“This is a huge archive of massive breadth that has an economic significance, but first and foremost historical and literary significance,” Ms. Pagi said on Israel Radio. “And I hope it marks a change, a beginning, in adopting this whole culture which belongs to the heritage of the Jewish people and finally the state of Israel will fully adopt it and maybe even implement it.”

When Mr. Brod, who had been the administrator of Kafka’s estate, died in 1968, he bequeathed to his secretary, Esther Hoffe, his and Kafka’s papers. Ms. Hoffe stashed them in her Tel Aviv apartment, where a scholar was last permitted to examine them in the 1980s; in 1988, she sold Kafka’s manuscript for “The Trial” for $2 million.

When she died in 2007, the materials passed to her daughters. One of them, Eva Hoffe, said in a 2008 interview that she was destitute and saw Mr. Brod’s archive as her only asset; she said she wanted to write a book about Mr. Brod. The German Literary Archive had supported her legal position, demanding the right to purchase the papers.

But Judge Kopelman Pardo rejected Ms. Hoffe’s claim that the papers were a gift from Mr. Brod to her mother, instead viewing them as a trust she was to administer. The judge noted that Mr. Brod’s 1948 will instructed that his archive go to a “public Jewish library or archive in Palestine,” and that he later specified Hebrew University, where Israel’s national library is housed.