Notable book burnings have taken place throughout history.
Following the advice of minister Li Si, Emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of all philosophy books and history books from states other than Qin — beginning in 213 BCE. This was followed by the live burial of a large number of intellectuals who did not comply with the state dogma.
Li Si is reported to have said: "I, your servant, propose that all historian's records other than those of Qin's be burned. With the exception of the academics whose duty includes possessing books, if anyone under heaven has copies of the Shi Jing, the Classic of History, or the writings of the hundred schools of philosophy, they shall deliver them [the books] to the governor or the commandant for burning. Anyone who dares to discuss the Shi Jing or the Classic of History shall be publicly executed. Anyone who uses history to criticize the present shall have his family executed. Any official who sees the violations but fails to report them is equally guilty. Anyone who has failed to burn the books after thirty days of this announcement shall be subjected to tattooing and be sent to build the Great Wall. The books that have exemption are those on medicine, divination, agriculture and forestry. Those who have interest in laws shall instead study from officials."[1]
The damage to Chinese culture was compounded during the revolts which ended the short rule of Qin Er Shi, Qin Shi Huang's son. The imperial palace and state archives were burned, destroying many of the remaining written records that had been spared by the father.
Several other large book burnings also occurred in Chinese history.[2] It appears they occurred in every dynasty following the Qin, but it is unknown how often.[3]
The Classical Greek philosopher Protagoras was a proponent of agnosticism, writing in a now lost work entitled On the Gods: "Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.[4] According to Diogenes Laertius, the above outspoken Agnostic position taken by Protagoras aroused anger, causing the Athenians to expel him from their city, where the authorities ordered all copies of the book to be collected and burned in the marketplace. The same story is also mentioned by Cicero.[5] However, the Classicist John Burnet doubts this account, as both Diogenes Laertius and Cicero wrote hundreds of years later and no such persecution of Protagoras is mentioned by contemporaries who make extensive references to this philosopher.[6] Burnet notes that even if some copies of Protagoras' book were burned, enough of them survived to be known and discussed in the following century.
The Bundahishn - an encyclopædiaic collection of Zoroastrian cosmogony and cosmology - refers to "Aleskandar" (Alexander the Great) as having burned the Avesta (Zoroastrian Scriptures), following his defeat of "Dara" (Darius III). For this act of sacrilage, Alexander's name was regularly accompanied in Zoroastrian texts by the appelation Gojastak or Gojaste (The Damned). No such act by Alexander is recorded in Greek and Latin accounts of his life - these, however, tend to depict Alexander in a favorable light.
In 168 BCE the Seleucid monarch Antiochus IV ordered Jewish 'Books of the Law' found in Jerusalem to be 'rent in pieces' and burned[7] - part of the series of persecutions which precipitated the revolt of the Maccabees.
In 17 BCE, Virgil died and in his will ordered that his masterpiece, the Aeneid, be burned, as it was a draft and not a final version. However, his friends disobeyed him and released the epic poem after editing it themselves.[8]
In 25 CE Senator Aulus Cremutius Cordus was forced to commit suicide and his History was burned by the aediles, under the order of the senate. The book's praise of Brutus and Cassius, who had assassinated Julius Caesar, was considered an offence under the lex majestatis. A copy of the book was saved by Cordus' daughter Marcia, and it was published again under Caligula. However, only a few fragments survived to the present.[9][10][11]
Flavius Josephus[12] relates that about the year 50 a Roman soldier seized a Torah scroll and, with abusive and mocking language, burned it in public. This incident almost brought on a general Jewish revolt against Roman rule, such as broke out two decades later. However, the Roman Procurator Cumanus appeased the Jewish populace by beheading the culprit.
According to the New Testament book of Acts, early converts to Christianity in Ephesus who had previously practiced sorcery burned their scrolls: "A number who had practised sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas." (Acts 19:19, NIV)[13]
Under the Emperor Hadrian, the teaching of the Jewish Scriptures was forbidden, as in the wake of the Bar Kochva Rebellion the Roman authorities regarded such teaching as seditious and tending towards revolt. Haninah ben Teradion, one of the Jewish Ten Martyrs executed for having defied that ban, is reported to have been burned at the stake together with the forbidden Torah scroll which he had been teaching. According to Jewish tradition, when the flame started to burn himself and the scroll he still managed to say to his pupils: "I see the scrolls burning but the letters fly up in the air" - a saying considered to symbolize the superiority of ideas to brute force. While in the original applying to sacred writings only, 20th Century Israeli writers also quoted this saying in the context of non-religious ideals.[14][15]
In the same period a Torah scroll was also burned ceremoniously on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, in this case without a human being added.
Among five catastrophes said to have overtaken the Jews on the Seventeenth of Tammuz, the Mishnah[16] includes "the burning of the Torah by Apostomus". Since no further details are given and there are no other references to Apostomus in Jewish or non-Jewish sources, the exact time and circumstances of this traumatic event are debated, historians assigning to it different dates in Jewish history under Seleucid or Roman rule, and it might be identical with one of the events noted above (see Apostomus page).
The book Established beliefs of Epicurus was burned in a Paphlagonian marketplace by order of the charlatan Alexander, supposed prophet of Ascapius ca 160[17]
A decree of emperor Diocletian in 303, calling for an increased persecution of Christians, included the burning of Christian books. At that time, the governor of Valencia offered the deacon who would become known as Saint Vincent of Saragossa to have his life spared in exchange for his consigning Scripture to the fire. Vincent refused and let himself be executed instead. In religious paintings he is often depicted holding the book whose preservation he preferred to his own life (see illustration in Saint Vincent of Saragossa page.)[18]
The books of Arius and his followers, after the first Council of Nicaea (325 B.C.E.), were burned for heresy. Arius was exiled and presumably assassinated following this, and Arian books continued to be regularly burned into the 330s.[19]
In 364, the Christian Emperor Jovian ordered the entire Library of Antioch to be burnt.[20] It had been heavily stocked by the aid of his non-Christian predecessor, Emperor Julian.
Elaine Pagels claims that in 367, Athanasius ordered monks in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria in his role as bishop of Alexandria to destroy all "unacceptable writings" in Egypt, the list of writings to be saved constituting the New Testament.[21]
The Sibylline Books were a collection of oracular sayings. According to myth,[22] the Cumaean sibyl offered Lucius Tarquinius Superbus the books for a high price, and when he refused, burned three. When he refused to buy the remaining six at the same price, she again burned three, finally forcing him to buy the last three at the original price. The quindecimviri sacris faciundis watched over the surviving books in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but could not prevent their being burned when the temple burned down in 83 BCE. They were replaced by a similar collection of oracular sayings from around the Mediterranean in 76 BCE, along with the sayings of the Tiburtine sibyl, and then checked by priests for perceived accuracy as compared to the burned originals.[23] These remained until for political reasons they were burned by Flavius Stilicho (died 408).[24]
In 385, the theologian Priscillian of Ávila became the first Christian to be executed by fellow-Christians as a heretic. Some (though not all) of his writings were condemned as heretical and burned. For many centuries they were considered irreversibly lost, but surviving copies were discovered in the 19th century.[25]
The Sassanid Empire's capital Ctesiphon was conquered by Arab armies under the military command of Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqas in 637, during the caliphate of Umar. Though the general population was not harmed, the palaces were burned, leading to destruction of archives recording centuries of Sassenid history.
The library of the Serapeum in Alexandria was trashed, burned and looted, 392, at the decree of Theophilus of Alexandria, who was ordered so by Theodosius I. Around the same time, Hypatia was murdered. One of the largest destructions of books occurred at the Library of Alexandria, traditionally held to be in 640; however, the precise years are unknown as are whether the fires were intentional or accidental.[26][27]
Etrusca Disciplina, the Etruscan books of cult and divination, were collected and burned in the 5th century.[28][29]
The books of Nestorius, declared to be heresy, were burned under an edict of Theodosius II(435).[30][31] The Greek originals of most writings were irrevocably destroyed, surviving mainly in Syriac translations.
Uthman ibn 'Affan, the third Caliph of Islam after Muhammad, who is credited with overseeing the collection of the verses of the Qur'an, ordered the destruction of any other remaining text containing verses of the Quran after the Quran has been fully collected, circa 650. This was done to ensure that the collected and authenticated Quranic copy that Uthman collected became the primary source for others to follow, thereby ensuring that Uthman's version of the Quran remained authentic. Although the Qur'an had mainly been propagated through oral transmission, it also had already been recorded in at least three codices, most importantly the codex of Abdullah ibn Mas'ud in Kufa, and the codex of Ubayy ibn Ka'b in Syria. Sometime between 650 and 656, a committee appointed by Uthman is believed to have produced a singular version in seven copies, and Uthman is said to have "sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered any other Qur'anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt."[32]
After the conquest of Toledo, Spain (1085) by the king of Castile, it was being disputed on whether Iberian Christians should follow the foreign Roman rite or the traditional Mozarabic rite. After other ordeals, it was submitted to the trial by fire: One book for each rite was thrown into a fire. The Toledan book was little damaged after the Roman one was consumed. Henry Jenner comments in the Catholic Encyclopedia: "No one who has seen a Mozarabic manuscript with its extraordinarily solid vellum, will adopt any hypothesis of Divine Interposition here."[33]
The provincial synod held at Soissons (in France) in 1121 condemned the teachings of the famous theologian Peter Abelard as heresy; he was forced to burn his own book before being shut up inside the convent of St. Medard at Soissons.[34]
The rebellious monk Arnold of Brescia - Abelard's pupil and colleague - refused to abjure his views after they were condemned at the Synod of Sens in 1141, and went on to lead the Commune of Rome in direct opposition to the Pope, until being executed in 1155. The Church ordered the burning of all his writings, which was carried out so thoroughly than none of them survives and it is unknown even what they were - except for what can be inferred from polemics against him.[35] Nevertheless, though no written word of Arnold's has survived, his teachings on apostolic poverty continued potent after his death, among "Arnoldists" and more widely among Waldensians and the Spiritual Franciscans.
The library of Nalanda, known as Dharma Gunj (Mountain of Truth) or Dharmagañja (Treasury of Truth), was the most renowned repository of Buddhist and Hindu knowledge in the world at the time. Its collection was said to comprise hundreds of thousands of volumes, so extensive that it burned for months when set aflame by Muslim invaders in 1193.[36]
The Royal Library of the Samanid Dynasty was burned at the turn of the 11th century during the Turkic invasion from the east. Avicenna was said to have tried to save the precious manuscripts from the fire as the flames engulfed the collection.[37][38][39]
Following the conversion of the Maldives to Islam in 1153 (or by some accounts in 1193), the Buddhist religion - hitherto state religion for more than a thousand years - was suppressed. The copper-plate document known as Dhanbidhū Lōmāfānu gives information about events the southern Haddhunmathi Atoll, which had been a major center of Buddhism, where monks were beheaded, and statues of Vairocana, the transcendent Buddha, were destroyed. At that time, also the wealth of Buddhist manuscripts written on screwpine leaves by Maldivian monks in their Buddhist monasteries was either burnt or otherwise so thoroughly eliminated that it has disappeared without leaving any trace.
During the 13th century, the Catholic Church waged a brutal campaign against the Cathars of Languedoc (smaller numbers also lived elsewhere in Europe), culminating in the Albigensian Crusade. Nearly every Cathar text that could be found was destroyed, in an effort to completely extirpate their heretical beliefs; only a few are known to have survived.[40]
Maimonides' major philosophical and theological work, "Guide for the Perplexed", got highly mixed reactions from fellow-Jews of his and later times - some revering it and viewing it as a triumph, while others deemed many of its ideas heretical, banning it and on some occasions burning copies of it.[41] One such burning took place at Montpellier, Southern France, in 1233.
In 1242, The French crown burned all Talmud copies in Paris, about 12,000, after the book was "charged" and "found guilty" in the Paris trial sometimes called "the Paris debate". This burnings of Hebrew books were initiated by Pope Gregory IX, who persuaded French King Louis IX to undertake it. This particular book burning was commemorated by the German Rabbi and poet Meir of Rothenburg in the elegy (kinna) called "Ask, O you who are burned in fire" (שאלי שרופה באש), which is recited to this day by Ashkenazi Jews on the fast of Tisha B'av.
Since the Church and Christian states viewed the Talmud as a book hateful and insulting toward Christ and gentiles, subsequent popes were also known to organize public burnings of Jewish books. The most well known of them were Innocent IV (1243–1254), Clement IV (1256–1268), John XXII (1316–1334), Paul IV (1555–1559), Pius V (1566–1572) and Clement VIII (1592–1605).
Once the printing press was invented, the Church found it impossible to destroy entire printed editions of the Talmud and other sacred books. Johann Gutenberg, the German who invented the printing press around 1450, certainly helped stamp out the effectiveness of further book burnings. The tolerant (for its time) policies of Venice made it a center for the printing of Jewish books (as of books in general), yet the Talmud was publicly burned in 1553 and there was a lesser known burning of Hebrew book in 1568.
The House of Wisdom was destroyed during the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, along with all other libraries in Baghdad. It was said that the waters of the Tigris ran black for six months with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river.
In 1410 John Wycliffe's books were burnt by the illiterate Prague archbishop Zbyněk Zajíc z Házmburka in the court of his palace in Lesser Town of Prague to hinder the spread of Jan Hus's teaching.
According to the Madrid Codex, the fourth tlatoani Itzcoatl (ruling from 1427 (or 1428) to 1440) ordered the burning of all historical codices because it was "not wise that all the people should know the paintings".[42] Among other purposes, this allowed the Aztec state to develop a state-sanctioned history and mythos that venerated the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli.
In the 1480s Tomas Torquemada promoted the burning of non-Catholic literature, especially the Jewish Talmud and also Arabic books after the final defeat of the Moors at Granada in 1492.
In 1497, followers of the Italian priest Girolamo Savonarola collected and publicly burned books and objects which were deemed to be "immoral", some - but by no means all - of which might fit modern criteria of pornography or "lewd pictures", as well as pagan books, gaming tables, cosmetics, copies of Boccaccio's Decameron, and all the works of Ovid which could be found in Florence.
In 1490 a number of Hebrew Bibles and other Jewish books were burned at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition. In 1499 about 5000 Arabic manuscripts were consumed by flames in the public square at Granada on the orders of Ximénez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo.[43][44] Many of the poetic works were allegedly destroyed on account of their symbolized homoeroticism.[45] The German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine wrote about this, stating "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" (Where they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn humans), a quote written on the monument for the Nazi Book Burnings today.
In October 1526 William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament was burned in London by Cuthbert Tunstal, Bishop of London.
Angelo Carletti di Chivasso's work on Scotist theology, widely taken up in the Catholic Church, so infuriated Martin Luther that the Protestant founder had it publicly burned.
In 1553, Servetus was burned as a heretic at the order of the city council of Geneva, dominated by Calvin - because a remark in his translation of Ptolemy's Geographia was considered an intolerable heresy. As he was placed on the stake, "around [Servetus'] waist were tied a large bundle of manuscript and a thick octavo printed book", his Christianismi Restitutio. In the same year the Catholic authorities at Vienne also burned Servetus in effigy together with whatever of his writings fell into their hands, in token of the fact that Catholics and Protestants - mutually hostile in this time - were united in regarding Servetus as a heretic and seeking to extirpate his works. At the time it was considered that they succeeded, but three copies were later found to have survived, from which all later editions were printed.
"The Historie of Italie" (1549), a scholarly and in itself not particularly controversial book by William Thomas, was in 1554 suppressed and publicly burnt by order of Queen Mary I of England - after its author was executed on charges of treason. Enough copies survived for new editions to be published in 1561 and 1562, after Elizabeth I came to power.[46]
July 12, 1562, Fray Diego de Landa, acting Bishop of Yucatan - then recently conquered by the Spanish - threw into the fires the sacred books of the Maya.[47] The number of destroyed books is greatly disputed. De Landa himself admitted to 27, other sources claim "99 times as many" - the later being disputed as an exaggeration motivated by anti-Spanish feeling, the so-called Black Legend. Only three Maya codices and a fragment of a fourth survive. Approximately 5,000 Maya cult images were also burned at the same time. The burning of books and images alike were part of de Landa's effort to eradicate the Maya "idol worship", which he considered "diabolical". As narrated by de Landa himself, he had gained access to the sacred books, transcribed on deerskin, by previously gaining the natives' trust and showing a considerable interest in their culture and language:[48][49] "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."[50] De Landa was later recalled to Spain and accused of having acted illegally in Yucatan, though eventually found not guilty of these charges. Present-day apologists for de Landa assert that, while he had destroyed the Maya books, his own Relación de las cosas de Yucatán is a major source for the Mayan language and culture. Allen Wells calls his work an “ethnographic masterpiece”,[51] while William J. Folan, Laraine A. Fletcher and Ellen R. Kintz have written that Landa‘s account of Maya social organization and towns before conquest is a “gem.[52]”
In 1584 Pasquale Vassallo, a Maltese Dominican friar, wrote a collection of songs, of the kind known as "canczuni", in Italian and Maltese. The poems fell into the hands of other Dominican friars who denounced him for writing "obscene literature". At the order of the Inquisition in 1585 the poems were burned for this allegedly 'obscene' content.[53]
The 12-volume work known as the Florentine Codex, result of a decades-long meticulous research conducted by the Fransciscan Bernardino de Sahagún in Mexico, is among the most important sources on Aztec culture and society as they were before the Spanish conquest, and on the Nahuatl language. However, upon Sahagún's return to Europe in 1585, his original manuscripts - including the records of conversations and interviews with indigenous sources in Tlatelolco, Texcoco, and Tenochtitlan, and likely to have included much primary material which did not get into the final codex - were confiscated by the Spanish authorities, disappeared irrevocably, and are assumed to have been destroyed. The Florentine Codex itself was for centuries afterwards only known in heavily-censored versions.
Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible was burned in Catholic-dominated parts of Germany in 1624, by order of the Pope - part of the exacerbation of Catholic-Protestant relations due to the Thirty Years' War, then in its early stages.
The 1624 book An Examination of the Traditions of the Pharisees, written by the dissident Jewish intellectual Uriel da Costa, was burned in public by joint action of the Amsterdam Jewish Community and the city's Protestant-dominated City Council. The book, which questioned the fundamental idea of the immortality of the soul, was considered heretical from the Jewish and the Christian points of view alike.
The theologian and scientist Marco Antonio de Dominis came in 1624 into conflict with the Inquisition in Rome and was declared "a relapsed heretic". He died in prison, which did not end his trial. On 21 December 1624 his body was burned together with his works.
Sixty identified printed books, pamphlets and broadsheets and 3 newsbooks were ordered to be burned during this turbulent period, spanning the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell's rule.[54]
During the English Civil War in 1646, Thomas Fairfax ordered the New Model Army to burn the private library of the Earl of Worcester in Raglan Castle.
The first book burning incident in the Thirteen Colonies occurred in Boston in 1651 when William Pynchon, founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, published The Meritous Price of our Redemption, which criticised the Puritans, who were then in power in Massachusetts. The book became the first banned book in North America, and subsequently all known copies were publicly burned and Pynchon was deported back to England.
In 1656 the authorities at Boston imprisoned the Quaker women preachers Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, who had arrived on a ship from Barbados. Among other things they were charged with "bringing with them and spreading here sundry books, wherein are contained most corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous doctrines contrary to the truth of the gospel here professed amongst us" as the colonial gazette put it. The books in question, about a hundred, were publicly burned in Boston's Market Square.
In 1666, during the Great Fire of London, many booksellers moved their books to the stone crypts of Old St. Paul's Cathedral to escape destruction of their books, but the crypt collapsed and all the books were burned.
In 1683 several books by Thomas Hobbes and other authors were burnt in Oxford University.
During the 1720s rabbis in Italy and Germany ordered the burning of the kabbalist writings of the then young Moshe Chaim Luzzatto. The Messianic messages which Luzzatto claimed to have gotten from a being called "The Maggid" were considered heretical and potentially highly disruptive of the Jewish communities' daily life, and Luzzatto was ordered to cease disseminating them. Though Luzzatto in later life got considerable renown among Jews and his later books were highly esteemed, most of the early writings were considered irrevocably lost until some of them turned up in 1958 in a manuscript preserved in the Library of Oxford.
In 1731 Count Leopold Anton von Firmian - Archbishop of Salzburg as well as its temporal ruler - embarked on a savage persecution of the Lutherans living in the rural regions of Salzburg. As well expelling tens of thousands of Protestant Salzburgers, the Archbishop ordered the wholesale seizure and burning of all Protestant books and Bibles.
In 1733, Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni burned his tragedy Amalasunta due to negative reception by his audiences.
In 1750, the Imperial Book Commission of the Holy Roman Empire at Frankfurt/Main ordered the wholesale burning of the works of Johann Christian Edelmann, a radical disciple of Spinoza who had outraged the Lutheran and Calvinist clergies by his Deism, his championing of sexual freedom and his asserting that Jesus had been a human being and not the Son of God. In addition, Edelmann was also an outspoken opponent of royal absolutism. With Frankfurt's entire magistracy and municipal government in attendance and seventy guards to hold back the crowds, nearly a thousand copies of Edelmann's writings were tossed on to a tower of flaming birch wood. Edelmann himself was granted refuge in Berlin by Friedrich the Great, but on condition that he stop publishing his views.[55]
China's Qianlong Emperor (1711– 1799) embarked on an ambitious program - the Siku Quanshu, largest compilation of books in Chinese history (possibly in human history in general). The enterprise included, however, also the systematic banning and burning of books considered "unfitting" to be included - especially those critical, even by subtle hints, of the ruling Qing Dynasty. During this Emperor's nearly sixty years on the throne, the destruction of about 3000 "evil" titles (books, poems, and plays) was decreed, the number of individual copies confiscated and destroyed variously estimated at tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands. As well as systematically destroying the written works, 53 authors of such works were executed, in some cases by lingering torture or along with their family members (see literary inquisition#Qing, Qianlong Emperor#Burning of books and modification of texts). A famous earlier Chinese encyclopedia, Tiangong Kaiwu (Chinese: 天工開物) was included among the works banned and destroyed at this time, and was long considered to be lost forever - but some original copies were eventually discovered, preserved intact in Japan.[56] Ironically, the Qianlong Emperor's own masterpiece - the Siku Quanshu, produced only in seven hand-written copies - was itself the target of later book burnings: the copies kept in Zhenjiang and Yangzhou were destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion, and in 1860, during the Second Opium War an Anglo-French expedition force burned most of the copy kept at Beijing's Old Summer Palace. The four remaining copies, though suffering some damage during World War II, are still preserved at four Chinese museums and libraries.
The 1760 tract by Simeon Uriel Freudenberger from Luzern, arguing that Wilhelm Tell was a myth and the acts attributed to him had not happened in reality, was publicly burnt in Altdorf, capital of the Swiss canton of Uri — where, according to the legend, William Tell shot the apple from his son's head.
Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet, was a writer whose works were burnt several times in pre-revolutionary France. His "Lettres philosophique", published in Rouen in 1734 and giving his describing British attitudes toward government, literature, and religion clearly implied that the British constitutional monarchy was better than the French absolute one - which led to the book being burned.
Later, Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique, which was originally called the Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, had its first volume, consisting of 73 articles in 344 pages, burnt upon release in June 1764.[57]
An "economic pamphlet", Man With Forty Crowns, was ordered to be burnt by Parliament, and a bookseller who had sold a copy was pilloried. It is said that one of the magistrates on the case exclaimed, "Is it only his books we shall burn?"[58]
In 1787, an attempt by the Catholic authorities at Mainz to introduce vernacular hymn books encountered strong resistance from conservative Catholics, who refused to abandon the old Latin books and who seized and burned copies of the new German language books.[59]
Many French scholars accompanied Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1799, where they made many important finds. When forced to surrender to the British in 1801, the scholars initially strongly resisted the claim made by the British to have the collections of the expedition handed over. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire ominously threatened that, were that British demand persisted in, history would record "a second burning of a library in Alexandria". The threat was, however, not carried out, and the finds were finally handed over and ended up in the British Museum.
In 1808, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov burned the only copy or copies of one of his own books for an unknown reason. Many Hasidic Jews continue to search for "The Burned Book," as they call it, by looking for clues in his other writings.
In 1812 the Goa Inquisition was suppressed, after hundreds of years in which it had been enacting various kinds of religions persecution in the Portugese colony of Goa, India. In the aftermath, most of the Goa Inquisition's records were destroyed - a great loss to historians, making it is impossible to know the exact number of the Inquisition's victims.[60]
On October 18, 1817 about 450 students, members of the newly founded German Burschenschaften ("fraternities"), came together at Wartburg Castle to celebrate the German victory over Napoleon two years before, condemn conservatism and call for German unity. The Code Napoléon as well as the writings of German conservatives were ceremoniously burned 'in effigy': instead of the costly volumes, scraps of parchment with the titles of the books were placed on the bonfire. Among these was August von Kotzebue's History of the German Empires. Karl Ludwig Sand, one of the students participating in this gathering, would assassinate Kotzebue two years later.
In 1842, officials at the school for the blind in Paris, France, were ordered by its new director, Armand Dufau, to burn books written in the new braille code. After every braille book at the institute that could be found was burned, supporters of the code's inventor, Louis Braille, rebelled against Dufau by continuing to use the code, and braille was eventually restored at the school.[61]
On 8 May 1844, the Irish St. Augustine Church, Philadelphia was burned down by anti-Irish Nativist rioters (see Philadelphia Nativist Riots). The fire also destroyed the nearby St. Augustine Academy, with many of the rare books in its library - though in this case the arsonists did not specifically target the books, but rather sought to destroy indiscriminately everything belonging to Irish Catholic immigrants.
In 1860, during the Second Opium War, twenty captive Westerners were tortured and killed by the Chinese government. In retaliation, the British High Commissioner to China, Lord Elgin, ordered the destruction of The Old Summer Palace in Beijing, which was then carried out by French and British troops. The palace complex had been built up by succeeding Chinese dynasties for nearly a thousand years, and many unique works of art were destroyed or looted by the soldiers. Also unique copies of Chinese literary work and compilations, stored there, were burned down as part of the general destruction.
In 1868 the French police, under Napoleon the Third, seized the extensive papers and Europe-wide correspondence of the Parisian Pacifist and Social Reformer Edmond Potonie. The papers, which might have been of considerable value to historians, have disappeared irrevocably and are assumed to have been destroyed.[62]
Anthony Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873 and over the years burned 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plate, and almost 4 million pictures. Lobbying the United States Congress also led to the enactment of the Comstock laws.
Following the death of noted American poet Emily Dickinson in 1890, her sister Lavinia Dickinson burned almost all of her correspondences in keeping with Emily's wishes, but as it was unclear whether the forty notebooks and loose sheets all filled with almost 1800 poems were to be included in this, Lavinia saved these and began to publish the poems that year.[63][64]
In 1901 the Russian Council of Ministers banned a five-volume work on the socio-economic conditions of Jews in the Russian Empire, the result of a decade-long comprehensive statistical research commissioned by Ivan Bloch. (It was entitled "Comparison of the material and moral levels in the Western Great-Russian and Polish Regions"). The research's conclusions - that Jewish economic activity was beneficial to the Empire - refuted antisemitic demagoguery and were disliked by the government, which ordered all copies to be seized and burned. Only a few survived, circulating as great rarities.
Many books and writings were destroyed by the Communists during their rule in Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reports that large numbers were burnt.[65]
On August 25, 1914, in the early stage of the First World War, the university library of Leuven, Belgium was destroyed by the German army, using petrol and incendiary pastilles, as part of brutal retaliations for the extensive activity of "francs-tireurs" against the occupying German forces. Among the 300,000 books destroyed were many irreplaceable books, including Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts.[66][67] At the time, this destruction aroused shock and dismay around the world.
In 1918 the Valley of the Squinting Windows, by Brinsley MacNamara, was burned in Delvin, Ireland. MacNamara never returned to the area, his father James MacNamara was boycotted and subsequently emigrated, and a court case was even sought. The book criticised the village's inhabitants for being overly concerned with their image towards neighbours, and although it called the town "Garradrimna," geographical details made it clear that Delvin was meant.
In June 1920 the left-wing German cartoonist George Grosz produced a lithographic collection in three editions entitled Gott mit uns. A satire on German society and the counterrevolution, the collection was swiftly banned. Grosz was charged with insulting the army, which resulted in a court order to have the collection destroyed. The artist also had to pay a 300 German Mark fine.[68]
At the culmination of the April 1922 fighting in and around the Four Courts in Dublin, as the Republican forces hitherto barricaded in the building were surrendering, the west wing was obliterated in a huge explosion, destroying the Irish Public Record Office located at the rear, with nearly one thousand years of irreplaceable archives being destroyed. Responsibility for this act was bitterly debated for years afterwards, the government accusing the Republicans of having deliberately perpetrated the destruction of the archives while they rebutted that it was completely accidental.
The works of some Jewish authors and other so-called "degenerate" books were burnt by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. Richard Euringer, director of the libraries in Essen, identified 18,000 works deemed not to correspond with Nazi ideology, which were publicly burned.
On May 10, 1933 on the Opernplatz in Berlin, S.A. and Nazi youth groups burned around 25,000 books from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and the Humboldt University; including works by Albert Einstein, Vicki Baum, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine, Helen Keller, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Frank Wedekind, Ernest Hemingway and H.G. Wells. Student groups throughout Germany in 34 towns also carried out their own book burnings on that day and in the following weeks. Erich Kästner wrote an ironic account (published only after the fall of Nazism) of having witnessed the burning of his own books on that occasion. Radio broadcasts of the burnings were played in Berlin and elsewhere, and 40,000 turned up to hear Joseph Goebbels make a speech about the acts. See here for a partial list of authors whose books were burned.
In May 1995,[69] Micha Ullman's underground “Bibliotek” memorial was inaugurated on Bebelplatz square in Berlin, where the Nazi book burnings began. The memorial consists of a window on the surface of the plaza, under which vacant bookshelves are lit and visible. A bronze plaque bears a quote by Heinrich Heine: “Where books are burned in the end people will burn.”[70]
On May 13, 1946 the Allied Control Council issued a directive for the confiscation on all media that could contribute to Nazism or militarism. As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offence. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order was in principle no different from the Nazi book burnings.[71]
In 1933, Joe Shuster burned the first comic strip featuring Superman, cowritten with Jerry Siegel, because he was in despair after not finding a publisher.
Trustees of Warsaw, Indiana ordered the burning of all the library's works by local author Theodore Dreiser in 1935.[72]
In 1939, shortly after the surrendering of Barcelona, Franco's troops burned the entire library of Pompeu Fabra, the main author of the normative reform of contemporary Catalan language, while shouting "¡Abajo la inteligencia!" (Down with intelligentsia!). .[73]
In 1940 the Australian artist Norman Lindsay sought to make his artistic work safer from the recently started World War II by sending 16 crates of paintings, drawings and etchings to safekeeping in the U.S. However, many of these works were of frank and sumptuous nudes, very daring by the standards of the time. When they were discovered due to the train they traveled in catching fire, they were impounded and burned as "pornography" by American officials. Lindsay's older brother Lionel remembers Norman's reaction was, "'Don't worry, I'll do more.' And he did."[74]
In May 1940, during Nazi Germany's offensive in Europe in World War II, the university library of Leuven, Belgium was destroyed by the German army and 900,000 books burned. This was after 300,000 others had burned when the library was attacked in World War One.
During World War II, Japanese military forces destroyed or partly destroyed numerous Chinese libraries, including libraries at the National University of Tsing Hua, Peking (lost 200,000 of 350,000 books), the University Nan-k'ai, T'ien-chin (totally destroyed, 224,000 books lost), Institute of Technology of He-pei, T'ien-chin (completely destroyed), Medical College of He-pei, Pao-ting (completely destroyed), Agricultural College of He-pei, Pao-ting (completely destroyed), University Ta Hsia, Shanghai (completely destroyed), University Kuang Hua, Shanghai (completely destroyed), National University of Hunan (completely destroyed). In addition other libraries had some or all of their collection removed to Japan, including the University of Nanking, Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai, University of Shanghai, and Soochow University[75]
In September 1940 during the Blitz in London, a plane commanded by Nazi Germany dropped a bomb on the British Museum. It is not believed that it was intended to hit the Museum in particular, but 124 volumes were destroyed and 304 other volumes were damaged past repair.
From May 10-11 1941, the Museum's book collections (now the British Library) were bombed again, this time burning more than 150,000 books.[76]
During the Second World War the French writer and anti-Nazi resistance fighter André Malraux worked on a long novel, The Struggle Against the Angel, the manuscript of which was destroyed by the Gestapo upon his capture in 1944. The name was apparently inspired by the Jacob story in the Bible. A surviving opening part named The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, was published after the war.
Much of Warsaw, Poland was destroyed during World War II by the Nazis: an approximated 85% of buildings, including 16,000,000 volumes. 10% of the buildings were destroyed in the Invasion of Poland that ignited the war in 1939, 15% in the reorganization of Warsaw and the first Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 25% in the second and far more famous Uprising, and the last 35% due to systematic German actions after the Uprising was defeated. 14 libraries, not including the libraries in the University of Warsaw and the Warsaw Institute of Technology that were also razed, were completely burned to the ground. German Verbrennungskommandos (Burning detachments) were responsible for much of the targeted attacks on libraries and other centers of knowledge and learning.
In October 1944, the National Library of Poland's manuscript collection was burned to erase Polish national history.
The Krasiński Library had part of its building destroyed in September 1939, leading to its collections, which had almost all survived, being moved in 1941. In September 1944, an original collection of 250,000 items was shelled by German artillery, although many books were saved by being thrown out the windows by library staff. In October, what had survived was deliberately burned by the authorities, including 26,000 manuscripts, 2,500 incunables (printed before 1501), 80,000 early printed books, 100,000 drawings and printmakings, 50,000 note and theatre manuscripts, and many maps and atlases.
The Załuski Library - established in 1747 and thus the oldest public library in Poland and one of the oldest and most important libraries in Europe - was burned down during the Uprising in October 1944. Out of about 400,000 printed items, maps and manuscripts, only some 1800 manuscripts and 30,000 printed materials survived. Unlike earlier Nazi book burnings where specific books were deliberately targeted, the burning of this library was part of the general setting on fire of a large part of the city of Warsaw.
The extensive library of the Polish Museum, Rapperswil, founded in 1870 in Rapperswil, Switzerland, had been created when Poland was not a country and was thus moved to Warsaw in 1927. Through 1944, most of the library's 20,000 engravings, 92,000 books, and 27,000 manuscripts were burned.
In World War II, bomber planes under orders by Nazi Germany specifically targeted the National Library of Serbia in Belgrade. All the collections were destroyed, totaling 500,000 books, 1,424 Cyrillic manuscripts and charters, 1,500 maps and prints, 4,000 journals, 1,800 newspaper titles, and Serbian historical correspondences.
The firebombing of German cities during World War II caused extensive destruction of German libraries, including the Library of the Technical University of Aachen (50,000 volumes), the Berlin Staatsbibliothek (2 million volumes), the Berlin University Library (20,000 volumes), the Bonn University Library (25% of its holdings), the Bremen Staatsbibliothek (150,000 volumes), the Hessische Landesbibliothek in Darmstadt (760,000 volumes), the Library of the Technical University in Darmstadt (two thirds of its collection), the Stadt- und Landesbibliothek in Dortmund (250,000 of 320,000 volumes), the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden (300,000 volumes), the Stadtbibliothek in Dresden (200,000 volumes), the Essen Stadtbücherei (130,000 volumes), the Frankfurt Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek (550,000 volumes, 440,000 doctoral dissertations, 750,000 patents), the Giessen University Library (nine tenths of its collection), the Greifswald University Library (17,000 volumes), the Hamburg Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (600,000 volumes), the Hamburg Commerz-Bibliothek (174,000 of 188,000 volumes), the Hannover Stadtbibliothek (125,000 volumes), the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe (360,000 volumes), the Library of the Technical University in Karlsruhe (63,000 volumes), the Kassel Landesbibliothek (350,000 of 400,000 volumes), the Murhardsche Bibliothek in Kassel (100,000 volumes), the Kiel University Library (250,000 volumes), the Leipzig Stadtbibliothek (175,000 of 181,000 volumes), the Magdeburg Stadtbibliothek (140,000 of 180,000 volumes), the Marburg University Library (50,000 volumes), the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich (500,000 volumes), the Munich University Library (350,000 volumes), the Munich Stadtbibliothek (80,000 volumes), the Munich Benedictine Library (120,000 volumes), the Münster University Library (360,000 volumes), the Nürnberg Stadtbibliothek (100,000 volumes), the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart (580,000 volumes), the Library of the Technical University in Stuttgart (50,000 volumes), the Würzburg University Library (200,000 volumes and 230,000 doctoral dissertations). The above is only a shortlist of the most notable losses, in all it's estimated that a third of all German books were destroyed[78]
Following the suppression of the pro-Soviet Kurdish Republic of Mahabad in north Iran in December 1946 and January 1947, members of the victorious Iranian Army burned all Kurdish-language books that they could find, as well as closing down the Kurdish printing press and banning the teaching of Kurdish.[79]
In 1948, children — overseen by priests, teachers, and parents — publicly burned several hundred comic books in both Spencer, West Virginia, and Binghamton, New York. Once these stories were picked up by the national press wire services, similar events followed in many other cities.[80]
Around 1949, the books that Shen Congwen (pseudonym of Shen Yuehuan) had written in the period 1922-1949 were banned in the Republic of China and both banned and subsequently burned by booksellers in the People's Republic of China.
As part of Joseph Stalin's efforts to stamp out Jewish culture in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Judaica collection in the library of Birobidzhan, capital of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast on the Chinese border, was burned.
In 1953 United States Senator Joseph McCarthy recited before his subcommittee and the press a list of supposedly pro-communist authors whose works his aide Roy Cohn found in the State Department libraries in Europe. The Eisenhower State Department bowed to McCarthy and ordered its overseas librarians to remove from their shelves "material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc." Some libraries burned the newly-forbidden books. President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially agreed that the State Department should dispose of books advocating communism: "I see no reason for the federal government to be supporting something that advocated its own destruction. That seems to be the acme of silliness." However, at Dartmouth College in June 1953, Eisenhower urged Americans concerning libraries: "Don't join the book burners. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book…."
Noted psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich was prosecuted in 1954, following an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in connection with his use of orgone accumulators. Reich refused to defend himself, and a federal judge ordered all of his orgone energy equipment and publications to be seized and destroyed. In June 1956, federal agents burned many of the books at Reich's estate near Rangeley, Maine. Later that year, and in March 1960, an additional 6 tons of Reich's books, journals and papers were burned in a public incinerator in New York.[81] Reich died of heart failure while in federal prison in November 1957.[82]
Following the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, General Justino Alves Bastos, commander of the Third Army, ordered, in Rio Grande do Sul, the burning of all "subversive books". Among the books he branded as subversive was Stendhal's The Red and the Black.[83]
It is the Chinese tradition to record family members in a book, including every male born in the family, who they are married to, etc. Traditionally, only males' names are recorded in the books. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), many such books were forcibly destroyed or burned to ashes, because they were considered by the Chinese communist party as among the Four Old Things to be eschewed.[84] Also many copies of classical works of Chinese literature were destroyed, though - unlike the genealogy books - these usually existed in many copies, some of which survived.
In May 1981 a mob composed of thugs and plainclothes police officers went on a rampage in minority Tamil-dominated northern Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and burned down the Jaffna Public Library. At least 95,000 volumes were destroyed, including a very rare collection of ancient palm leaf volumes.[85]
The 1988 publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie, provoked angry demonstrations and riots around the world by followers of political Islam, some of whom considered it blasphemous. In the United Kingdom, book burnings were staged in the cities of Bolton and Bradford. In addition, five U.K. bookstores selling the novel were the target of bombings, and two bookstores in Berkeley, California were firebombed.
On May 17, 1992, the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo (Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina) was completely destroyed by Serbian shelling, with thousands of rare books and manuscripts inside.
On August 25, 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina was firebombed and destroyed by Serbian nationalists. Almost all the contents of the library were destroyed, including more than 1.5 million books that included 4,000 rare books, 700 manuscripts, and 100 years of Bosnian newspapers and journals.[86]
Georgian troops entered Abkhazia on 14 August 1992, sparking a 14-month war. At the end of October, the Abkhazian Research Institute of History, Language and Literature named after Dmitry Gulia, which housed an important library and archive, was torched by the invaders; also targeted was the capital's public library. It seems to have been a deliberate attempt by the Georgian paramilitary soldiers to wipe out the region's historical record.[87]
In 1987, the Nasir-i Khusraw Foundation was established in Kabul, Afghanistan due to the collaborative efforts of several civil society and academic institutions, leading scholars and members of the Ismaili community. This site included video and book publishing facilities, a museum, and a library.[88] The library was a marvel in its extensive collection of fifty-five thousand books, available to all students and researchers, in the languages of Arabic, English, and Pashto. In addition, its Persian collection was unparalleled – including an extremely rare 12th-century manuscript of Firdawsi’s epic masterpiece The Book of Kings (Shāhnāma). The Ismaili collection of the library housed works from Hasan-i Sabbah and Nasir-i Khusraw, and the seals of the first Aga Khan. With the withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan in the late 1980s and the strengthening of the Taliban forces, the library collection was relocated to the valley of Kayan. However, on August 12, 1998, the Taliban fighters ransacked the press, the museum, the video facilities and the library, destroying some books in the fire and throwing others in a nearby river. Not a single book was spared, including a thousand-year-old Quran.[89]
In January 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture ordered the burning of some 6,000 books of homoerotic poetry by the well-known 8th Century Persian-Arab poet Abu Nuwas, even though his writings are considered classics of Arab literature.[90][91]
In 2003 "Independent Librarians" were put on trial in Cuba in some cases their books were ordered destroyed by the court. For example, in the case of Julio Antoniao Guevara, the trial judge ordered: "As to the disposition of the photographic negatives, the audio cassette, medicines, books, magazines, pamphlets and the rest of the documents, they are to be destroyed by means of incineration because they lack usefulness." Among some of the many thousands of materials burned or destroyed by the Cuban Department of Interior were books on the U.S. Constitution, Martin Luther King, journalism manuals, a book called "Fidel's Secret Wars," and in one case, even a book by Jose Marti, the Cuban hero of independence beloved by most Cubans and often quoted by Castro. American writer Ray Bradbury strongly condemned these book burnings.[92]
Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iraq's national library and the Islamic library in central Baghdad were burned and destroyed. The national library housed rare volumes and documents from as far back as the 16th century, including entire royal court records and files from the period when Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire. The destroyed Islamic library of Baghdad included one of the oldest surviving copies of the Qur'an.[93]
In 2003, thousands of materials were burned, including in the case of Julio Antoniao Guevara a judgement that stated that "As to the disposition of the photographic negatives, the audio cassette, medicines, books, magazines, pamphlets and the rest of the documents, they are to be destroyed by means of incineration because they lack usefulness." The Cuban Department of the Interior also burned journalism manuals, books on the United States Constitution and Martin Luther King, Jr., a book called Fidel's Secret Wars, and even a book by Cuban revolutionary hero José Martí.[94]
There have been several incidents of Harry Potter books being burned, including those directed by churches at Alamogordo, New Mexico and Charleston, South Carolina in 2006.[95] See Religious debates over the Harry Potter series.
On May 27, 2007, Tom Wayne and W.E. Leathem, the proprietors of Prospero's Books, a used book store in Kansas City, Missouri, publicly burned a portion of their inventory to protest what they perceived as society's increasing indifference to the printed word. The protest was interrupted by the Kansas City Fire Department on the grounds that Wayne and Leathem had failed to obtain the required permits.[96]
In May 2008, a "fairly large" number of New Testaments were burned in Or Yehuda, Israel. Conflicting accounts have the deputy mayor of Or Yehuda, Uzi Aharon (of Haredi party Shas), claiming to have organized the burnings or to have stopped them. He admitted involvement in collecting New Testaments and "Messianic propaganda" that had been distributed in the city. The burning apparently violated Israeli laws about destroying religious items.[97]
The Amazing Grace Baptist Church of Canton, North Carolina, headed by pastor Marc Grizzard, intended to hold a book burning on Halloween 2009.[98][99] The church, being a King James Version-exclusive church, held all other translations of the Bible to be heretical, and also considered both the writings of Christian writers and preachers such as Billy Graham and T.D. Jakes and most musical genres to be heretical expressions. However, a confluence of rain, oppositional protesters[100] and a state environmental protection law against open burning resulted in the church having to retreat into the edifice to ceremoniously tear apart and dump the media into a trash can (as recorded on video which was submitted to People For the American Way's Right Wing Watch blog[101]); nevertheless, the church claimed that the book "burning" was a success.[102]
On September 20, 2010 the Pentagon bought and burned 9,500 copies of Operation Dark Heart, nearly all the first run copies for supposedly containing classified information.
Sometime during the weekend of April 15–17, 2011, books and other items designated for a new public library in the FLDS polygamous community Colorado City, Arizona were removed from the facility where they had been stored and burned nearby.[103] A lawyer for some FLDS members has stated that the burning was the result of a cleanup of the property and that no political or religious statement was intended, however the burned items were under lock and key and were not the property of those who burned them.[104] As of May 31, Arizona officials are investigating.
In his autobiography, Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg recounted how during a severe winter in his childhood his family burned books from a village library for heating, but the young Ehrenburg was allowed to read some of them before they were thrown into the fire.
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