclusion that it is a good guess to state that only the following libraries in the Arab world contain a larger amount of Western social science literature in general:

• Egypt: Misr International University, MIU, Cairo; MSA Modern Science and Arts University, Cairo; American University, Cairo
• Iraq: American University of Iraq, Sulaimani
• Jordan: Al Hussein Bin Talal University, Ma’an; Mutah University, Karak; Philadelphia University (Jordan); Jerash Private University; Amman Central Bank of Jordan, Amman; Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman; University of Jordan, Amman; Hashemite University; Zarqa al-Bayt University, Mafraq
• Lebanon: Notre Dame University-Louaizé, Zouk Mosbeh; Lebanese American University Libraries, Beirut; University of Balamand, Amioun; American Education Institute UCM, Beirut
• Morocco: Fondation du Roi Abdul-Aziz, Casablanca; King Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences, Casablanca; Akhawayn University Library, Ifrane; Ecole d’Gouvernance et D’Economie, Rabat
• Qatar: Qatar University, Doha
• Saudi-Arabia: National Center for Financial and Economic Information, Riyadh; King Fahad National Library, Riyadh
• United Arab Emirates: Abu Dhabi University, Adu Library, Abu Dhabi; Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi; United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain; British University in Dubai, BUiD Library; American University of Sharjah

We can estimate from the OCLC data that of the more than 300 million books currently held in global libraries, more than 120 million books were published in English, 43 million in German, and around 31 million in French. Of the 20.8 million books published over the last five years, 45% were published in English, and in the field of political science, for example, this share was even 55%.⁶⁸

Our article attempts to provide some initial basic ideas about the global presence of titles related to the Shoah in the framework of these highly concentrated global-library means of knowledge distribution, and it does so with the help of OCLC tools, such as OCLC First Search, but also the open-access portals OCLC Classify,⁶⁹ OCLC advanced search,⁷⁰ and TE PUNA (the New Zealand Library catalogue) on OCLC,⁷¹ which freely offers great opportunities for the global research community.

The basic idea of the OCLC project, which was founded by Frederick Kilgour (1914 – 2006) 45 years ago, was to unify the knowledge of humanity available in all the libraries of the world.⁷² Today the catalogue ranges from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, Alaska, to the Universidad de Concepción in southern Chile, and from Tromsö University in northern Norway to the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is now expanding into the Asia-Pacific region as well as into the Middle East; in addition, Worldcat now integrates major libraries in the BRIICS countries. It will be difficult to find a university library from one of the top 100 universities in the world, classified under the Shanghai University Ranking⁷³ System, or the Scimago-SIR University and Research Institute ranking⁷⁴ based on Scopus-indexed publications,⁷⁵ which is not a member of the OCLC Worldcat. Virtually all major libraries in Western Europe are also members of the OCLC Worldcat today, for example, 428 in Germany, 1,212 in France, and 261 in Italy. Membership in the Middle Eastern region is strongly expanding.⁷⁶ Currently there are twenty member libraries in Israel, seven in Egypt, six in Qatar, and so on. With 40 million daily accesses worldwide, OCLC is a real radar screen of the wealth of global library holdings. One of the startling advantages of the system is that it also offers its users not only to rank scientific titles with a given title word or author name by the global library impact this title word or author has achieved, but it also allows users to search for a given location around the globe where this item is being held, and it tells users even the geographical distance to the next library where this item is to be found.

Combining OCLC Worldcat analysis with Scopus-based scientific journal rankings

Even on a smartphone, and even with the open-access version contained in the New Zealand TE PUNA on Worldcat, the OCLC Worldcat users might also find out, for example, the listing of the global libraries that are subscribed to the world’s leading journal in the field of Shoah-related studies, namely, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press)⁷⁷ (see Image 2). Thus OCLC Worldcat allows researchers, as already noted, to analyze the geography of global library holdings. A researcher enters the title in whose global presence he or she is interested, and enters the country under scrutiny. The system tells the researcher whether or not the title is available in a given country, and also lists the availability of the title in the geographical vicinity. Concerning scholarly journals, we suggest combining this methodology with the freely available journal-ranking system Scimago (based on citations in other scientific journals)⁷⁸ or MIAR (based on a journal’s inclusion in global scientific indices and abstract services).⁷⁹ The entire range of the methodology of this exercise is shown in Image 2.

Image 2: The impact factor (H-Index) and the global library presence of Holocaust and Genocide Studies according to Scimago journal rankings and the OCLC Worldcat

So, in a nutshell, OCLC Worldcat and OCLC Classify could answer the query about which of the most widely circulated Shoah-related publications are not only available at Harvard and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge, but, say, at the Nehru University in Delhi, and at the University in Sao Paulo. And in Morocco and Jordan, in Ghana, in Mongolia and in China? In Sydney and in Singapore? Malaysia or Botswana? And all this is made visible today with a single mouse click on one’s computer or with the touch of one’s thumb on a tablet or smartphone!

Analyzing the geography of global library holdings

OCLC Worldcat also tells us, for example, that in the geographical vicinity of 100 km (62 miles) from New York City, there are 42 libraries holding the present journal – the Jewish Political Studies Review⁸⁰ – while library users would have to travel more than 1,000 km (621 miles) from Moscow to the National Library of Poland to get a copy of the JPSR (if they do not read it on the internet)⁸¹ and there are only five copies of the JPSR registered in the libraries of Latin America. Also, notably, the OCLC Worldcat tells its users that there is an equal number of subscribers to the present journal in the predominantly Muslim country of Malaysia as in the whole of Latin America – five libraries. The potentialities of this research methodology are practically unlimited, and the author hopes researchers will take up the opportunity to work on the “cartography” of the global library holding structure of Shoah–related books and journals.

For this essay, we especially designed a methodology which allows us to inform readers quickly and in general terms about the geographical distribution of OCLC Worldcat library holdings at a single glance, working with the concept of libraries in the vicinity of major geographical centers of the developed, industrial Western world, Southern Africa,⁸² and the centers of new industrialization in East Asia

• United States and Canada: libraries in the vicinity of < 3,800 km (2,361 miles) from Winnipeg, Canada, in the geographical center of English-speaking North America. With this specification, only libraries in the United States and Canada are included.
• European Union: libraries in the vicinity of < 1,750 km (1,087 miles) from Brussels, Belgium. With this specification, only libraries in the European Union are included.
• Australia: libraries in the vicinity of < 3,800 km (2,361 miles) from Perth, Australia. With this specification, only libraries in Australia are included.
• New Zealand: libraries in the vicinity of < 800 km (497 miles) from Wellington, New Zealand. With this specification, only libraries in New Zealand are included
• Southern Africa: libraries in the vicinity of < 4000 km (2,485 miles) from Cape Town, South Africa. This specification included all the Worldcat libraries from Cape Town to Nairobi.⁸³
• East Asia: libraries in the vicinity of < 3000 km (1,864 miles) from Hong Kong, China. This specification includes the economically important region of East Asia.

Even at the risk of some minor overlapping, we can also easily discover the number of holdings in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia:

• Latin America and the Caribbean: libraries in the vicinity of < 5,700 (3,542 miles) km from Campo Grande, Brazil, in the geographical center of Latin America and the Caribbean. Such a specification excludes libraries in Florida and California.
• Sub-Saharan Africa: libraries in the vicinity of < 3600 km (2,237 miles) from Yaunde, Cameroon, in the geographical center of Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Asia: libraries in the vicinity of < 3700 km (2,299 miles) from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in the geographical center of East Asia.

The special analysis of the libraries in the Middle East and in the Vatican

Our methodology and the data now at the readers’ disposal also permit an in-depth analysis of the library holdings in nations and institutions where there is often a notorious lack of Shoah knowledge and awareness, i.e., in the Middle East and in the different worlds of Catholicism, headed in the hierarchical system of the global Catholic Church by the Vatican. To this end, we performed the following:

• Analyses of the Shoah-relevant library holdings in the Arab countries, based on the OCLC Worldcat and on the available Arab Union catalogues. To find out the presence of Shoah–related titles in Arab OCLC Worldcat member libraries, we entered the names of the member states of the Arab League into the OCLC Worldcat search profile, country-wise.

• Analyses of the Shoah-relevant library holdings in the main Vatican library,⁸⁴ used by the pontiff and the entire Vatican administration, as well as the library holdings of the Pontifical Universities in Rome (see above).

For that purpose, we drew up a list of the library catalogues of the Pontifical Universities, contained in Appendix Table 2 (see above).

Webometrics

Another methodology, used in this essay to confront the realities of Shoah knowledge and awareness in the 21st century, is webometrics. Google Scholar already mentions 13,000 items using the term webometrics, which is generally understood to be a method to make statements about opinions and trends based on user statistics from the internet. With internet density reaching global record levels, such a methodology is thus more than justified.⁸⁵ In all this, we must regard Wikipedia download statistics as a first and very reliable seismograph of global social network trends. Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopedia founded on January 15, 2001, has become a huge international factor and today also includes articles on virtually all key issues of history and politics. The online encyclopedia was, according to its own data, the fifth most frequently visited website on earth. Its 49.3 million articles in almost 300 languages are therefore also a treasure trove for the research on Judaism, Israel, the memory of the victims of the Shoah, and global anti-Semitism.

With the easy-to-use on-demand download statistics program available from Wikipedia, social trends in the world can be clearly and quickly analyzed. The methodology reveals the global impact of any issue or personality one can imagine according to the language of the article of interest.

Washington’s PEW Research Center estimated that the English-language version of the encyclopedia was already receiving annually 97.2 billion queries worldwide, followed by 15 billion in Japanese, 14.3 billion in Spanish, 13 billion in German, 12.0 billion in Russian, 9.2 billion in French, 6.4 billion in Italian, 4.9 billion in Chinese, 4.1 billion in Portuguese, and 3.5 billion in Polish per year. Another way to estimate the global distribution of downloads from Wikipedia is to ask the system for the download figures of the culturally most neutral article in this context, the Wikipedia article on the encyclopedia Wikipedia itself.

Table 4: Estimating the real size of the global Wikipedia readerships in the different languages of the world, based on a culturally neutral subject – the readership of the Wikipedia article on the encyclopedia Wikipedia

English-language name	Language code	Number of downloads of Wikipedia article on the encyclopedia Wikipedia, last 20 days of June 2019	Daily average	% of global downloads
English	en	1,518,715	72320	65.3030
Japanese	ja	110,473	5261	4.7502
Russian	ru	84,254	4012	3.6228
German	de	73,366	3494	3.1547
Spanish	es	67,857	3231	2.9178
Korean	ko	45,407	2162	1.9525
Chinese	zh	40,863	1946	1.7571
French	fr	31,524	1501	1.3555
Italian	it	28,181	1342	1.2118
Polish	pl	25,106	1196	1.0795
Vietnamese	vi	22,848	1088	0.9824
Portuguese	pt	15,359	731	0.6604
Turkish	tr	13,695	652	0.5889
Arabic	ar	11,820	563	0.5082
Persian	fa	11,739	559	0.5048
Dutch	nl	11,401	543	0.4902
Czech	cs	8,940	426	0.3844
Swedish	sv	7,466	356	0.3210
Hindi	hi	6,577	313	0.2828
Indonesian	id	6,257	298	0.2690
Hebrew	he	5,434	259	0.2337
Norwegian	no	5,403	257	0.2323
Simple English	simple	5,400	257	0.2322
Bengali	bn	4,903	233	0.2108
Hungarian	hu	3,669	175	0.1578
Thai	th	3,244	154	0.1395
Finnish	fi	3,214	153	0.1382
Tagalog	tl	3,211	153	0.1381
Serbian	sr	2,327	111	0.1001
Georgian	ka	2,238	107	0.0962
Ukrainian	uk	2,220	106	0.0955
Danish	da	2,195	105	0.0944
Greek	el	1,906	91	0.0820
Bulgarian	bg	1,813	86	0.0780
Uzbek	uz	1,782	85	0.0766
Slovenian	sl	1,761	84	0.0757
Romanian	ro	1,754	84	0.0754
Croatian	hr	1,653	79	0.0711
Catalan	ca	1,590	76	0.0684
Azerbaijani	az	1,512	72	0.0650
Lithuanian	lt	1,406	67	0.0605
Slovak	sk	1,354	64	0.0582
Basque	eu	1,254	60	0.0539
Swahili	sw	1,185	56	0.0510
Malayalam	ml	1,174	56	0.0505
Estonian	et	1,102	52	0.0474
Afrikaans	af	1,043	50	0.0448
Tamil	ta	1,026	49	0.0441
Bosnian	bs	994	47	0.0427
Minnan	zh-min-nan	926	44	0.0398
Egyptian Arabic	arz	906	43	0.0390
Latvian	lv	871	41	0.0375
Serbo-Croatian	sh	852	41	0.0366
Cantonese	zh-yue	764	36	0.0329
Buriat (Russia)	bxr	711	34	0.0306
Jamaican Patois	jam	692	33	0.0298
Irish	ga	684	33	0.0294
Aragonese	an	678	32	0.0292
Kannada	kn	673	32	0.0289
Marathi	mr	673	32	0.0289
Malay	ms	663	32	0.0285
Somalia	so	654	31	0.0281
Urdu	ur	632	30	0.0272
Belarusian	be	628	30	0.0270
Kazakh	kk	626	30	0.0269
Albanian	sq	620	30	0.0267
Southern Azerbaijani	azb	616	29	0.0265
Burmese	my	608	29	0.0261
Bashkir	ba	605	29	0.0260
Esperanto	eo	601	29	0.0258
Icelandic	is	590	28	0.0254
Carpatho-Russinic	rue	586	28	0.0252
Cornish	kw	585	28	0.0252
Amharic	am	583	28	0.0251
Armenian	hy	577	27	0.0248
Manx	gv	572	27	0.0246
Alemannic	als	548	26	0.0236
Lesgish	lez	548	26	0.0236
Aramaic	arc	546	26	0.0235
Chuvash	cv	537	26	0.0231
Mongolian	mn	530	25	0.0228
Galician	gl	519	25	0.0223
Breton	br	517	25	0.0222
Asturian	ast	514	24	0.0221
Ladino/Judeo-Español	lad	511	24	0.0220
Panjabi / Punjabi	pa	509	24	0.0219
Occitan	oc	508	24	0.0218
Scots	sco	505	24	0.0217
Luxembourgish	lb	504	24	0.0217
Latin	la	494	24	0.0212
Quechua	qu	492	23	0.0212
Mari	mhr	491	23	0.0211
Angal	ang	490	23	0.0211
Kabiye	kbp	488	23	0.0210
Waray / Samar-Leyte Visayan	war	487	23	0.0209
Yiddish	yi	479	23	0.0206
Scottish Gaelic	gd	478	23	0.0206
Kapampangan	pam	476	23	0.0205
Faroese	fo	474	23	0.0204
Ilokano	ilo	472	22	0.0203
Romani	rmy	470	22	0.0202
Ido	io	468	22	0.0201
Maltese	mt	467	22	0.0201
Novial	nov	467	22	0.0201
Bavarian	bar	466	22	0.0200
Sardinian	sc	462	22	0.0199
Megrelian	xmf	449	21	0.0193
Tatar	tt	447	21	0.0192
West Frisian	fy	446	21	0.0192
Interlingua	ia	435	21	0.0187
Kurdish	ku	434	21	0.0187
Macedonian	mk	432	21	0.0186
Newar	new	430	20	0.0185
Kirghiz	ky	425	20	0.0183
Sater Frisian	stq	424	20	0.0182
Raeto Romance	rm	421	20	0.0181
Chabacano	cbk	420	20	0.0181
Belarusian (Taraškievica)	be-tarask	419	20	0.0180
Samogitian	bat-smg	416	20	0.0179
Dimli	diq	416	20	0.0179
Shona	sn	413	20	0.0178
Low German / Low Saxon	nds	411	20	0.0177
Upper Sorbian	hsb	409	19	0.0176
Võro	fiu-vro	404	19	0.0174
Punjabi	pnb	404	19	0.0174
Norwegian Nynorsk	nn	399	19	0.0172
Wu	wuu	387	18	0.0166
Jakutian	sah	383	18	0.0165
Welsh	cy	378	18	0.0163
Sicilian	scn	378	18	0.0163
Mirandese	mwl	366	17	0.0157
Mazanderani	mzn	364	17	0.0157
Javanese	jv	347	17	0.0149
Piedmontese	pms	337	16	0.0145

How can we then estimate whether or not a given language community on Wikipedia has a high or a low relative tendency to seek information on the Shoah, contained in the encyclopedia?

Image 3 provides a clue to the simple statistical regression methodology, used to compare the assumed relative size of the different language communities on Wikipedia (data from PEW or alternatively, Table 4) and the language distribution of the download statistics for the main Shoah article.

Image 3: The relative size of the Wikipedia language community (x-axis, based on the annual PEW download data) and the share of the language community in the downloads of the main Wikipedia Shoah article in the last 20 days

Such comparisons of the Shoah article download figures are also made vis-à-vis the download statistics of the respective Wikipedia article on Israel. In each case, the answers to these comparisons are relatively simple: considering the size of the language community, or considering the revealed interest in information about the state of Israel, is there a relatively high or a relatively low tendency to acquire Shoah knowledge and awareness?

The multivariate analysis of our data

We also investigated the blockades against Shoah knowledge and awareness, emerging from our national library holdings data by means of standard cross-country social science analysis. Are the data, documented in our flagship statistical table (Table 6) and choropleth map of the worldwide national library holdings of Shoah titles (Image 6), determined in any way by standard indicators of politics and economics of the nations of the earth?⁸⁶

Our investigations built on the data already used in an earlier contribution to this journal by the present author.⁸⁷ These national background data are fully and freely available in machine-readable format.⁸⁸ The national background data used in this essay were also amply discussed at length in the available literature.⁸⁹ The methodology uses standard statistical techniques, well established in cross-national data analysis: partial correlation and standard ordinary least square (OLS) multiple regression.⁹⁰ The statistical software used was the IBM SPSS Version 24, made available to the author by Innsbruck University, Austria.⁹¹

Results

We will now proceed to our results.

Results based on nationwide union catalogues of libraries

Table 5 summarizes the enormous differences in the numbers of titles on the Shoah in the national union catalogues around the world. Image 4 projects our results onto a world map. For reasons of visibility and clarity of the choropleth map, we ranked the data of Table 5 with the statistical program EXCEL. The United Kingdom is assigned rank 1, while Bulgaria, Egypt, India, and the Philippines are assigned rank 49 (countries with numerically identical results are assigned the same rank). The highest numerical value in our summarizing choropleth map is 49, and it means a high lack of Shoah awareness in the countrywide library system.

The global North-South and North-East divide in Shoah awareness, evident from our statistics, and to be seen at one glance in Image 4, is simply overwhelming.

Among the countries holding less than 100 titles in their combined entire countrywide library system, we find countries where considerable numbers of Jews were sent to the Nazi German death camps: Hungary, Finland, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. In Croatia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, this number is even 10 or below. Equally distressing is the low interest in the Shoah in the Vatican, which holds only 11 items with the word Shoah in its library (see below), but to this day has Alfred Rosenberg’s edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its stacks (see also our special section on this, below).⁹² With 235 items, Turkey is the majority-Muslim country with the largest library holdings on the subject.

Table 5: Items in the nationwide library union catalogues of the world with the word Shoah (Latin alphabet) in the title

Library catalogue	Number of items with the title word or keyword Shoah
United Kingdom	52,283
Canada	4,648
Luxembourg	4,613
Germany – North Rhine-Westphalia	3,734
Germany – Berlin State	2,633
Czech Republic	2,462
Germany – Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern	2,142
Italy	2,016
Germany – Bavaria	1,931
Israel	1,430
Switzerland	1,336
Austria	1,121
Germany – Hesse	1,113
Germany – Baden-Württemberg	1,008
France	819
European Commission Libraries	676
Australia	673
Belgium	457
Denmark	256
Sweden	238
Turkey	235
New Zealand	203
Japan	202
China	131
Poland	131
Hungary	98
Finland	73
Slovenia	59
Korea (South)	38
Serbia	24
Brazil	15
Iceland	11
Portugal	11
Vatican	11
Croatia	9
Algeria	8
Jordan	8
Latvia	8
Estonia	6
Tunisia	6
Lithuania	4
Bosnia and Herzegovina	3
Northern Macedonia	3
Saudi Arabia plus 24 Arab countries – Aruc Arab Union Catalogue	3
Thailand	2
Albania	1
Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama)	1
Costa Rica	1
Malta	1
Montenegro	1
Bulgaria	0
Egypt	0
India	0
Philippines	0

Image 4: The lack of Shoah awareness – data from the national union catalogues

Results based on the library catalogues of national libraries

Our findings from the holdings of national libraries reveal even more encompassing results. We should note here that several of the national libraries, ranking well in our Table 6, owe their strong position to the inclusion of electronic scientific databases like Ebsco Host⁹³ in their library system and also their catalogues. This is especially true for the enormous wealth of literature available to users of the national libraries of Luxembourg, Denmark, and Saudi Arabia. For adherents of a library culture, still based on the classical printed book, this trend may be disturbing, but in our electronic age there is no alternative to such an inclusion of electronic books in our result lists. At the end of the day, these electronic opportunities now partially available at libraries also imply cracks in the relative or even absolute walls of ignorance vis-à-vis the Shoah, otherwise existing in the library systems of such countries as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.⁹⁴

One of the most breathtaking aspects of Table 6 is the fact that users of the King Fahad National Library in Saudi Arabia, thanks to our electronic age, now have almost 110 times more titles available on the Shoah than the pontiff, the cardinals, the bishops, and the more than 2,800 bureaucrats working for the global administration of the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican⁹⁵ via their central library, the Vatican Library, and that the relatively still poor Caribbean country of Jamaica, with its world-class universities, offers in its national library 13 times as many titles on the Shoah as the Vatican Library! The National Library of Egypt, the Biblioteca Alexandrina, now already has eight times as many titles on the Shoah at its readers’ disposal as the Vatican.

Table 6: Items available in the national libraries of the countries of the world with the word Shoah (Latin alphabet) in the title

National library	Number of items with the word Shoah in the title
Luxembourg	4,613
Denmark	2,345
Israel	2,290
United States	1,493
Saudi Arabia	1,208
United Kingdom	1,094
Latvia	1,004
Austria	744
Germany	596
Poland	229
Jamaica	146
Italy	128
Egypt	84
Finland	83
France	77
Belgium	65
Switzerland	64
Netherlands	61
Monaco	55
Sweden	54
Canada	47
Australia	45
Romania	44
Czech Republic	33
Japan	28
Spain	21
Korea (South)	19
Slovak Republic	14
Hungary	13
Singapore	13
China	12
Russia	12
Slovenia	12
Iceland	11
Vatican	11
Serbia	9
Argentina	8
Portugal	8
Portugal	8
Liechtenstein	7
Moldova	7
Irish Republic	6
Ukraine	6
Belarus	5
Brazil	5
New Zealand	5
Lithuania	4
Turkey	4
Colombia	3
Norway	3
Taiwan – China	3
Chile	2
Croatia	2
Trinidad and Tobago	2
Albania	1
Bosnia and Herzegovina	1
Costa Rica	1
Cyprus	1
Ecuador	1
Greece	1
Iran	1
Malaysia	1
Panama	1
Azerbaijan	0
Bahamas	0
Bhutan	0
Cuba	0
India	0
Indonesia	0
Iraq	0
Kazakhstan	0
Kuwait	0
Maldives	0
Malta	0
Mexico	0
Namibia	0
Oman	0
Peru	0
Thailand	0
Uruguay	0
Venezuela	0

Image 5 reveals a small but highly politically relevant incident: brave librarians at the National Library of Iran in Tehran dared to catalogue a single work with the word Shoah in the title into the library system,⁹⁶ all the Holocaust denial by the mullahs’ regime notwithstanding.⁹⁷

Image 5: A single library holding of a book with “Shoah” in the title in the National Library of Iran

Image 6, using the same methodology as Image 5, described above, reveals again the dearth of materials on the Shoah available to the users of the national libraries in the global South and East. With the exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, one must really speak of walls of ignorance vis-à-vis the Shoah, even in countries which are solidly anchored in the economic and political system of the West or which aspire to be in the coming years, such as Serbia, Portugal, Liechtenstein, Moldova, Irish Republic, Ukraine, Brazil, New Zealand, Lithuania, Turkey, Norway, Croatia, Trinidad and Tobago, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Greece, and Malta where the national library in each case holds less than 10 titles on the Shoah.

Image 6: The lack of Shoah awareness – data from the national library catalogues

The fairly encompassing national library data will also be used in our multivariate analysis of the subject.

Results based on the library catalogues of legislative assembly libraries

Table 7 summarizes the availability of Shoah-related titles in the libraries of the legislative assemblies around the world. What scholars, students, and other library users do is always one thing, while what legislators and their staff read and what they do not read is another. In our list, three parliamentary libraries excel – the libraries of the European Parliament, the Canadian Parliamentary Library, and – of course – the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The European Parliamentary Library is extremely well equipped with all sorts of electronic resources and must be regarded as one of the most complete libraries for history and the social sciences in Europe.

Moving down our list, we find over 200 items in the Swedish parliamentary library and over 100 items in the two parliamentary libraries of Italy (we added their results together). Germany and Japan, the other former Axis powers, have less than 100 Shoah items in their parliamentary libraries, and in Austria, the country of birth of Adolf Hitler, Adolf Eichmann, Franz Stangl, Franz Novak, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Odilo Globocnik, Alois Brunner, and countless other Nazi murderers,⁹⁸ the parliamentary library lists only 50 items on the Shoah. This is in sharp contrast to the high Shoah knowledge and awareness reflected in the data on the other Austrian academic and other libraries, documented in Table 6 and Image 5. The results for the legislative assembly libraries in Spain, Brazil, Switzerland, Finland, and Australia are depressing, and at least suggest the hypothesis that in the political system of these countries, solidly integrated economically and politically with the rest of the West, the issues of the Shoah play only a secondary parliamentary role or practically no parliamentary role at all (Table 7).

Table 7: Availability of items on the Shoah in the legislative assembly libraries of the world

Country	Number of items with the word Shoah in the title
European Union	3,044
Canada	1,567
United States	1,492
Sweden	225
Italy	123
Germany	93
Austria	50
Japan	29
Spain	12
Brazil	5
Switzerland	2
Finland	1
Australia	0
Chile	0
Georgia	0
Mexico	0

Results based on the library catalogues of international organizations

Just as in the library systems considered before, there are huge differences in the number of Shoah–related titles in the libraries of international organizations. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in Santiago, well-known for its dedicated analytical work on Latin American and global social and economic problems,⁹⁹ outdoes all the UN-related libraries and the other libraries under consideration in Table 8. Its extremely well-organized connectedness to electronic databases of all sorts makes its library a truly global one. At the same time, the hierarchy of the library holdings about the Shoah among the different UN organizations is revealing and even astonishing, and indeed tells us something about the presence of a strong anti-Israeli lobby in several UN organizations and bodies, including UNESCO and the UN ESCWA in Beirut.¹⁰⁰ The Shoah-related holdings at the main UN library in Geneva are more inclusive than those at the center of the United Nations in New York. Our analysis also implies something about the lack of priorities set by the European Commission and the Council of Europe to uphold the memory of the six million victims of the Shoah: the UN ECA in Addis Ababa and the Asian Development Bank have more Shoah-related titles in their library than the main European Commission Library in Brussels. Even more disappointing are the results for the Council of Europe¹⁰¹ and NATO.

Table 8: Libraries of the international organizations – number of items with the word Shoah in the title

Library catalogue	number of items with the word „Shoah” in the title
UN ECLAC, Santiago	12,196
United Nations, Geneva	2,460
United Nations, New York	2,438
UN ECA, Addis Ababa	1,664
Asian Development Bank	1,502
European Union	676
International Labour Organization	202
World Bank and IMF	172
Council of Europe	16
UNESCO Digital Library	13
NATO	2
OSCE Academy Bishkek	0
UN ESCWA, Beirut	0
African Union	0

Results based on the OCLC Worldcat

We first show the ranking of the global library circulation of Shoah–related books. Of all the available global titles on the subject, we have chosen the three most widely circulated ones for our further analysis.¹⁰² Future research might produce more exhaustive lists, but the tendencies evident from these three most widely circulated volumes will certainly repeat themselves and already reveal a solid and constant negative pattern. Library knowledge and awareness about the Shoah is geographically highly concentrated in English-speaking North America, in Europe, and in the few other English-speaking academic cultures of Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Africa. Adding to this the libraries of the newly industrialized countries of East and Southeast Asia, you arrive at 98% to 99% of the global library holdings on the Shoah.

Image 7: Searching for global library presence of the most widely circulated Shoah books with the open-access version of OCLC Classify

The global geographical results for the three highest-ranked books and the most widely circulated peer-reviewed journal in the field, the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press, see methodology section, above), are the following:

Table 9: Results based on OCLC Worldcat – absolute numbers

Title	Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust	The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution	Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields	Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Author	by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah	by Friedlander, Henry	by Lower, Wendy,	Oxford University Press (journal)
Holdings	4,768	2,786	2,738	1,023
Vicinity of < 3,800 km from Winnipeg, CND	2,169	1,336	1,333	734
Vicinity of < 1,750 km from Brussels, Belgium	270	147	158	227
Vicinity of < 3,800 km from Perth, Australia	84	38	61	19
Vicinity of < 800 km from Wellington, NZ	22	7	33	4
Vicinity of < 4,000 km from Cape Town, South Africa	12	10	5	13
Vicinity of < 3,000 km from Hong Kong, China	12	2	5	9
Subtotal	2,569	1,540	1,595	1,006
Rest of the world	31	29	7	17
Total analyzed holdings	2,600	1,569	1,602	1,023

In relative terms, the global percentage distribution is the following:

Table 10: Results based on OCLC Worldcat – geographical percentage distribution of global holdings

Title	Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust	The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution	Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields	Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Author	by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah	by Friedlander, Henry	by Lower, Wendy	Oxford University Press (journal)
Vicinity of < 3,800 km from Winnipeg, CND	83.42	85.15	83.21	71.75
Vicinity of < 1,750 km from Brussels, Belgium	10.38	9.37	9.86	22.19
Vicinity of < 3,800 km from Perth, Australia	3.23	2.42	3.81	1.86
Vicinity of < 800 km from Wellington, NZ	0.85	0.45	2.06	0.39
Vicinity of < 4,000 km from Cape Town, South Africa	0.46	0.64	0.31	1.27
Vicinity of < 3,000 km from Hong Kong, China	0.46	0.13	0.31	0.88
Subtotal	98.81	98.15	99.56	98.34
Rest of the world	1.19	1.85	0.44	1.66
Total analyzed holdings	100.00	100.00	100.00	100.00

Almost like in a mirror, we now look at the other side of these lamentable realities; the dearth of library holdings on the Shoah in the global South and East is again documented in the following table:

Table 11: Results based on OCLC Worldcat – holdings in Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Title	Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust	The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution	Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields	Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Author	by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah	by Friedlander, Henry	by Lower, Wendy	Oxford University Press (journal)
Vicinity of < 5,700 km from Campo Grande, Brazil	10	4	0	3
Vicinity of < 3,600 km from Yaoundé, Cameroon	2	4	1	3
Vicinity of < 3,700 km from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia	2	0	2	2

Results based on Wikipedia statistics about downloads of the main Wikipedia Shoah article in 136 languages

In the following, we will analyze whether or not at least download figures from the freely available internet encyclopedia Wikipedia in the different languages of the world suggest a countervailing trend. One can argue in principle that modern academic publishing produces very expensive products, and that these products – like the ones analyzed in the preceding chapters – are beyond the reach of poorer countries. And yet this argument partially neglects the fact that many titles are now open-access publications, or are at least available via lower-cost subscriptions for libraries in the developing world, especially in special document packages. The company Ebsco Host is at the forefront of such efforts to overcome the digital divide.¹⁰³

Apart from the more than 9,000 global daily downloads of the English-language Wikipedia article on the Shoah, there are now more than 1,000 daily downloads in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, French, Russian, and Italian. And at least the Spanish, Portuguese, and French languages, just like English, are being spoken widely in the developing world. In addition, the more than 100 daily downloads in Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Indonesian, Korean, and Vietnamese have a high relevance for strategies to think about the diffusion of Shoah knowledge and awareness in the developing countries.

Table 12: Downloads of the main Shoah article on Wikipedia in the different languages of the world

Language code	Name of the language in English	Title of the Wikipedia article on the Shoah	20 days of downloads, last 20 days of June 2019	Daily average	% of global Shoah- article downloads
en	English	The Holocaust	194,534	9,264	36.5763
es	Spanish	Holocausto	58,987	2,809	11.0907
pt	Portuguese	Holocausto	41,463	1,974	7.7959
de	German	Holocaust	40,668	1,937	7.6464
ja	Japanese	ホロコースト	24,774	1,180	4.6580
fr	French	Shoah	24,060	1,146	4.5238
ru	Russian	Холокост	22,689	1,080	4.2660
it	Italian	Olocausto	22,661	1,079	4.2607
zh	Chinese	猶太人大屠殺	8,927	425	1.6785
nl	Dutch	Holocaust	8,870	422	1.6677
fa	Persian	هولوکاست	8,703	414	1.6363
ar	Arabic	الهولوكوست	7,189	342	1.3517
pl	Polish	Zagłada Żydów	7,175	342	1.3490
id	Indonesian	Holokaus	6,079	289	1.1430
ro	Romanian	Holocaust	5,670	270	1.0661
he	Hebrew	השואה	5,065	241	0.9523
fi	Finnish	Holokausti	3,429	163	0.6447
cs	Czech	Holokaust	3,030	144	0.5697
ko	Korean	홀로코스트	2,687	128	0.5052
el	Greek	Ολοκαύτωμα	2,660	127	0.5001
hu	Hungarian	Holokauszt	2,623	125	0.4932
uk	Ukrainian	Голокост	2,270	108	0.4268
vi	Vietnamese	Holocaust	2,164	103	0.4069
sv	Swedish	Förintelsen	2,095	100	0.3939
bg	Bulgarian	Холокост	1,988	95	0.3738
no	Norwegian	Holocaust	1,902	91	0.3576
sk	Slovak	Holokaust	1,458	69	0.2741
th	Thai	ฮอโลคอสต์	1,438	68	0.2704
sr	Serbian	Холокауст	1,330	63	0.2501
tr	Turkish	Holokost	1,253	60	0.2356
ca	Catalan	Holocaust	1,181	56	0.2221
da	Danish	Holocaust	1,156	55	0.2174
hr	Croatian	Holokaust	1,120	53	0.2106
simple	Simple English	The Holocaust	983	47	0.1848
hi	Hindi	यहूदी नरसंहार	797	38	0.1499
ka	Georgian	ჰოლოკოსტი	766	36	0.1440
lt	Lithuanian	Holokaustas	740	35	0.1391
ta	Tamil	பெரும் இன அழிப்பு	597	28	0.1122
sq	Albanian	Holokausti	455	22	0.0855
bn	Bengali	ইহুদি গণহত্যা	363	17	0.0683
lv	Latvian	Holokausts	348	17	0.0654
sl	Slovenian	Holokavst	306	15	0.0575
tl	Tagalog	Holocaust	292	14	0.0549
et	Estonian	Holokaust	272	13	0.0511
hy	Armenian	Հոլոքոստ	259	12	0.0487
sh	Serbo-Croatian	Holokaust	247	12	0.0464
mk	Macedonian	Холокауст	220	10	0.0414
ur	Urdu	مرگ انبوہ	192	9	0.0361
az	Azerbaijani	Holokost	165	8	0.0310
ms	Malay	Holokus	151	7	0.0284
af	Afrikaans	Holocaust	141	7	0.0265
arz	Egyptian Arabic	هولوكوست	131	6	0.0246
ml	Malayalam	ഹോളോകോസ്റ്റ്	111	5	0.0209
sw	Swahili	Maangamizi makuu dhidi ya Wayahudi wa Ulaya	107	5	0.0201
zh-yue	Cantonese	猶太人大屠殺	92	4	0.0173
uz	Uzbek	Holokost	85	4	0.0160
gl	Galician	Holocausto	77	4	0.0145
eo	Esperanto	Holokaŭsto	72	3	0.0135
mr	Marathi	होलोकॉस्ट	71	3	0.0133
mn	Mongolian	Холокост	67	3	0.0126
azb	Southern Azerbaijani	هولوکاست	65	3	0.0122
bs	Bosnian	Holokaust	65	3	0.0122
eu	Basque	Holokaustoa	65	3	0.0122
my	Burmese	ဂျူး သုတ်သင်ရေး စီမံကိန်း	62	3	0.0117
is	Icelandic	Helförin	59	3	0.0111
yi	Yiddish	חורבן אייראפע	56	3	0.0105
kk	Kazakh	Холокост	53	3	0.0100
be	Belarusian	Халакост	51	2	0.0096
nn	Norwegian Nynorsk	Holocaust	47	2	0.0088
cbk	Chabacano	ھۆلۆکۆست	46	2	0.0086
ba	Bashkir	Холокост	45	2	0.0085
als	Alemannic	Völkermord an den europäischen Juden	43	2	0.0081
fiu-vro	Võro	Holokaust	40	2	0.0075
ang	Angal	Eallbærnet	39	2	0.0073
bar	Bavarian	Holocaust	39	2	0.0073
pam	Kapampangan	Holocaust	39	2	0.0073
rm	Raeto-Romance	Holocaust	39	2	0.0073
rw	Rwandi	Itsembabwoko ry’Abayahudi	39	2	0.0073
mzn	Mazanderani	هولوکاست	36	2	0.0068
ga	Irish	Uileloscadh	34	2	0.0064
xmf	Megrelian	ჰოლოკოსტი	34	2	0.0064
arc	Aramaic	ܩܛܠܥܡܐ ܝܗܘܕܝܐ	33	2	0.0062
sco	Scots	Holocaust	33	2	0.0062
an	Aragonese	Holocausto	32	2	0.0060
kn	Kannada	ಹೋಲೋಕಾಸ್ಟ್	32	2	0.0060
nds	Low German / Low Saxon	Schoah	32	2	0.0060
bxr	Buriat (Russia)	Холокост	31	1	0.0058
mhr	Mari	Холокост	31	1	0.0058
oc	Occitan	Olocaust	31	1	0.0058
pnb	Punjabi	ہولو کاسٹ	31	1	0.0058
rmy	Romani	Holokausto	31	1	0.0058
cy	Welsh	Yr Holocost	30	1	0.0056
ky	Kirghiz	Холокост	30	1	0.0056
la	Latin	Soa	30	1	0.0056
rue	Carpatho-Russinic	Голокауст	30	1	0.0056
sah	Yakutian	Холокост	30	1	0.0056
hif	Fidshi-Hindi	The Holocaust	29	1	0.0055
lad	Ladino / Judeo-Español	Olokósto	29	1	0.0055
mt	Maltese	L-Olokawst	29	1	0.0055
nov	Novial	Li Holokauste	29	1	0.0055
scn	Sicilian	Olucaustu	29	1	0.0055
cv	Chuvash	Холокост	28	1	0.0053
new	Newar	होलोकस्ट	28	1	0.0053
wuu	Wu	犹太人大屠杀	28	1	0.0053
am	Amharic	ሆሎኮስት	27	1	0.0051
ast	Asturian	Holocaustu	27	1	0.0051
hsb	Upper Sorbian	Holocaust	27	1	0.0051
lb	Luxembourgish	Holocaust	27	1	0.0051
pa	Panjabi / Punjabi	ਯਹੂਦੀ ਘੱਲੂਘਾਰਾ	27	1	0.0051
pms	Piedmontese	Olocàust	27	1	0.0051
sc	Sardinian	Olocàustu	27	1	0.0051
fo	Faroese	Holocaust	26	1	0.0049
gd	Scottish Gaelic	Uile-losgadh	26	1	0.0049
kw	Cornish	Loskaberth	26	1	0.0049
so	Somalia	Holokost	26	1	0.0049
mwl	Mirandese	Houlocausto	25	1	0.0047
diq	Dimli	Holokost	24	1	0.0045
fy	West Frisian	Holokaust	24	1	0.0045
ku	Kurdish	Holokost	24	1	0.0045
lez	Lesgish	Холокост	24	1	0.0045
stq	Sater Frisian	Holocaust	24	1	0.0045
zh-min-nan	Minnan	Holocaust	24	1	0.0045
br	Breton	Loskaberzh	23	1	0.0043
jv	Javanese	Holocaust	23	1	0.0043
sn	Shona	Rushigido	23	1	0.0043
tt	Tatar	Holokost	23	1	0.0043
war	Waray / Samar-Leyte Visayan	An Holokausto	23	1	0.0043
bat-smg	Samogitian	Huoluokausts	22	1	0.0041
ilo	Ilokano	Holokausto	22	1	0.0041
jam	Jamaican Patois	Di Olokaas	22	1	0.0041
ia	Interlingua	Holocausto	21	1	0.0039
io	Ido	Holokausto	21	1	0.0039
qu	Quechua	Ulukawstu	21	1	0.0039
kbp	Kabiye	Soowa (Shoah)	20	1	0.0038
gv	Manx	Yn Deherree	18	1	0.0034
be-tarask	Belarusian (Taraškievica)	Галакост	17	1	0.0032

Table 13 now applies our methodology to compare the percentage shares of the general global annual Wikipedia pageviews (PEW data, see methodology section) by a specific language group and the percentages of a given language group of the global Shoah article downloads. Compared to the presumed size of the Wikipedia user community, the Portuguese, Spanish, German, Italian, Persian, and French speaking Wikipedia users had a higher tendency to download the main Shoah Wikipedia article. Results for the Wikipedia downloads in Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Swedish, Polish, Korean, Ukrainian, Czech, Finnish, English, Indonesian, Arabic, and Dutch (in descending order) were below the trend.

Table 13: Percentage of general global annual Wikipedia pageviews and percentage of global Shoah article downloads over the last 20 days among the major global Wikipedia communities

Language	% of global Wikipedia pageviews in 2015	% of global Shoah article downloads – last 20 days	Trend – in %	Residual – in %
Portuguese	2.13	8.44	2.79	5.65
Spanish	7.44	12.00	6.89	5.11
German	6.77	8.27	6.36	1.91
Italian	3.33	4.61	3.71	0.90
Persian	0.47	1.77	1.50	0.27
French	4.79	4.89	4.84	0.06
Dutch	1.04	1.80	1.94	-0.14
Arabic	0.83	1.46	1.78	-0.32
Indonesian	0.83	1.24	1.78	-0.55
English	50.60	39.58	40.20	-0.62
Finnish	0.42	0.70	1.46	-0.76
Czech	0.42	0.62	1.46	-0.85
Ukrainian	0.36	0.46	1.42	-0.96
Korean	0.57	0.55	1.58	-1.04
Polish	1.82	1.46	2.55	-1.09
Swedish	0.62	0.43	1.62	-1.20
Chinese	2.55	1.82	3.11	-1.29
Russian	6.25	4.62	5.96	-1.35
Turkish	0.94	0.25	1.86	-1.61
Japanese	7.81	5.04	7.17	-2.13

Table 14 is based on the same methodology as Table 13, but estimates the size of the Wikipedia language community by the downloads of the Wikipedia article on the encyclopedia itself. Here results for the Shoah articles in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Persian, Arabic, Indonesian, Hebrew, Polish, Chinese, and Czech are encouraging and above the trend, while the results for the articles in English, Korean, Vietnamese, Turkish, Bengali, Hindi, Simple English, Swedish, and Norwegian are below the trend.

Table 14: Percentage of general global annual Wikipedia pageviews and percentage of global Shoah article downloads over the last 20 days among different global Wikipedia communities, estimated by the number of Wikipedia article downloads on Wikipedia itself

	Wikipedia average	% of global Wiki traffic	Trend	Residual	Residual in % of the Wiki download share	Shoah downloads – daily average	% of global Shoah downloads
Portuguese	731	0.66	0.71	7.09	1,072.90	1,974	7.80
Romanian	84	0.08	0.38	0.69	915.14	270	1.07
Spanish	3,231	2.92	2.00	9.09	311.55	2,809	11.09
Italian	1,342	1.21	1.03	3.24	267.00	1,079	4.26
French	1,501	1.36	1.11	3.42	252.03	1,146	4.52
Indonesian	298	0.27	0.49	0.66	243.99	289	1.14
Dutch	543	0.49	0.61	1.05	215.16	422	1.67
Hebrew	259	0.23	0.47	0.49	208.00	241	0.95
Persian	559	0.50	0.62	1.02	201.10	414	1.64
German	3,494	3.15	2.14	5.51	174.68	1,937	7.65
Finnish	153	0.14	0.41	0.23	168.57	163	0.64
Greek	91	0.08	0.38	0.12	147.05	127	0.50
Arabic	563	0.51	0.62	0.73	143.32	342	1.35
Russian	4,012	3.62	2.40	1.86	51.41	1,080	4.27
Hungarian	175	0.16	0.42	0.07	44.52	125	0.49
Ukrainian	106	0.10	0.39	0.04	41.35	108	0.43
Polish	1,196	1.08	0.95	0.40	36.99	342	1.35
Japanese	5,261	4.75	3.05	1.61	33.90	1,180	4.66
Chinese	1,946	1.76	1.34	0.34	19.43	425	1.68
Czech	426	0.38	0.55	0.02	4.48	144	0.57
English	72,320	65.30	37.66	-1.08	-1.65	9,264	36.58
Bulgarian	86	0.08	0.38	0.00	-4.55	95	0.37
Swedish	356	0.32	0.52	-0.12	-38.11	100	0.39
Norwegian	257	0.23	0.47	-0.11	-46.46	91	0.36
Korean	2,162	1.95	1.45	-0.94	-48.32	128	0.51
Vietnamese	1,088	0.98	0.89	-0.49	-49.61	103	0.41
Turkish	652	0.59	0.67	-0.43	-73.66	60	0.24
Thai	154	0.14	0.41	-0.14	-101.89	68	0.27
Simple English	257	0.23	0.47	-0.28	-120.87	47	0.18
Hindi	313	0.28	0.49	-0.34	-121.84	38	0.15
Serbian	111	0.10	0.39	-0.14	-139.81	63	0.25
Slovak	64	0.06	0.37	-0.09	-157.87	69	0.27
Danish	105	0.09	0.39	-0.17	-179.45	55	0.22
Bengali	233	0.21	0.45	-0.39	-182.62	17	0.07
Catalan	76	0.07	0.37	-0.15	-219.10	56	0.22
Croatian	79	0.07	0.37	-0.16	-229.07	53	0.21
Georgian	107	0.10	0.39	-0.24	-253.30	36	0.14
Tagalog	153	0.14	0.41	-0.36	-258.41	14	0.05
Lithuanian	67	0.06	0.37	-0.23	-377.45	35	0.14
Slovenian	84	0.08	0.38	-0.32	-420.64	15	0.06
Uzbek	85	0.08	0.38	-0.36	-470.59	4	0.02
Azerbaijani	72	0.07	0.37	-0.34	-521.28	8	0.03
Tamil	49	0.04	0.36	-0.25	-557.02	28	0.11
Estonian	52	0.05	0.36	-0.31	-651.50	13	0.05
Basque	60	0.05	0.36	-0.35	-651.64	3	0.01
Swahili	56	0.05	0.36	-0.34	-670.76	5	0.02
Malayalam	56	0.05	0.36	-0.34	-675.02	5	0.02
Afrikaans	50	0.04	0.36	-0.33	-740.05	7	0.03

Statistics about downloads of Wikipedia Israel articles compared to the downloads of the Wikipedia Shoah articles

In Table 15 and in Image 8, we analyze the attention received by Israel and the Shoah by global publics on Wikipedia. On a daily basis, more than 11,000 global readers now read the English-language article on Israel, followed by more than 2,000 in Russian, Spanish, Polish, and German, and more than 1,000 in Hebrew, French, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, and Italian.

Given these download figures of the two analyzed Wikipedia articles in different language versions, it is now interesting to see which global audiences had a comparatively high download pattern of the Wikipedia Shoah article and which language versions received a relatively low download pattern, compared to the audiences of the Wikipedia article on Israel. Following the methodology, already explained in Image 3, we put the readership of the Wikipedia articles on Israel on the x-axis and the readership of the Wikipedia article on the y-axis. Ideally, rates of attention should be about equally high. Such a trend line would unequivocally reflect the words of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which highlights that the foundation of the state of Israel is the answer to the culmination of two millennia of anti-Semitism in the Shoah:

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the community of nations. Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.¹⁰⁴

Tentatively, we might say that downloads of the Portuguese, Spanish, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Romanian, French, and Indonesian Wikipedia articles on the Shoah were above the trend line while downloads of the Polish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and Persian-language Wikipedia articles on the Shoah were below the trend line.

Table 15: Wikipedia articles on Israel and on the Shoah in the different languages of the world

English-language name	Language code	Wikipedia title of the article on Israel	% of global downloads of Israel article	20-day downloads of Israel article	Daily average of downloads of Israel article	% of global downloads of the Shoah article	Trend value, predicted by the Israel percentage	Residual
English	en	Israel	30.5223	247,838	11802	36.5763	35.0122	1.5641
Russian	ru	Израиль	7.4230	60,274	2870	4.2660	8.2865	-4.0205
Spanish	es	Israel	6.9507	56,439	2688	11.0907	7.7400	3.3507
Polish	pl	Izrael	6.3746	51,761	2465	1.3490	7.0734	-5.7244
German	de	Israel	5.7213	46,456	2212	7.6464	6.3175	1.3289
Hebrew	he	ישראל	4.2903	34,837	1659	0.9523	4.6620	-3.7096
French	fr	Israël	3.8592	31,336	1492	4.5238	4.1631	0.3606
Japanese	ja	イスラエル	3.4435	27,961	1331	4.6580	3.6822	0.9758
Arabic	ar	إسرائيل	3.2435	26,337	1254	1.3517	3.4508	-2.0991
Chinese	zh	以色列	3.1500	25,578	1218	1.6785	3.3427	-1.6642
Portuguese	pt	Israel	2.9723	24,135	1149	7.7959	3.1371	4.6588
Italian	it	Israele	2.8803	23,388	1114	4.2607	3.0306	1.2301
Other languages	other languages	xx	2.8520	23,158	1278,9	0.6141	2.9978	-2.3838
Persian	fa	اسرائیل	2.1824	17,721	844	1.6363	2.2231	-0.5868
Indonesian	id	Israel	1.2030	9,768	465	1.1430	1.0899	0.0531
Dutch	nl	Israël	1.0770	8,745	416	1.6677	0.9442	0.7236
Vietnamese	vi	Israel	1.0700	8,688	414	0.4069	0.9360	-0.5292
Czech	cs	Izrael	0.8051	6,537	311	0.5697	0.6295	-0.0598
Swedish	sv	Israel	0.8016	6,509	310	0.3939	0.6255	-0.2316
Romanian	ro	Israel	0.6963	5,654	269	1.0661	0.5037	0.5624
Thai	th	ประเทศอิสราเอล	0.6261	5,084	242	0.2704	0.4225	-0.1521
Hindi	hi	इज़राइल	0.5754	4,672	222	0.1499	0.3638	-0.2139
Korean	ko	이스라엘	0.5695	4,624	220	0.5052	0.3570	0.1483
Hungarian	hu	Izrael	0.5456	4,430	211	0.4932	0.3293	0.1639
Greek	el	Ισραήλ	0.5419	4,400	210	0.5001	0.3250	0.1751
Bulgarian	bg	Израел	0.5047	4,098	195	0.3738	0.2820	0.0918
Finnish	fi	Israel	0.4771	3,874	184	0.6447	0.2501	0.3946
Ukrainian	uk	Ізраїль	0.4751	3,858	184	0.4268	0.2478	0.1790
Serbian	sr	Израел	0.3660	2,972	142	0.2501	0.1216	0.1285
Turkish	tr	İsrail	0.3643	2,958	141	0.2356	0.1196	0.1160
Croatian	hr	Izrael	0.3461	2,810	134	0.2106	0.0985	0.1121
Norwegian	no	Israel	0.3149	2,557	122	0.3576	0.0624	0.2952
Bengali	bn	ইসরায়েল	0.2882	2,340	111	0.0683	0.0315	0.0367
Danish	da	Israel	0.2810	2,282	109	0.2174	0.0232	0.1941
Tagalog	tl	Israel	0.2585	2,099	100	0.0549	-0.0028	0.0577
Slovak	sk	Izrael	0.2567	2,084	99	0.2741	-0.0050	0.2791
Georgian	ka	ისრაელი	0.2166	1,759	84	0.1440	-0.0513	0.1953
Azerbaijani	az	İsrail	0.1632	1,325	63	0.0310	-0.1131	0.1441
Lithuanian	lt	Izraelis	0.1603	1,302	62	0.1391	-0.1164	0.2555
Simple English	simple	Israel	0.1512	1,228	58	0.1848	-0.1269	0.3118
Slovenian	sl	Izrael	0.1267	1,029	49	0.0575	-0.1553	0.2128
Catalan	ca	Israel	0.1165	946	45	0.2221	-0.1671	0.3892
Tamil	ta	இசுரேல்	0.0977	793	38	0.1122	-0.1889	0.3012
Serbo-Croatian	sh	Izrael	0.0935	759	36	0.0464	-0.1938	0.2402
Urdu	ur	اسرائیل	0.0893	725	35	0.0361	-0.1986	0.2347
Estonian	et	Iisrael	0.0881	715	34	0.0511	-0.2000	0.2512
Albanian	sq	Izraeli	0.0879	714	34	0.0855	-0.2002	0.2857
Armenian	hy	Իսրայել	0.0796	646	31	0.0487	-0.2099	0.2586
Malay	ms	Israel	0.0719	584	28	0.0284	-0.2187	0.2471
Latvian	lv	Izraēla	0.0676	549	26	0.0654	-0.2237	0.2891
Macedonian	mk	Израел	0.0489	397	19	0.0414	-0.2453	0.2867
Afrikaans	af	Israel	0.0317	257	12	0.0265	-0.2653	0.2918

Image 8 summarizes the findings of Table 15. With 844 daily downloads of the Israel article in Persian and 1,254 daily downloads of the Israel article in Arabic, a certain presence of the theme of Israel among Wikipedia audiences in the Middle East has now been achieved. Above all, the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking audiences of Wikipedia in Latin America, Europe, and around the rest of the world have a high tendency nowadays to access the open-access and free information about the Shoah in electronic form. This is also an important finding for future strategies to keep the memory of the Shoah alive around the world.

Image 8: Percentage share of the major global languages of the Wikipedia downloads of the main Israel article and the main Shoah article in the encyclopedia

Cracks in the walls of ignorance? Shoah titles in the Arab world and Iran

Our assessment of the holdings of Arab libraries on the subject of the Shoah in our tables above was based on the following library catalogues:

• Algeria national union catalogue
• Egypt national union catalogue
• Egypt national library
• Iran national library
• Iraq national library
• Jordan national union catalogue
• Kuwait national library
• Oman national library
• Saudi Arabia national library
• Saudi Arabia plus 24 Arab countries – Aruc Arab Union Catalogue – national union catalogue
• Tunisia national union catalogue
• UN ESCWA Beirut library of the UN in the Arab world

In addition, we analyzed the subscriptions of the leading journal of Shoah studies, the Oxford University Press journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Arab libraries, integrated into the OCLC Worldcat. In general, holdings of a greater amount of Western literature are available from Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the countries of the Gulf, moving in an eastward direction across the region. The library system of Tunisia, which must be praised for its openness to include an author like Georges Bensoussan,¹⁰⁵ is unfortunately not yet included in the OCLC Worldcat.

Holocaust and Genocide Studies was available only at the American University Library in Cairo, Egypt; the Christian Notre Dame University in Louaizé, Lebanon; the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, Iraq; the American University of Kuwait in Kuwait City; the Weill Cornell Medical College in Doha, Qatar; and at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, UAE.

According to our hypothesis, one of the main reasons for the trajectory of still existing radicalism, hatred, and intolerance to be found in many parts of the Arab world is indeed the dire state of higher education, especially in the social sciences, in the region, which is also evident from our statistics. Our findings from international library network catalogues¹⁰⁶ support the contention, already made in the United Nations Human Development Program’s Arab Human Development Report (2002), that Arabic culture is indeed especially closed to influences from other world regions and world cultures and that this self-inflicted isolation is among the real root causes of the societal stagnation of the region: “The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Maa’moun’s time (the ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year.”¹⁰⁷

The Arabic Union catalogue Aruc offers startling insights into the biased distribution of Arabic library holdings, incompatible with tendencies of globalized modern science. The Arabic Union catalogue integrates a good part of the library holdings of the major research and government libraries in countries like Morocco, Algeria, Sudan, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula.¹⁰⁸ It especially offers insight into the thought and ideology patterns of “deep Arabia,” whose intellectual isolationism is also contrasted with the discernible positive library holding patterns in countries like Turkey or some Muslim countries of the Commonwealth, most notably Malaysia.

A typical consequence of such higher-education structures is the charter of the terrorist organization Hamas, which specifically refers to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and blames Jews and Freemasons for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and World Wars I and II.¹⁰⁹ These infamous Protocols are available in at least 10 Arabic translations, published in 203 editions.¹¹⁰ Entering the Arabic-language search term for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (روتوكولات حكماء صهيون ) reveals that in the Aruc union catalogue we find no less than 203 editions, present at many universities, research centers, and public administration libraries in the region.

Image 9: 203 editions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Arab union catalogue

Table 16 offers an astonishing insight into the presence of the Protocols in major academic and government libraries in the Arab world:

Table 16: Samples of different editions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and their presence in different Arabic public and academic libraries¹¹¹

Country	Library
Bahrain	Library Resource Center Bahrain
Jordan	University of Jordan
Jordan	Yarmouk University
Jordan	Jordanian University for Science and Technology
Jordan	Yarmouk University
Saudi Arabia	Air Force Research Center
Saudi Arabia	King Abdul Aziz Public Library
Saudi Arabia	King Fahad Public Library
Saudi Arabia	King Fahad Security College – Prince Selman Library
Saudi Arabia	King Saoud University
Saudi Arabia	Medina Tiba University
Saudi Arabia	Omm Alqura University Library
Saudi Arabia	Prince Noora University – Girls College
Saudi Arabia	Technical and Vocational Training Corporation
Kuwait	National Library of Kuwait
Morocco	King Abdul Aziz Foundation
Oman	His Majesty’s Advisor Office Library
West Bank and Gaza	Njah National University
Qatar	Qatar National Library
United Arab Emirates	Emirates University

Cracks in the walls of ignorance? Library holdings in the Vatican and its universities and think tanks

Our analysis, based on the main library catalogue of the Vatican,¹¹² revealed that in the entire Vatican library there are only 11 items available with the word Shoah in the title. The current leadership of the global Roman Catholic Church must be aware that – in the words of Julius Berman quoted earlier – “without education, we risk the history of the Holocaust being distorted and otherwise denied and those who were murdered being forgotten.” This lack of attention to the Shoah and its six million innocent victims, which reveals itself in the Vatican library holding figure, must be redressed immediately, and the dearth of information available to the pope, the cardinals, and all the bureaucracy working behind the walls of the Vatican State is made all the worse by the vast, devastating, and undeniable history of Catholic anti-Semitism, which played such a central role in the two millennia of historical events leading up to the Shoah.¹¹³ Table 17 also shows what a pontifical university could achieve today – the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, quite in contrast to the other compared libraries.

Table 17: Library holdings on the Shoah in the libraries of the Pontifical Universities in Rome, by international comparison

Library catalogue	Number of items with the word Shoah
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago	1,461
Biblioteca “Paolo VI” – Pontificia Facoltà di Scienze dell’Educazione “Auxilium”	94
Pontifical Gregorian University “Gregoriana” (“Jesuits”)	72
Pontifical Salesian University “Salesianum”	32
Pontifical University of the Holy Cross “Santa Croce” (“Opus Dei”)	14
Pontifical Lateran University “Lateranum”	9
Pontifical University of St. Anthony “Antonianum”	9
Pontifical Xavierian University, Bogotá	9
Papal University John Paul II, Krakow, Poland	5
Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas “Angelicum”	4
Pontifical Orient Institute	2
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil	1

Such structures even clearly contradict the official guidelines on Pontifical Universities and on the need to study the Shoah, set out by the Vatican itself. Pope Francis, in his often overlooked Papal Document on the Pontifical Universities, seems to be aware of the deficiencies of the libraries of his Papal Universities around the world;¹¹⁴ he had to remind them, after decades and even centuries of functioning, that the libraries must be equipped with an appropriate catalogue (i.e., 2019) and that they must allocate money to continually acquire books and journals (i.e., 2019). We assume that the pontifical exhortation was not an empty one, and that, read the other way, the mentioned document says nothing more and nothing less than that today, there are Pontifical University libraries which still (a) have no catalogue and (b) spend no money to order new books and journals

There is also a sentence in the Vatican declaration on the Shoah, entitled “We Remember,” which says in crystal-clear fashion that Roman Catholics have a duty to learn more about the reality of the Shoah:

The inhumanity with which the Jews were persecuted and massacred during this century is beyond the capacity of words to convey. All this was done to them for the sole reason that they were Jews. The very magnitude of the crime raises many questions. Historians, sociologists, political philosophers, psychologists, and theologians are all trying to learn more about the reality of the Shoah and its causes. Much scholarly study still remains to be done. But such an event cannot be fully measured by the ordinary criteria of historical research alone. It calls for a “moral and religious memory” and, particularly among Christians, a very serious reflection on what gave rise to it. The fact that the Shoah took place in Europe, that is, in countries of long-standing Christian civilization, raises the question of the relation between the Nazi persecution and the attitudes down the centuries of Christians towards the Jews.¹¹⁵

How do these words tally, then, with the results in the above Table 17, and how do such depressing results tally with the papal exhortations about libraries in the Papal Universities? Let us quote them here fully:

Article 53. In order to achieve its proper purposes, especially in regard to scientific research, each University or Faculty must have an adequate library, in keeping with the needs of the teachers and students. It must be correctly organized and equipped with an appropriate catalogue.

Article 54. Through an annual allotment of money, the library must continually acquire books, old and new, as well as the principal reviews, so as to be able effectively to serve research, teaching of the disciplines, instructional needs, and the practical exercises and seminars.

Article 55. The library must be headed by a trained librarian, assisted by a suitable council. The librarian participates opportunely in the Council of the University or Faculty.¹¹⁶

So, to this date, after two millennia of Catholic anti-Semitism and the Shoah, the Pontifical University of the Dominicans¹¹⁷ in Rome, for example, obviously thinks that offering just four titles to its students and academic staff from around the world on the Shoah is a sufficient thing to do. The Papal University in Krakow, Poland, located only around 50 kilometers away from the horrors of Auschwitz, offers its students and academic staff just five items with the word Shoah in the title. At the same time, as of August 19, 2019, the Vatican Library (see Image 10) still contained three titles by the chief ideologist of the NSDAP, Alfred Rosenberg, among them his infamous edition of the Protocols, along with four other editions of the Protocols in English, five in German, and so on.

Image 10: Alfred Rosenberg’s edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Vatican Library (August 9, 2019)

If the church really stands by its commitments given in the Second Vatican Council Declaration “Nostra Aetate,”¹¹⁸ then Shoah research must be a top priority of the Roman Catholic institutions, research institutes, universities, and other think tanks. As a small example of how the church leadership’s understanding of the processes of the Shoah and the Nazi dictatorship are to this day very deficient, we quote from “We Remember” itself, which states:

The Church in Germany replied by condemning racism. The condemnation first appeared in the preaching of some of the clergy, in the public teaching of the Catholic bishops, and in the writings of lay Catholic journalists. Already in February and March 1931, Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, Cardinal Faulhaber, and the bishops of Bavaria, the bishops of the province of Cologne, and those of the province of Freiburg published pastoral letters condemning National Socialism, with its idolatry of race and of the State.¹¹⁹

But Cardinal Adolf Johannes Bertram (March 14, 1859 – July 6, 1945), presented by the church to the world in “We Remember” as a shining example of opposition to Nazi rule, ordered, as is well-known from current research, a requiem mass for Adolf Hitler to be held in all the parishes of Wroclaw/Breslau shortly before the city’s liberation by the Red Army and shortly before Bertram’s own death.¹²⁰

The multivariate perspective

Our multivariate analysis of the library holdings of the national libraries of the world on the Shoah revealed very interesting aspects, further corroborating our analysis above. In Table 18, we present some selected statistically significant results of a partial correlation analysis of these library holdings with our list of socioeconomic background variables.¹²¹ In order to correct for the statistical skewness of the national library holdings indicator (Table 6), we took the fourth root of the original The mean geographical distance of a country to Belgium, and the real income level in 2010 (natural logarithm of income per capita in the EU=100), were kept constant.

• The variable trust, highlighted by recent international comparative economic research, has again been confirmed to be of overriding importance.¹²² Societies based on trust are also less prone to prejudice and tend to be open to Shoah knowledge and awareness, as indicated by national library holdings data.
• There is a clear-cut positive partial correlation coefficient of the share of “other Christians per total population” and the openness of the national libraries toward holdings of titles on the Shoah.¹²³
• The share of Jews per total population has a clear-cut positive statistical relationship with Shoah knowledge and awareness of a society, manifesting itself in national library holdings of Shoah-related titles,¹²⁴ again underlining the beneficial effects of a larger Jewish community on the liberal and open-minded intellectual climate of a country.
• The country’s share in the world’s top 500 universities has a clear-cut positive relationship with national library holdings on the Shoah.¹²⁵ There is a clear interaction between library quality and the top international ranking of a country’s universities.
• FPZ (free production zones) employment as percentage of total population has a significant and negative effect.¹²⁶ Countries practicing the model of the “new international division of labor” tend to be global peripheries with the corresponding negative effects on knowledge accumulation, described above.
• The rate of societal anti-Semitism, measured by the ADL 100 indicator (rate of anti-Semitism per total population), clearly negatively affects the national library Shoah items holding indicator.¹²⁷

Table 18: Partial correlations of the national library holdings on the Shoah with standard socioeconomic and political indicators¹²⁸

Variables (constant: distance to Belgium, income 2010) (natural logarithm EU=100)	Correlation with the national library holdings indicator	Error probability	Degrees of freedom
Gallup poll about satisfaction: trust in other people	0.378	0.003	59
Share of other Christians per total population	0.353	0.002	70
Share of Jews per total population	0.331	0.005	70
Country share in world’s top 500 universities	0.322	0.006	70
FPZ (free production zones) employment as % of total population	-0.265	0.025	70
ADL 100 (rate of anti-Semitism per total population)	-0.319	0.011	60

Table 19 presents a tentative cross-national analysis of the national library holdings of a country on the Shoah, based on indicators of the structural position of a country in international society. Using a standard approach of international development performance accounting,¹²⁹ the following predictors proved to be significant in our standard OLS multiple regression analysis:

• The first is the so-called Kuznets curve¹³⁰ of the nonlinear trade-off between development levels and development performance, named after Nobel Economics Laureate Simon Kuznets (1901-1985), who discovered that inequality levels are greatest at middle income levels. Many crisis phenomena and patterns of prejudice, apart from inequality, also culminate at middle income levels, and in our case, the lack of a national library to inform the citizens of a nation about the Shoah is also highest at those
• Public education expenditure is associated with a higher rate of national library holdings on the Shoah. Priorities in educational investment have a positive trade-off with overall cultural and political performance.¹³¹
• Cross-national development research tends to contradict many of the optimistic assumptions of the “welcome culture” in the West. In our case, net international migration rates¹³² are a significant negative predictor of the national library holdings of a country on the Shoah, thus again confirming apprehensions voiced in the recent literature.¹³³
• Years of membership in the EU¹³⁴ have ceteris paribus a significant and positive effect on the overall library culture of a country, and in our case this explanatory variable has a significant positive effect on our dependent variable, i.e., Shoah knowledge and awareness in the national library holdings of a country, which are positively affected by the process of European integration.
• But years of membership in the European Monetary Union (EMU)¹³⁵ – due to what Nobel Laureate Martin Feldstein (1939-2019) called the economic liability of European Monetary Union – has ceteris paribus a significant negative effect on many development performance variables, including the adequacy of the national library, and in our case also on the Shoah–related national library holdings. Maastricht austerity causes a downward pressure on public expenditures, including on education and library infrastructure.

Table 19: Multiple regression – national library holdings about the Shoah and standard political and economic country indicators, including globalization¹³⁶

	Regression coefficient B	Standard error	Standardized regression coefficient	T-value	Error probability
Constant	35.796	22.471		1.593	0.116
% world population	0.058	0.057	0.099	1.017	0.313
ln GDP per capita	-9.121	4.889	-3.835	-1.866	0.067
ln GDP per capita ^2	0.569	0.267	4.479	2.129	0.037
MNC PEN – stock of inward FDI per GDP	-0.014	0.012	-0.123	-1.185	0.241
Population density	0.001	0.001	0.188	1.563	0.123
Public education expenditure per GNP	0.246	0.113	0.222	2.179	0.033
Net international migration rate, 2005-2010	-1.309	0.626	-0.310	-2.090	0.041
Years of membership in the EU, 2010	0.046	0.020	0.395	2.240	0.029
Years of membership in EMU, 2010	-0.184	0.104	-0.292	-1.763	0.083

N = 70; adj. R^2 = 44.5%; F = 7.136; error probability = 0.000.

Table 20 finally provides an alternative statistical approach to account for national library holdings about the Shoah. It is clear from Image 6 above that global geography also plays a role in our results.

Apart from national income (see above), geographical distance to Europe (EU-28, with Belgium at its center) will play a role in explaining national library holdings. Our regression analysis used the sophisticated CEPII approach to calculate geographical distance, which is now state-of-the-art in global political geography.¹³⁷ The CEPII database GeoDist provides several geographical variables, in particular bilateral distances measured using city-level data to account for the geographic distribution of population inside each nation. Different measures of bilateral distances are available for 225 countries. For most of them, different calculations of “intra-national distances’’ are also available.

In all our multiple regression test approaches, the share of “other Christians” from Barro’s international religious denomination data invariably played a major positive role in the explanation of our national library holdings variable.¹³⁸ The theoretical reason behind these quite robust statistical effects is that the “dissident” Christian groupings, more often than not historically persecuted by the mainstream Christian congregations, especially by the Roman Catholic Church, often showed solidarity with Jews. To this day, Evangelical Christians in America are among the staunchest supporters of Israel.¹³⁹

Finally, it should be noted that the ADL-rates of anti-Semitism have no significant effects on our library holdings data, once the other important variables are introduced into the equation.¹⁴⁰

Table 20: Multiple regression – national library holdings about the Shoah and standard political and economic country indicators, including anti-Semitism

	Regression coefficient B	Standard error	Standardized regression coefficient	T-value	Error probability
Constant	3.830	1.655	xxx	2.315	0.024
Distance to Belgium	-0.525	0.150	-0.392	-3.506	0.001
Income 2010 (natural logarithm of EU-28 = 100)	0.491	0.201	0.280	2.444	0.018
Share of other Christians per total population	5.793	1.938	0.336	2.990	0.004
% anti-Semitic (ADL 100)	0.002	0.011	0.022	0.189	0.850

N = 62; Adj. R^2 = 35.8%; F = 9.504; error probability = 0.000.

What is needed: a startup for high quality open-access research depositories in the field of Shoah studies and Jewish studies in general

We turn now to strategic issues of how to possibly redress the many geographical and other imbalances which exist in global Shoah knowledge and awareness. For a sound and well-founded analysis, we need to look at the structures of global modern science, including the social sciences, the humanities, and history, and the way in which they are distributed around the globe today. Shoah knowledge and awareness requires a sound global scientific base, communicated in such a way that the results of science are openly accessible at least in working-paper form to the millions of internet users around the globe.

Undoubtedly, many of the imbalances discussed in this article are connected with general research, science, and publication policy perspectives of social and historical sciences today, for which global Shoah knowledge and awareness policy is yet to find answers. Publishing in high-priced scholarly journals is in a deep crisis.

In view of the unquestionable digital divide still separating the West from the rest of the world, there is an unquestionable need to overcome the narrowness of the hitherto existing systems of the diffusion of scientific knowledge. If the international scientific production and distribution system yields as the final result that a great part of the landmass of our globe has no access to this information, then something is basically wrong with it. This article analyzed the presence of works about the Shoah; but the simple diffusion of leading journals in the social sciences, like the American Economic Review, the American Political Science Review, or the American Sociological Review,¹⁴¹ will also correspond to the geographical patterns represented most visibly in our Image 5 and Image 6.

As we have shown, there are now tens of thousands of people from around the world, even in the countries of the Middle East, who eagerly read open-access information about the Shoah on Wikipedia.

Should the scientific community, engaged in Shoah research, wait for publishing companies like Elsevier, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell to diffuse this knowledge around the globe to a small geographical share of global publics, or should such scientific work be made public in high quality and respected open-access publications? Considering the enormous concentration of the world’s scientific publishing by those five major international publishers,¹⁴² which now control 50% of all global article publishing indexed in the Web of Knowledge (now called Web of Science),¹⁴³ we briefly analyze here the number of scholarly articles on the Shoah published by these major companies. Each company nowadays offers a representative, exclusive database about the articles published by it, and we simply directly took the numbers mentioned by them. In each case we performed an exact title search:

• Elsevier – Science Direct¹⁴⁴ – 29 results
• Sage– Sage Journals¹⁴⁵ – 21 results
• Springer – Springerlink¹⁴⁶ – 59 results
• Taylor & Francis – Taylor & Francis Online¹⁴⁷ – 67 results
• Wiley-Blackwell – Wiley Online Library¹⁴⁸ – 15 results

We will not go into the exact details of a comparison of the frequency of Shoah–related articles published by these big five international publishers compared to the hundreds of articles they publish – however important they may be – which correspond to the latest intellectual fashion trends, achieve very high quotation factors, and range from feminism to multiculturalism, gender studies, queer social science, and so on.

It is no longer a good idea to put the dissemination of the results of Shoah research exclusively in the hands of the international scholarly publishing system as it is evolving today. In our strategic conclusions, we can only reiterate here the critique, voiced for many years, of the duality of university-ranking systems combined with journal impact factor lists, which compel an ever larger percentage of global academic staff to publish in high impact factor journals so as to advance in their careers, from simple tenure decisions for assistant professors to recruitments of people at the professorial level.¹⁴⁹ This basically unhealthy and irrational system does its own to marginalize Shoah studies in the future. Why? The distortions caused by this system were already spelled out years ago, and yet they persist and only get stronger and stronger.¹⁵⁰ In times of financial constraints, the idea has spread in most political circles in the Western world to link government university funds to what is euphemistically called “performance.”¹⁵¹ The iron logic of this “performance” testing is built on publications in high impact factor journals, reflecting the citations of a journal in the global literature, which then are used to evaluate the ranking of a university. What is the connection, then, with Shoah studies? Younger scientists or even persons striving for tenure, let alone for a job as professor, and working in the field of Shoah studies are confronted by the fact that the impact factor, nowadays measured by a number called the H-Index,¹⁵² of even the leading journal in the field, Oxford University Press’s Holocaust and Genocide Studies is only 16, while themes now very popular in Western academia achieve much higher impact factors. One will probably receive more quotations by writing about “gender” and “discrimination” than by writing about the Shoah. Holocaust and Genocide Studies is the only relevant university-ranking academic journal in the field, while nowadays dozens, if not hundreds, of journals accept and disseminate studies on the entire array of research corresponding to those latest academic fashion trends.

For a university president’s office or a dean’s office looking into the global ranking of their university,¹⁵³ it is clear that the publications of a colleague in the Journal of Homosexuality (H-Index 64) or in Gender and Society (H-Index 89) are much more attractive in terms of boosting the university’s ranking than a publication in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.¹⁵⁴ Most university-ranking systems, using machine-readable data about scientific journals, will function that way, thus putting almost irresistible pressure on scholarly staff to put aside their activities in the field of Shoah studies and concentrate their future academic work on what are today called “ranking relevant journal publications.” The nearly endless literature on the technicalities of the university-ranking process¹⁵⁵ more often than not will overlook the simple and – in our case – very tragic consequences of these machineries, marginalizing Shoah studies in favor of other, more trendy scientific subjects. One must also be aware that despite the very encompassing database Scopus’s larger journal coverage in all fields,¹⁵⁶ still this particular unique database, too, shows similar biases to those found in the Clarivate Web of Knowledge (formerly Web of Science). Both databases still favor natural sciences and engineering as well as biomedical research to the detriment of social sciences and arts and humanities.¹⁵⁷ Similarly, English-language journals are favored to the detriment of other languages. These important limits should be taken into account when assessing any scientific activity.¹⁵⁸

A compounding problem, which has to be spelled out in our context, is a certain marginalization of the scholarship published in Israeli scientific journals on the “world market” of scholarly products. There are now only 21 scientific journals published in Israel which are still included in the world’s most inclusive journal database, Scopus.¹⁵⁹ Not even one of these Israeli journals is dedicated primarily to Shoah-related research. These journals, ranked by their H-Index are:

Table 21: Scientific journals published in Israel and included in the Scopus database

Title	ISSN	H- Index	Publisher	Coverage	Categories
Israel Medical Association Journal	15651088	50	Israel Medical Association	1999-ongoing	Medicine (miscellaneous)
Pediatric Endocrinology Reviews	15654753	32	Y.S. Medical Media Ltd.	2003-ongoing	Medicine (miscellaneous); Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health; Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism
Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences	3337308	30	Gefen	1981-ongoing	Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Public Health Reviews	21076952, 03010422	26	Technosdar Ltd.	1973-1980, 1982-2003, 2010-ongoing	Community and Home Care; Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Israeli Journal of Aquaculture – Bamidgeh	0792156X	25	Kibbutz Ein Hamifratz	1988-ongoing	Agronomy and Crop Science; Aquatic Science
Medicine and Law	7231393	18	Yozmol Heiliger	1982-ongoing	Law; Health Policy
Harefuah	177768	17	Israel Medical Association	1947-1964, 1969-ongoing	Medicine (miscellaneous)
Israel Exploration Journal	212059	14	Israel Exploration Society	2002-ongoing	History; Archaeology; Archaeology (arts and humanities)
Refuat ha-Peh veha-Shinayim (1993)	7929935	11	Histadrut Rofei ha-Shinayim be-Eretz Yisrael	2001-ongoing	Medicine (miscellaneous)
Geography Research Forum	3335275	10	Ben-Gurion University of the Negev	1990-1993, 1995-ongoing	Earth-Surface Processes; Geography, Planning and Development
Israel Journal of Veterinary Medicine	3349152	9	Israel Veterinary Medical Association	2007-ongoing	Animal Science and Zoology; Veterinary (miscellaneous)
International Water and Irrigation	3345807	7	SNER Communications Ltd.	1994-1999, 2001-ongoing	Aquatic Science; Geotechnical Engineering and Engineering Geology; Water Science and Technology
Atiqot	7928424	5	Israel Antiquities Authority	2011-ongoing	Archaeology; Archaeology (arts and humanities); Conservation
Israel Economic Review	7920385	4	Bank of Israel	2008-ongoing	Economics, Econometrics and Finance (miscellaneous)
Scripta Classica Israelica	3344509	3	Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies	2011, 2014-ongoing	Classics; Literature and Literary Theory; History
53rd Israel Annual Conference on Aerospace Sciences, IACAS 2013	2015	3	xx	2015	Computer Networks and Communications; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Hardware and Architecture
56th Israel Annual Conference on Aerospace Sciences, IACAS 2016	2016	3	xx	2016	Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Environmental Engineering; Soil Science; Water Science and Technology
57th Israel Annual Conference on Aerospace Sciences, IACAS 2017	2017	2	xx	2017	Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials; Mechanics of Materials
CHoPS 2015 – 8th International Conference for Conveying and Handling of Particulate Solids	2015	2	xx	2015	Computer Networks and Communications; Computer Science Applications; Control and Systems Engineering; Modeling and Simulation
Cahiers d’Etudes Levinassiennes	15655512	1	Institut d’Etudes Levinasienne	xx	Philosophy

Iran is now included with no less than 174 journals in the Scopus list, and there are now 820 journals from the entire Middle East region in this list. That means the share of Israel in the number of university-ranking relevant peer-reviewed journals of the entire region of the Middle East is now only 2.6%.¹⁶⁰ These depressing data also imply that the vast majority of articles on the Shoah have to be published nowadays by journals outside of Israel, thus implicitly putting the scientific publication of the results of Shoah research in the hands of profit and sales maximizing publishers of scientific journals, who may one day decide that it pays much better to launch additional journals like the already existing Journal of Islamic Marketing (the quotation metric measured by the so-called H-Factor for this journal is 28).

In addition, gradually the West is losing not only economically but also scientifically vis-à-vis the rising power centers around the globe, creating the need to find new anchors for Shoah research relevant to Shoah knowledge and awareness.

Image 11 shows, on the basis of the Scimago-SIR Academic Institution ranking,¹⁶¹ the dramatic shifts which have taken place in recent years to the detriment of the “old” West.

Image 11: Country distribution of the top 100 research institutes and universities (RI) around the world

Without question, Israeli research institutes and universities were and are the main anchor of Shoah knowledge and awareness and of the scientific work to support it. Leading Israeli universities and research institutes, also negatively affected by the anti-Semitic BDS movement, are no longer among the global top 100, and nowadays the Scimago-SIR rankings of the Israeli institutions are:¹⁶²

189   Tel Aviv University

245   Weizmann Institute of Science

295   Hebrew University of Jerusalem

348   Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

388   IBM Israel Research Laboratory

473   Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

501   Hadassah Medical Center

502   Bar-Ilan University

530   Chaim Sheba Medical Center

557   Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center

624   Agricultural Research Organization

632   Rambam Health Care Campus

633   Shaare Zedek Medical Center

644   University of Haifa

653   Rabin Medical Center

680   Edith Wolfson Medical Center

688   Assaf Harofeh Medical Center Zerifin

693   Meir Medical Center

694   Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya

701   Open University of Israel

705   Soroka University Medical Center

709   Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel

732   Ariel University

752   Clalit Health Services

765   Holon Institute of Technology

Ideas for a startup: what one could learn from Spanish efforts to maximize the scholarly presence in the age of globalization and the internet

Having analyzed the data and published this article in the state of Israel, not only the nation which solemnly celebrates Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) each year but which is also a nation of startups and innovation,¹⁶³ we would like to highlight as an outsider some of the factors which could redress the negative trends analyzed in this article through proper initiatives. These would involve synergies of existing and of increasing high-quality open-access scholarly publishing in the field, to be implemented by Israeli scholarship and ingenuity.

Spain, with its vibrant bibliometric analysis, is perhaps the Western country which so far has come up with the most innovative answers to the strategic problems of the unequal diffusion of the results of scientific research in our age. In being, with regard to its language and culture, part of Europe and the Americas in a way, Spain not only developed its own ranking systems of world universities and academic research and devised an innovative new system to rank scholarly journals, but it also developed an encompassing and mostly open-access network of scientific literature published in more than 10,000 journals, now with more than two million users worldwide, mostly in the countries of the Iberian linguistic and cultural tradition. This network, Dialnet, was developed with ingenuity by the University of La Rioja.¹⁶⁴ This network could serve as a role model for a global network of Jewish studies and/or Shoah studies, with a high percentage of open-access high-quality peer-reviewed articles to be disseminated to the global libraries analyzed in this article.

Dialnet began its activities in 2001 specializing in the humanities and the social sciences. The portal is managed by the Dialnet Foundation of the University of La Rioja, a nonprofit organization established in February 2009 for the management and development of one of the largest databases of scientific literature in the world.

It contains the indexes of the scientific journals of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, including books (monographs), doctoral theses, conferences, and other documents. The full text of many of the documents is available online. Nowadays many Spanish and Latin American universities and public and specialized libraries collaborate in the initiative. It also incorporates databases with documents in other languages. Apart from its other advantages, it offers full-text doctoral theses.

Further ideas for a startup in the field

Without question, other measures could also accompany such a strategy, such as the prepublication electronic publishing of articles in the field in high-quality open-access academic depositories such as the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) in New York.¹⁶⁵ It currently disseminates 881,976 reviewed research papers from 418,492 researchers across 30 disciplines. Nowadays many scholarly institutions and scientific journals have their content automatically disseminated by the SSRN. The partners in publishing of the SSRN are a de facto “Who’s Who” of the 57 American institutions that are among the world’s top 100 academic institutes.¹⁶⁶ The working papers of many leading research institutions are published in conjunction with the SSRN.

Another depository of a very similar design is IDEAS/RePEc.¹⁶⁷ Run by the University of Connecticut, it is chiefly designed to be the working-paper depository of the economics profession. It indexes over 2,900,000 research items, including over 2,700,000 items that can be freely downloaded in full text. There are over 2,000 participating archives, including all the major publishers and research outlets in the economics field. Authors register with RePEc to create an online profile. Interested publics from around the world can download their papers.

Working papers of partner institutions are directly uploaded, while individuals wishing to deposit their prepublication literature must do so via the Munich-based Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA),¹⁶⁸ which first reviews all submitted papers to ensure a certain amount of quality control. In all, there are now 14,392 participating economics institutions, and 56,586 authors who have registered with the RePEc Author Service. They have authored 1,538,047 items listed in RePEc.¹⁶⁹

The following is a quick glance at the dynamics of the global research depositories and databases whose best characteristics could be combined in such an open-access Shoah–related and/or Jewish-studies-related research depository:

• Researchgate:¹⁷⁰ 15 million users, 100 million papers, unfortunately no prior review, Alexa global internet traffic rank: 124; social network communication functions in place; ranking of scholars and papers is offered. Average monthly downloads of the Wikipedia article about it: 14,039.

• Edu:¹⁷¹ 34 million users, 21 million papers, unfortunately no prior review, Alexa global internet traffic rank: 267; social network communication functions are offered; ranking of scholars and papers exists. Average monthly downloads of the Wikipedia article about it: 9,543.

• Social Science Research Network (SSRN):¹⁷² 882,206 research papers from 418,632 researchers; there is prior review and quality control; there is an individual paper upload via SSRN, but for member institutions there is an automatic upload of their working papers; Alexa global internet traffic rank: 8,250; no social network communication functions are offered; but there is a ranking of scholars and papers. Average monthly downloads of the Wikipedia article about it: 8,013.

• Dialnet: ¹⁷³ Indexing and search profiles for the articles from 10,511 journals, mainly from the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, containing more than 6.6 million documents, over 2 million users; many texts freely available as open-access materials; the depository also contains the freely available full text of more than 200,000 theses (master level + PhD). Alexa global internet traffic rank is 10,627. Average monthly downloads of the English-language Wikipedia article about the merged article about Dialnet and the University of La Rioja: 345. Average monthly downloads of the Spanish Wikipedia article about it: 2,211.

• IDEAS/RePEc:¹⁷⁴9 million research papers in the field of economics, 2.7 million papers can be downloaded freely. Over 50,000 authors, prior review of the individual paper upload via Munich University (FRG) MPRA Archive; for member institutions there is an automatic upload of reviewed working papers; Alexa global internet rank: 13,880; no social network communication functions are offered; but a very sophisticated ranking of scholars and papers is implemented. Average monthly downloads of the Wikipedia article about it: 1,876.

• Central and East European Library (CEEOL):¹⁷⁵ Indexing and search profiles for the publications of more than 1,000 publishers and their journals from Eastern Europe in the fields of the humanities and the social sciences; many texts are freely available as open-access materials; Alexa global internet traffic rank is 113,068. Average monthly downloads of the Wikipedia article about it: 176.

Table 22 and Image 12 summarize the characteristics of the mentioned depositories.

Table 22: Webometrics of important research depositories which could serve as role models for a future research depository of Shoah studies and Jewish studies

	Alexa rank	Wikipedia monthly downloads
Researchgate	124	14,039
Academia.edu	267	9,543
SSRN	8,250	8,013
Dialnet	10,627	2,211
RePEc/Ideas	13,880	1,876
CEEOL	113,068	176

Image 12: The global popularity of scientific depositories as measured by Alexa internet traffic statistics and monthly Wikipedia downloads, from August 2018 to August 2019

Conclusions

We have reached the end of a long journey into the field of bibliometrics concerning the impact of the literature commemorating the six million Jews who were murdered in the Shoah. Our article summarizes the enormous differences in the numbers of titles on the Shoah in the library catalogues of the world. The global North-South and North-East divide in the library presence of Shoah-related titles evident from our statistics is simply overwhelming.

We encountered many aspects which were perhaps to be expected, but we also encountered many surprising aspects of the political geography of global library holdings on the Shoah. For example, with 235 items, Turkey is the majority-Muslim country with the largest library holdings on the subject, much higher in the rankings than many European Union member countries.

One of the most breathtaking aspects of our research results is the fact that users of the King Fahad National Library in Saudi Arabia, thanks to our electronic age, now have almost 110 times more titles available on the Shoah than the pontiff, the cardinals, the bishops, and the more than 2,800 bureaucrats working for the global administration of the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican via their central library, the Vatican Library, while the relatively still poor Caribbean country of Jamaica, with its world-class universities, offers in its national library 13 times as many titles on the Shoah as the Vatican Library! The National Library of Egypt, the Biblioteca Alexandrina, now already has eight times as many titles on the Shoah at the disposal of its readers than the Vatican.

Table 7 above summarizes the availability of Shoah-related titles in the libraries of the legislative assemblies around the world. In our list, three parliamentary libraries excel: that of the European Parliament, the Canadian Parliamentary Library, and – of course – the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The results for the legislative assembly libraries in Spain, Brazil, Switzerland, Finland, and Australia are depressing, and at least suggest the hypothesis that in the political system of these countries, solidly integrated economically and politically with the rest of West, the issues of the Shoah play only a secondary parliamentary role or practically no parliamentary role at all.

There are also huge differences in the number of Shoah-related titles in the libraries of international organizations. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in Santiago, well-known for its dedicated analytical work on Latin American and global social and economic problems, excels all the UN-related and other libraries under consideration. At the same time, the hierarchy of the library holdings about the Shoah among the different UN organizations is revealing and even astonishing, and tells us indeed something about the presence of a strong anti-Israeli lobby in several UN organizations and bodies, including UNESCO and the UN ESCWA in Beirut.

We also analyzed the presence of Shoah-related classics in the libraries of the world, based on the data of the OCLC Worldcat.

Our analyses based on Wikipedia statistics suggest a more positive tendency. Apart from the more than 9,000 global daily downloads of the English-language Wikipedia article on the Shoah, there are now more than 1,000 daily downloads in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, French, Russian, and Italian. And at least the Spanish, Portuguese, and French languages, just as English, are being spoken widely in the developing world. Also, the more than 100 daily downloads in Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Indonesian, Korean, and Vietnamese have a high relevance for strategies to think about the diffusion of Shoah knowledge and awareness in the developing countries.

Our assessment of the holdings of Arab libraries on the subject of the Shoah revealed that the flagship Oxford University Press journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies was available only at the American University Library in Cairo, Egypt; the Christian Notre Dame University in Louaizé, Lebanon; the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, Iraq; the American University of Kuwait in Kuwait City; the Weill Cornell Medical College in Doha, Qatar; and at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, UAE.

According to our hypothesis, one of the main reasons for the trajectory of still existing radicalism, hatred, and intolerance to be found in many parts of the Arab world is indeed the dire state of higher education, especially in the social sciences, in the region, which is also evident from our statistics. A typical consequence of such higher-education structures is the prolific presence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Arab libraries, which blames Jews and Freemasons for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and World War I and II. These infamous “Protocols” are available in at least 10 Arabic translations, published in 203 editions. Its readership includes the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia  Air Force Research Center, the King Fahad Security College, the National Library of Kuwait, and the Qatar National Library.

But our analysis, based on the main library catalogue of the Vatican, revealed that the main Vatican Library also still contained in August 2019, 80 years from the outbreak of World War II, three titles by the chief ideologist of the NSDAP, Alfred Rosenberg, among them his infamous edition of the Protocols, along with four other editions of the Protocols in English, five in German, and so on.

Our multivariate analysis of the library holdings of the national libraries of the world on the Shoah revealed very interesting aspects, further corroborating our analysis above. There is a clear-cut positive partial correlation coefficient of the share of “other Christians per total population” and the openness of the national libraries toward holdings of titles on the Shoah. The share of Jews per total population has a clear-cut positive statistical relationship with Shoah knowledge and awareness of a society, manifesting itself in national library holdings of Shoah-related titles, again underlining the beneficial effects of a larger Jewish community on the liberal and open-minded intellectual climate of a country.

We highlight in the article phenomena of the global digital and science divide. Undoubtedly, many of the imbalances discussed in this article are connected with general research, science, and publication policy perspectives of social and historical sciences today, for which global Shoah knowledge and awareness policy has yet to find answers. At present the way in which science is communicated in high-priced scholarly journals, published by a handful of leading global publishers, is in a state of deep crisis.

In view of the unquestionable digital divide still separating the West from the rest of the world, there is an unquestionable need to overcome the narrowness of the hitherto existing systems of the diffusion of scientific knowledge. If the international scientific production and distribution system yields as a final result that a great part of the landmass of our globe has no access to this information, then something is basically wrong with it. This article analyzed the presence of works about the Shoah; but the diffusion of leading journals in the social sciences, like the American Economic Review, the American Political Science Review, or the American Sociological Review, corresponds to the geographical patterns represented most visibly in Image 5 and Image 6 above.

As we have shown, there are now tens of thousands of people from around the world, even in the countries of the Middle East, who eagerly read open-access information about the Shoah.

Should the scientific community engaged in Shoah research wait for publishing companies like Elsevier, Sage, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell to diffuse this knowledge around the globe to a small geographical share of global publics, or should such scientific work be made public in high quality and respected open-access publications?

We suggest the launching of such an open-access working paper depository of Shoah–related studies and/or Jewish studies modeled around the leading global depositories such as Researchgate, Academia.Edu, the Social Science Research Network, and IDEAS/RePEc. Such a depository could also have features of the Spanish-language database Dialnet and the Central and East European Library (CEEOL). The article discusses their advantages and disadvantages.

Appendix

Appendix Table 1: Master list of the 165 library catalogues used in this project

Library catalogue	Website	Search profile	Type of catalogue
Albania	http://www.al.cobiss.net/scripts/cobiss?ukaz=SFRM&id=1954593281638220	title word	national union catalogue
Algeria	https://www.ccdz.cerist.dz/index.php?nav=11	title word	national union catalogue
Australia	https://trove.nla.gov.au/?q&adv=y	title word	national union catalogue
Austria	https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=advancedSearch&uiLanguage=en	title word	national union catalogue
Belgium	https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=advancedSearch&uiLanguage=en	title word	national union catalogue
Bosnia and Herzegovina	http://www.bh.cobiss.net/scripts/cobiss?ukaz=SFRM&id=1957346430628425	title word	national union catalogue
Brazil	https://www.pergamum.pucpr.br/redepergamum/consultas/site_CRP/pesquisa.php	title word	national union catalogue
Bulgaria	https://plus.bg.cobiss.net/opac7/bib/search/advanced?db=cobib	title word	national union catalogue
Canada	https://canada.on.worldcat.org/advancedsearch?databaseList=	title word	national union catalogue
Central America176 (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama)	https://www.metabase.net/	keyword	national union catalogue
China	http://opac.calis.edu.cn/simpleSearch.do	keyword	national union catalogue
Costa Rica	http://catalogo.sinabi.go.cr/janium-bin/busqueda_rapida.pl?Id=20190721215044	title word	national union catalogue
Croatia	http://opak.crolib.hr/cgi-bin/ewero.cgi	keyword	national union catalogue
Czech Republic	https://aleph.nkp.cz/F/?func=file&file_name=find-b&local_base=skc&CON_LNG=ENG	title word	national union catalogue
Denmark	https://bibliotek.dk/eng	title word	national union catalogue
Egypt	http://www.egyptlib.net.eg/Site/OPAC/AdvancedSearch.aspx	title word	national union catalogue
Estonia	https://www.ester.ee/search~S1	title word	national union catalogue
European Commission Libraries	https://ec-europa-finder.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/search?vid=32EUC_VU1&lang=en_US&sortby=rank&mode=advanced	title word	national union catalogue
Finland	https://melinda.kansalliskirjasto.fi/F/1HSYJ2T9YT5GPNC4LQUCKRDL3GYXQBCIR8BD2D3G478JUYGH2K-00361?func=find-d-0	title word	national union catalogue
France	http://www.sudoc.abes.fr/xslt/?COOKIE=U10178,Klecteurweb,I250,B341720009+,SY,NLECTEUR+WEBOPC,D2.1,E723e19ab-ad9,A,H,R85.124.10.31,FY	title word	national union catalogue
Germany (Baden Württemberg)	http://swb.bsz-bw.de/?COOKIE=Us998,Pbszgast,I2017,B20728+,SY,NRecherche-DB,D2.1,E7560b59e-0,A,H,R193.197.31.8,FY	title word	national union catalogue
Germany (Bavaria)	https://opacplus.bib-bvb.de/TouchPoint_touchpoint/search.do?methodToCall=switchSearchPage&SearchType=2&emptyFields=true	title word	national union catalogue
Germany (Berlin State)	https://portal.kobv.de/advancedSearch.do?index=internal&plv=2	title word	national union catalogue
Germany (Hesse)	http://cbsopac.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/LNG=DU&CHARSET=UTF-8/DB=2.1/?COOKIE=U203,K203,I251,B1999++++++,SN,NDefault+login,D2.1,E46d688e2-545,A,H,R213.225.34.80,FY	title word	national union catalogue
Germany (Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern)	https://kxp.k10plus.de/DB=2.1/LNG=DU/?COOKIE=U999,K999,D2.1,Ef1da30bc-e,I0,B9994++++++,SY,A,H12,,73,,76-78,,88-90,NGAST,R213.225.34.80,FN	title word	national union catalogue
Germany (North Rhine-Westphalia)	http://193.30.112.134/F/CC5KC8SUP1VNUR4M3XJLF5G3MM3NBH9SG9YQ4DSQIANLUVB4LQ-00056?func=file&file_name=find-c	title word	national union catalogue
Hungary	http://www.mokka.hu/en/web/guest/home	title word	national union catalogue
Iceland	https://leitir.is/primo-explore/search?sortby=rank&vid=GEGNIR&lang=en_US	title word	national union catalogue
India	https://indcat.inflibnet.ac.in/index.php/search	title word	national union catalogue
Israel	http://merhav.nli.org.il/primo-explore/search?sortby=rank&vid=ULI&lang=en_US&fromRedirectFilter=true&_ga=2.118302861.528956307.1564511401-62759818.1557720315	title word	national union catalogue
Italy	https://opac.sbn.it/sbn3.0/opac/iccu/free.jsp	title word	national union catalogue
Japan	https://ci.nii.ac.jp/books/?l=en	title word	national union catalogue
Jordan	http://hip.jopuls.org.jo/c/portal/layout?p_l_id=PUB.1.1	title word	national union catalogue
Korea (South)	http://www.riss.kr/index.do	title word	national union catalogue
Latvia	https://kopkatalogs.lv/F/D1EURLMQYAK396QQKJJQFMDI9LMKIM24VGH4G2TDSL3E3S79B9-06034?func=find-d-0	title word	national union catalogue
Lithuania	http://www.libis.lt/lang.do?language=en	title word	national union catalogue
Luxembourg	https://a-z.lu/primo-explore/search?vid=BIBNET&tab=all_content&sortby=rank&lang=fr_FR	title word	national union catalogue
Malta	https://www.maltalibraries.gov.mt/iguana/www.main.cls?v=c97386a2-914a-40c2-bd8d-df4c273175e6&searchProfile=PL	title word	national union catalogue
Montenegro	https://plus.cg.cobiss.net/opac7/bib/search/advanced?db=cobib	title word	national union catalogue
New Zealand	https://tepuna.on.worldcat.org/advancedsearch?databaseList=	title word	national union catalogue
Northern Macedonia	https://plus.mk.cobiss.net/opac7/bib/search/advanced?db=cobib	title word	national union catalogue
Philippines	http://opac.librarylink.org.ph/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl	title word	national union catalogue
Poland	http://katalog.nukat.edu.pl	title word	national union catalogue
Portugal	http://porbase.bnportugal.pt/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=156X546T49T43.387531&profile=porbase&menu=search&submenu=subtab15&ts=1564546664942	title word	national union catalogue
Saudi Arabia plus 24 Arab countries –Aruc Arab Union Catalogue	https://www.aruc.org/en/home	title word	national union catalogue
Serbia	http://www.vbs.rs/scripts/cobiss?ukaz=SFRM&id=2006505524603013	title word	national union catalogue
Slovenia	https://plus.si.cobiss.net/opac7/bib/search/advanced?db=cobib	title word	national union catalogue
Sweden	http://libris.kb.se/form_extended.jsp?f=ext	title word	national union catalogue
Switzerland	https://www.swissbib.ch/Search/Advanced	title word	national union catalogue
Thailand	http://uc.thailis.or.th/catalog/Advance.aspx	title word	national union catalogue
Tunisia	http://www.bu.turen.tn/accueil.php	keyword	national union catalogue
Turkey	http://www.toplukatalog.gov.tr/	title word, to be searched with “baslik”	national union catalogue
United Kingdom	https://discover.libraryhub.jisc.ac.uk/advanced-search/	title word	national union catalogue
Vatican	https://opac.vatlib.it/all/	title word	national union catalogue
Albania	http://www.bksh.al/Katalogu/library/wwwopac/wwwroot/beginner/index_gb.html	title word	national library
Argentina	https://catalogo.bn.gov.ar/F/7PUIK1SCSFTP2AUGYGXHTMX2LT3TJIR2IYCA81SXH4B1ATI81B-93924?func=find-b-0#	title word	national library
Australia	https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Search/Advanced	title word	national library
Austria	https://search.onb.ac.at/primo-explore/search?institution=43ACC_ONB&vid=ONB&tab=default_tab&search_scope=ONB_gesamtbestand&mode=advanced&displayMode=full&bulkSize=10&highlight=true&dum=true&query=any,contains,shoah&displayField=all&lang=de_DE	title word	national library
Azerbaijan	http://ek.anl.az/search/advanced?theme=e-kataloq	title word	national library
Bahamas	http://bahamas-voyager-linux.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/vwebv/searchAdvanced	title word	national library
Belarus	https://e-catalog.nlb.by/	title word	national library
Belgium	https://opac.kbr.be/Library/form.aspx?SC=DEFA	title word	national library
Bhutan	https://aleph-01.kb.dk/F/FS4YFD6DYSVU758QC1VX1F24YNG3MXL4CNMBL58NL7VDTXJE1K-01406?func=file&file_name=find-d	title word	national library
Bosnia and Herzegovina	http://www.nub.ba/xnj/index.php/usluge/za-korisnike/online-katalog	title word	national library
Brazil	http://acervo.bn.br/sophia_web/index.html	title word	national library
Canada	https://bac-lac.on.worldcat.org/advancedsearch?databaseList=	title word	national library
Chile	http://descubre.bibliotecanacional.gob.cl/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do;jsessionid=CF683B6C0CC95839C56CBE49E0D0EC4F?mode=Advanced&ct=AdvancedSearch&vid=BNC&dscnt=0&dstmp=1563767016376	title word	national library
China	http://www.nlc.cn/newen/	keyword	national library
Colombia	http://catalogo.bibliotecanacional.gov.co/uhtbin/cgisirsi.exe/?ps=Fzm3rDAI6K/B.NACIONAL/234820014/60/502/X	title word	national library
Costa Rica	http://catalogo.sinabi.go.cr/janium-bin/busqueda_rapida.pl?Id=20190721215044	title word	national library
Croatia	http://katalog.nsk.hr/F?RN=840799691	title word	national library
Cuba	http://bdigital.bnjm.cu/?secc=catalogo	title word	national library
Cyprus	http://opac.cypruslibrary.gov.cy/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl	title word	national library
Czech Republic	https://aleph.nkp.cz/F/?func=file&file_name=find-b&CON_LNG=ENG&local_base=nkc	title word	national library
Denmark	https://rex.kb.dk/primo-explore/search?sortby=rank&vid=NUI&lang=en_US	title word	national library
Ecuador	http://biblioteca.casadelacultura.gob.ec/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl	title word	national library
Egypt	http://balis.bibalex.org/en/OPAC/Home/LoadAdvancedSearchOPAC	title word	national library
Finland	https://kansalliskirjasto.finna.fi/Search/Advanced	title word	national library
France	https://catalogue.bnf.fr/recherche-avancee.do?pageRech=rav	title word	national library
Germany	https://portal.dnb.de/opac.htm;jsessionid=XYUnK4B2geNFDtw9LjkEsww6_9_dRKiQ2O_5Kx2S.prod-fly9?method=showOptions#top	title word	national library
Greece	https://catalogue.nlg.gr/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=ebe0–2&reloadxsl=true#focus	title word	national library
Hungary	http://nektar2.oszk.hu/librivision_eng.html	title word	national library
Iceland	https://leitir.is/primo-explore/search?sortby=rank&vid=GEGNIR&lang=en_US	title word	national library
India	http://opac.nationallibrary.gov.in/cgi-bin/gw/chameleon	title word	national library
Indonesia	http://opac.perpusnas.go.id/	title word	national library
Iran	http://opac.nlai.ir/opac-prod/search/bibliographicAdvancedSearch.do;jsessionid=ECBEACAF7A77A8B0C19FF4EC236212F8?command=NEW_SEARCH&classType=0&pageStatus=1	title word	national library
Iraq	http://www.iraqnla-iq.com/opac/index.php	keyword	national library
Irish Republic	http://catalogue.nli.ie/	title word	national library
Israel	https://merhav.nli.org.il/primo-explore/search?tab=default_tab&search_scope=Local&vid=NLI&lang=en_US&query=any,contains,Shoah	title word	national library
Italy	https://opac.bncf.firenze.sbn.it/opac/controller.jsp?action=search_avanzataedit	title word	national library
Jamaica	https://nlj.worldcat.org/advancedsearch	title word	national library
Japan	https://www.ndl.go.jp/en/	title word	national library
Kazakhstan	http://cat.nlrk.kz/	title word	national library
Korea (South)	http://www.nl.go.kr/english/search/collections.jsp	title word	national library
Kuwait	http://library.nlk.gov.kw/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=central	title word	national library
Latvia	https://primolatvija.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/search?vid=371KISCNLL_VU1&lang=en_US&sortby=rank&mode=advanced	title word	national library
Liechtenstein	http://aleph.bibliothek.li/F?RN=165870401	title word	national library
Lithuania	http://www.libis.lt/lang.do?language=en	title word	national library
Luxembourg	https://a-z.lu/primo-explore/search?vid=BIBNET&tab=all_content&sortby=rank&lang=fr_FR	title word	national library
Malaysia	http://opac.pnm.gov.my/search/advanced?theme=PNM2	title word	national library
Maldives	https://opac.nlm.gov.mv/liberty/opac/search.do?anonymous=true&corporation=default_corp	title word	national library
Malta	https://www.maltalibraries.gov.mt/iguana/www.main.cls?v=c97386a2-914a-40c2-bd8d-df4c273175e6&searchProfile=NL	title word	national library
Mexico	http://bnm.unam.mx/	title word	national library
Moldova	http://catalog.bnrm.md/opac	keyword	national library
Monaco	https://www.mediatheque.mc/Default/form.aspx?SC=DEFAULT	title word	national library
Namibia	http://www.nln.gov.na:8081/client/natlib1/search/advanced;jsessionid=2AF3C9119C32F60112ED140CEB747E9C?	title word	national library
Netherlands	http://opc4.kb.nl/IMPLAND=Y/SRT=YOP/LNG=EN/DB=1/	title word	national library
New Zealand	https://natlib-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/search?vid=NLNZ&sortby=rank&mode=advanced	title word	national library
Norway	https://www.nb.no/en/the-national-library-of-norway/	title word	national library
Oman	http://libweb.squ.edu.om/uhtbin/cgisirsi.exe/?ps=2TEzp8Rne4/MAIN/43560027/60/502/X	title word	national library
Panama	http://biblos.binal.ac.pa/cgi-bin/abnetclwoe/O7014/ID3cc7a9f6?ACC=101	title word	national library
Peru	http://catalogocolectivo.bnp.gob.pe/Externo/Inicio	keyword	national library
Poland	https://katalogi.bn.org.pl/discovery/search?query=any,contains,shoah&tab=BN&search_scope=MyInstitution1&vid=48OMNIS_NLOP:48OMNIS_NLOP&lang=pl&offset=0&mode=advanced	title word	national library
Portugal	http://catalogo.bnportugal.gov.pt/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=	keyword	national library
Romania	http://alephnew.bibnat.ro:8991/F/	title word	national library
Russia	http://aleph.rsl.ru/F/P9Q8JXLGC9G1EC7BKD1GASGQYP8Q8K44STPPS21CRFJNHFEFRI-00541?func=file&file_name=find-b&CON_LNG=ENG	title word	national library
Saudi Arabia	https://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/search/basic?vid=0&sid=f71ba5be-044f-42c1-bbe1-7f28e64fea1d%40sessionmgr101	title word	national library
Serbia	http://www.vbs.rs/scripts/cobiss?command=CONNECT&base=70000&lani=sr&scri=cyr	title word	national library
Singapore	https://catalogue.nlb.gov.sg/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/BIBENQ	title word	national library
Slovak Republic	https://chamo.kis3g.sk/search/advanced?theme=snk	title word	national library
Slovenia	https://plus.cobiss.si/opac7/bib/search?db=nuk	keyword	national library
Spain	http://catalogo.bne.es/uhtbin/webcat	title word	national library
Sweden	https://ask.kb.se/F/VTA657BM8FENYBEX3JD61QDQCXVUUDSSVXBGJ7FG91S14XP86S-06493?func=file&file_name=find-a	title word	national library
Switzerland	https://nb-helveticat.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=41SNL_51_INST:helveticat&sortby=rank&lang=de&mode=advanced	title word	national library
Taiwan – China	http://aleweb.ncl.edu.tw/F/LFJC3H9BNB46K4DNXC3CPBXT5U2XEE3K2AJJ5BVGEUISI3VMPU-30157?func=file&file_name=find-b&CON_LNG=ENG	title word	national library
Thailand	http://www.library.nlt.go.th:8991/F/7U2S9QUFR3EQCDY56QMVYEK4AQ6GIFPEJ1ELJ6FGDBBAC292M4-05631?func=find-d-0	title word	national library
Trinidad and Tobago	http://opac.nalis.gov.tt/uhtbin/cgisirsi.exe/?ps=JCuxBCEcAU/POSAL/X/60/1180/X	title word	national library
Turkey	https://kasif.mkutup.gov.tr/	title word	national library
Ukraine	http://irbis-nbuv.gov.ua/cgi-bin/irbis_all/cgiirbis_64.exe	keyword	national library
United Kingdom	http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do;jsessionid=F4E94E7CC3F15C671C18273C6308CC22?mode=Advanced&ct=AdvancedSearch&vid=BLVU1&dscnt=0&dstmp=1564483542975	title word	national library
United States	https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced	title word	national library
Uruguay	http://catalogo.bn.gub.uy:8080/F?func=find-b-0&local_base=BNU01	title word	national library
Vatican	https://opac.vatlib.it/all/	title word	national library
Venezuela	http://sisbiv.bnv.gob.ve/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=ti&q=shoah&branch_group_limit=	title word	national library
Australia	https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/search.w3p;adv=yes;orderBy=date-eFirst;query=Dataset%3Alcatalog;resCount=Default	title word	parliamentary library
Austria	http://bibliothek.parlament.gv.at/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do;jsessionid=67BE76AEB4587B463D4AF7E0E9C17C3C?mode=Advanced&ct=AdvancedSearch&vid=PAR&dscnt=0&dstmp=1563788767835	title word	parliamentary library
Brazil	http://biblioteca2.senado.gov.br:8991/F/?func=find-b-0&local_base=sen01	title word	parliamentary library
Canada	https://parl-gc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=01CALP_INST:01CALP&lang=en&mode=advanced	title word	parliamentary library
Chile	https://www.bcn.cl/catalogo	title word	parliamentary library
European Union	https://europarl-eplibrary.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/search?vid=32EPA_V1&lang=en_US&mode=advanced	title word	parliamentary library
Finland	https://eduskunnankirjasto.finna.fi/Search/Advanced	title word	parliamentary library
Georgia	https://catalog.nplg.gov.ge/search*eng	title word	parliamentary library
Germany	https://opac.bundestag.de/aDISWeb/app;jsessionid=925A2B0B8C43F1C58E94A3371A0F66E4?service=direct/1/POOLBUNEWWW21@@@_44029200_35D4CF80/SAA0_ddGFBO_2.directlink&sp=S%24%24GFBO_2&sp=SS6&requestCount=0	title word	parliamentary library
Italy	http://opac.parlamento.it/F/6YL938SKYHHR8SD2P7NQ4D7VF1IU43RSMAI92LCDHBJPC7K97H-34375?func=file&file_name=find-m	title word	parliamentary library
Japan	https://ndlonline.ndl.go.jp/#!/search?searchCode=SIMPLE&lang=en&keyword=shoah	title word	parliamentary library
Mexico	http://biblioteca.diputados.gob.mx/janium-bin/busqueda_rapida.pl?Id=20190721234726	title word	parliamentary library
Spain	http://www.madrid.org/biblio_publicas/cgi-bin/abnetopac/O9846/ID66392401/NT1?ACC=120&FORM=2&xindbt=%271%27	title word	parliamentary library
Sweden	https://riksdagen.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?sortby=rank&vid=46RIKS_INST:VU1&lang=en&mode=advanced	title word	parliamentary library
Switzerland	https://biblio.parlament.ch/libero/WebOpac.cls?VERSION=2&ACTION=LANGXX&RSN=0&DATA=PDB&TOKEN=o1t3MEKdch4010&Z=1	title word	parliamentary library
United States	https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced	title word	parliamentary library
African Union	http://library.africa-union.org/	keyword	international organization library
Asian Development Bank	https://library.adb.org/iii/encore/home?lang=eng&suite=def&advancedSearch=true&searchString=	title word	international organization library
Council of Europe	http://normalsup.coe.int/uhtbin/cgisirsi.exe/?ps=tb3ysTuYcB/ARCHIVES/X/60/79/X	title word	international organization library
European Union	https://ec-europa-finder.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/search?vid=32EUC_VU1&search_scope=default_scope&query=any,contains,shoah&lang=en_US&mode=advanced	title word	international organization library
International Labour Organization	https://ilo.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?vid=41ILO_INST:41ILO_V1&sortby=rank&lang=en&mode=advanced	title word	international organization library
NATO	https://n10314uk.eos-intl.eu/N10314UK/OPAC/Search/AdvancedSearch.aspx	keyword	international organization library
OSCE Academy (Bishkek)	http://www.osce-academy.net/en/librarycatalog/	title word	international organization library
UN ECA Addis Ababa	http://encore.uneca.org/iii/encore/home?lang=eng&suite=gold&advancedSearch=true&searchString=	title word	international organization library
UN ECLAC Santiago	https://pmt-eu.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/search?institution=41UNOG&vid=41UNSO_V2&tab=tab%3Ddefault_tab&search_scope=41unog_alma_eclac&mode=advanced&displayMode=full&bulkSize=10&highlight=true&dum=true&query=any,contains,shoah&displayField=all&pcAvailabiltyMode=true&lang=es_ES	title word	international organization library
UN ESCWA Beirut	https://olib.escwa.org.lb/webview?infile=advsearchform.glu&style=adv	title word	international organization library
UNESCO Digital Library	Classify.oclc.org	title word	international organization library
United Nations Geneva	http://pmt-eu.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?mode=Advanced&ct=AdvancedSearch&vid=41UNOG_V1&dscnt=0&dstmp=1564560649867	title word	international organization library
United Nations New York	http://pmt-eu.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?mode=Advanced&ct=AdvancedSearch&frbg=&&fn=search&indx=1&dscnt=0&vid=41DHL_V1&ct=search&srt=rank&tab=default_tab&vl(freeText0)=shoah&dum=true&dstmp=1564560260712	title word	international organization library
World Bank and IMF	https://imf-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/search?vid=01TIMF_INST_V1&lang=en_US&mode=advanced	title word	international organization library

Appendix Table 2: Library catalogues of the Pontifical Universities in the city of Rome, by international comparison

Library catalogue	Website	Search profile
Biblioteca “Paolo VI” – Pontificia Facoltà di Scienze dell’Educazione “Auxilium”	http://oseegenius1.urbe.it/aux/advanced?a=reset	title word
Papal University John Paul II, Krakow, Poland	http://biblioteka.upjp2.edu.pl/	keyword
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago	https://buscador.bibliotecas.uc.cl/primo-explore/search?vid=56PUC_INST&lang=es_CL&mode=advanced	title word
Pontifical Gregorian University “Gregoriana” (Society of Jesus; “Jesuits”)	https://oseegenius.unigre.it/pug/?l=en	title word
Pontifical Lateran University “Lateranum” (Diocese of Rome)	http://oseegenius.pul.it/pul/advanced?a=reset	title word
Pontifical Salesian University “Salesianum” (Society of St. Francis de Sales; “Salesians of Don Bosco”)	http://webopacups.urbe.it/libero/WebOpac.cls	title word
Pontifical University of St. Anthony “Antonianum” (Order of Friars Minor; “Franciscans”)	http://oseegenius2.urbe.it/ant/advanced?a=reset	title word
Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas “Angelicum” (Order of Preachers; “Dominicans”)	https://pust.urbe.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl	title word
Pontifical University of the Holy Cross “Santa Croce” (Personal Prelature of the Holy Cross; “Opus Dei”)	http://catalogo.pusc.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl	title word
Pontifical Xavierian University, Bogotá	http://biblos.javeriana.edu.co/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/SIRSI/0/57/60/495/X?user_id=WEBSERVER	title word
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro	http://www.dbd.puc-rio.br/pergamum/biblioteca/index.php?resolution2=1024_1&tipo_pesquisa=&filtro_bibliotecas=&filtro_obras=&word=shoah	title word
Pontifical Orient Institute	http://unipio.org/en/library/catalog/	title word

* * *

Notes