When Benjamin felt the ground beginning to tremble under his feet he started thinking of the possibility of immigrating to Palestine, as did many other German-Jews at the time. Although he never reached Palestine, he had been sending material to his close friend Gershom Scholem, who was then the head of the Judaica department at the National Library, and, starting in 1925, a professor at the Hebrew University. In fact, Benjamin wrote to Scholem that these materials were all part of the Beniaminia archive which he was slowly building. Benjamin, like Zweig, understood that if he were to perish, the NLI was the safe haven for his intellectual work when all else was lost.