The trove of scientific papers and books was intricate and narrated the evolution of an entire school of scientific theory, punctuated by glimpses of the camaraderie and wit of Bredig and his colleagues. There was also a prescient letter Bredig had sent in 1911: I am most interested in the associate professor at the University, the physicist A. Einstein, a still young, totally brilliant guy from whom one can learn a lot, he wrote. Unfortunately, we are losing him, because he has been appointed professor in Prague instead of Lippich. I believe he has a great future.

According to documents from the 1930s and 40s, shortly after the Nazis took power, Bredig was forced to resign from the Karlshule Institute of Technology and had his credentials as a scientist revoked. At age 70, Bredig was arrested on Kristallnacht and forced to stand for hours with his head against the wall of a barn.

Bredig fled to Amsterdam in 1939. His son Max, also a chemist, persuaded Princeton University to extend a job offer to his father, which facilitated a visa to the United States. He arrived in poor health and was never able to take up the post. Bredig died in New York in 1944.

His daughter and son-in-law, Viktor and Marianna Homburger, spent much of the war in a concentration camp in Vichy, France. The collection contained many letters Dr. Bredig received from his friend Alfred Schnell and his wife, Eva, written from their hiding place in a room under a haystack — which were delivered via the Red Cross to America. The Schnells were shot by Dutch collaborators in 1944.

Before he fled, Bredig expressed concern over the preservation of his precious library and notebooks. In case you don’t want to keep it, give it a university library, preferably one abroad, or to a good friend, he wrote to Max. Under no circumstances do I want it to be wasted/lost, given away or tossed! It should give witness to my life’s work.

Amazingly, his wish was fulfilled. While in Amsterdam awaiting a visa, Bredig entrusted his books and papers to the laboratory of his late colleague, Nobel Prize winner Jacobus van ’t Hoff. They remained there for the duration of the war and in 1946 were returned to Max Bredig.

For decades, the collection lay hidden from the world in a musty basement in the American south. After the Raabs completed their labors, the Bredig archive was purchased by a private foundation and is currently part of the Science History Institute’s permanent collection.

The archive was unique in both its magnitude and the emotional cross section of science, history, and personal struggle. Yet it was just one of many discoveries that made up the impressive volume of original documents upon which the Raab Collection built its reputation while bringing new stories to light.

Buried Treasures

A visit to the Raabs is like taking a whirlwind tour through time, guided by some of history’s best-known characters. It also opens an understanding of what drives their clients to spend generous sums to own pieces of history.

It seems a bit clichéd to refer to the Raab Collection’s offices as a hidden treasure, but the shoe fits.

Principally operated by Nathan Raab, the company has become one of the nation’s leading sellers of historical documents. It is a business, built on spending hours plumbing the depths of archives and auction catalogues in search of gems long hidden from public view.

In an office building amid a posh outdoor mall in the upscale Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore, the dentist’s office at the end of the hall upon exiting the elevator is more prominent than the nondescript door to the side, which could just as well be a closet. The Raab office’s camouflage is designed to ward off thieves and insulate it from aspiring sellers whose self-proclaimed “priceless” collectables are in fact forgeries or items that will fetch little market interest.

Once inside, though, the cover is quickly blown. The walls are decorated with framed letters from a historical who’s who, including presidents, monarchs, and others that shaped the world over the centuries.

The Raab Collection was founded by Steven Raab, an attorney whose command of history and passion for collecting remnants of it grew into a small autograph and document business.

After college, his son Nathan spent time working overseas as a correspondent for the Associated Press, as a Congressional aide, and as an operative for a political campaign. At 24, and at a crossroads, his father floated the idea of joining the document business. After some vacillation, Nathan threw himself into the challenge.

Steven Raab has a gifted eye and ability to mobilize his knowledge to spot diamonds in the rough. One example is how he used dates and markings to pick out a previously unknown recording made aboard Air Force One in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963. The recording was made in the flight from Dallas back to Andrews Air Force Base, and was purchased by Raab in the pubic estate sale of a senior military aide who had kept the tape in a nondescript box.

Mr. Raab senior passed those skills on to Nathan through an apprenticeship spanning several years. A combination of his father’s guidance and trial and error eventually imparted in Nathan Raab the unusual sixth sense necessary for the documents trade.

Scanning auctions for the most marketable items that others might overlook, and finding value in long-neglected archives, was a first step. Another was getting used to decoding antiquated handwriting.

Being able to determine authenticity in a market flooded with forgeries was another essential skill.

Mr. Raab points to a letter written by 19th century women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony to demonstrate. “There are markings on it, you can see some small show through, it’s clearly old, here’s the letterhead, the whole letter is in her handwriting, it’s folded like it was previously in an envelope — after a while you get the gist of it.”

There are other pitfalls to beware of, like family inheritance disputes and other shadowy ownership scenarios. When the Raabs first offered the Kennedy Air Force One tape for sale — the asking price was $500,000 — they received a call from the National Archives claiming it was property of the federal government. Mr. Raab was able to placate Uncle Sam by explaining the tape’s origins and surrendering one of two copies purchased, but staying out of such trouble requires learned vigilance.

“When I find myself asking, Why is this item on the private market? I initially won’t buy it,” says Raab. “We have government agencies and archivists on our email list. So if you want to sell stolen goods, we’re not the place to do it, and hopefully people know that.”

While the personalities that Raab’s offerings deal with are long deceased, the historical document market does shift with public interest. A popular book and Broadway show about Alexander Hamilton sent the founding father’s stocks soaring.

“You used to be able to buy his letters for $1,500 or $2,000, but now he’s right next to Washington and Jefferson,” Nathan Raab says. “The Hamilton craze is real.”

The reverse has occurred as well. A wave of negative attention to some of Woodrow Wilson’s views on race left his signature far less desired.

In Nathan Raab’s deceptively ordinary-looking file cabinet, John Adams rubs shoulders with Queen Victoria and Thomas Edison.

None are for those on a tight budget. An early Lincoln letter runs at $60,000. An 1860 letter by Confederate President Jefferson Davis mulling over secession lists at $12,000.

For $9,500, one could own an 1814 note written by Napoleon Bonaparte during his exile on the island of Elba insisting that his mother cover her own expenses. It is fitting that these expense reports ordered by Madame be presented back to her so that she can pay. It is the only way to ensure she orders no more, wrote the fallen emperor.

For $12,000, another fascinating Einstein letter is up for purchase. The recipient was Hedwig Rosenheim, the wife of a former Einstein colleague and mother of Kate Rosenheim, who was central to organizing the Kindertransport. Mrs. Rosenheim was an accomplished musician in Germany and was forced to flee Nazi rule with few of her possessions. After arriving in America, she wrote to Einstein seeking help in procuring a new flute.

The matter of the flute shall not fail, wrote the scientist and music lover in response. Einstein offered to serve as a guarantor in an application to the Hebrew Free Loan Society and contributed $20 of his own funds to the cause.

The Closest You Can Get

While some might wonder why people spend thousands of dollars to own the handwriting of historic greats, picking up Mr. Raab’s merchandise offers an emotional window of understanding. Somehow, holding a letter from George Washington radiates with the illusionary feeling of having crossed paths with him, more so than reading his words in a book or even seeing his penmanship behind glass in a museum.

“You can’t get closer to Washington than we are right now,” says Mr. Raab, holding one of his letters. “Even if you were to go to his grave, he’d be farther away… For those who can afford it, it gives some people a visceral feeling of connection to someone they admire.”

Nathan Raab and his wife, Karen, also a partner in the business, have spent their morning poring over a recent acquisition, a set of documents that once belonged to Benjamin Crowninshield and his family. Hardly a well-known name today, in the late 18th and early 19th century, Crowninshield was a prominent privateer who eventually served as Secretary of the Navy. His papers include commissions and signatures from Presidents James Madison and James Monroe.

The Crowninshields retained their distinction for decades, occupying a prominent place among the group of distinctly American New England aristocrats known as the Boston Brahmins.

“You just don’t hear names like Crowninshield anymore,” remarked Mr. Raab, showing a large military commission in the collection. Despite being over 200 years old, he adds that one need not be overly cautious in handling this specific piece. “It’s vellum, which is made from animal skin — you could run it over with your car.”

One item in the Crowninshield collection contains a reference to Jews, a rarity in early American documents. The mention is not especially flattering. In an 1805 letter, Jacob Crowninshield (who later became a member of Congress) complains that the “Jews and sharpers” who dominate markets in Bordeaux are trying to force him to sell the coffee he imported there at an undervalued price.

Another Crowninshield letter addresses the case against Vice President Aaron Burr for killing Alexander Hamilton in their famous duel. History has long cast Burr as the villain, but the letter expresses concern that his “prosecutors, or persecutors, as some call them” will not deal with him fairly given the “public feelings on the death of Gen. H [Hamilton].”

With the era of privateers and patricians largely a relic of the past, a Crowninshield descendant offered the trove for sale, and Mr. Raab, convinced that it would attract interest, drove to the owner’s home in western Pennsylvania to purchase it.

Such searches, and the time spent piecing together the stories they tell, form the backbone of Mr. Raab’s business in a job that makes him part historian, part detective, and part luxury item broker.

“I love the hunt, finding things you didn’t know existed in places where you never thought you’d find them,” says Mr. Raab, who authored the 2020 book The Hunt for History, detailing his experiences locating and authenticating historical artifacts. “You go to someone’s house and find several hundred documents that no one’s seen for two centuries. That’s what I still enjoy most. We scour the world looking for these lost pieces of history.”

Dealing with personal letters, business transactions, or papers that have historic significance but are not often focused on offers Raab a unique view of the personalities of the figures whose documents he handles.

“You really get to know these people in a different way, doing what we do,” he says. “It’s funny to hear people who really have very little experience dealing with these personalities see some TV program and then say, ‘Oh, this is what Washington was like.’ ”

Some of that familiarity comes from the handwriting itself. Mr. Raab holds up a 1793 address to the Senate written by Washington against, for comparison’s sake, a letter of French impressionist painter Claude Monet.

“Washington’s script is big and bold, while Monet’s letters are small in comparison,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily tell you what kind of people they were, but reading a great deal of what Washington wrote and how he wrote it, Mr. Raab says he can confirm the common image of him as the “very deliberative, educated, thoughtful, careful” father of America.

“You get the distinct impression he understood the challenge that he was up against and understood his role in all of it,” he says. “Having gone through these documents, he strikes me as a very serious person.”

Churchill’s Foreboding

Together with Washington and Einstein, the other figure with the largest base of interested document buyers is Winston Churchill.

One of the most intriguing Churchill items that came Mr. Raab’s way was a pencil note he wrote in 1899 to a kind Afrikaner guard during the Boer War. Young Churchill traveled to South Africa to cover the war as a press correspondent and was captured by the enemy. He would eventually escape captivity, but before he did, the future British prime minister crossed paths with a fellow named Hendrik Spaarwater. Spaarwater was assigned to escort British prisoners and apparently did so with great care. Churchill wrote a note saying that in return for Spaarwater’s kindness, “I shall be personally grateful to anyone who may be able to do him any service should he himself be taken prisoner.”

The note was passed down through Spaarwater’s family and eventually to a museum in his remote South African village. In 2016, the museum’s proprietors contacted the Raabs about buying it. They later sold it to a private American collector for $36,000.

The note fits into a category of what Mr. Raab says is his favorite class of documents.

“I really enjoy seeing these items that capture people in a moment where they’re not yet famous, and didn’t know they would be,” he says. “They’re just going about their lives as young people, but you can begin to see the pieces coming together.”

The contents of Raab’s current Churchill file contain about a dozen documents reflecting better-known chapters of his life.

One is a typed draft of an article from months before the outbreak of World War II, in which Churchill forebodingly wrote about the likelihood of air raids and attacks on Britian’s civilian population.

“Churchill had such a strong opinion so far ahead of time that we think of him as a genius of sorts,” Mr. Raab says. “But had things worked out differently, he’d be an afterthought of history.”

A 1940 memo expresses regret over “interning all enemy aliens,” which included mostly Jews and other German and Austrian refugees from Nazi oppression. Other offerings include a signed photo of Churchill amid rubble, visiting a bombed neighborhood during the Blitz. A paper signed by both him and Franklin Roosevelt lists for $57,000.

“Churchill has an active buyer base all over the world,” Mr. Raab relates. “When you think about courage in the face of a dark place, somebody whose moral courage continues to inspire people today, I think that shines through in his letters and that’s why people go to Churchill.”

Ignoble

While the vast majority of Raab’s offerings highlight noble individuals, among its current inventory is a letter penned by one of humanity’s worst offenders — Adolf Eichmann.

This letter came their way as part of a collection that belonged to Tuviah Friedman, a Nazi hunter and director of Yad Vashem’s Haifa branch. Friedman was one of the central figures in collecting evidence against Eichmann and advocating for his capture from Argentina.

“We’ve never carried Nazi material,” says Mr. Raab. “It’s not because we’re Jewish, because generally Jews don’t have an issue with it.” While Jews see these documents as historically important, there is sometimes a sort of nervous discomfort among non-Jews, who might fear they will be seen as somehow connected. But from the perspective of the Raab Collection, the letter was actually much more about Friedman’s encounters with Eichmann than Eichmann himself.

The documents were sold to the Raabs by a private collector who bought them decades ago in a West Coast antique shop.

The Eichmann letter was written from his prison cell in January 1962 in response to a query from Friedman regarding two former Gestapo chiefs who had been arrested in West Germany. They admitted a role in deportations but claimed ignorance regarding the fate of the Jews they were sending off on cattle cars.

“Do you think that it is true, or even possible, that a Gestapo chief of his high rank did not know in the years 1942-44 that the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Problem,’ as adopted by the Wannsee Conference, signified the physical extermination of the Jewish People?” asked Friedman in his letter to Eichmann.

Eichmann wrote a highly detailed response in red ink on the same day he received Friedman’s query, stating that while local police officials were only informed of the conclusions of the Wannsee conference orally, there was little doubt as to Nazi plans for the Jews.

“The then-Fuehrer of Germany talked quite unmistakably [about the fate of the Jews] to the German public on the state radio,” he wrote.

Eichmann, who played a key role in the Wannsee conference and oversaw much of the Final Solution’s implementation, took pains to absolve himself and all but a small cadre of Nazi leaders from responsibility for Nazi genocide.

“Neither I, nor any local police chief, was empowered to order a deportation or to stop one,” wrote Eichmann. “The whole matter was under the exclusive jurisdiction of the authorized persons.” He included only a half dozen names in the list of those with such authority including Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Eichmann’s former superior, Reinhard Heydrich.

Six months later, Eichmann was hanged in Ramla prison.

Choppy Sea

Between world leaders, artists, and scientists, some chapters of Jewish history have been told through the Raab Collection.

In 2019, Mr. Raab was contacted by a descendent of Moses Allen, an 18th-century Christian clergyman from Georgia who joined a patriot regiment to fight in the American Revolution. In 1778, Allen was captured and confined to a prison ship, the Nancy. This descendant had a set of water-logged papers that he thought might find interest in the historic document market.

After a short time in captivity, Allen attempted to escape and drowned in the process. Yet a set of pages from his diary were recovered with his body. Among the tales of suffering, they recount heretofore unknown details about a fellow prisoner named Mordecai Sheftall.

Sheftall was a founding member of Savannah’s Mikve Israel congregation, known for his punctilious Jewish observance. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the cause for American independence, attaining the rank of colonel, thus making him the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the Continental Army. When Savannah fell to the British in December 1778, he and his 15-year-old son were taken prisoner.

His British captors apparently knew of Sheftall’s piety and cruelly used it against him.

Pork for dinner. The Jews Mr. Sheftall & son refused to eat their pieces, & their knives & forks were ordered to be greased with it…It is a happiness that Mr. Sheftall is a fellow sufferer. He bears it with such fortitude as is an example to me, recorded Allen in his diary.

Sheftall’s story and capture were known before these papers came to light, but the fact that kashrus was used as a means to torment him added a new detail to his plight.

Also, among the papers was a letter written later by Sheftall, who described the cruelty of the Nancy’s captain, Samuel Tate. In this missive, intended to protest that Tate had been allowed to remain in America after the war, Sheftall recounted his failed attempt to bribe the captain to permit Allen’s burial.

I offered him two half Johanneses out of three, that I had, for as many boards, as would make a coffin for the poor parson; some of the soldiers offered to make the coffin; yet [Tate] refused to let me have the boards, saying Rebels had no business with coffins, wrote Sheftall.

The diary, and Allen’s body, were eventually returned to his brother, Thomas Allen, another patriot minister. The papers remained in the family’s hands and their content was unknown until they reached the Raab Collection, which ultimately sold them to a Sheftall descendent.

Real Value

In the last few decades, much of the focus of popular and academic history cast its eyes on knocking down the western world’s “great men,” criticizing their motivations and magnifying unflattering aspects of their personal lives. That movement took on far more confidence in recent years, felling statues and stripping names and subjects from prominence under the banner of “social justice.” Even one-time liberal heroes were not spared. Thomas Jefferson’s statue was removed from New York’s City Hall and Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton University’s school for public policy.

Against that backdrop, the business of finding buyers willing to pay tens of thousands to celebrate the legacies of historic giants can feel like blowing against cultural storm winds.

“There’s a movement to cancel people whose lives were complicated or nuanced, but we’re not political, we don’t take sides. We just try to take history as it comes,” says Nathan Raab. “Take Thomas Jefferson, someone who owned slaves, a practice none of us would advocate, but who did a lot of great things. That same movement is busy imposing modern moral values on people in a different time frame, which is quite unreasonable.”

In a short-attention-span society where judgment is passed in the time frame of social media posts and articles that lose their value in 24 hours, the Raabs’ business stands apart, helping people remember the value of the written word.

“What we’re selling is basically ink on paper. As to their component material value, they’re worth pennies,” says Mr. Raab. “What gives them distinction is the history, the emotion, the morality, the deep symbolism. That’s why my clients are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to own them — they’re buying so much more than pieces of paper. They’re buying the connection to the man or woman who touched them. And we’re making sure that history survives from one generation to the next.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1064)