Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History (Studies in Contemporary Jewry) [Illustrated] 9780199934249, 019993424X

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STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through the generous assistance of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund, Seattle, Washington

THE AVRAHAM HARMAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY JEWRY THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

VISUALIZING AND EXHIBITING JEWISH SPACE AND HISTORY STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY AN ANNUAL XXVI

2012 Edited by Richard I. Cohen

Published for the Institute by

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visualizing and exhibiting Jewish space and history / edited by Richard I. Cohen. p. cm. — (Studies in contemporary Jewry, an annual, ISSN 0740-8625 ; 26) “The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-993424-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Jewish art. 2. Jewish artists—Exhibitions. 3. Jewish museums—Europe—History. 4. Jewish museums. 5. Museums—Collection management. I. Cohen, Richard I. II. Makhon le-Yahadut zemanenu ’a. sh. Avraham Harman. III. Series: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 26. N7415.V58 2012 704.03′9240075—dc23 2012022530

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY Founding Editors Jonathan Frankel (1935–2008) Peter Y. Medding Ezra Mendelsohn Editors Richard I. Cohen Anat Helman Eli Lederhendler Uzi Rebhun Institute Editorial Board Michel Abitbol, Mordechai Altshuler, Haim Avni, Yehuda Bauer, Daniel Blatman, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Sergio DellaPergola, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Amos Goldberg, Yisrael Gutman, Hagit Lavsky, Pnina Morag-Talmon, Dalia Ofer, Gideon Shimoni, Dimitry Shumsky, Yfaat Weiss Managing Editors Laurie E. Fialkoff Hannah Levinsky-Koevary

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Preface

Previous volumes of Studies in Contemporary Jewry have on occasion dedicated the symposium to cultural themes. Volume XXVI, Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History, continues in that spirit. Veteran readers have no doubt recognized an engagement with those fields of artistic endeavor that marked the changing terrain of Jewish life from the late 19th century: art, music, and literature. This is certainly true of our present concern, which pursues the evolution of visual representation in general and that of Jewish museums in particular from the turn of the 20th century. Anyone traveling in America, Europe, or Israel today is apt to come upon Jewish museums in major cities—some quaint, others elaborately built. Although it may seem that certain museums have always been part of the terrain, in fact they are all products of the 20th and 21st centuries. Dozens of Jewish museums are in existence; understandably, our symposium had no intention of being all-inclusive. Our goal was rather to focus on some of the central issues in collecting, representing, and interpreting the Jewish past and present from the perspective of the museum. The notion of the museum as the modern-day Temple was common among museums in the 19th century, and helps to explain how the museum has emerged in Jewish life as such an attractive cultural institution and as a central venue for representing Jewish art, history, and culture. The overarching historical question is what occasioned this revolution in Jewish life—this is the question around which the symposium essays revolve. Looking at a variety of Jewish museums, the authors highlight the manifold stages in their development, with special emphasis placed on the period after 1945. Several essays stray somewhat from a particular focus on a museum in order to illuminate unique phenomena of the visual representation of Jews and Judaism: for instance, a pair of studies focusing on 60 years of Israeli art; a contribution on two artists of Jewish origin in very contrasting situations; and a pioneering essay on the non-Jewish preoccupation with Judaica in the 18th century. Apart from the symposium, this volume contains an essay exploring the recurrent modes of antisemitic stereotyping in England of the 20th century (both by non-Jews and Jews), two review essays, and more than two dozen book reviews. Studies in Contemporary Jewry continues to receive the support of various foundations and grants. We acknowledge with gratitude the ongoing contribution of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Foundation, the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, and more recently, the very generous assistance provided to us by the Nachum Ben-Eli Honig Fund. In this regard, we also note with sadness the passing of Mr. William Lee Frost of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, who for years administered with care and diligence the Foundation’s support of many books of Jewish scholarship, including Studies, and by so doing left his mark on the world of research. vii

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A permanent element of Studies is its superb team of managing editors, Laurie E. Fialkoff and Hannah Levinsky-Koevary. All of the contributors to this volume, as well as those of preceding years, can attest to their dedicated and professional attention to all issues, large and small—in particular, their endless resolve to make the text as clean and clear as possible. Kudos to them, and sincere thanks to my fellow editors for their wise suggestions and advice at different stages of this project. RIC

Contents

Symposium Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History Richard I. Cohen, The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life—An Overview

3

Michael Korey, Displaying Judaica in 18th-Century Central Europe: A Non-Jewish Curiosity

25

Tobias Metzler, Collecting Community: The Berlin Jewish Museum as Narrator between Past and Present, 1906–1939

55

Inka Bertz, Jewish Museums in the Federal Republic of Germany

80

Ruth Ellen Gruber, Post-trauma “Precious Legacies”: Jewish Museums in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust and before the Fall of Communism

113

Robin Ostow, From Wandering Jew to Immigrant Ethnic: Musealizing Jewish Immigration

133

Ruth Direktor, Six Exhibitions, Six Decades: Toward the Recanonization of Contemporary Israeli Art

159

Osnat Zukerman Rechter, In Between Past and Future: Time and Relatedness in the Six Decades Exhibitions

180

Lisa Saltzman, A Matrix of Matrilineal Memory in the Museum: Charlotte Salomon and Chantal Akerman in Berlin

204

Abigail Glogower and Margaret Olin, Between Two Worlds: Ghost Stories under Glass in Vienna and Chicago

217

Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Thoughts on the Role of a European Jewish Museum in the 21st Century

243

Essay Elliott Horowitz, “The Forces of Darkness”: Leonard Woolf, Isaiah Berlin, and English Antisemitism

ix

261

x

Contents

Review Essays Chaim I. Waxman, It’s Not All Religious Fundamentalism

281

Kiril Feferman, One Step before the Abyss: Recent Scholarship on the Jews in Occupied Soviet Territories during the Second World War

288

Book Reviews (arranged by subject) Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The Final Solution in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944, KIRIL FEFERMAN

288

Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (trans. Ora Cummings), KIRIL FEFERMAN

288

Suzanne Bardgett, David Cesarani, Jessica Reinisch, and Johannes-Dieter Steinert (eds.), Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Europe after the Second World War: Landscapes after Battle, LAURA JOCKUSCH

297

Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (eds.), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, KIRIL FEFERMAN

288

Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism, KIRIL FEFERMAN

288

Israel Gutman, Sugiyot beh.eker hashoah: bikoret uterumah (Issues in Holocaust scholarship: research and reassessment), SAMUEL KASSOW

301

Andrei Oişteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures (trans. Mirela Adăscăliţei), RAPHAEL VAGO

304

Anton Weiss-Wendt, Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust, KIRIL FEFERMAN

288

Cultural Studies and Education Walter Ackerman, “Jewish Education—For What?” and Other Essays (ed. Ari Ackerman, Hanan Alexander, Brenda Bacon, and David Golinkin), MICHAEL GILLIS

307

Simon J. Bronner (ed.), Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity, ANNA LIPPHARDT

309

Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture, EMILY BUDICK

312

Contents

xi

Amy Horowitz, Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic, ASSAF SHELLEG 313 Miryam Segal, A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent, YAEL RESHEF

318

Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff, Nächstes Jahr in Marienbad: Gegenwelten jüdischer Kulturen der Moderne, MARTIN J. WEIN

321

History and the Social Sciences Ben Zion Dinur, Ketavim yeshanim vegam h.adashim (Posthumous and other writings; ed. Arielle Rein), YITZHAK CONFORTI

324

Haya Gavish, Unwitting Zionists: The Jewish Community of Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan, ESTHER MEIR-GLITZENSTEIN

326

Esther Hertzog, Orit Abuhav, Harvey E. Goldberg, and Emanuel Marx (eds.), Perspectives on Israeli Anthropology, JACK KUGELMASS

329

Jack Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland, DANIEL BLATMAN

332

Carole S. Kessner, Marie Syrkin: Values beyond the Self, GERALD SORIN

336

Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: From Caste to Class, BETH S. WENGER

338

Natan M. Meir, Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History 1859–1914, EZRA MENDELSOHN

340

Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, MIKHAIL KRUTIKOV

343

Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (trans. and ed. Elizabeth Yuval), SAMUEL KASSOW

345

Daniel Tsadik, Between Foreigners and Shi’is: Nineteenth-Century Iran and Its Jewish Minority, NORMAN A. STILLMAN

349

David Yeroushalmi, The Jews of Iran in the Nineteenth Century: Aspects of History, Community, and Culture, NORMAN A. STILLMAN

349

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East Sami Shalom Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (trans. Oz Shelach), HENRIETTE DAHAN KALEV

352

Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories, CHAIM I. WAXMAN

281

Motti Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple? CHAIM I. WAXMAN

281

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David Ohana, Political Theologies in the Holy Land: Israeli Messianism and Its Critics, MOTTI INBARI

353

Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration, HAIM KAUFMAN

355

Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXVII

359

Note on Editorial Policy

361

Symposium Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History

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The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life— An Overview Richard I. Cohen (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

Martin Buber, the Viennese-born Jewish philosopher, made an impassioned plea at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901 to refashion the Jewish soul through art. Arguing that art and aesthetics had been overlooked in the historical development of the Jews, and accepting a widely held notion of their aniconic nature, Buber minced no words: Jewish art is a series of facts. For thousands of years we were a barren people. We shared the fate of our land. A fine, horrible desert sand blew and blew over us until our sources were buried and our soil was covered with a heavy layer that killed all young buds. The excess in soul power that we possessed at all times expressed itself in the exile merely in an indescribably one-sided spiritual activity that blinded the eyes to all the beauty of nature and of life. We were robbed of that from which every people takes again and again joyous, fresh energy—the ability to behold a beautiful landscape and beautiful people. The blossoming and growth beyond the ghetto was unknown to and hated by our forebears as much as the beautiful human body. All things, from whose magic the literature spins its golden veil, all things, whose forms are forged through art’s blessed hands, were something foreign that we encountered with an ineradicable mistrust. . . . The very thing in which the true essence of a nation expresses itself to the fullest and purest, the sacred word of the national soul, the artistic productivity, was lost to us. Wherever the yearning for beauty raised itself with tender shy limbs, there it was suppressed with an invisible, merciless hand. . . . A whole and complete Jewish art will be possible only on Jewish soil, just like a whole and complete Jewish culture as such.”1

In Jewish tradition, as is well known, visual and literary texts were rarely regarded as being on the same level. Art was to a certain extent frowned upon, viewed by some as a problematic form of expression, by others with disinterest and disregard. Only by allowing art and aesthetics to reemerge at the mainstream of Jewish life, and “on Jewish soil,” Buber argued, could a Jewish renaissance evolve. Today, more than a century following Buber’s remarks and the path-breaking exhibition of Jewish artists he organized (together with Ephraim Lilien, Chaim Weizmann, and Berthold Feiwel) for the 1901 Congress,2 it seems appropriate to acknowledge that a veritable revolution has transpired in the penetration and scope of the artistic dimension in Jewish communal life during this period—even if not entirely in the Zionist spirit. 3

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Contemporaneous observers of Jewish visual culture might have taken issue with Buber’s pronouncement. They might have faulted him for minimizing the impressive and monumental synagogue architecture of the previous century and the extensive synagogue art and ritual objects of former generations—as well as for characterizing such artworks as the expression of a “dark, laborious groping of a nation for whom visual art is not a natural form of expression but who, nevertheless, desires beauty for its surroundings, at least during times of celebration.”3 They might also have noted that Buber could not have mounted the 1901 Zionist Congress art exhibition were it not for the fact that a critical mass of Jewish artists already existed—some of them supported by Jewish and non-Jewish patrons of the arts.4 Be that as it may, for Buber, who had studied art history at the University of Vienna, it was clear that an artistic transformation, “a yearning for beauty that was again and again tortured to death in the ghetto,” was beginning to take place by virtue of the entry of Jews into western civilization (what he called “cultural buds, artistic seeds” that needed nurturing) and the recognition of the need for a Jewish national existence. Undoubtedly inspired by the ways in which artists in Central Europe had given expression to their nationalist visions, Buber sought to strengthen the relationship between Jewish artists and the “Jewish spirit,” the “Jewish character,” and “Jewish perception and form,” hoping to develop on “Jewish soil” a “consciously Jewish art public that knows and loves its artists.”5

Background to the 20th-Century Visual Revolution In contradistinction to the widely held view that Jews were indifferent or even inimical to art, as Buber thought, the 19th century had witnessed a growing interest in the visual sphere among the acculturated Jewish urban population in both Western and Eastern Europe. In line with their integrationist ideology, Jews commissioned and collected art; patronized art and institutions that collected art, especially local and national museums; served as benefactors of archaeological missions and excavations; and dealt commercially in art of different cultures. In their engagement with art, they were driven by individual, universalist, and integrationist orientations—a fact bemoaned by Buber, on the one hand, and the post-Impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak, on the other.6 Jewish art, in all of its manifestations, was seldom part of their interest. Peter Paret has maintained that the “German-Jewish high bourgeoisie” was extremely prominent among the donors of modern and pre-modern art to Berlin museums from the end of the 19th century through the Weimar period. Some were great supporters of the Secessionist Movement (groups of artists in Western and Central Europe who had broken away from traditional styles of the academies of art, adopting modernist styles), whereas others, among them the venerable Rudolph Mosse, the newspaper mogul, looked askance at this phenomenon, preferring to support artists who dealt with historical themes. During the Wilhelminian period, both in Berlin and elsewhere, “the arts provided unusual scope for the individualism and creativity of members of a group still not fully accepted in German society. Those Jews who resented or were unimpressed by norms that found them inadequate could welcome new forms of art for reasons that would not motivate gentile supporters.”7

The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life—An Overview

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Consider, for instance, the case of James Simon, one of the towering art patrons of the Wilhelminian period. Simon was both a founding father and the main benefactor of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG), which promoted interest in archaeological discoveries and excavations in the Middle East. Born in Berlin in 1851, Simon had become interested in ancient civilizations and artifacts at an early age; as he gradually assumed a leading role in the family’s textile business, he became a passionate art collector. In order to turn Berlin into a central site for art, Simon endowed its museums with an abundance of objects drawn from his enormous collection, which ranged from 17th-century Dutch paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer to Mannerist and Baroque sculpture, medieval sculpture, Japanese woodblock prints, 19th-century European art, Buddhist relics, and European folk art. He was involved in the creation of the Museum für Völkerkunde, to which he donated many objects from his collection of national costumes and models of farmhouses; but he was perhaps best known for his deep interest in archaeology, as evinced by the financial support he provided for DOG’s excavation projects in historic Babylon, Egypt (Abusir and Amarna), Mesopotamia, and Palestine.8 Simon’s unstinting devotion to the arts did not preclude his involvement in Jewish causes. Among other things, he was a supporter of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (created in 1901 to assist Jewish educational and social welfare institutions in Eastern Europe). He also provided financial assistance for the building of the Technion in Haifa, and he was an active member of the Jewish Colonization Association (I.C.A.), an organization that encouraged and aided Jews from Eastern Europe to settle in agricultural colonies in South America. In sum, Simon was certainly the kind of Jewish patron that Buber and Pasternak would have wanted on their side. However, Simon, like many others, had no predilection for the Jewish visual sphere. Other acculturated and financially successful Jews in the 19th century did take an interest in this area. Ezra Mendelsohn has documented the ways in which Jews of substance patronized and purchased Maurycy Gottlieb’s paintings in the 1870s.9 During that period, Mathias Bersohn (1801–1873) of Warsaw amassed an impressive collection that included Polish art, Judaica, and Polish Jewish handicrafts. This collection was first shown publicly in Warsaw in 1875. Bersohn willed his important collection of Polish art to three Polish museums, and he bequeathed his Judaica to . ' the . Jewish community, enabling it to eventually establish the Muzeum Starozytnosci Zydowskich im. Mathiasa Bersohna (Mathias Bersohn Museum of Jewish Antiquities) in 1904.10 His division of the arts was to be pursued by others—among them, Lesser Gieldzinski of Danzig, who was a major donor of Danzigiana to important civic buildings, and who also bestowed a significant collection of Judaica to the Danzig Jewish community, providing the core for a Jewish museum in the local synagogue in 1904.11 Both for Bersohn and Gieldzinski, Judaica was different from other forms of art: collecting it was an act of affirmation for the Jewish past (and sometimes also a form of local patriotism), and the objects themselves were exhibited in “Jewish” sites. In St. Petersburg, members of the Gintsburg dynasty, noted for their wealth and prestige in pre-Soviet Russian society, were also dedicated patrons of the arts, supporting both Jewish and non-Jewish artists (most notable among the former was Mark Antokol’skii); S. An-ski’s ethnographic expedition; the Jewish Museum in ś

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Petrograd; and a host of other community institutions, including the Choral Synagogue (dedicated in 1893). One of the scions of that family, David Gintsburg, also amassed a large and important collection of Hebrew manuscripts and books, including incunabula, which is presently located in the Russian State Library in Moscow. As Benjamin Nathans has shown, such acts of philanthropy were part and parcel of the Gintsburgs’ vision of integration into Russian society and the creation of a Russian Jewish culture.12 Symbolic of their support for the arts and their vision of integration was an offer made first by Horace Gintsburg and later by his son, Vladimir. In an act meant to honor Alexander II (1855–1881), who had emancipated the serfs and improved the status of the Jews, Horace Gintsburg commissioned Antokol’skii to make a statue of the tsar, which was meant to be placed in the Choral Synagogue. The statue, however, was rejected by Jewish religious authorities of the synagogue who cited the Second Commandment injunction against “graven images.” In consequence, it was given to the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts. Almost 20 years later, in 1910, Baron Vladimir Gintsburg notified the mayor of Kiev of his intention to donate a copy of the sculpture to Kiev’s city library. Art, patronage, culture, patriotism, and Jewish self-interest were all combined in these initiatives.13 As opposed to the private undertakings outlined above, Jewish communal institutions took little interest in the collection and preservation of Jewish art and artifacts in Jewish museums (whether in Europe or in Palestine) in the years prior to the First World War. The visual dimension in general, and Jewish museums in particular, were yet to be recognized as significant elements of Jewish culture and patronage. Nonetheless, there were a number of exhibitions of Jewish art (for instance, those in the last quarter of the 19th century, the 1901 show, and several sequels in 1906 and 1907, each with different emphases), all of which were indicative of an interest in the visual arts. Their organizers hoped to dispel the notion “that Jews, as a race have no genius for the graphic and plastic arts.”14 This apologetic and celebratory trope, so common in the exhibition of Jewish works of art, was often embedded in the commentaries of both Jewish and non-Jewish figures at that time. Whereas some viewed these early exhibitions as evidence that “the graphic arts, like the others, will before long be recognised as equal witness of the emotional and intellectual genius of the House of Israel,”15 others entertained more grandiose notions, expecting art exhibitions to promote relations between eastern and western Jews—and inevitably between Jews and non-Jews—by means of dispelling misconceptions.16 Such commentators continued the 19th-century belief that art could contribute to the improvement of society. However, not all were convinced that the level of art shown in such exhibitions disproved the common claim that Jews lacked creative ability in this particular area. Reverend Morris Jacobs, reviewing the Whitechapel (London) exhibition of 1906, described a “motley gathering of portraits, etc.” that, while “rich in promise” failed to reach the level of works by European artists. As did many others, he attributed this sorry situation to a taboo rooted in the Second Commandment.17 Such comments reinforced the dilemma faced by those who struggled to enhance the visual dimension in Jewish community life. Thus, the fledgling Jewish museums established prior to the First World War in cities such as Vienna, Frankfurt, Danzig,

The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life—An Overview

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Warsaw, and Prague (and, following the war, in Petrograd in 1917) were centered in extremely modest and unassuming surroundings, and seldom in a building of their own: a far cry from many contemporary Jewish museums.18 The museums were maintained by individuals who, for a variety of reasons (apologetics, nostalgia, local Jewish patriotic feelings, historical consciousness, nationalism), believed that preserving and displaying Jewish art could promote their particular self-image. They had come to appreciate the ability of art to convey traditions and to evoke memories of the past, while at the same time asserting an important perspective on the Jewish present and future. As noted by the Society for Collection and Preservation of Artistic and Historical Monuments of Judaism, which laid the foundations in Vienna for the first Jewish museum (established in 1895), the goals of the museum would be “to collect and preserve historical documents and works of literature, art, scholarship, and science to the extent that they relate to the political and cultural history of the Jews, regardless of whether they are produced by Jewish people or by other peoples [von solchen anderer Völker].” Such collections would show that, “in spite of thousands of years of suffering and persecution our people have preserved the unique character of their thoughts and feelings, have achieved excellence in all areas of mental creativity and have truly contributed to the culture and civilized behaviour of all humanity.”19 Sensing that museums had become accepted as markers of cultural acculturation and maturity, individuals such as the historian Salomon Hugo Lieben (Prague) and the rabbi and folklorist Max Grunwald (Hamburg) argued that a Jewish museum was a necessity for Jewish integration, as well as being a means of protecting an important aspect of Jewish culture from falling into oblivion. In addition, there were those, like S. An-ski in Russia, whose main focus was to promote a sense of Jewish pride and belonging. An-ski hoped that his ethnographic and anthropological research in the Russian Pale of Settlement, undertaken in the years 1912 to 1914, would lead to a museum that would provide sources for “Jewish writers, poets, and artists who henceforth would not reject their roots, who would not lose themselves in their search for motifs and whose works . . . would not wander among those of other nations like pale shadows, but would live their own forms.”20 In the spirit of Russian ethnographic work, he believed that individuals belonging to a given nation needed to “study the life of the nation, its past and its present, its ways of life, belief systems, poetic and artistic creation.”21 Assembling material on the Jewish nation, he hoped, would be a means both of inspiring Russian Jewish intelligentsia who had distanced themselves from Jewish tradition and life, and of stimulating new forms of Jewish national existence. On the basis of his expedition, An-ski laid the foundation for a (short-lived) museum that opened in Petrograd in 1917.22 Two years earlier, the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (JSEA) had been established. Inspired by Ilya Gintsburg, an artist who taught at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, and supported by wealthy Jewish families, its stated goal was to “develop and encourage the plastic arts among Jews” as “Jews do not know their own artists”23—echoing Buber’s words, albeit from a different, non-Zionist, perspective. Between 1916 and 1917, the JSEA mounted two large exhibitions featuring Russian Jewish artists, with the aim of encouraging Jewish patrons to support new artistic talent, in this way enlarging Jewish cultural existence beyond the purview of traditional Jewish life.

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Meanwhile, other individuals in different European cities were engaged in addressing the need to present Jewish culture and its past to the non-Jewish world. In so doing, they asserted anew the classic tendencies of the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums in early 19th-century Germany, especially the notion that it was incumbent upon Jews to guarantee that their culture be known among the nations before it passed from the world. People involved in the creation of the first Jewish museums, and ever since, have often placed special importance on the “Jewish contribution” to society in their cultural agenda.24 Interestingly enough, in two immigrant countries, the United States and Palestine, the arts were regarded as a means both to assist immigrants in acculturating to their new environment and to promote a particular ideology—socialism in one case, Zionism in the other. In the United States, where the turn of the century marked the peak of a massive immigration from Eastern Europe, including more than two million Jews between 1890 and 1910, the Educational Alliance, a settlement house (a reform institution bent on creating an independent community in urban settings for the benefit of the poor), was established in 1889 in New York to help integrate Jewish immigrants into American society. Several years later it established art classes, both to prepare students to meet the standards of the uptown schools and to develop their moral character and aesthetic taste. Louis Lozowick, an artist who lectured in the Alliance Art School, wrote that it was “one of the first organized efforts in America to turn the creative energies of the Jew to the plastic and pictorial arts. . . . [It] has won its place among the leading art schools of America and among the important cultural institutions of American Jewry.”25 In addition, the Alliance brought exhibitions to the Lower East Side that attracted tens of thousands of visitors and served as an inspiration for many budding artists.26 The Alliance exhibitions and art training encouraged others to follow suit, among them the People’s Art Guild under the direction of John Weichsel. Born in Poland, Weichsel came to the United States after having completed a degree in engineering in Zurich. Weichsel was motivated by socialist ideas and believed that labor unions and art appreciation would enhance the lives of the immigrant workers. In this, he differed from the Alliance, whose main goal was to help integrate the immigrants into American society. The People’s Art Guild organized dozens of exhibitions by Jewish artists, culminating in a major exhibition in 1917 in the impressive building of the Yiddish daily Forward (opened in 1912) on the Lower East Side, having successfully gained the support and sponsorship of prominent Jews (including Rabbis Stephen Wise and Judah L. Magnes, and several leading Jewish philanthropists— Jacob Schiff, Samuel Lewisohn, and Philip Lewisohn). That same year, Weichsel prepared a proposal, supported by Mathilde Asch, the wife of the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, to create a National Jewish Museum. According to Norman Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe, the proposal does not seem to have gone very far, but within this context it is significant to point out that Weichsel to some extent echoed the connections Buber had made between art and a national identity. Claiming that the art emerging from the Lower East Side would emerge as “truly national art,” Weichsel argued that the American Jewish community could make a contribution to the United States only if it were to connect itself to its soul—the world of the immigrant. Although his museum did not plan to overlook the religious past and its ceremonial

The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life—An Overview

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art, the emphasis was to be on secular art by contemporary “Jewish workers” and other Jewish artists.27 The timing, in the middle of the First World War, was clearly not opportune for such a project, notwithstanding the support Weichsel had received from the uptown Jewish establishment for the 1917 Forward exhibition. In Palestine, meanwhile, efforts by Boris Schatz to turn the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts (founded in 1906) into a center for the study and development of the arts, while at the same time serving the economic needs of the Jewish population, were plagued both by lack of means and by Schatz’s rejection of all forms of modernist art. The parent organization (the Zionist organization in Berlin) had much more specific goals for Bezalel—namely, to manufacture rugs. Yet Schatz, the founder of Bezalel, was unwilling to forego his more grandiose vision and forged ahead to create a distinct Bezalel style in many objects. Under his stewardship, more than two dozen departments of decorative arts (including ceramics, ivory work, and copper work) were set up with the help of teachers brought over from Europe. Schatz attempted to keep the school alive by arranging Bezalel exhibitions abroad (the first took place in Odessa in 1911, the last in 1929 in the United States), where a wide variety of school products was sold. Bezalel was to become synonymous with a “Jewish art” design based on an amalgamation of biblical and Zionist themes with Oriental motifs, often with a Jugendstil touch. Though Schatz was able to keep the institution alive (together with an exhibition space, formalized as the Bezalel National Museum in 1922) until 1929, it was then closed by the Zionist organization for several years because of the school’s dwindling revenue, coupled with opposition to Schatz’s management style.28 Thus it appears that, by the First World War, the Jewish visual dimension had grown in stature, having gained a certain acceptance and presence in Jewish communal life while benefiting from a modicum of support by Jewish patrons. At the same time, large philanthropic efforts were usually directed elsewhere, and patronage was still earmarked for general concerns that rarely touched the Jewish artistic sphere.29 Integrationist tendencies generally dominated the day for upwardly mobile Jews, who preferred to leave their imprint on the general art scene rather than facilitating, championing, and developing Jewish art of all shades and forms.

The Interwar Years The interwar period saw the intensification of the trends, tensions, and struggles charted above. Two significant phenomena that transpired during this period—one in Paris, the other in Berlin—illustrate the evolution in the Jewish artistic sphere. Scholars relating to the widespread growth in the number of artists of Jewish origin in Paris have noted that this “sudden” development in contrast to the past was represented by “scores of Jewish artists . . . seen on all the artistic horizons,” and attribute it to the “migration en masse of the East European Jewish artists towards Paris.”30 Indeed, the rich diversity of artists of the “circle of Montparnasse” challenged the accepted wisdom on Jews and their artistic creativity and aroused heated discussions concerning the impact of their upbringing on their artistic oeuvre. These artists (among them, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine,

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and Jules Pascin) were known and exhibited in a wide range of galleries, some of them owned by Jews. Similarly, their paintings were purchased by a variety of collectors: non-Jews and Jews, French, Americans, Germans, and others. A large number of these artists had works shown at the 1937 Paris World Fair, following a period of backlash against “foreign” artists in the earlier half of the 1930s.31 Yet none of this creative energy overflowed into the life of institutional Jewry. Paris remained without a Jewish museum until 1948; even then, it received minimal attention and support. (This paralleled the situation in another center of art, New York, which maintained a minimalist exhibition/museum of ceremonial art on the premises of the Jewish Theological Seminary until after the Second World War, when the Seminary received an unexpected gift from a major benefactor.32) The case of Berlin brings us back to a recurrent conundrum—the nature of a “Jewish artist”—a matter that was manifested most poignantly in January 1933 with the opening of the Jewish Museum of Berlin, a week before Adolph Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reich.33 The opening exhibition of the Jewish museum included some works by the distinguished artist Max Liebermann, who by then had become the honorary president of the Jewish Museum Society (decades earlier, he had opposed being included in the volume edited by Buber, as he objected to being categorized as a “Jewish artist”). Liebermann’s representation in the 1933 show aroused the ire of Curt Glaser, a distinguished art historian and director of the Berlin Library of Arts, who was soon to be removed from his position by the Nazis. The Jewish-born Glaser (he subsequently converted to Protestantism) was a specialist in northern Renaissance art, a patron of Expressionist artists, and a partner in the impressive art gallery run by Paul Cassirer and Karl Scheffler. In addition, he had become a major collector of modern art, including the works of two artists later to be defamed in the 1937 Nazi-inspired Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) exhibition, Edvard Munch and Max Beckmann. Glaser was also a friend of Henri Matisse and Ludwig Kirchner (they, too, were defamed by the Nazis). This assimilationist background puts into context Glaser’s rejection of the very name “Jewish Museum”34 and his biting comment regarding the inclusion in the museum of works by artists of Jewish origin that ostensibly lacked “Jewish” themes, as was the case with the Liebermann paintings. Glaser wrote: “This leads to a split, which is totally undesirable and from an academic point of view in no way justifiable. Liebermann, for example, is a European. He is a German, a Berlin artist. The fact that he belongs to a Jewish family is totally irrelevant with regards to the form and essence of his art.”35 Glaser was neither the first nor the last to ruminate on this theme with regard to Liebermann. Notwithstanding, during the National Socialist period, the Jewish Museum of Berlin became the home for various artists with a similar pedigree who had little chance of being exhibited in a “German” venue; moreover, the museum was able to do homage to Liebermann, a year after his passing in 1936, when it created an all-Liebermann show with some 69 of his works.36 By then, Liebermann and others had become firmly identified as “Jewish artists.” The penetration of visual culture into the life of Jews and their institutions persisted until the impact of National Socialism and the rise of strident nationalism in many European countries began to limit the possibilities of development. The interwar period saw a dramatic growth in the number of artists of Jewish origin who rose

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to prominence in Europe, the United States, and Palestine. Exhibitions of their works, and also of works produced by earlier Jewish artists (among them, Maurycy Gottlieb, Samuel Hirszenberg, Max Liebermann, Maurycy Minkowsky, Moritz Oppenheim, and Abraham Neuman), were held in different venues, with varying degrees of public interest. In addition, Jewish patronage and ownership of art galleries rose significantly in most major cities in Central and Western Europe, England, the United States, and Palestine; and several new Jewish museums (for instance, the Jewish museum in Berlin, to be discussed at greater length in this symposium)—still within relatively confined quarters, with combined collections of art and artifacts—were established. Jewish journals devoted to the arts (for instance, Ost und West, Múlt és jövo" ) continued to discuss works by artists of Jewish origin and on Jewish themes. In Germany, Max Liebermann rose to an unprecedented position for an artist of Jewish origin by becoming president of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1920, a position he retained until 1932.37 Evidence of the changing image of Jews and the arts was highlighted by the growing discussion regarding the “Jewish influence” on the arts—this was noted in different countries, generally in antagonistic ways, most often in terms of assigning materialistic motives to those Jews who were interested in art.38 The “negative” artistic influence of Jews was also a leading theme in the 1937 Nazi exhibition on degenerate art, which included a small number of artists of Jewish origin (among them, Chagall, El Lissitzky, Jankel Adler, Ludwig Meidner, Lazar Segal, and László Moholy-Nagy). This elaborate growth and association of the visual with the Jewish world, whether in terms of communities or individuals, paved the way to the remarkable development in the postwar period. ő

The Impact of the Holocaust The Holocaust of European Jewry resulted in a dramatic change in the contours of the Jewish museological world—not immediately, of course, but incrementally, as we shall see in some of the essays in this symposium. Over the next two generations of the 20th century, there would be myriad attempts to rebuild the shattered worlds of communities and individuals. Different agendas appeared in different countries, but often this process of rebuilding included visual representation, including an emphasis on exhibitions of Jewish content and the establishment of Jewish museums. The place of the Holocaust in the impetus to create these museums (especially, but not exclusively in Europe) and its impact both on the themes such museums have pursued and on their self-conception, cannot be exaggerated. Indeed, the tremendous public, academic, and political engagement with the Holocaust from the late 1960s on has spurred the establishment of a spate of Holocaust museums in the United States and in many European cities and countries.39 Holocaust museums have become an entity in their own right and are not defined or regarded as “Jewish museums,” though in some cases (for instance, the Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus in Farmington Hills, Michigan) a certain overlapping exists. The division between Holocaust museums and Jewish museums requires a certain elaboration. Jewish museums (that is, those whose names

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specifically designate themselves as such) are continually confronted with the practical dilemma of how to contain the Holocaust within their premises without being defined in some way as a “Holocaust” institution. By the same token, if Holocaust museums are not construed as “Jewish museums”—indeed, in some cities (for instance, Paris, Los Angeles, Berlin, and New York) there is both a Jewish and a Holocaust museum—what does that imply about the two types of museum? Are they to be regarded as mutually exclusive, or are they equally integral aspects of the experience of Jews? Recently, the historian David Engel took issue with Jewish historians of the modern period and with historians of the Holocaust alike. Scholars in both fields, he argued, were failing to integrate the Holocaust into the scheme of Jewish historical development, and likewise failing to create new paradigms of Jewish history in the wake (and shadow) of the Holocaust.40 Clearly the museological scene could provide grist for Engel’s mill. Two strikingly contrasting images of Jews are being represented by these two types of museums: one depicts the Jew(s) as victim— weak, powerless, and persecuted—whereas the other more often exudes success and celebrates acceptance, acculturation, and influence; though sometimes the two binary images merge into one. Jewish museum initiatives in the post-Holocaust period have also capitalized on periods of “Jewish pride” and engagement in the course of the founding and development of the state of Israel. So, too, the breakdown of Communism and the end of a monolithic interpretation of society in East European countries (see the essays on this theme in the symposium) resulted in new avenues of expression that, among other things, allowed for the emergence of Jewish museums. Finally, the postwar era was marked by an expansion and transformation of Jewish philanthropic activities. All of these provided the foundations for a “visual revolution” in this period. In many cases, especially in the last two decades, Jewish museums have been built along the lines of monumental synagogues of the 19th century: no longer quaint, almost invisible sites, but rather attractive, spacious, and engaging buildings. Patronage of Jewish visual space has become the anchor for this development. It would seem that, were they alive and active today, the great collectors and patrons of museums in the preFirst World War period (such as James Simon) would either be strongly encouraged to contribute, or else pleased to lend a philanthropic hand, to the creation of a Jewish and/or Holocaust museum. (To be sure, this turn in Jewish philanthropy toward granting Jewish museums and the visual dimension a high priority does not imply that donations by Jews to general museums has declined. On the contrary, many a distinguished museum, be it the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Louvre, or the British Museum, are recipients of large donations by Jews; in consequence, those restrictions that had previously prevented Jews from sitting on the board of such museums have necessarily come to an end. Fine galleries of art, sponsored by Jews and dedicated in their names, are increasingly seen in these institutions.) Through the economic and social connections Jews have developed in this period, combined with the heavy moral and political weight of the Holocaust that has emerged in some countries, Jews have also been able to promote their endeavors with the aid of financial resources and political clout originating outside the regular Jewish constituency. This sociological development can be compared to that sense of

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belonging Jews felt in various countries in the 19th century, in Europe and America especially, which moved them to procure permission to create impressive synagogues that declared openly their sense of attachment to the public space, which in turn granted them a recognizable presence in the city.41 Today, in certain countries and in certain situations, Jews benefit not only from a sense of belonging but from newly acquired political and economic influence. Accordingly, in the post-Holocaust age, Jews and non-Jews have enabled the Jewish museum to assume a distinguished place in the urban setting, unlike most (if not all) other minorities in society. Indeed, whereas other minorities, among them blacks in America, Ukrainians and Poles in Canada and the United States, and ethnic minorities in China, are also represented in museums, and some in their own separate museums, it appears that none have reached the visibility of Jews in their “museological turn.” A case in point is the National Museum of American Jewish History, recently built on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. Completed within three years, the 100,000-squarefoot glass and terra-cotta building was designed by the architectural firm of James Polshek at a cost of some $150 million. Participating in the opening ceremony in 2010 were Vice President Joe Biden and other dignitaries, including the mayor of Philadelphia, the governor of Pennsylvania, and leaders of Jewish institutions. The museum’s self-presentation speaks for itself with its sense of self-confidence and pride: “Rising five stories above Independence Mall, in the heart of historic Philadelphia, the National Museum of American Jewish History will join Independence Hall, the National Constitution Center, the Liberty Bell and other landmarks at the hallowed site of America’s birth. There could not be a more fitting place for a museum that will explore the promise and challenges of liberty through the lens of the American Jewish experience.”42 The National Museum of American Jewish History wished to showcase the American Jewish experience as a beacon for others to explore the immigrant experience, and its statement of purpose affirmed the pride of a successful minority group: “The National Museum of American Jewish History’s mission is to present educational programs and experiences that preserve, explore and celebrate the history of Jews in America. Our purpose is to connect Jews more closely to their heritage and to inspire in people of all backgrounds a greater appreciation for the diversity of the American Jewish experience and the freedoms to which Americans aspire.” To these words the president of the museum, Michael Rosenzweig, added his own commentary: “Our Museum will illustrate how freedom and its choices, challenges and responsibilities, fostered an environment in which American Jews were able to accomplish truly extraordinary things. And since other immigrant ethnic groups have faced similar challenges, the Museum will also be a place for all Americans to explore.”43 From the side of the building overlooking Independence Mall, a neon light with the words Only in America (the phrase popularized by Harry Golden in his eponymous book) shines as the day darkens; there is also a flickering light in the upper corner of the façade that evokes associations with a lighthouse beacon seen from afar by immigrants approaching the shores of the new land. In front of that façade, a sculpture created by the American Jewish sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 has been relocated from a site further down the street. Ezekiel’s sculpture, representing Religious Liberty, was dedicated by B’nai B’rith, the organization that originally commissioned it, “to the people of the United States.”

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The universal allegory of religious liberty is epitomized by the female figure wearing a “liberty cap” containing 13 stars representing the original states in the Union, who holds in one hand the constitution of the United States (which guarantees that liberty). As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett pointed out, the sculpture does not insert any reference to Jews or Judaism in its universalistic message;44 however, its present location below the neon phrase creates a definite association between the message, the sculpture, and American Jewry. The exhibition in the National Museum of American Jewish History follows the evolution of American Jewry from the Jews’ first arrival to America in the 17th century to the recent past, providing viewers with the wide gamut of directions taken by Jews over these centuries—professionally, religiously, culturally, and politically. The core exhibition notes the growing Jewish population over the past centuries and individual and community successes, and also gives some attention to antisemitic events and controversial issues (for instance, Jewish involvement in slave trade, the Rosenberg espionage trial, and the role of Jews in organized crime). Overall, however, the main focus of this enterprise is on success, contribution, accomplishment, exceptionalism, diversity, and celebration. In a certain sense the museum also conveys a conscious effort to de-center both Israel and the Holocaust as the primary Jewish narratives of our time. The museum can thus be seen as American Jewry’s self-presentation of a counternarrative to the Holocaust and the tragic fate of European Jewry, which, of course, is the main theme of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in a no less significant location on the Washington Mall. The “visibility” of Jewish museums in the era following the Second World War was accompanied by a changing museological strategy. This shift took several directions. Attempts have been made, in Europe and elsewhere, to assert the place of Jews within the context of the city or country they inhabited. Hugo Lieben had made this a major principle of his collection policy in Prague at the turn of the century, as did Lesser Gieldzinsky in Danzig. This agenda took on a new direction following the Holocaust. By granting pride of place to artists of Jewish origin of a given city in which a Jewish museum existed, curators were making a multiple claim. Take the case of Isidor Kaufmann of Hungary (1853–1921), who has often been regarded, incorrectly, as an epigone of Moritz Oppenheim—almost as his “twin brother,” though Kaufmann’s breadth of creativity was more limited than Oppenheim’s and his subjects were more often Jewish figures and scenes of Jewish life. Kaufmann’s clear goal was to turn his art into a social agenda, desiring to glorify and exalt Judaism. He “strove to reveal its beauties and its nobility and tried to make the traditions and institutions that speak of such great religious devotion and reverence accessible for Gentiles as well.”45 This, in fact, was not far afield from Oppenheim’s agenda, yet Kaufmann’s insularity, unlike Oppenheim’s accessibility, could not easily appeal to Austrian society in the highly nationalistic atmosphere of the interwar years. Likewise, his attempts to recreate Jewish life prior to acculturation did not meet with a warm reception among Viennese Jews eagerly pursuing the road of integration. It took the post-Holocaust generation and the emergence of a vibrant Jewish museum in Vienna (nothing like its namesake of the prewar years), plus a powerful drive to reimplant Jewish culture into Austrian consciousness, in order to make a

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claim on Kaufmann—that is, to assert his relevance for fin-de-siècle Austrian art. He was to be situated as a Viennese artist, even though his claim to fame lay in his portrayals of internal Jewish life. In a major retrospective of Kaufmann’s work mounted in the Jewish Museum Vienna in 1999, Kaufmann’s image as an Oppenheim imitator was rejected: his Jewish genre scenes were placed within the artistic context of the Munich School alongside the work of such figures as Carl Spitzweg, Eduard Grützner, and Franz von Defregger. The bilingual catalog by G. Tobias Natter (such catalogs are common in European Jewish museums, though not usually found in city or even national museums) summed the matter up in its bilingual title, Rabbiner-Bocher-Talmudschüler: Bilder des Wiener Malers Isidor Kaufmann, 1853–1921 (Rabbis, students, Talmud scholars: paintings of the Viennese artist Isidor Kaufmann)—Kaufmann was both an artist of the traditional Jewish world and a Viennese painter. The exhibition represented the desire of the Jewish Museum Vienna and of Natter, its guest curator, to reinstate an aspect of the apologetic agenda that had characterized the first exhibitions of Jewish art in the 20th century. The museum wished to demonstrate Jewish creativity in the visual arts, but above all to affirm the Jewish contribution to Austrian culture and to illuminate the shared traditions with non-Jewish Viennese artists (such as Friedrich Georg Waldmüller). Kaufmann was one of several artists highlighted by the museum, in conjunction with Natter, during the 1990s. Two of the women artists exhibited, Broncia Koller-Pinell and Tina Blau, had not been featured at any of the early 20th-century Jewish exhibitions, possibly because their Jewish roots had been unknown to the organizers (both had converted to Christianity in the late 19th century). Koller-Pinell and, even more so, Blau had been relatively well-known at the beginning of the century in Austria, though both later fell into a certain obscurity. The impetus to show their works in post-Holocaust Vienna emerged, I would argue, from the desire to make their Jewish roots known to Viennese society, as neither artist had any clear thematic connection with Judaism—at most, one might point to one of Blau’s paintings, Jewish Street in Amsterdam, which relates ostensibly to Jews, or to Koller-Pinell’s striking portrait of Anna Mahler, the sculptor and daughter of the renowned composer. However, these were clearly tangential connections (if indeed at all) to Judaism. Similarly, Fritz Schwarz-Waldegg (1889– 1942), whose works were shown in the museum in a retrospective held in 2009–2010, was known for his earlier Expressionist works and later for works with a strong influence of Cézanne; his career was cut short when he was deported in 1942 to the Nazi extermination camp Maly Trastsianiets, on the outskirts of Minsk in Belarus. From these examples, it is apparent that the exhibition of artists of Jewish origin in Vienna in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was designed at least in part to refashion the image of Jews and Judaism in the eyes of Austrian society and to guarantee their memory in the history of turn-of-the-century Austrian art: a significant shift from the direction urged by Buber, to have Jewish art taking shape on “Jewish soil.” Moreover, the Viennese case was by no means unique. Moritz Oppenheim (1800– 1882) provides another interesting example. Oppenheim, who was the subject of a retrospective centennial exhibition in 1900 by the Frankfurter Kunstverein, was given cameo appearances in the major post-Holocaust exhibitions in Frankfurt and Cologne in the 1960s and received more extensive and direct attention in New York

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exhibitions of 1977 and 1981, which were followed by a major retrospective in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem in 1983.46 But the crowning moment came in December 1999 when the recreated Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main opened a comprehensive retrospective in conjunction with the Museum Hanau Schloss Philippsruhe, under the patronage of the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. The resurgence of interest in Oppenheim following the war may be related to historical factors outlined by Elisheva Cohen, the chief curator of the Bezalel wing of the Israel Museum (and herself a former Frankfurtian), who argued that, with reference to the history of 19th-century German art, “Moritz Oppenheim may not have been one of its outstanding figures, but he deserves to be remembered. . . . [He] stood between the ages of repression and emancipation. . . . In his own way Moritz Oppenheim stands as a true and worthy representative of a significant period in German-Jewish history.”47 In short, Oppenheim became a symbol of German Jewry and German-Jewish symbiosis prior to the catastrophe. His paintings appealed to diverse constituents in the post-Holocaust era: those who desired to assert the role of Jews in German society before the onslaught of Nazism; those who wanted to enlighten Germans on the Jewish past; and those who wished to present Judaism in its representative mode. No other Jewish artist from the 19th century could fulfill this cultural desideratum. Oppenheim’s themes and preoccupations fit the role perfectly, almost in the way that Moses Mendelssohn’s life and writings had earlier been turned into the symbol of German-Jewish rapprochement. Oppenheim offered a congenial representation of Jewish life that showed custom and ritual but was also open to non-Jews and respectful of German traditions. Several of the grisaille paintings from his well-known series Scenes from the Traditional Jewish Family Life integrated non-Jews into the scenes sensitively, showing children peering at Jews who were performing religious rituals. Louis Edward Levy, a journalist and community leader, had showered platitudes on this series in 1895, describing the “poetry and earnestness” in Oppenheim’s work, along with “piety and tenderness, sobriety and conscientiousness . . . the human and the pathos of that oldtime Jewish life.”48 In addition, Oppenheim’s work featured none of the harsh portrayals of Jewish life—and troubling encounters with the non-Jewish world—to be found, for example, in works of East European artists such as Maurycy Minkowski or Samuel Hirszenberg. Constructing a world according to Oppenheim’s paintings enabled a generation after the Holocaust—Jews and non-Jews (and, first and foremost, Germans)—to reward this “first Jewish painter” with his rightful place in his hometown in Hanau, in his relocated residence in Frankfurt, and in the Jewish centers of New York and Jerusalem. Not incidentally, the title of the major retrospective in Hanau/Frankfurt was “Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art.” The word “German” was missing from the title, but Hanau (where he was born) and Frankfurt (where he spent a good portion of his life) could now reclaim for themselves this German Jewish artist. Curators, like historians, select from the past and have their own narratives and agendas. Moreover, whether consciously or subconsciously, curators as a group tend to follow similar patterns of thought. Thus it may not be surprising that the Jewish Museum Munich, situated on St. Jakobs-Platz between the Jewish community center

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and the central Ohel Jacob synagogue, and in close proximity to the Munich city museum, has been concerned (since its inauguration in 2007) with identifying Munich Jewish collectors of art and showing objects of their former collections.49 This orientation is part of a larger vision of creating a bridge between the present city of Munich and its Jewish past and present. Collectors and collections of a very broad scope have been highlighted in the first years of the museum’s existence. Dr. Heinrich Feuchtwanger, for instance, was a dentist who collected Judaica; his fine collection was first exhibited in its entirety in Jerusalem (where he lived from 1936) in 1971.50 Heinrich Thannhauser was a household name both in the Munich modern art scene and in the art world in general, having founded in 1909 the Moderne Galerie, where he exhibited a diverse group of modern artists from the Impressionists to German artists (in particular, the expressionist circle known as Der Blaue Reiter); this was also the first gallery to hold a retrospective of Picasso, in 1913. After a period of impressive growth, the gallery faced increasing opposition during the early years of the National Socialist regime; in consequence, Thannhauser and his family closed it and left Germany. (Thannhauser eventually settled in New York.) Similarly, members of the prestigious Bernheimer gallery, established in 1864 in Munich, were forced to leave Germany after years of purveying Italian Renaissance art and decorative arts to the court of Bavaria and to European and American collectors and galleries. The family returned to Munich after the war, reclaimed its stolen art, and reopened the Bernheimer galleries in Munich. No longer of the Jewish faith, Konrad Bernheimer, the present owner of the gallery, cooperated willingly with the museum to present the history of the family’s gallery.51 Creating a Jewish museum in Munich, where National Socialism had received strong support and where the national headquarters of the National Socialist party had been stationed,52 was in itself a statement to the people of the city. The Jewish Museum Munich is not a Holocaust museum, yet the Holocaust remains an everlasting presence, as noted by Inka Bertz in her essay. In choosing the above strategy for its initial temporary exhibitions, it would seem that the museum’s dominant raison d’être was to enable contemporary Munich residents to become acquainted with the diverse nature of the Jews who once resided in the city and who contributed to it in the artistic sphere. To be sure, in all of the cases cited above (and in others not discussed), the outcome was similar—the Jews left the city in order to ensure their future. The details of Nazi persecution were not glossed over in the exhibitions; nonetheless, the museum quite deliberately chose not to place the Holocaust in the foreground.53 In a similar spirit to the above shows, a recent exhibition in the Cracow Jewish museum, devoted to the Jewish artists who inhabited the city for some years, offered a view of the cultural and artistic life that flourished there prior to the Second World War, with particular emphasis on the artistic production of Jewish and universal themes.54 Further examples might be brought to illustrate this museological tendency, which parallels an increasingly common historiographical orientation in certain countries (among them, France, Germany, the United States, Canada, and Israel) wherein research on a given local country takes precedence over other aspects of historical research. With regard to Jewish museums, however, especially in Europe, the attempt to “reclaim” local artists of Jewish origin (or, for that matter, other individuals of Jewish origin, or

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Jewish groups), reflects the museological mandate of filling the void of what has been lost to society. A somewhat different strategy has been to revisit artists of Jewish origin in order to focus attention on them from new perspectives. The case of artists of Jewish origin in Paris in the 20th century provides such an example—Camille Pisarro, Chaim Soutine, and Jules Adler are among those who have been the subject of exhibitions in Jewish museums and elsewhere. Curators in Jewish museums are challenged to present the problematics and complexity of these artists as part of the interest in them and their development; acknowledging that they have a definite place in a Jewish museum, curators are nonetheless generally averse to presenting them in a onedimensional approach, avoiding their simplistic classification as “Jewish artists.” Rather, such artists are seen within the context of their artistic period and style, and alongside their cultural and social context (including their Jewish upbringing or content), all of which deservedly demands attention.55 In this manner, many an artist of Jewish origin has been reassessed and reevaluated within a “Jewish context,” which in turn has provided many Jewish museums with an opportunity to engage the public in Jewish artistic creativity. Moreover, some Jewish museums are placing a new emphasis in their collections and exhibitions on those artists who can be considered “representable” and “general” enough, highlighting these artists’ paintings and sculpture while moving ceremonial objects (the core of earlier Jewish museums) to the sidelines.

Postscript Acculturation of Jews from the 19th to the 21st centuries brought about a reassessment of the visual dimension in Jewish institutional life, which asserted itself in a variety of forms and cultural modes. Jewish museums and exhibitions have played an important role in this development, synthesizing this evolution and emerging as important interpreters and exponents of Jewish tradition, past and present, and as carriers of social and cultural messages. Moreover, Jewish museums, especially since 1945, present an impressive example of the general claim that the modern museum is one of the most absolute—and dynamic—success stories within modern culture. This symposium explores some of the ways in which Jewish museums have determined or highlighted the nature of Jewish visibility and will inquire into the methodological underpinnings of some of these projects, the specific impact of the national setting, and the changing terrain of boundaries within the museums. Other than in Israel, where many museums were created in rural settlements (for instance, the Israeli settlement museums of Yifat, the Old Courtyard of Ein Shemer, and Ein Harod) but were seldom considered “Jewish” museums, Jewish museums have largely been an urban phenomenon. Long before the Second World War, the urban setting strongly attracted Jews, far more than it did other minority groups. This pattern did not change in the postwar period: Jews became identified with the city and were seen as quintessential urban figures, involved in the liberal professions the urban setting offered. As the century progressed, they also became important and

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significant benefactors of cultural concerns. Following the war, major (and in some instances, smaller) cities in Europe and America have become home to Jewish museums. The number of such museums grows annually in Europe and the United States, manifesting the public association between Jews and the city. Jewish museums have assumed a distinguished locus in the urban setting, unlike most (if not all) other minorities in society. Over the course of the last two decades, Jewish museums in Germany and in several other European countries have had no real possibility, or desire, to avoid their complicated context and history. The void created by the Holocaust, plus the need to bring the Jews back into society in some imaginative way, were often the catalyst to create a Jewish museum. The Holocaust cannot be fully removed from any of these museums; its presence hovers over every one of them. The Jewish Museum Berlin— probably the best known European Jewish museum, in large part because of Daniel Libeskind’s dramatic architectural design and Menashe Kadishman’s ever-present metallic “fallen leaves”—certainly struggles with the responsibility of being such a visible and central venue for non-Jewish and Jewish visitors to Berlin. Though the evolution of Nazism’s rise to power is presented in a wide range of artifacts, it is far from being the central focus of the permanent exhibition, which rather tells the story of German Jewry from the time of the medieval communities of SHU”M (the three central Jewish communities in the medieval Rhineland: Speyer, Worms, and Mainz) through the post-Second World War, recounting its narrative in tremendous detail and utilizing all the modern technical means to engage the visitor. Individual objects, however, are subsumed in the overall context and haunting atmosphere of the museum, where visitors are well aware of what awaits them at the end of the building’s circuitous route. A grain of truth is certainly present in James Young’s dramatic claim “that the Jewish extension to the Berlin Museum has become the prism through which the rest of the world will come to know Berlin’s own past.” In a somewhat convoluted way, one might even claim that Jewish presence in Berlin has become empowered and magnified through its representation in the museum, and now even more so via the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the center of the city (consisting of a maze of large slabs of stone with no text) and the impressive Holocaust museum directly below the memorial that sensitively focuses on several individual stories. The parallel between these structures in Berlin, on the one hand, and with the central location granted the National Jewish Museum of American History in Philadelphia, on the other, is striking: in both places, despite radically different historical perspectives, there is a sense of Jewish empowerment and visibility. Inevitably faced with the issue of context and how to represent changing internal boundaries and interconnections with the non-Jewish surrounding, Jewish museums are undergoing dramatic developments. One example is provided by the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, designed by Libeskind, which opened in 2008. This is truly a contemporary Jewish museum—most radically in the sense that it lacks a permanent collection. In addition, the museum prides itself on being non-dogmatic and inclusive with regard to definitions of Jews and Judaism, seeking to be in the forefront of dialogue, freedom of expression, social justice, religious tolerance, and the promotion of creativity and imagination. Art and

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the “Jewish space” of the museum welcome innovation and strive to reach beyond the Jewish community to bring about broader civic and cultural exchange. The museum’s desire to be at the forefront of a new multicultural identity was exemplified in a recent exhibition titled Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, which treated openly her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, her extensive contacts with leading artists and writers in Paris, her image as portrayed in many works of artists, and her own literary career. The Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco (its name changed from the Jewish Museum San Francisco) is configured within the context of California and post-modernism. The lachrymose interpretation of Jewish life—the stress on the suffering of the Jews—is nowhere to be found. Instead, its exhibits project optimism and hope: “No blood libels, pogroms etc. came after the gold rush. As pioneers they prospered. Nowhere else in the world—not Babylon nor Rome nor Sepharad nor Ashkenaz—had so many Jews participated in the commercial development of a city and not been consigned to lasting second-class status.” Thus Mitchell Schwarzer, a leading figure in the museum, gave expression to the museum’s spirit, noting as well its goal and culmination in Libeskind’s creation: “Just as Gershwin expanded the range of his music by intertwining strains of the blues and jazz into the classical repertory, so too the Contemporary Jewish Museum strives to expand public engagement with Jewish culture by intertwining contemporary currents with older traditions and rituals. Libeskind has created a space from which to explore how Judaism may continue to do so into the future.”56 Clearly this museum sees itself and Judaism in a new light, as a combination of vitality and creativity, bolstered by the Bay Area location that offers “a life of possibilities, of beauty, of openness, really of America in its most vibrant and aspiring state.”57 Gone are the common phrases of Jewish museums from the early 20th century, which spoke of turning the museum into a forum for reengagement with one’s heritage. In their place is the Libeskind vision of the museum, which for him “embodies and manifests hope. It is a beacon radiating the Jewish imagination and creativity underlying a culture of freedom, curiosity, and possibility. . . . ecumenical experience available to all those interested in the contemporary relevance—for Jews and non-Jews alike—of the 4000–year old ‘Jewish experience.’”58 Thus, Jewish museums today manifest a resounding acknowledgement of the cultural and historical factor of Jews in the historical process—whether in the sense of their achievements, their integral positioning in the societies they inhabit, or the tragic developments in their history. No other minority group has galvanized such a wide-ranging involvement in its development. Moreover, various Jewish museums (and possibly some of the Holocaust museums) in America and Europe seem to be seeking a role for themselves as the avatars of historical developments and futuristic visions. Apologetics are often being replaced by a more universalistic approach. The visual dimension and dramatic new architectural spaces are increasingly central to this imaginative reconstruction of the Jews in culture and history, which challenges the traditional foundations of exclusivity and singularity—very distant from the regenerative talk of Martin Buber. The symposium touches on only a few examples of this growing force in Jewish culture, one that truly warrants its depiction as a visual revolution.

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Notes My gratitude to Anat Helman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Mirjam Rajner, and David Ruderman, both for their conscientious critical reading of a previous draft of this article and for their beneficial suggestions. 1. Gilya G. Schmidt (ed. and trans.), The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber (Syracuse: 1999), 48, 50. 2. Gilya G. Schmidt, The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901 (Syracuse: 2003). In the wake of the exhibition, Buber edited a volume titled Jüdische Künstler (1903). 3. Schmidt, The First Buber, 55. 4. Ezra Mendelsohn, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Hanover: 2002), 103. 5. Schmidt, The First Buber, 105. These remarks originally appeared in 1903 in Jüdische Künstler and were reprinted in several different places. 6. See Pasternak’s comment to Chaim Nachman Bialik, quoted in John E. Bowlt, “Jewish Artists and the Russian Silver Age,” in the exhibition catalog Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change 1890–1990, ed. Susan Tumarkin Goodman (Munich: 1995), 44: “No-one knew about these Jewish artists. Neither the flower of the Jewish intelligentsia, nor the moneyed class—let alone the poor hungry Jewish masses—needed art. The Jews were just not interested.” 7. Peter Paret, “Modernism and the ‘Alien Element’ in German Art,” in the exhibition catalog Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918, ed. Emily Bilski (Berkeley: 1999), 56. 8. O. Matthes, “Zur Vorgeschichte der Ausgrabungen in Assur 1898–1903/05,” in Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft zu Berlin 129 (1997), 9–27. 9. Mendelsohn, Painting a People, 100–103. 10. François Guesnet, “Bersohn, Mathias,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, vol. 1 (New Haven: 2008), 169–170. 11. Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: 1998), 203–204. 12. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: 2002), passim, 161–162. 13. Ibid., 161; Natan M. Meir, Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859–1914 (Bloomington: 2010), 248. 14. Jewish Chronicle (November 9, 1906). On the 19th-century exhibitions, see Cohen, Jewish Icons, 186–219. 15. M. [Marion] H. Spielmann, “Jewish Art,” in Whitechapel Art Gallery: Exhibition of Jewish Art and Antiquities (London: 1906), 85. Spielmann (1858–1948), the prominent Victorian art critic and editor of two respectable art magazines of his day (The Connoisseur and the Magazine of Art), was a member of the advisory committee of the exhibition. 16. See, for instance, the comments by Salli Kirschstein, who had a private museum of Judaica in Berlin, later sold to Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, quoted in Joseph Gutmann, “The Kirschstein Museum of Berlin,” Jewish Art 16–17 (1990–1991), 176. 17. Jewish Chronicle (December 21, 1906). On the Second Commandment and Jewish artistic creativity, see Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: 2000) 13–58; Margaret Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: 2001). 18. For a preliminary list of Jewish museums and their catalogs, see William L. Gross, “Catalogue of Catalogues: Bibliographical Survey of a Century of Temporary Exhibitions of Jewish Art,” Journal of Jewish Art 6 (1979), 133–157. 19. See Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Wiebke Krohn (eds.), Das Erste–Das erste jüdische Museum (Vienna: 2006), 6, 15. 20. John E. Bowlt, “Jewish Artists and the Russian Silver Age,” 46. 21. Quoted in Eugene A. Avrutin, Valerii Dymshits, Alexander Lvov, Harriet Murav, and Alla Sokolova (eds.), Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions (Waltham: 2009), 8.

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22. The An-ski exhibition has been studied extensively. See, for instance, Mikhail Beizer, The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions through a Noble Past, trans. Michael Sherbourne, ed. Martin Gilbert (Philadelphia: 1989), 117–124. Avrutin, Photographing the Jewish Nation, 21–25, provides an extensive bibliography. 23. Bowlt, “Jewish Artists and the Russian Silver Age,” 48; Alina Orlov, “First There was the Word: Early Russian Texts on Modern Jewish Art,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 3 (2008), 383–402. 24. The history of the early Jewish museums has been treated by various authors. See, for instance, David Altschuler (ed.), The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections (New York: 1983), 17–45; Cohen, Jewish Icons, 186–219; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: 1998), 79–128; Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Georg Heuberger (eds.), Was übrig blieb. Das Museum Jüdischer Altertümer in Frankfurt 1922–1938 (Frankfurt: 1988); Ilona Benoschofsky and Alexander Schreiber (eds.), Das Jüdische Museum in Budapest (Budapest: 1989); Heimann-Jelinek and Krohn (eds.), Das Erste Museum. 25. Louis Lozowick, “A Jewish Art School,” Menorah Journal 10 (November 1924), 465, quoted in Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe, “Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900–1945,” in the exhibition catalog Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, 1900–1945: A Tribute to the Educational Alliance Art School, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe (New York: 1991), 101; see also Matthew Baigell, “From Hester Street to Fifty-Seventh Street: Jewish-American Artists in New York,” in ibid., 30–36. 26. On another settlement home and the Exposition of the Jews from Many Lands in Cincinnati, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 111–117. 27. Unfortunately, I have not seen Weichsel’s original document; this account relies on Kleeblatt and Chevlowe, “Painting a Place,” 104–113. 28. See the exhibition catalog, Bezalel shel Schatz: 1906–1929/Schatz’s Bezalel: 1906– 1929, ed. Nurit Shilo-Cohen (Jerusalem: 1983); Gideon Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel, trans. Peretz Kidron (Boulder: 1998), 21–33. 29. On the philanthropic concerns of Jewish patrons, see Derek J. Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: 2001), 90–123; 174–219; Meir, Kiev, Jewish Metropolis, 224. 30. Kenneth E. Silver, “Introduction,” in the exhibition catalog The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905–1945, ed. Kenneth E. Silver and Romy Golan (New York: 1985), 10, and the dramatic quote there from Monroe Wheeler (1950) in his catalog on Soutine: “More painting has been done in France in this century by immigrants from Eastern European ghettos than the Jewish nation has produced in all the centuries gone by.” 31. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven: 1995), 154. 32. See Julie Miller and Richard I. Cohen, “A Collision of Cultures: The Jewish Museum and the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1904–1971,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. 2, Beyond the Academy, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: 1997), 324 ff. 33. An exhibition titled In Search of a Lost Collection—The Berlin Jewish Museum (1933– 1938) was recently held in Berlin (late 2011) at the Stiftung Neue Synagoge-Centrum Judaicum, which reconstructed the opening exhibition of the Berlin Jewish Museum in the 1930s. My thanks to Michal Friedlander of the Jewish Museum Berlin for this information. 34. The issue of the name of the Berlin museum had already surfaced in the preliminary discussions on the museum. See Martina Weinland and Kurt Winkler, Das Jüdische Museum in Stadtmuseum Berlin. Eine Dokumentation/The Jewish Museum in the Berlin Municipal Museum (Berlin: 1997), 7. It should be noted that many Jewish museums since 1933 have had a difficult time deciding upon a name, seeking to find the fine line between acculturation and identity. See Miller and Cohen, “A Collision of Cultures,” 330–332. 35. Weinland and Winkler, Das Jüdische Museum, 9–10; misleadingly discussed in James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: 2000), 156; reprinted in Connie Wolf (ed.), Daniel Libeskind and the

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Contemporary Jewish Museum: New Jewish Architecture from Berlin to San Francisco (New York: 2008), 47. My thanks to Tobias Metzler for this clarification. 36. See the exhibition catalog Was vom Leben übrig bleibt, sind Bilder und Geschichten. Max Liebermann zum 150. Geburtstag. Rekonstruktion der Gedächtnisausstellung des Berliner Jüdischen Museums von 1936, ed. Hermann Simon (Berlin: 1997). This exhibition and catalog reconstructed the 1936 show and raised many issues with regard to Liebermann’s association with the museum and his identity as a “Jewish artist.” Liebermann had earlier been represented in the first exhibition of “Degenerate art” in 1933, orchestrated by the artist Hans Adolf Bühler, who denounced Liebermann as “the greatest enemy of the German spirit.” See Peter Paret, “‘The Enemy Within’—Max Liebermann as President of the Prussian Academy of Arts,” The Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture, 28 (New York: 1984). 37. Ibid., 21–22. 38. Such comments were extremely common. See, for instance, Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, 150–154; Bland, The Artless Jew, passim; Olin, The Nation without Art, passim. 39. For a current list, see the site of the Association of Holocaust Organizations, online at www.ahoinfo.org/membersdirectory.html (accessed November 28, 2011). Peter Novak claims that, until the 1960s, “the Holocaust made scarcely an appearance in American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse. . . . No monuments or memorials were constructed, except for a few commemorative plaques on synagogue walls” (Novak, The Holocaust in American Life [Boston: 1999], 103–104). Novak attributes to the Eichmann trial a major role in the changing American consciousness of the Holocaust. See also Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (New York: 1999). Not surprisingly, the increasingly intense interest in Holocaust museums has led to a certain backlash on the part of some writers—see, for instance, the engaging, vitriolic (but humorous) dialogue between two characters in Howard Jacobson’s award-winning novel, The Finkler Question (New York: 2010), 179–180. See also Novak, The Holocaust in American Life, passim; Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: 2000), 72–78. Novak and Finkelstein have been at loggerheads since Novak’s book appeared. See Finkelstein, “Uses of the Holocaust,” London Review of Books (January 6, 2000); K. Hannah Holtschneider, The Holocaust and Representations of Jews: History and Identity in the Museum (New York: 2011). 40. David Engel, Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Stanford: 2010); see the Jewish Quarterly Review focus on his book (Winter 2012) and Dimitry Shumsky’s review in Yad Vashem Studies 40, no. 1 (2012), 275–300. 41. Carole H. Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: 1985); Richard I. Cohen, “Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions: Jewish Culture in Western and Central Europe in the Modern Age,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: 2002), 731–796. 42. See the internet site of the National Museum of American Jewish History under its mission statement, online at www.nmajh.org/missionstatement.aspx (accessed November 28, 2011). See also Richard I. Cohen, “Between Encyclopedias and Museums—Modes of Jewish Empowerment and Visibility,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 9 (2010), 459–472; esp. 464–466. 43. Ibid., 465. 44. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 87–88; Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver, Jewish Art: A Modern History (London: 2011), 118–120. 45. These are Kaufmann’s own words from 1917, quoted in Cohen, Jewish Icons, 154. 46. It is significant to note that, even as Nazism was threatening German society and pressuring curators to avoid exhibiting Jewish artists, Oppenheim’s work was included in two exhibitions in 1932 and 1933, in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, respectively. See Richard I. Cohen, “Exhibiting Nineteenth-Century Artists of Jewish Origin in the Twentieth Century: Identity, Politics, and Culture,” in the exhibition catalog The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Susan Tumarkin Goodman (New York: 2001), 158. 47. Quoted in the exhibition catalog, Moritz Oppenheim: The First Jewish Painter (Jerusalem: 1983), 28.

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48. The Jewish Year Illustrated by Pictures of Old-Time Jewish Family Life Customs and Observances from the Paintings by Moritz Oppenheim (Philadelphia: 1895), n.p. 49. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley: 2000), unravels the process by which Munich’s politicians and public confronted the National Socialist past from 1945 until the late 1990s. 50. Isaiah Shachar, Jewish Tradition in Art: The Feuchtwanger Collection of Judaica, trans. R. Grafman (Jerusalem: 1981); the first Hebrew edition was published in Jerusalem in 1971. 51. See the exhibition catalogs (both of them edited by Emily D. Bilski) Die Kunst-und Antiquitätenfirma Bernheimer/The Art and Antiques House of Bernheimer (Munich: 2007) and Die “Moderne Galerie” von Herbert Thannhauser/The “Moderne Galerie” of Herbert Thannhauser (Munich: 2008). 52. See the painstaking effort to document the impact of National Socialism on the physical landscape of the city in Winfried Nerdinger (ed.), Ort und Erinnerung. Nationalsozialismus in München (Salzburg: 2006). 53. The Munich museum has been treated by several scholars in Germany and abroad. See the essays by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Inka Bertz in this volume and their bibliographies; see also Carol Salus, “The Anatomy of the New Jewish Museum, Munich: Traces of the Past and Present,” Collections 5, no. 2 (2009), 127–147; and see as well the impressive catalog put out at the time of the museum’s inauguration: Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock (eds.), Zeige deine Sammlung. Jüdische Spuren in Münchner Museen/Show your Collection: Jewish Traces in Munich’s Museums (Bonn: 2008). . 54. See the exhibition catalog authored by Natasza Styrna, Artys'ci Zydowscy w Krakowie 1873–1939/Jewish Artists in Kraków 1873–1939 (Cracow: 2008). 55. See the exhibition catalog An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt and Kenneth E. Silver (Munich: 1998). The exhibition was first shown at the Jewish Museum, New York and then traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Cincinnati Art Museum. 56. Mitchell Schwarzer, “Toward a California Judaism,” in Wolf, Daniel Libeskind and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 40–41, 43. 57. Ibid., 41. 58. Daniel Libeskind, “Contemporary Jewish Museum,” in ibid., 107. ś

Displaying Judaica in 18th-Century Central Europe: A Non-Jewish Curiosity Michael Korey (STAATLICHE KUNSTSAMMLUNGEN DRESDEN)

In the summer of 1836, a newspaper advertisement placed by the Jewish merchant Samuel Elb announced a spectacle for “the local and general art-loving public, as well as for great lords and foreign visitors” to Dresden. In the center of the Saxon capital, readers were informed, one could pay four groschen to see: 1. the model of the Temple of Solomon with all its furnishings, among which the Holy of Holies, finished with gold and silver and set with precious stones, especially stands out—a unique and fascinating work of art, produced in full accord with published drawings and descriptions of this building; 2. the Tabernacle, including all its appropriate arrangements [of priestly figures] and vessels; 3. a complete synagogue, likewise outfitted with all its furnishings, in which the ceremonies and customs of the Israelites are made vividly clear; as well as 4. a collection of ancient works of art.1 Elb’s was not the first presentation of this remarkable group of objects. Indeed, for nearly a century, the combination of large-scale architectural models of the Temple and the Tabernacle and a fully furnished replica synagogue had been publicly exhibited as the “Juden-Cabinet” in the Dresden Zwinger, a renowned Baroque building that is also one of the oldest museum complexes in Central Europe (Fig. 2.1). What were these objects, where had they originated, and how did they come to be exhibited in so prominent (and so “non-Jewish”) a place in the 18th century? The first part of this essay seeks to answer these questions by reconstructing the origin and display of the now largely forgotten Juden-Cabinet in Dresden.2 The second part looks for parallels to this development and offers a tentative attempt to set the Dresden exhibition in the context of contemporary discussions of “Jewish ceremonies and rituals.”

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Figure 2.1. Aerial view of the Zwinger, ca. 2005. The Wallpavillon (Ramparts Pavilion), former site of the Juden-Cabinet, is at the top (photo: Herbert Boswank).

The Juden-Cabinet in Dresden Our starting point is the Tempel Salomonis, a monumental (originally some 20-footsquare) wooden model of the biblical Temple, one of the most elaborate and significant architectural models ever constructed (Fig. 2.2).3 The model had been commissioned at the end of the 17th century by the learned Hamburg city councilor, Gerhard Schott (1641–1702). In almost every detail it was built according to the Temple reconstruction (on paper) by the Spanish Jesuit Juan Bautista Villalpando (1552–1608), as documented in the large-format engravings in his three-volume commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, In Ezechielem Explanationes (vol. 2, Rome, 1605—see Figs. 2.3, 2.4a/b). Schott was one of the initiators of the opera on the Gänsemarkt in Hamburg—notable for being the first non-courtly opera north of the Alps—and the model is known to have been on display since 1694 on the grounds of the opera house. There it was admired by distinguished travelers such as Czar Peter the Great, who is said to have measured it himself: a gesture in keeping with the view of the Temple as the embodiment of divine architecture with perfect proportions.4 Following Schott’s death, his heirs sought to find a buyer for the model, to which end it was sent to London in 1724, along with a further model built under Schott’s direction, that of the Tabernacle. The London Journal extolled “the finest Model of the Temple of Solomon that has been seen . . . composed of Materials and Ornaments so rich, that the whole Work is valued at 20,000 £,” and noted, upon its arrival on the

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Figure 2.2. Model of the Temple of Solomon (view from the west), Hamburg, late 17th century, Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (photo: Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte/ Markus Wacker).

Figure 2.3. Longitudinal section of the Temple (view from the east), engraving from Juan Bautista Villalpando, In Ezechielem explanationes et apparatus urbis, ac templii Hiersolymitani, vol. 2 (Rome: 1605) (photo: Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig).

Thames, that “this extraordinary Curiosity was immediately shewn to the King, who was so well pleas’d with it, that it’s said His Majesty will be the purchaser.”5 A descriptive souvenir booklet was published,6 and for eight years the model was shown in two prominent locations in central London, the Haymarket Theater and the Royal Exchange, where it was open daily to paying visitors and explained by trained guides. The English king was not the only ruler to show a profound interest in the model. Among others was Friedrich August I of Saxony, known commonly as “August the Strong,” who, in 1732, succeeded in securing it for Dresden as his last great acquisition. After a disaster-ridden journey including near-shipwreck, the freezing-over of the Elbe River near Hamburg, and the overturning of the transport carriage, the Temple finally reached the Saxon court seat on January 10, 1733. On the very same day, August left Dresden for his court in Warsaw,7 where he died several weeks later. The

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sovereign’s plans were nonetheless realized, and by 1734 the models of the Temple and Tabernacle were on display in the Wallpavillon (Ramparts Pavilion) of the Zwinger in Dresden. In the 1720s, August had divided the scientific collections of the court by discipline—from anatomy to zoology, from prints to mathematical instruments—and had displayed these separately within the individual galleries and pavilions of the Zwinger complex; with the arrival of the Temple, the Palais des sciences in the Zwinger was thus metaphorically crowned by the proverbial wisdom of Solomon.8 In the Zwinger, the models of the Temple and Tabernacle were soon joined by another group of objects, and together these formed the so-called “Juden-Cabinet.” A traveler’s account from 1735 reports the following on the collections in the Zwinger, and particularly those of the Wallpavillon: Each room [in the Zwinger] contains in itself special rarities, which together are known as the Curiosity Cabinets. The name is apt, for one sees here every curious and seldomseen thing that the world has brought forth. . . . The Juden-Cabinet displays all manner of rarities. Here there can be found a life-sized stuffed rabbi [ausgestopffter Rabine], who has a hat on his head, spectacles on his nose, and a coat on. One sees him standing at a lectern on which a Talmud is lying, which he is touching with several of his fingers. Anyone entering this Cabinet for the first time and without prior knowledge would swear that this is in reality a live rabbi, on account of the accuracy and lifelikeness of the presentation. Inside are also shown all of the instruments used for circumcision and other Jewish rituals.9

Within the Juden-Cabinet one could thus view not only the tableau-vivant figure of a life-sized “stuffed rabbi,” but also a variety of Jewish ritual objects. Various reports speak of a fully adorned Torah, an ark with an eternal light (ner tamid), a Scroll of Esther (megilat Esther), a shofar, a circumcision knife, and much more—all presented within the full-scale replica of a synagogue: “All of this is present . . . and has been displayed in the manner of a true synagogue, as if a Jewish service were about to be conducted—in fact, this is the wish of Jews who have seen the presentation and found everything to be correct.”10 Like the Temple model, this replica synagogue had taken a circuitous route on its way to Dresden. Its path led not through Hamburg and London, but began rather in 1708 on the Baltic Sea coast, where Johann Friedrich Mayer (1650–1712), an orthodox Lutheran, a professor of theology, and the powerful general-superintendent of all Protestant churches in Swedish-occupied Pomerania in northern Germany, had it erected in the famous library within his home in Greifswald. August the Strong reportedly tried to secure Mayer’s library in 1711.11 In the wake of Mayer’s

‹ Figures 2.4a, 2.4b. The Temple model of the Hamburg councilman Schott closely follows the Temple reconstruction on paper by the Spanish Jesuit Villalpando; here a comparison of the two versions of the lateral facade of the Temple sanctuary: a. Model of the Temple of Solomon, Hamburg, late 17th century, Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (photo: Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte/Markus Wacker). b. Engraving from Juan Bautista Villalpando, In Ezechielem explanationes et apparatus urbis, ac templii Hiersolymitani, vol. 2 (photo: SLUB/Deutsche Fotothek).

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death the following year, the library was caught up in the throes of the Northern War and also in the domestic battle over Mayer’s estate between his estranged wife and their sons. In 1716, it was put up for auction in a spectacular bibliophilic offering in Berlin.12 The synagogue and its contents were acquired at no small cost by the University of Leipzig, with the purchase exhausting the university’s acquisition budget for several semesters.13 The pleasure in Leipzig was short-lived, however, as the following year a letter from the Dresden court arrived at the university. The reply, by the Leipzig historian Johann Burchard Mencke, is an exercise in understatement: Most nobly born, elevated patron: . . . As nothing more joyous could happen to our university than its possessing something with which it could prove its subservience to your Royal Majesty, no time will be lost in sending over in a good state the apparatus of the Jewish synagogue. . . . Since we would very much like to make a copy of one or another thing from this synagogue before sending it on, we have been asked to inquire whether the shipment might be postponed for a few weeks.14

The replica synagogue was accordingly sent to Dresden. Christoph Wallich, a convert from Judaism who had assembled the synagogue for Mayer in Greifswald, was later commissioned to prepare a partial copy of it for the university library in Leipzig (it is not certain when, exactly, this project was carried out). In 1724, the library commissioned Wallich to copy additional writings, including a megilat Esther (see Fig. 2.5), in order to complete the Leipzig model synagogue.15 In 1735, the synagogue of Mayer sent earlier from Leipzig went on display in the Dresden Zwinger, joining the biblical models acquired from London.16 The Juden-Cabinet that so emerged was regarded as a highlight of the Dresden collections, and references to it can be found in numerous traveler’s accounts and city topographies over the next hundred years. In these descriptions, the wealth of detail and the degree of exactness of the Temple model, as well as the comprehensiveness of the synagogue’s ritual contents, are repeatedly praised.17 The diary entry of Arthur Schopenhauer may serve to illustrate the impact of the Cabinet on its visitors. On a visit to Dresden in 1800 with his parents, the then twelve-year-old Schopenhauer, later to become the influential German philosopher, wrote: In the afternoon we went to the Zwinger, a fine orangery surrounded by fine buildings, in which all manner of rarities can be seen, of which we viewed several. In the first building are various things relating to the Jewish religion: a Tempel Salomonis of wood, copied and measured in a completely correct manner. A Hamburg city councilor had it made and thereby nearly drove himself into bankruptcy, when the Elector [August the Strong] bought it from him. There are also many old Jewish books, written very prettily with Hebrew letters on parchment and rolled up, as well as a variety of instruments for marriage, circumcision, divorce, and other Jewish ceremonies.18

Another visitor, the Russian officer Fedor Glinka, offered this appraisal in 1813: “Especially interesting is the collection of all, even the smallest, furnishings of the synagogue. If at some point a storm of the most adverse circumstances should destroy this entire people, one could at least find assembled here all of its customs and laws. Naturally, this cost no small amount [to assemble]. Two thousand talers were paid solely for the writing of the five Books of Moses on parchment.”19

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Figure 2.5. Megilat Esther, Leipzig 1724, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, shelf no. V 1101. This recently rediscovered megilah stems from the Leipzig model synagogue built by Wallich after his “original” from Greifswald was given over by the university to the Dresden court; it thus presents a direct link to the corresponding, but no longer extant megilah from the JudenCabinet in Dresden. It was used as an object of teaching and display (that is, outside of a ritual setting) nearly three centuries ago (photo: Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig).

Interestingly, although Dresden had long been known for its cultivation of the arts, it did not display any particular tolerance toward its Jewish inhabitants. In fact, Jews had been barred from residence in Saxony since the mid-16th century, a prohibition that was only gradually loosened around 1700.20 In this light, it is interesting to learn that for several decades the Juden-Cabinet was overseen by a Jewish curator, Isaac Löbel. His request to be exempted from punitive “Jewish taxes,” written on March 13, 1769, during the period of economic severity in Saxony following the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), offers unexpected insights and deserves to be quoted at length: Your Electoral Grace may most mercifully permit [me] in most profound subservience to report on how, after the Juden-Schule was created in the Zwinger complex, . . . I periodically looked after not only the Torah written on 45 whole calfskins and all the other things exhibited there, working with great effort to clean and keep everything in good order, but also that I myself on numerous occasions repaired the model of the Temple of Solomon, when it had become damaged in various places. I volunteered to do this and offered my services without the slightest recompense, as the enclosed testimonial certifies. . . . There

32

Michael Korey thus reaches Your Electoral Grace my most humble request, in light of the circumstances indicated above, that I may be placed under the protection of His Excellence, the Lord High Chamberlain von Vizthum, and be freed from the customary Jewish taxes, this manner of protection and release having already been granted to a number of my coreligionists. I offer myself for the above-mentioned services in the most diligent manner and without all payment, and I remain, with the greatest loyalty and devotion for the rest of my life, your Electoral Grace’s most obedient Isaac Löbel.21

The enclosed affidavit by Christian Heinrich Eilenburg, inspector of the Naturalienkabinett (Cabinet of Natural History) in the Zwinger, confirms that Löbel had done “every last thing” to maintain the “Juden-Schule.” Eilenburg proposed not only that Löbel be released from punitive taxes, but also, as Löbel had offered to continue his services on a voluntary basis, that he officially be named a curatorial assistant (Aufwärter). After making its way up through the ministerial apparatus, this recommendation was ultimately rejected; the “grave concerns” of the minister responsible argued against granting such an exemption to the “impoverished” Jew Löbel.22 However, on several occasions, Löbel’s decades of service in the Zwinger prevented his being expelled from Saxony.23 In short, in a Protestant state governed by a Catholic ruler,24 there emerged, in the Zwinger, a Jewish museum—long before such an idea was envisioned in Central Europe. Models of the Temple and the Tabernacle as well as a fully equipped, replica synagogue could be put on prominent display, whereas the Jews of Dresden were forbidden to build their own actual synagogue.25 The Juden-Cabinet was disbanded in the early 1830s, in the wake of a restructuring of the court collections. As noted above, Samuel Elb purchased the contents of the Cabinet, restored them, and tried his hand at exhibiting them in 1836. However, a huge panorama painting of St. Petersburg, displayed in a temporary structure erected adjacent to the building housing Elb’s Cabinet, apparently stole both his light and his thunder, so that his efforts as a showman proved short-lived.26 By 1846, the biblical models had been acquired by the Kreuzkirche (Dresden’s oldest parish); traces of the synagogue and its contents are by this point lost.27 Thirty years later, the Temple model was given to the Saxon antiquarian society (the Königlich-Sächsischer Verein zur Erforschung und Erhaltung vaterländischer Alterthümer), which from 1890 displayed it in the upper-story hall of its exhibition space, Dresden’s Palais im Grossen Garten. From the start, the society seems to have had an ambivalent relationship with the Temple model, and in 1910 the model was sold off to the Hamburg antiquarian society—on the stated grounds that it had neither artistic nor archaeological value, and at most was of cultural interest.28 The Temple thus returned after nearly two centuries to its place of origin. Placed into remote storage during the Second World War, the model survived the war and is now on display within the department of cultural history in the Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte.29

Parallel Projects and Perspectives Was the Juden-Cabinet in Dresden a singular phenomenon? Certainly with regard to the length of its duration, the prominence of its location, and the extent of its contemporary reception (as registered in the accounts of visitors), there is no known parallel.

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Moreover, the deliberate combination of biblical models and post-biblical ritual artifacts in a secular setting (the museum collections comprising the Palais des sciences in the Zwinger) also seems unique. The early modern era saw a plethora of Temple reconstructions, mostly on paper but in several cases in three dimensions, and these have long been the focus of considerable scholarly attention.30 Furthermore, the vernacular literature on Jewish custom and ritual produced by non-Jews (Christian Hebraists and converts to Christianity) between the 16th and the 18th centuries—an outpouring veritably forming a new genre, with at least 80 titles, many of which appeared in several editions and in translation—has been the subject of increased study over the past decades.31 By contrast, there has been little research to date on the Jewish ritual objects that were collected by non-Jews. The Greifswald replica synagogue that came to Dresden thus bears closer examination. Its contents will first be described before it is examined against the patterns found in the extensive contemporary literature on “Jüdisches Ceremoniel.”

The Greifswald Replica Synagogue Our earliest information on the Greifswald model synagogue comes from a German booklet (with some Hebrew) written by Christoph Wallich—who, as noted, later made a partial copy of the model for the university library in Leipzig. Bearing the bilingual title Beit hakeneset shel hagaon harav hagadol . . . oder Die Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde (Fig. 2.6) and published in 1711 in Greifswald, the text quickly went through two further editions (Helmstedt: 1714; Braunschweig: 1715).32 The core of the book is a description of the synagogue commissioned by the theologian Johann Friedrich Mayer, written in the manner of an annotated “guided tour.” The tour begins outside, where there is a ewer for hand-washing and an iron post for cleaning the shoes before entering (as is the case, we are told, in Worms, Frankfurt, and Furth). The account pauses at the threshold to point out the tzedakah box, inscriptions over the doorpost, and the custom of entering a synagogue hurriedly and leaving it slowly. Inside, the centerpiece is an ark (aron hakodesh) containing a Torah, about which Wallich explains: As I was previously a ‫( סופר‬sofer) scribe, I must confess that I was utterly amazed to see that the Jews had evidently allowed their great holiness to pass to a ‫[ גוי‬goy], as it is ‫אסור‬ (asur) forbidden, for a Jew to touch the Torah with his bare hands. . . . I must regard it as one of the greatest rarities to find this within the private library of a Christian, for the writing of the Torah among the Jews costs more than 100 reichstalers.33

This sum is said to be in addition to the cost of the parchment and the Torah’s rich accoutrements, including cloth coverings and binders, the silver pointer (yad), and the silk curtain (parokhet) hanging in front of the ark. The interior, we are told, also includes a table (shulh.an) upon which the Torah is read; on this is a strip in the form of a cue card with the text of the prayer “Vezot hatorah” written out for the use of those called up to make the benediction. Also described is a circumcision bench, a menorah, a shofar (with the remark that Jews begin to blow the ram’s horn at the beginning of the month of Elul, “so as to confuse

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Figure 2.6. Title page, Beit hakeneset shel hagaon harav hagadol . . ./ . . . oder Die Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde (Greifswald: 1711): a booklet by the convert Christoph Wallich describing the fully furnished replica synagogue commissioned for the library of the Greifswald theologian Joachim Friedrich Mayer and later prominently exhibited in the JudenCabinet within the Zwinger in Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek–Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek (hereafter: SLUB), Dresden, shelf no. Theol. Jud. 271 (photo: SLUB/Deutsche Fotothek).

Satan into not knowing when the actual New Year’s Festival is to begin”), a palm branch (lulav) and myrtle (hadas) for Sukkot, a megilat Esther inside a case, a kiddush cup, a havdalah candle and spice box, an ’eruv h.atzerot made of communal matzah,34 and a ner tamid. Wallich also points out that various abbreviations and sayings are written out and posted in the synagogue, “not just in place of images forbidden to the Jews, but also as a reminder of good thoughts,” and that several texts have been written out on wall panels, as is done “in the synagogues of nearly all kehilot, especially throughout Schwabia and Franconia,” among them “Mah tovu,”

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“Modim anah.nu lakh,” “El erekh apayim,” “Vayehi binso’a haaron,” and what he terms the “blasphemous prayer ’Alenu,” which will later be discussed.35 The next section includes a description of the remaining objects on display in this setting, “although much actually does not belong in a synagogue, but is a part of Jewish ‫( מנהג‬minhag).” Wallich has included these objects, as in his estimation they “cannot be found in this completeness anywhere else.”36 First to be mentioned is the impressively lifelike figure of the praying rabbi (with a yellow patch upon his black coat, as is required of the Jews in Frankfurt and Worms, we learn), complete with phylacteries, a talit and, underneath it, another four-cornered garment with fringes (Wallich uses for this the term arba’ kanfot; it is also known as a talit katan). From there, Wallich goes on to describe a chest containing three mezuzot; a set of phylacteries opened so as to reveal the parchment manuscripts stored within them; various amulets; a ketubah; a writ of divorce (get), a circumcision knife, and the “great rarity” of a h.alitzah shoe (part of the special rite used to free a childless widow from the obligation to marry her brother-in-law). The books in the synagogue include prayer books, a mah.zor hagadol, and selih.ot (penitential prayers), as well as various ordinances (tikunim), whereas the Talmud and a collection of midrashim are to be found, so Wallich informs us, in Mayer’s vast library. Wallich noted that this replica synagogue was not intended, nor needed, for Mayer’s own edification, as his patron’s knowledge of Jewish minhag was “unsurpassed”; indeed, Wallich had referred to the Lutheran theologian Mayer on the title page in Hebrew as “hagaon harav hagadol” (the brilliant, great scholar), had identified him as head of “the yeshiva of Greifswald,” and had compared him to other great Jewish scholars by the name of Mayer.37 Wallich explained that the synagogue and its contents were part of an instructional program “for the use of students,” a reference to the students in theology at the university in Greifswald. As has been pointed out by Richard Cohen, the early modern era saw many instances of the desire for direct observation and (as was often claimed) “objective” description of Jewish ritual practice.38 Reaching a peak in the first half of the 18th century, this led to a new genre claiming to offer “realistic description of the Jews, and more specifically of Jewish ritual.”39 Such rhetorical gestures were, however, “hardly an exercise in cross-cultural understanding” but were rather most often “directly linked to the exercise of power: . . . conceived as an effective tool for exerting control over the Jews living in their midst, for missionizing them, and for utilizing their sources in the service of Christian theology.”40 So it was also with this replica synagogue, as Wallich reveals in the dedicatory foreword. Not only had Mayer allegedly spared no effort or expense to facilitate the teaching of theology, sacred languages, and Jewish antiquities but, writes Wallich (addressing his patron directly): You have further had me erect a complete Jewish synagogue within your famous library, to be of service to the students, so that they could see and directly comprehend for themselves [mit sehenden Augen] the full extent of Jewish superstition [Aberglauben], which others only darkly attempt to put into words.41

The attest following this foreword, from Mayer’s fellow theologian at Greifswald, B.H. Gebhardi, confirms that the reader is to be confronted with a three-dimensional form of what Yaacov Deutsch has termed a “polemical ethnography.”42 As Gebhardi writes:

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No one can so clearly show them [presumably: the Jews] this Jewish blindness as when he sees the customs of the Jews with his own eyes. For this purpose . . . [Mayer] has had a synagogue built in his incomparable library, in which can be found a rich assembly of all sorts of Jewish rarities that belong in a Jewish synagogue . . . foremost in order to show, in light of the practices of Jewish worship, that a Jew today, amid all the prophetic writings he reads daily, is lifeless and without spirit [ohne Geist und Leben], and that nothing is left to him but circumcision and the mere letters [of the text], Rom. II, 27–29.43

Gebhardi’s testimony then continues by praising Wallich above all other converts and affirming that he is in no danger of recidivism: To erect this synagogue, [Mayer] had the counsel and help of the author of this booklet [Wallich], a man born of Jewish parents, who converted to Christianity many years ago, after recognizing the darkness [Finsternis]44 of the Jewish faith. Of him one may truthfully say that, among all known converts, I am aware of no one who equals him in fundamental knowledge of godly matters, Christian life, virtue, and diligence. By describing the finely erected synagogue in this booklet, he also endeavored to affirm his steadfastness as a Christian, casting aside from his heart all Jewish darkness and superstition and offering a sample of his desire to be of service to his fellow Christians with his own labor.45

Wallich himself assures his former co-religionists that this fully furnished synagogue has not been assembled for the purpose of derision or burlesque spectacle [Gauckelspiel]—“quite the contrary. Although I must concede that it has not been made into a hallowed sanctuary, no calumny [Beschimpfung] takes place there; and although the Torah is not kissed in the Jewish manner, nonetheless the word of God written [within the Torah] is held in as high regard as the printed Bible.” Yet even this apparent statement of tolerance is marked by the ambivalence typical of the literature of Jewish ceremonies and rituals: I doubt whether anywhere within 50 miles such a synagogue can be found, as the room is not only bright and pretty, but also well-ordered with everything in its proper place, as is rarely the case with the Jews. There are also no cobwebs, unlike in Worms, where the Jews leave these on the ceiling, so that the Shem Hamephurash [Tetragrammaton] painted on the vaulting will not be scratched. Indeed, this synagogue is kept much cleaner than by the Jews themselves . . . so that students may have the occasion to show the Jews their superstition . . . and with God’s grace to bring a Jew to the awareness of Jesus Christ. For indeed, while it is nowadays easy to have a Jew baptized, it is harder to bring about a true conversion.46

Thus, in spite of relativizing claims to the contrary, in its original setting in Greifswald, this Lutheran replica synagogue seems to be one further argument in an ongoing polemical struggle. It should be noted, however, that there is no evidence that this explicitly pejorative tone was maintained for the Greifswald synagogue once it was transplanted to the new (and long-lasting) setting of the Juden-Cabinet in the Zwinger, at least not judging by the existing reports of visitors.

The Regensburg Replica Synagogue It turns out that there were at least two other contemporary projects to build replica synagogues in the first part of the 18th century, and we turn now to the first of these, which was built in the library of the Regensburg theologian Georg Serpilius (1668–1723). This

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project, too, is described in a bilingually titled booklet, Beit hakeneset shel hagaon hagadol Georg Serpilius . . . oder Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog . . . (Regensburg: 1723), which was likewise written by a convert, Moritz Wilhelm Christiani (Fig. 2.7).47 Unlike Wallich, Christiani was not the creator of Serpilius’ model synagogue; he reports in the introduction that, while studying at the university in Altdorf two years earlier, he had heard of a synagogue that “was furnished more completely . . . than was likely to be the case even at a place with many hundreds of Jews.”48 Shortly thereafter, he was able to view this Regensburg replica synagogue in Serpilius’ home, an event that afforded him “special pleasure,” as he had neither “surmised nor seen anything comparable among Christians.” According to Christiani,

Figure 2.7. Title page, Beit hakeneset shel hagaon hagadol Georg Serpilius . . . oder Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog (Regensburg: 1723): a booklet describing the replica synagogue in the library of the Regensburg theologian Georg Serpilius (photo: courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary).

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the Jewish curiosities left behind by the blessed [late] Dr. Mayer in Greifswald and Professor Wagenseil . . . amount to only a tenth of the present collection. In addition, the entire stock, made of gold, silver, and other materials, has certifiably been made by various rabbis and other Jews, and the accompanying books bound by them. [Upon seeing it] I thus much regretted that this collection has until now not been more widely known, as it certainly deserves to be laid before the eyes of the learned and curious.49

Christiani reports that he received permission to give guided tours of the collection and also to write up an explanation “for his listeners in [the field] of Jewish ceremoniel,”50 which resulted in the present booklet. Claiming that Jews never give a “truthful and upright” account of their customs or the nature of their religion to those Christians visiting a synagogue or a private Jewish home—even when the latter wish to understand more about Judaism—and noting that “even learned Christians do not have enough information or documents to be able to understand the manifold ceremonies of the Jews and their meaning,” he set about his task of describing Jewish ritual practice with the help of the objects on display.51 Christiani’s account of the interior describes an aron hakodesh with a fully clad sefer torah, the shulh.an, a menorah, a lectern (’amud) for the cantor with large candlesticks beside it, a ner tamid, and a special seat for the rabbi or rosh hayeshivah. Within the drawer of the shulh.an are a haftorah scroll, several megilot Esther, the Leg-Bret (a board with a small, named compartment for each man of the community, in which tzedakah pledges in exchange for liturgical honors are marked), candles, a kiddush cup, a havdalah set, a shofar, an illuminated parchment manuscript bearing the text of “Lekha dodi” (the song that, in the Friday evening service, welcomes the Sabbath), the SchulKlopfer (a mallet used by the beadle to pound on the sides of the houses of the community to announce the time for services), and silk coverings used during the Torah reading to prevent the Torah scrolls from being accidentally touched. In addition, wax candles lit on the Sabbath are set on the ornamental screen around the shulh.an, and Serpilius’ synagogue is adorned with seats, prayer stands,52 and brass lamps, as well as wall panels on which are written the texts of key prayers (among them, “Mah tovu” and “Modim anah.nu lakh”) and moralizing acronyms based on the names of various textiles, such as ‫( ד׳מ׳ש׳ק׳‬damask), standing for ‫( דע מי שהוא קונך‬Know who is your Creator). There is also a circumcision bench, an ’eruv h.atzerot, and a tzedakah box.53 The objects described appear not as types, but as specific artifacts. For instance, when the wings of the aron hakodesh are opened, images of “Aaron and Moses among many stars” appear, and the ark is further adorned with three golden crowns with the words keter torah, keter kehunah, and keter malkhut, as well as pairs of lions and golden pomegranates.54 The next section of Christiani’s treatise describes a further collection of artifacts belonging to Serpilius: “various curiosities that are not to be found in a synagogue, but which, in part, are owned by Jews personally.”55 The list runs parallel to that in Wallich’s booklet, but is even more extensive. First to be mentioned here, as in Greifswald, is the life-size figure of a “Polish rabbi” wearing arba’ kanfot, an amulet about his neck, phylacteries, and a black cap—and also a talit over his head that is said to have been worn by the rabbi of Hildesheim. In addition, there is a circumcision knife (with accessories),56 a book on ritual slaughtering beside a shoh.et’s set of three knives, a Becken (lit. “basin”) within which infant firstborn sons were placed during the pidyon haben ceremony, three lulav-etrog sets (with hadas) for Sukkot,

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gold engagement and wedding rings adorned with the words “mazal tov,” a ketubah, a get, a h.alitizah shoe, a burial shroud (kitel), a mizrah. plaque indicating the (eastern) direction of prayer, a mezuzah, various amulets, a whip for use in penitential flagellation on Yom Kippur, two sets of dishes (for, respectively, milk and meat meals), an afikoman, a seven-pointed oil lamp for the Sabbath, various antique coins with Hebrew letters, a siddur, and various Jewish manuscripts.57 Christiani reports that his demonstration lectures in Serpilius’ replica synagogue were met with such great public interest and enthusiasm, “that patrons, supporters, and friends, especially several notable members of the praiseworthy group of local merchants, were determined to develop and cover the costs of their own synagogue, one which would be more compendious [than Serpilius’], as well as to acquire various books in Hebrew, Aramaic, German, and Yiddish. How far they have come up till now can be seen from the list at the end of these pages.”58 Indeed, under the heading “some curiosities acquired later for another synagogue,” the booklet’s threepart appendix first lists 16 entries that largely follow the contents of the synagogue of Serpilius, though the descriptions are briefer and the objects seem to be rather less elaborate.59 A second section, presumably also belonging to the collection assembled by the Regensburg merchants, includes 29 items “that the Jews must have in their homes,” and this likewise follows the second category in Serpilius’ own synagogue, with the notable absence of the life-size mannequin rabbi.60 A final section includes seven “rabbinic books” (from Arba’ Turim and the biblical commentary of Abravanel to a Yiddish edition of Josephus containing engraved illustrations), as well as 13 entries of various tractates of the Talmud.61 As is evident from the above lists, the overlap between the model synagogues owned by Mayer and Serpilius (and between the latter and its Regensburg offshoot) was extensive. In fact, it is quite likely that the synagogue in Greifswald inspired the one in Regensburg. For beyond the fact that Christiani makes passing reference to Mayer’s collection of “Jewish curiosities,” as noted above, and that Wallich’s booklet on Mayer’s synagogue was present in Serpilius’ library,62 the ties between the two noted Lutheran theologians were long-standing. While a student in 1695, Serpilius had lodged with Mayer, who was serving as pastor at St. Jacobi in Hamburg. Mayer was involved at the time in a polemical feud with the pietist August Hermann Francke in Halle, and the young Serpilius was given the task of responding to Francke. Serpilius’ explanation of his involvement in the controversy (at least initially a dispute over the proper translation and use of the Psalms) underscores the close bond with Mayer: Since the esteemed Doctor [Mayer] has other and more important matters to attend to than such biting around [sich herumb zu beissen] with Magister Francke, he has charged me—as I have the honor and benefit of sharing his instruction [Information], table, and home—with the task of reminding the Magister of his weakness, so that he does not think himself wise.63

Beyond their largely overlapping contents, the printed descriptions of the two synagogues share a number of common features. For example, each author designates himself on the title page as a convert64 and characterizes his patron as a learned gaon. In accord with the emphasis in Wallich’s booklet on observation mit eigenen Augen [with one’s own eyes], Christiani also stresses the importance of direct observation

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of the objects of Jewish ritual practice, even citing a rabbinical saying from what he describes as his “former Jewish life” to underscore this practice: “Enoh domeh lirioh o lischmioh, that is: it is one thing to see something with one’s own eyes and another to only hear about it.”65 Direct observation, we learn from both texts, is claimed to be most effective under the tutelage of a guide, such as Wallich or Christiani, who is privy to supposed Jewish secrets. Indeed, the notion of being a revealer of secrets, of catching the Jews in their own dissimulations and of having the knowledge and access to uncover their antiChristian posturing even ahead of Christian(-born) Hebraists, is at the heart of the role of the convert. As Yaacov Deutsch has noted, “for the convert, the ability to reveal the Jewish secrets was a claim to superiority over Christian scholars in regard to Jewish matters.”66 This tendency is particularly well illustrated by Wallich’s extensive diatribe against the ’Alenu prayer, following in a tradition going back at least to Antonius Margarita in the early 16th century.67 The text of the prayer is written out on one of the plaques lining the walls of Mayer’s synagogue in Greifswald, although “the Jews typically conceal it until a circumcision, so that the mohel can sing the prayer aloud immediately after the child is circumcised; only after the act is the child brought into the community of the Jews (klal yisrael).”68 Wallich claims that his far-reaching inside knowledge allowed him to cast aside layers of Jewish denial and apologetics that even renowned Christian Hebraists could not penetrate: The famous Dr. Wagenseil showed clearly in 1705 . . . that this prayer is not suspect when the cursing words are not included. . . . But today’s Jews direct this prayer with its curses at no one other than our Savior, Jesus of Nazareth, as I can swear by God and all the holy angels . . . though I know well that they claim that this horrid prayer is aimed at those who pray to the stars and the planets, as in Joshua’s era, when such idolatry was popular. . . . Since I, however, was born a Jew and committed such blasphemy—forgive me, God!—for many years, I should like to report how one such as I was led to this sin and instructed in it.

Wallich then explains how his cheder teacher taught him to memorize an extra, defamatory passage that was to be recited at a certain moment within the ’Alenu while spitting at the Thole (lit. “hanged one”).69 He reports that he only learned what this meant after his father had sent him to the local German grammar school in Worms; there he followed the directions of the teacher and kept reverently silent while the Christian pupils read from the Gospels, only to be chided by another Jewish boy in his class for “bowing to the Thole.” As further evidence to support his claim that this prayer was specifically anti-Christian, Wallich cites the prohibition against its recitation in Prussia, noting that clerics such as Daniel Ernst Jablonsky (a man “worldrenowned for his Hebrew and rabbinic knowledge and in daily intercourse with Jews, whom he treats with gentility and love”) and rulers such as the Prussian king (“under whom the Jews, by their own account, enjoy great protection”) would not groundlessly have supported a ban.70

The Uppsala Replica Synagogue One further North European replica synagogue was proposed in the same era at the (Lutheran) University of Uppsala, Sweden. Our source is a 1736 memorandum by Anders Norrelius (1677–1749), a noted Orientalist and the university librarian:

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On account of various circumstances that arose in the past fall semester I came to notice the passionate interest with which the young students of the university regarded the ceremonies and antiquities typical of the Jews in their synagogue in earlier times and still today. I thus conceived the plan to erect a synagogue, for the general good and the special use of those who love philology or are studying theology.71

Having received approval from the chancellor and vice-chancellor (the archbishop)— the latter in fact proposed that the replica synagogue be installed immediately adjacent to the room of the cathedral chapter—Norrelius now appealed to the university’s Consistorium Academicum. He was confident of the council’s support, given that this “work is not just useful and for the piety of students, but also should serve to elevate the university to greater honor.” Three hundred talers were approved to purchase certain “rare Jewish antiquities” from Superintendent Georg Wallin the Younger (1686–1760): several Torah scrolls, a shofar, various talitot, mezuzot, a menorah, Torah wimpels, and more. A month later Norrelius wrote to the Consistorium that he had “examined these objects and publicly described and explained them in the presence of more than 200 persons.” They were doubtless worth the price paid for them, and he added: I cannot avoid mentioning, from personal experience, that such objects can only be wrung from the Jews by pleas and payment. Yet they are vital in a synagogue and serve to explain both the Old and the New Testament in very many places. This has been shown by great and learned men, such as the Buxtorfs, Lightfoot, Wagenseil, Lundius, and others, who regarded it as worthy, in labor and expenditure, to have these [objects] engraved in copper and who wrote large volumes about them, which are esteemed by the entire learned world.

In the end, however, although Wallin’s collection was acquired (Fig. 2.8), the synagogue room itself was not completed, as the carpenter’s estimate for the whitewashing and furniture was judged to be too high (206 talers). Further research is necessary to determine whether any of the objects acquired have survived, but circumstantial evidence links this Swedish project to the Greifswald synagogue model. As a student of theology, Wallin (who was later to become bishop of Gothenburg) almost surely had seen the replica synagogue in Mayer’s home: his personal album amicorum (student autograph album) for the years 1708– 1710 records a visit to Mayer in Greifswald (Fig. 2.9).72 Wallin may also have been inspired to form his collection by a later visit to Leipzig; in 1722, Jacob Svedelius (1693–1763) recorded in his travel diary a joint visit with Wallin to the “synagoge Judaica” in the university library there,73 which—as noted above—is now known to have been the replica synagogue assembled by Wallich in order to replace the one that had been sent on to Dresden.

A Market for Judaica? Interestingly, both Wallich and Christiani address their works to “admirers of Jewish antiquities and ritual.”74 This phrase, used without further explanation as if it were a self-evident category, presupposes a readership with a certain level of familiarity with the topic discussed. Indeed, by emphasizing in several places the rarity or distinctiveness (and not simply the type or function) of the objects in Serpilius’ synagogue, Christiani implicitly appeals to his audience’s connoisseurship. For example, the drawer of the shulh.an in Serpelius’ synagogue contains no ordinary copy of the

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Figure 2.8. Price list from the accounts book of the university library, Uppsala universitetsbibliotek (Sweden), shelf no. Bibl. Arch. E7, fol. 62. The list documents the 1736 purchase of objects for the replica synagogue in Uppsala, including the sculpted figure of a rabbi, at a total cost of 300 talers (photo: Uppsala universitetsbibliotek).

Book of Prophets, to be used following the Torah reading, but a parchment scroll with a special status and history. In fact, it is said to have been rescued from the conflagration that destroyed the Juden-Gasse in Frankfurt (presumably in 1711): This uncommonly beautiful haftorah is all the rarer, as it is the only manuscript that a Jew in Frankfurt was despairingly able to save from the great fire . . . that was allegedly caused by Rabbi Abraham Brod, my former teacher in Metz. As can easily be imagined, this could be acquired for the synagogue [of Serpilius] only at great expense.75

Inside the drawer are also several megilot Esther, “some of which are so nicely adorned with fine engravings and paintings of the story of Haman and Mordechai that nothing comparable can be found within 100 miles.”76 Furthermore, the ark

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Figure 2.9. Page from the album amicorum (academic travel journal) of Georg Wallin documenting his encounter with the Greifswald theologian Joachim Friedrich Mayer in 1709: Memoria itineris ad exteros, Stiftsbiblioteket Linköping (Sweden), shelf no. B 128:1, fol. 55 (photo: Stiftsbiblioteket Linköping/Mathias von Wachenfeldt).

contains not just an elegantly adorned Torah, the materials of which are fully described, but also “several other 200-year-old Ez-Chaim [wooden Torah staffs].”77 Against the background of the proliferation of polemical ethnographic literature on Jewish ritual practice, several collections of ritual artifacts thus emerged. As suggested by the foregoing analysis, there may in fact have been a nascent “market” for collecting the realia of Judaism already in the 18th century, one in which collectors were sensitive to the subtle distinctions among such objects, though this is surely a topic needing further study.78 An examination of contemporary treatises on collecting may provide further insight. For example, the conception of a gentleman’s ideal collection of curiosities in Die Geöffnete Raritäten-und Naturalien-Kammer (Hamburg: 1704) envisions, within a three-story building fronting onto a garden, a “complete House of Rarities such as, to my knowledge, has not yet been assembled anywhere in the world.”79 The first floor is to encompass antiquities and the treasury, the second memorabilia and naturalia, the third a Kunstkammer (lit. “chamber of the arts”) for artificialia as well as a cabinet of mathematical and physical instruments and models. Within the memorabilia there should be a room for the “remarkable objects of the three widespread religions [that are] filled up with many ceremonies: the Papist [that is, Catholic], the Jewish, and the Turkish [Muslim] religion. . . . From the Jewish religion one takes care to preserve phylacteries, which . . . [the Jews] tend to bind upon their head and hands, fine copies of the Law [the Torah] that they actually use in their synagogues, shawls that are spread over their heads in prayer, etc.”80—that is, just the sort of objects actually collected in the replica synagogues of Mayer, Serpilius, and Norrelius.

Epilogue Looking for Jewish ritual objects in unconventional places such as the libraries of Lutheran clerics or princely natural-history collections may have the byproduct of uncovering new connections among them or of revealing unexpected information

Figure 2.10. Shavuot, in Machsor kol hashana, southern Germany, ca. 1290, SLUB, Dresden, shelf no. Mscr. Dresd.A.46.a (photo: SLUB/Deutsche Fotothek).

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about their provenance. Such is indeed the case with one iconic object, the illuminated mah.zor written around 1290 by Reuben, a pupil of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg in southern Germany (Fig. 2.10). The university libraries in Dresden and Breslau/ Wrocław each hold one volume of this renowned medieval mah.zor.81 The earliest, previously known reference to the Dresden volume is in the 1755 catalog of manuscripts of the Saxon Electoral Library in Dresden,82 but a passage encountered during research on the Temple model and the Juden-Cabinet pushes back this acquisition at least two decades. Jeremiah Milles (1714–1784), an English antiquarian who visited Dresden around 1735, recorded in his travel journal his having seen within the collection of manuscripts in the library “a Hebrew Bible adorned with ye figures of several birds &c.; artificially made of Hebrew letters a folio of ye Jewish prayers called ye Mahasor”;83 the latter folio is almost surely the mah.zor in question. It is thus quite likely that at least one volume of the mah.zor had already been acquired by August the Strong (d. 1733),84 which would make this yet another reflection of the Saxon ruler’s abiding interest in Jewish matters, broadly conceived.85 At any rate, there is surely much to gain by examining early modern courtly and ecclesiastical collections anew, looking for the presence, display, and context of what we have now come to call, perhaps rather too simply, “Judaica.” The present essay has shown that the collection and display of Jewish ritual objects was not foreign to nonJews in the 18th century. It thus adds to our knowledge of the scope of Christian Hebraism while offering a rather intriguing prehistory to the evolution of Jewish museums from the late 19th century. Moreover, the surviving accounts of travelers to these displays, in particular to that of the Juden-Cabinet in Dresden, present a vivid indication of the ways in which the encounter with such material could arouse strong emotions and stimulate profound reflection in the era prior to Jewish civil emancipation.

Notes 1. Dresdner Anzeiger (September 4, 1836). Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are mine. Elb had opened this exhibition in June 1836 in the former Calberla sugar refinery, close to the shore of the Elbe River, on what is now the Theaterplatz, the square in front of the Semper Opera House; see ibid. (June 1, 1836). 2. The section that follows, “The Juden-Cabinet in Dresden,” is a condensed version of my essay, “The Temple of Solomon and the Juden-Cabinet in the Dresden Zwinger: A Search for Their Historical Traces” within the exhibition catalog Fragments of Memory: The Temple of Solomon in the Dresden Zwinger—Facets of a Baroque Architectural Model and an Early Jewish Museum, ed. Michael Korey and Thomas Ketelsen (Berlin: 2010), 12–25. Further details are included in the appendix of original sources within the parallel German edition of the catalog, Fragmente der Erinnerung. Der Tempel Salomonis im Dresdner Zwinger. Facetten eines barocken Architekturmodells und eines frühen jüdischen Museums (Berlin: 2010), 96–110. 3. Here following the assessment of Hans Reuther, “Das Modell des Salomonischen Tempels im Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte,” Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte 19 (1980), 161–198. 4. On Peter, see the newspaper report in the London Daily Post (January 4, 1729) and [Christian Heinrich Eilenburg], Kurzer Entwurf der königlichen Naturalienkammer zu Dresden (Dresden: 1755), 99. On the importance of the Temple as a metaphor of knowledge in a

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variety of learned discourses in the era and as an incarnation of ideal architecture, see Jim Bennett, “Solomon’s Temple and Solomon’s House in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy,” in Korey and Ketelsen (eds.), Fragments of Memory, 26–34. 5. London Journal (August 29, 1724). 6. [Anon.], The Temple of Solomon / With all its Porches, Gates, Halls, Chambers . . . (London: 1724). 7. Following his conversion to Catholicism, August had become—by vote of the Polish nobility—King of Poland-Lithuania in 1697 (in this position he was known as August II), while remaining the Duke of Saxony and thereby one of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. 8. Korey, “The Temple of Solomon and the Juden Cabinet in the Dresden Zwinger,” 21–24. 9. Androphilius [pseudonym], Curieuse Reise-Beschreibung des Herrn Androphili . . . aus Francken /Sachssen und Schlesien deutlich beschrieben (Leipzig: 1735), 470–471. 10. Christian Gottlieb Pötzsch, Kurze Beschreibung des Naturalienkabinets in Dresden, 2nd ed. (Dresden: 1805), 53–54. Pötzsch gives dimensions in the plan for the biblical models— the Temple model is 19 square feet and the Tabernacle is set on a 7’ x 9’ platform—but not for the replica synagogue. A fuller analysis of the contents of this synagogue appears in the second part of this essay. 11. Friedhilde Krause, “Eine Buchauktion in Berlin im Jahre 1716. Das abenteuerliche Schicksal der Bibliothek von Johann Friedrich Mayer,” Marginalien. Zeitschrift für Buchkunst und Bibliophilie 45 (1972), 16–28. On Mayer, see Volker Gummelt, “Der Masslose Johann Friedrich Mayer—Wächter der Orthodoxie, virtuoser Prediger, Biblioman,” Greifswalder theologische Profile. Bausteine zur Geschichte der Theologie an der Universität Greifswald, ed. Irmfried Garbe, Tilman Beyrich, and Thomas Willi (Frankfurt: 2006), 45–56. 12. On the model synagogue and its contents, see [Anon.], Bibliotheca Mayeriana (Berlin: 1716), esp. 831–833. 13. Thomas Thibault Döring of the Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig has located the purchase agreement for the synagogue contained within the library’s Ms. 2789 (“Rationes Bibliothecae Academiae Lipsiensis Paulinae ab A. MDCCXI usque ad A. MDCCXXXVIII”). The entry reads: “Pro Synagoga. Judaica, a D. Jo. Frid. Mayera olim comparata, & cum Biblioteca ipsius Berolini m. Jan 1716 vendita: v. Cat. B. Mayer p. 831 (inclusi omnibus impensis) Partes Synagogam hanc constituents . . .” (fol. 13); the price was 79 talers and 7 groschen (personal communication to the author, September 11, 2009). 14. Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, Hauptstaatsarchiv Dredsen (hereafter: HStA Dresden), 10026 Geh. Kabinett, Loc. 380/1, fol. 14. Italicized words (which appear as such in the original text) are those of non-German origin. 15. I am grateful to Thomas Thibault Döring (Leipzig) for identifying the megilat Esther within the holdings of the library as the Esther scroll acquired from Wallich in 1724 (personal communication to the author, June 25, 2009); see also his entry (Nr. 166) on the megilah in Erleuchtung der Welt. Sachsen und der Beginn der modernen Wissenschaften, ed. Detlev Döring et al. (exhibition catalog of the Universität Leipzig) (Dresden: 2009), 137. 16. The location of the replica synagogue between its acquisition for Dresden from the University of Leipzig and its display in the Zwinger is not known. 17. For example, a marble placed atop a spiral staircase, only the top steps of which are visible from outside the Temple model, is said to roll perfectly all the way down, making every step audible. This rolling-marble motif appears already in the account of a 1710 visit to the model in Hamburg: see Conrad Zacharias von Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reisen durch Niedersachsen Holland und Engelland, Zweyter Teil (Ulm: 1753), 115–117; it is repeated in [Eilenburg], Kurzer Entwurf der königlichen Naturalienkammer zu Dresden, 100, as well as in several other later descriptions of the model in Dresden. 18. Arthur Schopenhauer, Journal einer Reise von Hamburg nach Carlsbad und von dort nach Prag; Rückreise nach Hamburg, Anno 1800 (ms., Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt, Schopenhauer-Archiv, transcription Jochen Stollberg); also available online at www.schopenhauer-dresden.de.

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19. Fedor Nikolaevicˇ Glinka (1786–1880), Pis’ma russkogo oficera, cited from the second edition (Moscow: 1870), 310–311 (1st ed. Moscow: 1815–1816). I thank Erhard Hexelschneider (Leipzig) both for this source and for its translation into German, and Birgit Dalbajewa (Dresden) for establishing contact between us. 20. The loosening of this prohibition occurred at first only for the “court Jew” Behrend Lehmann of Halberstadt, who had significantly contributed to the financing of Saxon ruler August the Strong’s election as King of Poland. On Lehmann, see Selma Stern, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in Central Europe (Philadelphia: 1950). More recently, see Bernd Schedlitz, Leffmann Behrens. Untersuchungen zum Hofjudentum im Zeitalter des Absolutismus (Hildesheim: 1984); Vivian Mann and Richard Cohen (eds.), From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power, 1600–1800 (exhibition catalog of the Jewish Museum, New York) (Munich: 1996); Rotraud Ries and J. Friedrich Battenberg (eds.), Hofjuden—Ökonomie und Interkulturalität. Die jüdische Wirtschaftselite im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: 2002); Cathleen Bürgelt, “Der jüdische Hoffaktor Berend Lehmann und die Finanzierung der polnischen Königskrone für August den Starken,” Medaon. Magazin für jüdisches Leben in Forschung und Bildung 1 (2007), 1–17. It should also be noted that with his ascension to the throne of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania in 1697, August the Strong became the ruler of the world’s largest Jewish community. On the broad presence and paradoxical status of Jewish themes in contemporary Saxony, see Stephan Wendehorst, “Saxon Judeities: Paradoxes between ‘Protestant Spain’ and a ‘Paradise for the Jews,’” in Korey and Ketelsen (eds.), Fragments of Memory, 35–43. 21. HStA Dresden, 10026 Geh. Kabinett, Loc. 376/2, fol. 161. 22. Ibid., fol. 159 (resolution of October 7, 1769). 23. For this additional information on Löbel, I thank Joachim Albrecht (Dresden), who has tracked references to Löbel in the tax records of the Dresden Jews in the Hauptstaatsarchiv. Albrecht shows that Löbel often listed his profession as “Schuldiener” (beadle, or lit. “servant in the shul”); presumably this refers to assistance in one of the small private chapels in Dresden, less likely to his work in the Zwinger, which, as noted above, both he and his superiors referred to as the “Juden-Schule.” Nevertheless, on account of his presentation of repeated testimonials documenting his “work both in the Juden-Schule as well as [with] the Tempel Salomonis in the Zwinger,” his presence in Dresden was tolerated for decades. He died on June 16, 1801, roughly 80 years old, never having been granted permanent residence (personal communication to the author, May 2010). 24. August’s son, Friedrich August II, also converted to Catholicism and later received the Polish crown (as August III) in 1733. 25. Private prayer chapels were allowed beginning in 1772, but the first official synagogue in Dresden since the Middle Ages was built by Gottfried Semper in 1839–1840, thus after the era of the Juden-Cabinet in the Zwinger. 26. See Elb’s complaint against the proprietor of this panorama: HStA Dresden, 19747 Nr. 516 (Schaustellung in Dresden, vol. 1), fol 14 ff. I thank Lars Rebehn (Dresden) for pointing me to this source as well as to a testimonial in which Elb petitioned for a reduction in the fees assessed upon him for this display. Elb reported in April 1837 that in spite of his great expenses in presenting the Temple model, it had been very poorly visited. Only the hope that outside tourists [Fremden] would visit it had moved him to exhibit it at all, yet “not only on account of the bad weather, but also specifically due to the structure with Mr. Lexa’s panorama of St. Petersburg, which was put up in front of the building in which I had exhibited the Tempel Salomonis, was I not in the least able to recover my costs” (Stadtarchiv Dresden, Ratsarchiv 2.1.3. C. XVIII 141 u. Vol. V [former signature B. XIII. 114 k. Vol. V], fol. 8 f.). Elb’s petition was granted, and the fees (originally set at 10 talers) were reduced by two-thirds. Chris Friedrichs (Vancouver) has kindly identified two candidates for this “Samuel Elb” within the biographical records of the Jewish community of Dresden, which are held by the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) in Jerusalem: their death dates are listed as June 21, 1838 (for Löb Samuel Elb) and December 1, 1843 (for Samuel Elb)—see CAHJP D/Dr2/ G5/976, 318 resp. 356.

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27. An early 20th-century list of the ritual objects within the synagogue in Dresden (built by Gottfried Semper, dedicated 1840) appeared in Cornelius Gurlitt, Beschreibende Darstellung der älteren Bau-und Kunstdenkmäler des Königreich Sachsens, Hefte 21–23 [Stadt Dresden] (Dresden: 1903), 296–298. It is quite possible that the large menorah, a paroh.et and other textiles, and silver vessels on this list may stem from the 18th-century private synagogue of the Schie family of Dresden; I thank Nora Goldenbogen for this information (Dresden, personal communication to the author, May 6, 2010). Given Elb’s difficulties, it is tempting to wonder whether the Torah or other objects from the Juden-Cabinet in the Zwinger (last traceable in Elb’s Cabinet in 1837) might also have passed to the synagogue at or around the time of its dedication in 1840. The Semper synagogue was destroyed in the pogrom of November 1938. 28. Jahresbericht des Königlich Sächsischen Altertumsvereins über die Fünfundachtzigste Vereinsjahr 1909/1910 (Dresden: 1910), 10–11. 29. Over the course of three centuries, the gallery encircling the outer “Court of the Gentiles” has been lost; what remains is the 12-foot-square Court of the Israelites containing the Court of the Priests and the Temple itself (with forecourt, sanctuary, and Holy of Holies). See Korey, “The Temple of Solomon and the Juden Cabinet in the Dresden Zwinger,” and idem, “Fragments of the Hamburg Temple Model,” both in Korey and Ketelsen (eds.), Fragments of Memory, 12–25, 68–69. 30. For an introduction to the immense literature on the reception of the Temple, see Simon Goldhill, The Temple of Jerusalem (Cambridge, Mass.: 2005); Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Salomons Tempel und das Abendland. Monumentale Folgen historischer Irrtümer (Cologne: 1994); and Helen Rosenau, Vision of the Temple: The Image of the Temple of Jerusalem in Judaism and Christianity (London: 1979). Two further recommended and more recent studies are Lesley Smith, “Jews and Christians Imagining the Temple,” in Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-place of Cultures, ed. Piet van Boxel and Sabine Arndt (exhibition catalog of the Bodleian Library) (Oxford: 2009), 99–114; and Jonathan Sheehan, “Temple and Tabernacle: The Place of Religion in Early Modern England,” in Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800, ed. Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (Chicago: 2007), 248–272. The most spectacular 17th-century Temple model prior to Schott’s Hamburg reconstruction was put together ca. 1640 by Jacob Jehuda “Templo” Leon; on this, see Hermine Pool, “Der verschwundene Tempel. Jacob Jehuda Leon (1602–1675) und sein Templum Salomonis,” Dresdener Kunstblätter, no. 4 (2009), 269–280. Leon’s model received tremendous public attention both within his own home and when he took it on tour; indeed, he “turned his house into a small museum where he exhibited [this] model of the Temple . . . [and] aroused great curiosity and attracted large numbers of Christian visitors. . . . Crowds that gathered in this house annoyed members of the Mahamad, the syndics of the Sephardic community, who complained that the ‘museum’ was open to non-Jewish visitors on Sabbaths and Jewish holidays” (Yosef Kaplan, “For Whom did Emanuel de Witte Paint His Three Pictures of the Sephardi Synagogue in Amsterdam?,” Studia Rosenthaliana 32, no. 2 [1998], 134, reprinted in idem, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe [Leiden: 2000], 30–31). 31. See especially Yaacov Deutsch, “‘A View of the Jewish Religion’: Conceptions of Jewish Practice and Ritual in Early Modern Europe,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 (2001), 273–295; Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven: 2001), 170–221; Stephen G. Burnett, “Distorted Mirrors: Antonius Margarita, Johann Buxtorf and Christian Ethnographies of the Jews,” Sixteenth Century Journal 35, no. 2 (1994), 275–287; as well as the sources cited therein. A contemporary awareness of this literature as a coherent category existed already in the 18th century: see the section “XIV. Scriptores Christiani de Antiquitatibus Hebraicis, ut & de moribus ac ritibus Judaeorum hodiernis, & an in Republ. Christiana tolerandi?” with approximately 80 titles, in Johann Christoph Wolf, Biblioteca Hebraea II (Hamburg: 1721), 1083 ff. 32. Christoph Wallich, Beit hakeneset shel hagaon harav hagadol . . . oder Die Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde /Zum Nutzen der studirenden Jugend aufgerichtet / Worinnen die dazu gehörige Jüdische Gebeter samt ihrem Geräthe zu finden. Aus denen Rabbinen deutlich vergestellet . . . (Greifswald: 1711). As pagination is most extensive in the

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third edition (Braunschweig: 1715), all page numbers from Wallich’s treatise will be given according to the latter. The 1715 edition has been digitized by the Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt and is available at http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/urn/urn:nbn: de:hebis:30-180012079001 (accessed October 9, 2011). Wallich’s book is mentioned in Deutsch, “‘A View of the Jewish Religion,’” and is also briefly addressed in Carlebach, Divided Souls, 202, as well as in the dissertation by Bernd Vogelsang, “‘Archaische Utopien’. Materialien zu Gerhard Schotts Hamburger ‘Bühnenmodell’ des Templum Salomonis” (University of Cologne, 1981), 322 f. (in which it is listed as a Temple reconstruction). An open question is whether comparable models were built by Wallich in Helmstedt and Braunschweig to accompany the second and third editions of his book that were printed there. Further biographical information on Wallich should be forthcoming in the dissertation of Anke Költsch (Halle) on early-modern converts from Judaism. 33. Wallich, Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde, 6 f. Note Wallich’s inconsistency in his handling of Hebrew words within the German text: he sometimes provides both a transliteration and a translation, sometimes one but not the other, and sometimes neither. Wallich’s training as a sofer is not surprising; as Elisheva Carlebach has pointed out, most converts who wrote on Jewish ritual had been (prior to their conversion) second-tier religious functionaries: often schoolteachers, scribes, or ritual slaughterers. See Carlebach, “Converts and their Narratives in Early Modern Germany: The Case of Friedrich Albert Christiani,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 40 (1995), 65–83, esp. 73. 34. Wallich writes the transcription as erubh (also giving the Hebrew word) and describes this as a special matzah; it is made from a mixture of flour for which the beadle (shamash) of the community gathers a portion from each house on the day before Passover, which is then baked with the other matzot. This ’eruv matzah is then hung on a nail on the wall of the synagogue, where it remains for a year until it is replaced just before the subsequent Passover (Wallich, Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde, 24–28). Yaacov Deutsch (Jerusalem) has kindly pointed out to me that this custom is traceable to medieval Ashkenazic communities, as cited by Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: 2006), 236–239. By establishing a shared food and thus expanding the definition of a private household to include surrounding courtyards (h.atzerot), the ‘eruv is designed to overcome the halakhic prohibition against the carrying of objects from the private to the public sphere on the Sabbath. 35. Wallich, Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde, 8 ff. (abbreviations and sayings); 12 ff. (motivation for mounting them); 29 ff. (wall prayers); 67 [sic—should be 47] (their widespread use); 36 ff. (’Alenu). 36. Ibid., 67 [sic—should be 47]. 37. On the name “Mayer,” as in R. Mayer (Meir) of Rothenburg, see ibid., X 2 ff. Presumably to display his learning and to please his patron, Wallich also made use of the rabbinic philological practice of underscoring the power of the individual Hebrew letters to transform word meanings; for instance, with the addition of the ‫ א‬from ‫( מאיר‬Mayer), nashim (women) becomes anashim (men/people). At one point in the text Wallich even announces his plans to write a book that will use gematriyah to prove the validity of Jesus being the Messiah. 38. Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: 1998), ch. 1. 39. Yaacov Deutsch, “Von der Iuden Ceremonien: Representations of Jews in SixteenthCentury Germany,” in Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, ed. Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett (Leiden: 2006), 335–356. 40. Aya Elyada, “Protestant Scholars and Yiddish Studies in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 203 (2009), 81. 41. Wallich, Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde, author’s dedication to J. F. Mayer, x5. 42. Yaacov Deutsch, “Polemical Ethnographies: Descriptions of Yom Kippur in the Writings of Christian Hebraists and Jewish Converts to Christianity in Early Modern Europe,” in Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson (Jewish Cultures and Contexts) (Philadelphia: 2004), 202–233.

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43. Wallich, Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde, foreword by B.H. Gebhardi. For many Christian Hebraists, such ethnographies were a further way of proving that the Jews were no longer chosen, having been superseded (by Lutherans); “reverence for Judaism and Old Testament could co-exist nicely with disdain for actual Jews because they had been effectively removed from their own history” (Allison Coudert, “Five Seventeenth-Century Christian Hebraists,” in Coudert and Shoulson [eds.], Hebraica Veritas?, 292); cf. R. Po-chia Hsia, “Christian Ethnographies of Jews in Early Modern Germany,” in The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After, ed. Raymond B. Waddington and Arthur H. Williamson (New York: 1994), 223–235. 44. Finsternis is also the word used to describe the darkness appearing in a solar eclipse, a Sonnenfinsternis. It may be that such a usage holds the additional connotation of Judaism having been eclipsed by the light of Christ. 45. Wallich, Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde (foreword by Gebhardi). 46. Wallich, Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde, 53 f. Carlebach, Divided Souls, 202, notes that the first part of this passage affirms “the long-standing Christian association of the synagogue with darkness and malevolence.” 47. Moritz Wilhelm Christiani, Beit hakeneset shel hagaon hagadol Georg Serpilius . . . /oder Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog, sammt einem Anhang von vielerley Jüdischen Curiositäten /oder denenjenigen Stücken die bey denen Jüden in ihren Privat-Häusern angetroffen werden. Seinen bissherigen Herren Auditoribus in Jüdischen Ceremoniel zum besten heraus gegeben von Moritz Wilhelm Christiani /einem Mitglied Wahrer Christen (Regensburg: 1723)—see the digitized copy in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich) accessible under http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10570316-0 (accessed October 9, 2011). The volume now seems to be quite rare; for example, World Cat lists only three copies. I thank Sharon Liberman Mintz (Jewish Theological Seminary, New York) for pointing me to this work; also see her recent entry, “Beit ha-knesset shel ha-gaon ha-gadol . . . Georg Serpilius . . .” (Lot 163), in Important Judaica (auction catalog, Sotheby’s New York, December 15, 2010). A revised edition of Christiani’s booklet appeared nine years later as the first part of Moritz Wilhelm Christiani Keyser, Beit hakeneset vehilkhot sheh.itot uvedikot bilshon ashkenaz/Das ist Kurtze Beschreibung einer Jüdischen Synagoge, Nebst einem Anhang von Schächten und visitiren aus dem Rabbinischen in Hochteutscher Sprache übergesetzet und heraus gegeben (Bremen: 1732). The entry in the National Library of Israel catalog (with a link to a digitalized version) can be found at: http://aleph.nli.org.il/F/Y43FF1E69QQUIUP9M2Q3XM67QGEBLAJ97T39SNJYTMNI75FSUU-26774?func=find-acc&; acc_sequence = 008351165 (accessed December 26, 2011). As the title makes clear, this also includes Christiani’s (polemically annotated) translation of a treatise on ritual slaughter, which the author describes as the first part of the publication on minhag that he had already announced in the foreword to the 1723 edition. World Cat lists only one extant copy of this 1732 volume, in the National Library of Israel; I thank Abraham David (Jerusalem) for facilitating my access to this work. The preface to the 1732 volume makes clear that it is indeed by the same author (in spite of the additional surname “Keyser”); in lieu of the earlier edition’s dedication to Serpilius and the account of his replica synagogue, the author now relates how, on the recommendation of the Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wolf in Hamburg, he had come to Bremen, where, with the support of the theologian Conrad Iken, he was given the chance to teach “rabbinic and talmudic languages” to a number of outstanding theology students. The 1732 text’s treatment of the synagogue follows §1–30 of the 1723 edition verbatim, except for certain modest changes (see notes 55, 59, 76, and 77), but the further sections of auxiliary objects exhibited by Serpilius in Regensburg and described on pp. 38 ff. in the earlier work (including the mannequin rabbi and various objects said typically to be kept in individual Jewish homes, such as a lulav and etrog, wedding rings, a ketubah, etc.) are omitted. The description from the earlier Kurtze Beschreibung now seems to function as a generic account of the objects to be found in a synagogue, not of any physically existing structure or model; there is no specific indication that a replica synagogue was built in Bremen. 48. Christiani, Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog, foreword, A2. 49. Ibid., A3. Note that Wagenseil’s collection of Hebrew manuscripts was acquired from his estate by the town council of Leipzig (and is now held by the university library there); see

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Leipziger Judentümer in Stadt und Universität, ed. Abraham David, Anke Költsch, and Stephan Wendehorst (Schriften aus Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig 19) (Leipzig: 2010). It is unclear whether Christiani’s reference to “curiosities” extends beyond these manuscripts. An illuminated megilat Esther owned by Wagenseil is held by the Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg-Erlangen (Ms. 1254), as was kindly pointed out to me by Evelyn Mühlhauber (Erlangen). Wallich believed this to stem from Persia and to be the oldest surviving Hebrew manuscript, writing that he had seen nothing equal to it in any of the libraries of Europe that he had visited and that he would not give it up at any price; he reported having received it as a gift from the Jewish community in Fürth in return for a great favor he had performed—see Christopher Gottlieb Murr, Memorabilia bibliothecarum publicarum Norimbergensium et universitatis Altdorfinae III (Nuremberg: 1791), 33 ff. Cf. Ernst Róth, in Hebräische Handschriften II (Wiesbaden: 1965), 45, who believes this megilah to be rather from the early 17th century. 50. Christiani, Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog, title page (“seinen bisherigen Herren Auditoribus im Jüdischen Ceremoniel zum besten heraus gegeben”) as well as the paraphrase on A4 v. 51. Ibid., foreword, A4. 52. Ibid., 33: “On the ground are orderly stands and seats for the congregation, upon which the Jews lay their books and set down their tefillin or talit after prayer, until the hour comes to pray again.” 53. Finally, mention is made of the separate women’s section and of the custom of posting an excommunication list on the door, though these features seem to be merely descriptive and not actually present in the Regensburg synagogue (ibid., 34–37). 54. Christiani, Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog, 7f. The three “crowns” are those of the Torah, the priesthood, and the kingship. 55. Ibid., 38 ff. This section does not appear in the 1732 edition (see n. 47 above). 56. As is often the case in this polemical literature, circumcision receives special attention. A rather cryptic passage (ibid., 16) reports how a synagogue menorah is said to stand above “a small sand pit, in which the circumcised foreskins are put; at other places, instead of in such a pit they are kept in silver dishes, likewise lined with sand, as is the case in our [that is, Serpilius’ own] synagogue mentioned above.” In the later description of the derivative synagogue established by Regensburg merchants, there appears the “orla, or foreskin of a Jewish boy, as well as everything pertaining to circumcision” (ibid., 55). 57. Christiani, Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog, 51. Among the manuscripts, Christiani chooses to emphasize only the “abominable curse-text ‫מעשה תלוי‬ Maaseh Tolah [Thole, lit. “the hanged one,” a highly pejorative biography of Jesus]. . . . I can especially vouch for the fact that this is the greatest secret of the Jews, and which is possessed only by a very few among them on account of the great danger it poses. I thought that a Christian would never be able to see it, much less own it. . . . Prof. Serpilius has published a portion of this curse-text in his biography of Johannes Bösenstein, 55 f., because he had noted that this poem confuses even learned Christians . . . and that the rabbis . . . deny the existence of the work. As this biography only appeared in a limited edition, a more thorough report will be provided on another occasion.” 58. Christiani, Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog, Vorrede, A 5f. 59. Ibid., 53–61. This, too, is omitted from the 1732 edition. 60. These objects range from a talit and phylacteries, a mezuzah, a wall calendar (luah.), and a mizrah. to engagement and marriage contracts, as well as a get and a h.alitzah shoe; various books, from a large “Rasche Chumisch” (Pentateuch with commentary by Rashi), a book on ritual slaughter (together with three knives), and a “Benschen” for the grace after meals, to various devotional works, a Hebrew grammar in Yiddish, a Passover hagadah, and even three Yiddish comedies on biblical themes. 61. Ibid., 60–61. 62. The published catalog of Serpilius’ library, numbering some 8,200 entries, contains the 1715 edition of Wallich’s Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde (Braunschweig) as well as the 1715 auction catalog of Mayer’s library: cf. Catalogus Bibliothecae Georgii Serpilii

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(Regensburg: n.d. [1723]), 408 (8° No. 2105) resp. 446 (8° No. 2363). Serpilius’ library also seems to have been somewhat of a tourist attraction in academic circles; for example, a eulogy of Jakob Friedrich Georg, pastor in Uffenheim, mentions a journey to Regensburg, “where he examined [besahe] the animate and inanimate rarities of this city, its buildings, its antiquities, its scholars, and its libraries, and among these he was especially pleased by the library of Superintendent Serpilius” (Geshichte jetztlebender Gelehrten, als eine Fortsetzung des jetztlebenden Gelehrten Europa, ed. Ernst Ludewig Rathlef [1741], 122). 63. Christian Serpilius, Dass Dem Königl. Schwedischen Ober-Kirchen-Raht Herrn D. Johann Fridrich Mayern Auff Seine An die Studiosos Theologiae, Schwedischer Bothmässigkeit unterworffen /Beschriebene Vorrede Hr. M. August. Hermann Francke Kein gottseeliges kluges Wort /sondern lauter Schand-und Schmäh-Worte /Nach Art der Heutigen sanfftmüthigen Pietisten Habe geantwortet /Wird gezeiget /und gedachtem Hn. M. Francken seine Schmäh-Worte wieder nach Hause geschicket von Christian Serpilio Der H. Schrifft Studioso (Hamburg: 1695). I thank Helmut Puff (Ann Arbor) for helping me translate some of the subtleties of this passage. Serpilius describes himself as a live-in student in his teacher’s house. (As evidenced by the first name of the author, it is likely that the Serpilius in question was Georg’s younger brother.) 64. Wallich and Christiani term themselves, respectively, as “Christoph Wallich /J[udaeus] C[onversius]” and “von Moritz Wilhelm Christiani/einem Mitglied Wahrer Christen,” in keeping with Carlebach’s observation of a designation marking the “special status of the convert who straddled two worlds but fully inhabited neither” (Carlebach, “Converts,” 77). Curiously, the descriptive texts on the Greifswald and Regensburg synagogues are listed under “Mayer” and “Serpilius” in Wolf, Bibliotheca Hebraea II, 1087 and 1090, rather than under the names of their respective authors, Wallich and Christiani. 65. Christiani, Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog, A2. 66. Deutsch, “‘A View of the Jewish Religion,’” 285; Carlebach, Divided Souls, ch. 10. 67. Yaacov Deutsch has informed me that the first reference is probably that of Yom Tov Lipmann Mülhausen in his 15th-century work, Sefer hanitzah.on (Jerusalem: 1984), 191. 68. This and the subsequent discussion of the ’Alenu are drawn from Wallich, Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde, 36–45. 69. According to Yaacov Deutsch, the use of ‫( תלוי‬hanged one) appears also in Jewish sources within the title of Ma’ase Thole (the story of the hanged one), one of the variant names for the work Toldot Yeshu (see n. 57). See Yaacov Deutsch, “Jewish Anti-Christian Invectives and Christian Awareness: An Unstudied Form of Interaction in the Early Modern Period,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 55 (2010), 57. 70. Wallich (Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde, 43 f.) also disputes the longer form of the ’Alenu insert claimed to be revealed by Sigismund Hosmann in his Das schwer zu bekehrenden Juden-Hertz (1st. ed., Celle: 1699), which reported on a manuscript now in the Leipzig library. According to Wallich, the purported addition would be too obvious and thus subject to suspicion, and also too long to be readily memorized. 71. This and the following passages have been translated directly from the German version given in Hans Joachim Schoeps, Philosemitismus im Barock. Religions-und geistesgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Tübingen: 1952), 205–207, citing Arch. A. 9, 61ff. in the Uppsala University Archives. I thank Håkan Hallberg (Uppsala) for providing me with copies of the Swedish originals, as well as for locating the price list shown in Fig. 2.8 (Bibl. Arch. E7, fol. 62). I thank Jan Holmberg and Caroline von Hove (both of Stockholm) for assistance with the Swedish in these texts. 72. Vokko Henk, Stambogsskikken I det danske monarki indtil 1800 (Odense: 2001), 362, pointed me to the existence of Wallin’s academic autograph album in the Stiftsbiblioteket Linköping. Mathias von Wachenfeldt (Linköping) confirmed that the album “Memoria itineris ad exteros” for the years between 1708 and 1710 (Ms. B 128:1) recorded a stay by Wallin in Greifswald and that the volume for Wallin’s travel between 1720 and 1722 (Ms. B 128:2) included a stay in Leipzig; he also generously provided me with the image from the earlier album confirming Wallin’s visit to Mayer (see Fig. 2.9). He informed me that the biography of Wallin by Tor Andrae, Georg Wallin: Resor, forskningar och oden (Stockholm: 1936), which

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draws on Wallin’s diaries held in Linköping (Ms. G 13, G 14, G 14a), records that Wallin was impressed by Mayer’s library, which he visited several times. 73. Schoeps, Philosemitismus im Barock, 213, gives a brief paraphrase of Svedelius’ diary from the archive of the University of Uppsala, X 381: “1722. Synagogenbesuch in Altona . . . gemeinsamer Besuch mit seinen Zöglingen (zwei Barone Cedercreutz) und G. Wallin in UB Leipzig, wo eine, synagoge Judaica’ beschaut wird.” Schoeps was apparently not aware that the replica synagogue in Mayer’s library in Greifswald had been acquired by the university in Leizpig, given to the Dresden court, and then partially reproduced by Wallich for Leipzig. Wallin, however, was most likely aware of this connection, having visited Mayer in Greifswald during his travels as a student and having traveled to Leipzig in the early 1720s (see previous note). 74. Wallich, Mayerische Synagoga in Greiffswalde, x 5 v.: “Liebhabern der Jüdischen Sachen /Ceremonien, und Antiquitäten”; Christiani, Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog, foreword, A3: “Liebhabern Jüdischer Antiquitäten und Ceremonien.” 75. Christiani, Kurtze Beschreibung einer wohleingerichteten Synagog, 19 f. Mention of any special provenance for the haftorah is omitted in the 1732 edition. 76. Ibid., 20. Puzzlingly, the 1732 edition retains this passage. 77. Ibid., 10. 78. Another place to look is Holland: Several Dutch theologians in the first half of the 18th century, namely David Mill (professor of Oriental languages, sacred antiquities, and theology, from 1718) in Utrecht; Bernard Sebastian Cremer (professor of theology, prophetic theology, and sacred antiquities, from 1718), from Stavenise and Asperen; and Emius Lucius Vriemoet (professor of Oriental languages and Jewish antiquities, from 1730) in Franeker, each built a furnished model of the Tabernacle and various vessels from the Temple for use in their teaching. The architectural models themselves do not survive, but remnants of the accompanying furnishings (such as miniature showbread tables, burnt-offering altars, arks of the Covenant) were collected by Leendert Schouten in the mid-19th century and presented in his “Bijbelsch Museum”; they are preserved in today’s Bijbels Museum in Amsterdam. It is not known to what extent these biblical models were accompanied by post-biblical ritual objects, though two mezuzot left in the will of Prof. Sebaldus Rau, David Mill’s successor in Utrecht, have also passed on to the Bijbels Museum through Schouten. See Hermine A. Pool, “Catalogus van het ‘Bijbelsch Museum,’” in Het ‘Bijbelsch Museum’ van ds Leendert Schouten. Van Tarbernakel tot Verzameling (Amsterdam: 2002), 30–69 (translated as “The Old Biblical Museum of Rev. Leendert Schouten: Extract from the Dutch Catalogue” on an insert). For additional information on Vriemont, I thank Arjen Dijkstra (Twente). 79. Die Geöffnete Raritäten- Und Naturalien-Kammer Worinnen Der Galanten Jugend / andern Curieusen und Reisenden gewiesen wird . . . (Hamburg: 1704), Vorrede, bound within Des geöffneten Ritter-Platzes Dritter Theil (Hamburg: 1705). Leonard Christoph Sturm may have been the editor of the series titled Des geöffneten Ritter-Platzes. The author of several key treatises in architectural theory, Sturm also proposed a widely known reconstruction (on paper) of the Temple based on the work of the Dutch mathematician Nicolas Goldmann, although no such Temple model is explicitly mentioned among the desiderata in the ideal gentleman’s collection. 80. Ibid., 42. 81. Sächsische Landesbibliothek—Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB), Dresden: Mscr.Dresd.A.46.a; Biblioteka Uniwersytecka we Wrocławiu: Ms.Or.I 1. 82. Catalogus manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Electoralis (1755), SLUB, Bibl. Arch. I. B, Vol.132, Nr. 211.: “Canticum Canticorum Hebraice. Acced. Liber precum Judaicarum quod singulis diebus festis solent.” I thank Thomas Haffner (Dresden) for pointing out that the identification of this as the mah.zor, and thus the assurance that one volume of the mah.zor was in Dresden already in 1755, is only recent—see Thomas Bürger and Thomas Haffner, “MachsorCodex digital vereint. Die UB Breslau und die SLUB Dresden wollen künftig kooperieren,” BIS—Bibliotheken in Sachsen 1 (2008), 166–168. For an analysis of the mah.zor itself, see Róth, Hebräische Handschriften, 33–36. The full mah.zor—both parts—has recently been digitized and is available at http://digital.slub-dresden.de/id280759886 (accessed August 4, 2011).

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83. Jeremiah Milles, Travel Journal, 1734–1737, British Library London, Add. 15768, fol. 223 (117). 84. In the first years of his reign (1733–1763), August’s son Friedrich August II expanded the picture gallery and the sculpture collection, as well as building up the display of firearms; there is so far no direct indication of his interest in the topic at hand, though the mah.zor may also have entered the collection by a different route. 85. See Korey, “The Temple of Solomon and the Juden Cabinet in the Dresden Zwinger,” 22–23; Wendehorst, “Saxon Judeities.”

Collecting Community: The Berlin Jewish Museum as Narrator between Past and Present, 1906–1939 Tobias Metzler (UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON)

On January 24, 1933, the Jewish Museum of Berlin was formally opened in its new location on Oranienburger Strasse, next to the New Synagogue, one of the most conspicuous Jewish sites in the center of Berlin. Attending its inauguration ceremony were high-ranking politicians, the directors of Berlin’s major museums, and other representatives of the city’s cultural institutions, which suggested that the museum was already well on its way to becoming rooted within the city’s cultural landscape. An optimistic vision of mutual cultural exchange reverberated in the inaugural speech delivered by the deputy president of the Berlin Jewish community, Leo Wolff, who spoke of the museum’s mission to teach both Jews and non-Jews about Jewish life and culture.1 With hindsight, it becomes evident that the opening of the Berlin Jewish museum marked a watershed not only for the city’s Jewish community but for German Jewry as a whole. Less than a week after the museum’s inauguration, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. With the Nazis in power, the museum’s trajectory was forced in a new direction: rather than representing the interconnectedness of Jewish and non-Jewish culture in Berlin, it became a refuge for Jewish art and culture in “the shrinking world of German Jewry.”2 In reconstructing the developments that led to the museum’s establishment, this essay suggests a new reading of its history in the context of early 20th-century attempts to redefine the place of Jews within the modern city. As will be seen, the Jewish museum played a significant role in efforts on the part of Berlin Jews to constitute, remodel, sustain, and defend a particular concept of urban Jewish culture. “Where is Jewish Berlin?” Eugen Caspary, the chairman of the Berlin Jewish community’s welfare office, asked in his introduction to the Berlin Jewish yearbook of 1926. According to Caspary, “Jewish” Berlin, despite the city’s considerable Jewish population, seemed oddly invisible amid the bustling metropolis. One could not, at first glance, identify the numerous Jewish associations, clubs, and institutions promoting “cultural and social tasks of the day in a specifically Jewish way that is suitable for Berlin.” The Jewish museum, destined to become an important institution within this network, helped to 55

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“reveal” Jewish Berlin, and was also instrumental in inventing a Jewish tradition suitable for early 20th-century Berlin.3 It became a mediator between past and present, between Jewish history and contemporary urban Jewish life-world. The history of the Berlin Jewish museum can be traced back to the late 19th century, when the first public Jewish exhibitions were put on display across Europe.4 Starting with the exhibition of Isaac Strauss’ collection of Judaica at the 1878 Paris Universal exhibition and the 1887 Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, Jewish culture and history became subjects of public display. Scholars have stressed the importance of these exhibitions for the formation of modern Jewish identities.5 Following the model of these pioneering exhibitions, the early 20th century saw the institutionalization of Jewish museums across Europe. Local initiatives aiming for the creation of a Jewish museum were often a response to the dramatic social and cultural changes posed by modernity to European Jewry, particularly in large cities. For a long time Berlin remained off the map in this respect. However, in the early years of the 20th century, a series of events, beginning in London, set off reverberations in the German capital city.

From Whitechapel to Berlin: Prelude to a Jewish Art Collection In November 1906, the Exhibition of Jewish Art and Antiquities opened at the Whitechapel Art Galley in London’s East End, in the heart of the city’s immigrant Jewish community. Apart from its unconventional site, the exhibition broke with tradition by displaying the works of contemporary Jewish artists, many of them of East European origin. It attracted some 150,000 visitors in just six weeks; among them was Karl Schwarz, a young German Jewish art student from Berlin. Schwarz filed an enthusiastic report in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in which he expressed the hope that other countries would follow the example of the London exhibition—adding that, in Germany, one would “most certainly find enough treasures to realize a Jewish exhibition.”6 This call did not go unheard. In the following year, a group of Berlin Jews formed the Verein zur Förderung jüdischer Kunst (Association for the Promotion of Jewish Art) to mount a similar exhibition in the German capital city.7 Several months later, almost exactly a year after the London exhibition had opened its doors, the Exhibition of Jewish Artists was formally inaugurated at the Gallery for Old and New Art on Wilhelm Strasse, in the center of Berlin.8 As was the case in London, this exhibition consisted of two main sections, one devoted to modern Jewish art and the other to Jewish ceremonial objects. The exhibition catalog declared that the idea behind placing historic artifacts alongside modern art was “to highlight the development of the artistic sentiment of Jews of previous centuries, which reverberates in the modern works on display.”9 Besides creating a link between past and present, these exhibits anticipated those of the future Berlin Jewish museum. Several works displayed in 1907, among them Lesser Ury’s Jeremias and Samuel Hirszenberg’s monumental painting Galut (since lost), as well as a section of ceremonial objects from the Old Synagogue in Berlin, found their way to the collection of the future Jewish museum.10 The significance of the 1907 exhibition, however, went beyond the re-exhibiting of artifacts. The exhibition highlighted the diversity of modern Jewish cultures across Europe and presented Jewish art as an

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integral part of contemporary artistic movements. Moreover, it underscored the important role of Jews in Berlin’s transformation into a center of modernism and, more generally, modern culture.11 Starting at the end of the 19th century, Berlin witnessed a breathtaking trajectory toward becoming the epitome of the modern metropolis, which put the city on a level with London and Paris.12 According to the 1910 census, Berlin and its suburbs were home to some 130,000 to 140,000 Jews.13 By 1925, mainly because of migration from the eastern territories lost as a result of the First World War, more than 170,000 Jews, almost a fourth of the Jewish population in Germany, lived in the capital city.14 This process of rapid Jewish “metropolitanization” represented a major challenge to the existing networks and communal institutions of Berlin Jewry.15 Many contemporaries feared that the concentration in cities represented a serious threat to Jewish traditions and identity.16 Berlin Jewry, however, appeared eager to face the challenges posed by the modern metropolis, and attempts to create a specific Berlin Jewish identity were central to its response. The Jewish press, especially the community newspaper, the Gemeindeblatt (founded in 1911), became an important instrument for strengthening the cohesion of the Jewish community. Additionally, urban Jews pioneered new forms of cultural practices directed at Jewish history in general and the local Jewish past in particular. Around the turn of the 20th century, local initiatives calling for the collection and preservation of Jewish relics and artifacts gained momentum across central Europe. In 1895, the Gesellschaft für Sammlung und Conservierung von Kunst- und historischen Denkmälern des Judenthums (Society for the Collection and Preservation of Artistic and Historical Monuments of Judaism) opened the first Jewish museum in Vienna.17 In 1897, the Gesellschaft zur Erforschung jüdischer Kunstdenkmäler (Society for the Study of Jewish Monuments) was founded in Frankfurt. A year later, Max Grunwald established the Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde (Society for Jewish Folklore Studies) in Hamburg, whose goals included the collection and exhibition of Jewish artifacts. The latter two societies also sought to establish links with local museums in Frankfurt and Hamburg, respectively, in order to put their collections on display.18 Although not directly related to these initiatives, the founding of a Jewish museum in Berlin was part of this wider development. In contrast with the institutions mentioned above, the Berlin Jewish museum did not have its origins in a local community effort. Rather, it began with a donation bequeathed by Albert Wolf, a jeweler from Dresden who had been collecting Jewish artifacts—especially coins and medals—since 1874. Shortly before his death in 1907 (a few months before the opening of the exhibition of Jewish artists), Wolf bequeathed his collection to the Berlin Jewish community. His deed of donation expressed the hope that the Jewish community in the capital city would be able to maintain and extend his collection as well as place it “in the service of Jewish scholarship” to “foster the public interest in Judaism and Jewish history.”19 At Wolf’s funeral, the representative of the Berlin Jewish community, Moritz Stern, publicly pledged the community’s commitment to sustain the “entrusted gem.”20 Before becoming the Berlin Jewish community’s head librarian in 1905—a position that later included the responsibility for the art collection—Stern had studied at Berlin University and had received a doctorate in Semitic studies. Simultaneously

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he had attended Esriel Hildesheimer’s Orthodox rabbinical seminary; following his ordination in 1890, he had served as a rabbi in Kiel, in northern Germany, for several years.21 In his new position in Berlin, Stern committed himself to the extension of the community’s library, transforming it into a significant Jewish studies research library. His personal research interests lay with the history of German Jews during the Middle Ages and local Berlin Jewish history.22 This may explain why the acquisition of Wolf’s collection presented an enormous challenge: Stern was familiar neither with art history nor with museology. For years, Wolf’s collection remained in storage.23 It was not until 1917, a decade after its acquisition, that part of the collection was displayed by Stern in the rooms of the community library. Apart from a focus on Jewish numismatics, this small-scale exhibition featured portraits of famous Jewish personalities, among them Moses Mendelssohn, Menasseh ben Israel, Baruch Spinoza, Salomon Maimon, and David Friedländer. Mounted on the walls, these portraits formed what Stern called an “ancestral line of Jewish spirit.” In several showcases, early modern illustrated Hebrew manuscripts were displayed alongside archeological artifacts from the Middle East. Jewish ceremonial objects found their place next to plates showing a reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple. Stern’s division of objects into ten categories, ranging from “Palestinian antiquities” to “medals since the 16th century,” “ceremonial objects,” and “rare books,” suggests that he was primarily interested in showing the broad range of the art collection rather than highlighting specific aspects of Jewish art or history.24 The central administrative building of the Berlin Jewish community on Oranienburger Strasse 29, where the initial exhibition was held, also housed the Gesamtarchiv der Deutschen Juden (Central Archive of German Jews).25 Founded in 1905, the archive’s mission was to preserve “all files and documents—no longer in use—from Jewish communities, institutions, and societies in Germany” for the sake of historical research.26 The physical proximity between archive and museum fostered a close cooperation between these institutions and also influenced the manner in which the art collection evolved over time. Following the model of the archive, Stern appealed to the Jewish public to support the art collection through donations of artifacts and artworks. In 1923, he lamented that “many are unaware of the existence of a community art collection” and expressed his hope that a visit to “this small but rich museum” might encourage individuals to donate heirlooms that might prove to be of historical and artistic value.27 Both prior and parallel to these acquisition efforts, a number of initiatives to foster the study of Jewish art were launched. One of the earliest was the Jüdischen Kunstarchiv (Archive of Jewish Art), which was established by Karl Schwarz in 1913 in cooperation with the Gesamtarchiv.28 (Schwarz, who as a student had reported on the London exhibition in 1907, went on to become an art historian. In 1927, he became Stern’s assistant and subsequently succeeded him as curator of the art collection.) According to its statutes, the Kunstarchiv was meant to “collect all documents and photographic material on Jewish monuments and Jewish artists around the world.”29 Schwarz issued an appeal to artists to provide reproductions of their works; in a response published in the Jüdische Rundschau in July 1913, the artist Hermann Struck enthusiastically endorsed the archival project.30 These reproductions later formed the nucleus of the large photographic and slide collection of the Berlin Jewish museum.31

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Another attempt to establish centralized Jewish archives met with opposition. In 1919, the young art historian Erich Toeplitz, who later became the director of the Museum Jüdischer Altertümer (Museum of Jewish Antiquities) in Frankfurt, founded a rival Jewish archive in Dresden. In response, Schwarz threatened legal action.32 Similar clashes occurred between the Gesamtarchiv and various provincial Jewish communities that refused to deposit their documents in Berlin.33 In 1933, looking back on three decades of work as director of the Gesamtarchiv, Jacob Jacobson noted that the archive had been “unable to cross the river Main,” in the sense of acquiring important documents from the traditional Jewish communities of Frankfurt, Mainz, and Worms.34 In contrast with these cities, with their long history of Jewish presence, Berlin was regarded as a “parvenu,” as Walter Rathenau once put it.35 Understandably, then, when the issue of establishing a central Jewish museum was first discussed at the turn of the century, many were in favor of its being located in the Frankfurt-Mainz-Worms region. Those promoting the idea of a central Jewish museum also came from very different political camps, ranging from the Zionist activist Heinrich Loewe to a Jewish schoolteacher from southern Germany, active in the Centralverein, who suggested the creation of a national German Jewish museum similar to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.36 It was not until the late 1920s that Berlin Jews began to stake their city’s claim to the project on the basis of its large Jewish community and its extensive Jewish art collection. Outside of Berlin, such claims were mostly ignored—by 1924, Jewish art collections had been established in many German cities, either displayed at local synagogues (for instance, in Worms, Danzig, and Brunswick) or in the context of local public museums (as in Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, and Würzburg).37 In contrast, the more manifold treasures of Berlin’s Jewish art collection were displayed only occasionally. A period of three years separated the opening of the first exhibition from that of the second, which was mounted in three rooms of the Berlin Jewish community library in 1920. As with the first exhibition, Stern chose to focus on objects from Albert Wolf’s collection, supplemented by several more recent acquisitions. In a series of articles in Ost und West, he meticulously described the exhibits and expressed his conviction that the art collection now claimed a “noteworthy place among Berlin’s institutions of learning.”38 He also suggested calling the collection a Museumssammlung (museum collection) rather than a Kunstsammlung (art collection), believing that this name would both describe the collection’s scope more accurately and underscore its importance. In his view, “[e]verything that served the extension of knowledge about Judaism and Jewishness and was depicted on canvas, stone, metal or other materials, everything that Judaism or Jewishness had accomplished in and contributed to the arts and sciences—to culture as a whole” had a place in what he hoped would become a greatly expanded, central collection.39

Times of Crisis The lurking economic crisis during the early years of the Weimar republic jeopardized Stern’s grand visions of an all-encompassing Jewish museum in Berlin. During the period of hyperinflation in 1922 and 1923, the Berlin Jewish community lost substantial

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assets and was plunged into serious and prolonged financial difficulties. To make matters worse, a number of valuable objects were stolen from the collection in May 1923. In consequence, the museum was closed for a period lasting almost two and a half years.40 It was not until the summer of 1926 that Stern managed to organize a third small-scale exhibition. This third exhibition took place in the aftermath of a major shift in Berlin Jewish communal affairs. In the 1926 elections to the community assembly, a Zionist party, the Jüdische Volkspartei (JVP), won a landslide victory that ended the uninterrupted dominance of the Liberal party in the communal institutions.41 Following a legal battle between the two political camps over alleged election irregularities (which paralyzed communal affairs for several months), the new Zionist-led community board, led by Georg Kareski, assumed control. Aaron Sandler, an experienced Zionist activist who had been serving as head of the library commission since 1920, remained in this position and began to implement a more Zionist agenda.42 Although the difficult economic situation ruled out any large-scale projects, Sandler managed to acquire several works by contemporary Jewish artists for the library’s art collection, and he also sent duplicates of books to the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem.43 These activities engendered strong opposition.44 Throughout 1929, there were repeated clashes over cultural issues between the liberal opposition and the Zionist community board—the publication of a special issue of the Gemeindeblatt on the subject of Palestine, for instance, led to an open dispute in the community assembly, during which both sides accused the other of attempting to take over the community newspaper.45 By this time, the art collection was in a lamentable state of affairs. Its exhibition rooms were inadequate and cataloguing was rudimentary. Moreover, as reported by Max Wollsteiner, a prominent Berlin banker and leading activist for the Jewish National Fund in the German Zionist Association, who visited the collection in 1926, “the quality of the art collection is unworthy of an important Jewish community such as that of Berlin. . . . If members of the community really follow the appeal to visit the collection, they will leave it with a feeling of pity for the miserable conditions of the museum.”46 Sandler continued his efforts to improve and expand the art collection; these were more successful than his attempts to institute a Zionist museum policy. However, his most significant act was the appointment of Karl Schwarz as curator of the art collection, under the nominal directorship of Stern. With Stern’s retirement in 1930, Schwarz was slated to take over the directorship. In the interim, their relationship seems to have been a difficult one, as the two men held contrary positions on practical and theoretical issues.47 Nonetheless, they collaborated on a number of exhibition projects, and shortly after taking up his new position, Schwarz participated in the preparation of the art collection’s fourth exhibition in 1927. The exhibition catalog suggests an uneasy truce between Stern and Schwarz.48 Each curated different sections of the exhibition: Stern once again focused on the display of Jewish coins and medals, whereas Schwarz seized the opportunity to set up a separate room devoted to “modern art,” which featured the work of contemporary Jewish artists such as Jakob Steinhardt, Joseph Budko, Hermann Struck, and Leopold Pilichowski. The works on display depicted biblical themes and scenes of European (especially East European) Jewish life.49 Additionally, early modern prints

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were displayed alongside portraits of 18th-and 19th-century Jewish politicians, philanthropists, merchants, bankers, composers, and hommes de lettres. Although Stern officially remained in charge, Schwarz began to overhaul the collection by extending the modern art section significantly. He also actively propagated the creation of a Jewish museum in the capital city by means of numerous public lectures and articles published in the Jewish press. In 1928, for instance, he confidently asserted that Wolf’s collection had laid the foundation for the “most important Jewish museum in Germany, maintained by the largest Jewish community,” and that the museum would both create and sustain a sense of community among Berlin Jews.50 This latter point, emphasizing the museum’s role for the Jewish Gemeinschaft (community) as well as for the Gemeinde (congregation), marked an important shift in the self-conceptualization of the museum.51 Such considerations may be better understood in the context of a widening debate on the nature of Gemeinschaft versus Gemeinde among Weimar Jews in general and Berlin Jews in particular.52 The dramatic socio-political changes in interwar Germany, the growing internal tensions among different political camps, and the subsequent fragmentation of urban Jewish communities, especially in Berlin, had a significant impact on this debate. Following the electoral victory of the JVP, meetings of the Jewish community assembly became a battleground for competing ideologies as representatives of the different fractions—Orthodox, Liberals, and Zionists—repeatedly clashed over communal policy and the future nature of the Jewish Gemeinde in Berlin.53 Yet despite the political divisions, there was consensus that the Gemeinde ought to be more than a mere administrative institution. It needed to address both the material and the spiritual crisis among German Jewry and to enhance the Jewish Gemeinschaft. Similarly, the discussion with regard to a Jewish museum increasingly centered on the museum’s role in creating and sustaining Jewish Gemeinschaft in modern society, particularly within the urban context. According to Schwarz, the museum’s mission was to act as a “cultural reference to Jewish intellectual history.” In order to do this, it needed to extend beyond the narrow circle of scholars into the broader public, enabling Jews to “familiarize themselves with the museum’s treasures.” Schwarz maintained that it was crucial that “the German capital city house a public collection that, more than a local history museum, is a place that displays and illustrates the entire complex of Jewish artistic genius through all times and across all countries.”54 On a more pragmatic level, Schwarz was convinced that extensive fundraising efforts were necessary to provide the basis for the establishment of a Jewish museum. To this end, he envisioned an association similar to that of the Friends of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum founded by Wilhelm von Bode in 1897, which had raised significant acquisition funds for one of Berlin’s most important art museums. Schwarz’s initiative eventually resulted in the founding of the Jüdischer Museumsverein (Jewish Museum Association). More than three hundred people were present at its inaugural meeting on November 28, 1929, among them Max Liebermann, the distinguished Berlin artist (who usually refrained from identifying himself as a Jewish artist), who had agreed to act as the association’s honorary president.55 Other board members included the art critics Adolph Donath and Max Osborn, community officials such as Eugen Caspary, director of the Jewish community’s welfare board, and Aaron Sandler, as well as the businessman Georg Tietz and the author Arnold Zweig.

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Besides “broadening the public interest in Jewish art and culture,” the central aim of the newly founded association was to foster the creation of a Jewish museum through the acquisition of “suitable artworks” for the community art collection.56 Yet the report on the inaugural meeting reveals another reason for the creation of the new association: “In many cities, private and public initiatives show their support for Jewish art.” The reference was to cities such as Würzburg, Kassel, and Breslau, which had their own Jewish museum associations, and where Jewish collections had been established as part of public museums. The implication was clear: Berlin, with its important community art collection, ought not to take second place to these cities.57 Therefore, the creation of “a central Jewish art museum” in the capital was to be another prime task of the newly formed association.58 Even the London Jewish Chronicle carried a positive report on this “interesting Berlin experiment.”59

Going Public The bicentenary of Moses Mendelssohn’s birth, celebrated in 1929, provided Schwarz and Stern with an opportunity to further popularize the Berlin Jewish art collection. Across Germany, numerous events, exhibitions, and celebrations honored Mendelssohn.60 At the Museum of Jewish Antiquities in Frankfurt, Erich Toeplitz curated a special exhibition titled Moses Mendelssohn and His Circle.61 The Berlin Jewish community collaborated in two major Mendelssohn exhibitions. One was held in Mendelssohn’s birthplace, Dessau, while the other took place in Berlin—organized by Schwarz and Stern in cooperation with the Prussian State Library.62 For the Berlin Jewish art collection, these celebrations provided an opportunity to present itself as an equal partner among the leading cultural institutions of the city and across the nation. The following year, the Berlin Jewish community participated in a public exhibition organized by Walter Stegel, the director of the Märkisches Museum, the main history museum of Berlin and its surrounding province. This exhibition, titled Old Berlin: Fundamentals of a World City, was displayed at the Berlin fairground during the summer months of 1930. On this site, Berlin’s success story was laid out in four large halls that were subdivided into several hundred rooms. While special attention was paid to the city’s great minds—Humboldt, Hegel, and Helmholtz—and to the architects and artisans who had helped create modern Berlin, the exhibition also celebrated everyday life and even Berlin’s underworld. The room allocated to the Jewish community was placed in the larger context of cultural institutions and personalities, primarily of the 19th century, that had helped shape the cultural direction of the metropolis. Thus, the exhibition of the Jewish community found its place between representative displays of the National Gallery and the Academy of Arts, a reconstruction of Rahel Varnhagen’s salon, and a room dedicated to the writer Theodor Fontane.63 The Jewish community’s display, focusing on Berlin Jewry’s movement toward emancipation and integration into the urban community, stressed the numerous contributions of Jews to all aspects of the city’s development. The central exhibit underscoring the successful integration of Jews in Berlin was a Torah curtain given to the

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Jewish community by the Prussian king in 1718. Additionally, the exhibition featured portraits depicting Berlin Jewish personalities such as the court Jew Daniel Itzig, the communal leader David Friedländer, and Moritz Veit (the first Jewish city councilor in Berlin) and a bust of Abraham Geiger, as well as photographs of Jewish sites such as Mendelssohn’s tomb in the cemetery on Grosse Hamburger Strasse. It is noteworthy that many of the exhibits on display came to occupy a prominent position in the future Jewish museum.64 In a special showcase, the Gesamtarchiv displayed important documents related to Prussian and Berlin Jewish history. Special emphasis was laid on Jewish legal emancipation as well as on the internal organization of the Jewish community.65 The Jewish press welcomed the participation of the Jewish community in general exhibitions as a means to “draw attention to the Jewish contributions to civilization.”66 Despite its eclectic character, the 1930 fairground exhibition offered an interpretation of Berlin’s Jewish history as a success story. “With pride,” Schwarz wrote in the Gemeindeblatt, “the Jewish community can declare that it represents an important factor in the life of the capital city.” He was convinced that the Jewish community, “with its exemplary organization and through numerous personalities,” had a share in “the development that has made a provincial town into a world city admired around the world.”67 In the following year, the exhibition Ritual and Form opened at the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum (Arts and Crafts Museum). Initiated by progressive Protestant theologians, the exhibition displayed a number of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish ceremonial objects. Special emphasis was placed on contemporary arts and crafts.68 Schwarz, representing the Jewish community on the exhibition’s organizing committee, was responsible for the Jewish section, which featured diverse examples of ceremonial objects designed by contemporary artists, among them the distinguished silversmith Ludwig Wolpert. Several art critics praised the Jewish contribution to the exhibition, highlighting the material and aesthetic quality of modern Jewish arts and crafts and especially the openness toward contemporary as well as modernist forms of expressions. The artistic liberation from traditional constraints was furthermore interpreted as a contribution to the modern revitalization of Judaism.69 Others stressed the exhibition’s role as a forum of interfaith dialogue.70 The exhibitions of 1930 and 1931 represent two central elements of the collection’s programmatic development over the coming years—Berlin’s Jewish heritage and modern Jewish art. Displayed in the larger context of two public exhibitions, the Jewish community’s art collection gained a broader public, and this helped to bolster the claim that the collection was an equal partner among Berlin’s leading museums. Moreover, Berlin’s Jews could take pride in their community’s participation in these exhibitions, as they highlighted the sense of integration within the urban cultural landscape. Many objects displayed in the exhibitions were publicized within the Jewish community through pamphlets and leaflets and by illustrations that appeared on the cover of the Gemeindeblatt under its new editor, Leo Winz. Through these channels, the art collections found their way into many Berlin Jewish homes.71 Works from the art collection also came to feature prominently in political campaigns. During the 1930 Jewish community election campaign, for instance, the Liberal party issued a leaflet depicting the busts of Mendelssohn and Geiger (from the Jewish

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community art collection) together with a photograph of Hugo Preuss, one of the foremost liberal politicians of the Weimar republic. The text accompanying the illustrations evoked the idea of a long and successful German Jewish liberal tradition, which began with the Enlightenment philosopher who had led the Jews “out of the ghetto into the world” and continued with Preuss, who had been actively involved in drafting the Weimar constitution (see Fig. 3.1).72 Despite continuous efforts, the situation of the art collection remained precarious. Its allocated space of two rooms of the community library was far too small to store the ever-growing collection, much less allow for any kind of public display. In May 1931, representatives of the JVP suggested renting rooms for the art collection on Meineke Strasse in the western district of Charlottenburg, where the Zionist Association’s headquarters was located.73 Supporters of the plan stressed that these rooms

Figure 3.1. Leaflet issued by the Liberal Party during the Jewish community assembly elections in 1930 (courtesy Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem).

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would offer enough space to provide an appropriate public display of the collection. However, the JVP was no longer in power, and the new Liberal administration rejected what it regarded as a Zionist proposal.74 A year later, an unexpected opportunity for the art collection’s relocation came about when a branch of the Jewish hospital was relocated from a building next to the New Synagogue. Schwarz successfully insisted that the entire first floor of the spacious building be allocated to the art collection—now referred to as a Jewish museum. The former hospital wing was transformed in accordance with plans drawn up by the Jewish community’s architect, Alexander Beer; by the end of 1932, the art collection had been installed.75 In a report on the formal opening of the Berlin Jewish museum, the Israelitisches Familienblatt noted that, “[w]ith the Jewish Museum, Berlin has won a new attraction. The Jewish community can be proud of this unique cultural achievement that will soon attract attention at home and abroad, for it is of significance not only to Berlin. Among all Jewish collections, it indisputably occupies a premier position.”76 Writing in the Gemeindeblatt, Karl Schwarz emphasized that the museum was not only “with all probability the largest of its kind” but was also the “only collection of Jewish artistic and cultural documents from all countries and epochs, ranging from the beginning of Jewish history to present-day artistic phenomena.” Moreover, unlike other Jewish collections, the new museum went beyond the ritual dimension. Schwarz envisioned the museum as a place where all aspects of Jewish art and culture would be depicted as living history.77 The entrance hall was emblematic of the museum’s goal to link the Jewish past with the present.78 Occupying the center of the hall was a sculpture of David (1921) by Arnold Zadikow (1884–1943).79 On the walls were three major paintings by contemporary German Jewish artists—two of them, by the eminent artist Lesser Ury (1861–1931), whom Buber once called “the poet of the Jewish soul,” depicted Jeremiah and Moses, respectively,80 whereas the third, Prophet, was an Expressionist work by Jakob Steinhardt (1887–1968). Emphasizing the distinguished German Jewish heritage and further linking Jewish tradition to modernity were the busts standing at opposite ends of the entrance hall: that of Moses Mendelssohn (a copy of the original sculpture by Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert [1727–1788]) and Abraham Geiger, by the sculptor Max Levi (1865–1912) (see Fig. 3.2).81 Once past the imposing entrance hall, visitors were invited to travel through Jewish history from antiquity to the present. Among the works displayed in the portrait gallery was Moritz Oppenheimer’s portrait of the 18th-century writer Ludwig Börne and portraits of Moses Mendelssohn and Leopold Zunz by Johann Christoph Frisch and Julius Jacob, respectively, as well as contemporary works, such as Leo Baeck’s portrait by Ludwig Meidner. The next hall was dedicated to modern painters; besides Hirszenberg’s monumental painting Galut, works by Ury and Marc Chagall were displayed. The following three rooms presented historical and contemporary examples of ceremonial objects. A room containing archaeological artifacts and antique Jewish coins followed. Finally, visitors arrived at the reconstructed interior of a synagogue, containing a bimah and an ark as well as several candelabras and Torah curtains from different synagogues across Prussia.82 The arrangement of the rooms underlined the museum’s role as a mediator between past and present and as a “place for contemplation and research,” in the words of the art historian Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein.83

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Figure 3.2. Entrance hall of the Berlin Jewish Museum, 1933 (courtesy Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin-Centrum Judaicum).

Withstanding the Tide: The Final Years of the Museum Less than a week after its formal opening, the Berlin Jewish museum had to face a dramatically new situation. Hitler had come to power, and with the rise of National Socialism and the subsequent exclusion of Jews from the German public sphere, the optimistic vision of a Jewish museum integrated within the cultural topography of the German capital city became much less certain. Until its forced closure in 1938, the museum responded to the changed political situation on two levels. On the one hand, it upheld a visible urban Jewish presence through numerous special exhibitions. On the other, it became increasingly involved in sustaining a sense of Gemeinschaft, providing a spiritual refuge as well as offering support to Jewish artists. When Karl Schwarz walked through the rooms of the Berlin Jewish museum for the last time on June 16, 1933, a day before his departure to Palestine to head the newly established Tel Aviv Museum of Art, he sensed a “deadly aura” in the museum’s rooms. As he later wrote in his memoirs, the museum seemed like a “seriously ill person for whom there was no hope.”84 Few would have shared Schwarz’s bleak vision back in 1933; in fact, the following years saw an extension of the museum’s activities. Despite or perhaps because of the deteriorating situation in Nazi Germany, the museum’s importance for intracommunal Jewish life in Berlin grew significantly. Through its continued exhibition activities, the museum underlined, against all odds, the integral role of Jewish culture in Berlin. It created an alternative sphere in which Jewish history and art could still be displayed and discussed. Internally as well as externally, it manifested the continuation of Jewish cultural activity in the German capital city. Following Schwarz’s emigration to Palestine, his former assistant, the art historian Erna Stein, took over as the museum’s interim director. In 1935, Stein reissued

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the museum catalog originally compiled by Schwarz in 1933. In an added preface to this new edition, she declared optimistically: “Over the past two years the Jewish Museum has occupied an important place in the spiritual and cultural life of German Jewry.” During this time, she noted, the museum had received more than 20,000 visits and, despite budget cuts, had been able to acquire numerous reproductions, ceremonial objects, and artworks.85 Increasingly, the museum extended its focus to include direct support for Jewish artists unable to exhibit their works in German galleries and museums, becoming an important venue for the community’s Künstlerhilfe (artist aid department).86 Apart from public events such as lectures on modern art and musical performances, consultation hours for artists were held at the museum.87 In cooperation with the Reich Federation of the Jewish Kulturbund, assistance to artists was extended significantly beyond the local level.88 Initiated by Lisbeth Cassirer and Max Osborn, who jointly chaired the Kulturbund’s division for decorative art, the museum hosted the National Exhibition of Jewish Artists in 1936, which featured 150 works of art produced in ten different cities.89 According to the Israelitische Familienblatt, “the exhibition prove[d] that the museum regards as its responsibility not only preserving historical artifacts but also active support for the creativity of our days.” The museum’s support was of particular importance,” the report went on, “for only a great community institution connected with the Kulturbund is able to alleviate the current burden.”90 In fact, the exhibition revealed German Jews’ fundamental ambivalence—their feeling of dislocation from German society while still profoundly identifying with German culture. “Without the term Jewish artists in the exhibition’s title, it would be impossible to determine that the works on display have been created by Jews,” Kurt Singer, the president of the Kulturbund, declared in his opening speech, pointing to the universality of artistic expression and the intertwining of Jewish artists and German culture. Some of the works on display, however, among them a painting by the 19th-century artist Otto Schloss with the ambiguous title In the Waiting Room, did reveal the artists’ sense of the precarious position of German Jews.91 The exhibition of Jewish artists took place at a time when Nazi Germany was gearing up to host the 1936 Olympics. For this reason, the regime temporarily relaxed anti-Jewish measures in order to deceive the international community with regard to its true intentions. This development provided the Kulturbund with a window of opportunity to organize a number of exhibitions and cultural events throughout 1936.92 As an official instrument of the Nazi regime, the Kulturbund occupied a difficult position. The historian Marianne Awerbuch, who left us a vivid picture of Jewish life in 1930s Berlin in her memoirs, describes the Kulturbund as a “cultural ghetto” and as an “undignified and humiliating institution” willingly accepting the Nazis’ doctrine of separating between Jewish and German art.93 Others, however, stress the Kulturbund’s outstanding support for Jewish artists, actors, and musicians, and some regard it as having expressed spiritual resistance to Nazism.94 In any event, it operated under government dictates and needed to obtain government approval for any project it wished to sponsor. In contrast, the Jewish museum appears to have retained its autonomy, and while it cooperated closely with the Berlin Kulturbund—for instance, in terms of aid to artists— it followed its own independent agenda.

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Under Stein’s temporary directorship, the museum continued Schwarz’s practice of stressing the works of contemporary Jewish artists. Two years prior to the exhibition of Jewish artists, an exhibition honoring Eugen Spiro and Ludwig Meidner was opened in April 1934.95 In October that year, Stein organized a second special exhibition displaying portraits of leading Jewish figures, from Maimonides to Mendelssohn.96 In March 1935, the museum mounted a special exhibition as part of the international Maimonides octocentennial celebrations.97 Also in 1935, the museum organized its first spring exhibition in cooperation with the Künstlerhilfe.98 By the time this exhibit opened in May, Franz Landsberger had assumed the position of director of the museum. (Until his dismissal by the Nazis in 1933, he had served as an adjunct professor for art history at Breslau University.) Working alongside him as honorary curator was Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, a pioneer in the field of Jewish art history. Once again (as had previously been the case with Karl Schwarz and Moritz Stern) the two colleagues had differing opinions with regard to Jewish art. Born in Minsk, Wischnitzer-Bernstein came to Berlin in 1921 after studying in Paris and Heidelberg; in Berlin, she edited the Hebrew and Yiddish avant-garde journal Rimon—Milgroym together with her husband, the historian Mark Wischnitzer.99 She also served as art and architecture editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. She emphasized the distinctive nature of Jewish art, believing that such art, though influenced by the non-Jewish environment, represented an independent artistic expression inseparably linked to Jewish culture and tradition.100 Landsberger, in contrast, stressed the extent to which Jewish art was permeated by surrounding non-Jewish artistic influences. Hence his conclusion, in his book Einführung in die jüdische Kunst (Introduction to Jewish art), published in 1935, that “there are but a few elements that could be noted as characteristics of Jewish art.”101 The dual leadership of the museum was intended to bring about a division of labor within the museum’s administration as well as reflecting the different interests of the two art historians. Landsberger was in charge of the museum’s art and archeology divisions, whereas Wischnitzer-Bernstein was responsible for ceremonial objects.102 Although their professional relationship was not without conflict, the museum experienced a highly productive period under their leadership.103 In January 1936, several months after he had taken over the directorship of the museum, Landsberger reflected on the institution’s development. “It was not always our museum,” he wrote, “even if it always was a Jewish museum. For this Jewish museum was not always ours. When visiting a museum, most of us tended to go to the major galleries and public museums. Few had even heard of the Jewish museum’s existence. To those aware of its existence, it appeared to be a curiosity. It seemed far off, even though it is only a few minutes away from the major museums. In fact, one might argue that it is actually a part of Berlin’s museum district.” Yet things had changed, Landsberger declared, emphasizing that the Berlin Jewish community was now embracing its “own cultural heritage.” Moreover, the Jewish museum itself had changed from being “an institution devoted to scholarship and aesthetic pleasure” to one “standing amid the flow of life.”104 The first exhibitions under Landsberger’s directorship were devoted to two contemporary Berlin Jewish painters. The first, commemorating Max Liebermann, the Berlin-based artist who had died the previous year, drew a record number of 6,000

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visitors during the month and a half that it was shown.105 During the fall of 1936, a second exhibition, devoted to works of Max Fabian (1873–1926), opened.106 This was followed by what was arguably the most important show of the year, an exhibition titled Our Ancestors, which was a joint project of the museum, the Gesellschaft für jüdische Familienforschung (Society for Jewish Genealogy), and the Gesamtarchiv.107 This exhibition featured family portraits, family trees, and panels detailing various aspects of genealogical research, as well as death registers, memorial books, royal charters, and community accounts from a variety of German Jewish communities.108 According to Jacob Jacobson, the director of the Gesamtarchiv, the documents on display formed “a bridge” for contemporary Jews “living in a world that once again emphasizes the Jewish element” to “the world of our ancestors.”109 Although centered on the Berlin Jewish heritage, the exhibition went beyond the local context to reveal the “myriad connections between Berlin and the world, and between the world and Berlin,”110 while also evoking images of a golden age of cosmopolitan Berlin Jewish culture and fruitful relations between Jews and non-Jews.111 It is difficult to assess the visitors’ response to the exhibition—did it make them realize the extent to which their world was shrinking, or did it provide them with hope for the future? What we do know is that its organizers consciously linked past and present and outlined a particular vision of a Jewish future in difficult times. In his opening speech, the president of the Gesellschaft für jüdische Familienforschung, Arthur Czellitzer, placed special emphasis on the significance of family portraits in the trans-generational transmission of Jewish tradition. For Czellitzer, abandoning the practice of commissioning portraits, as many urban middle-class German Jews had done, marked a deplorable break with the generational devotion still alive among East European Jews. He regarded the exhibition as a means to counter this development by reviving a sense of pride in “those Jewish ancestors” who had resisted the “enormous temptation of conversion.”112 More than 4,000 people came to see the exhibition, which also attracted attention outside the Jewish community.113 The following year, two exhibitions curated by Wischnitzer-Bernstein shifted the focus. In June 1937, an exhibition commemorating the 500th birthday of the Sephardic communal leader, philosopher, and exegete Don Yitzhak Abravanel, following his life from Spain to Portugal and subsequently Italy, was formally opened.114 Several months later, in cooperation with the Gesamtarchiv, an exhibition on Akiva Eger, a leading early 19th-century rabbi and talmudic scholar, was mounted. In his preface to the exhibition catalog, Alfred Klee (Sandler’s successor on the community board) linked the Eger and Abravanel exhibitions, characterizing the former as a depiction of the “last Gaon from Germany” and the world of Ashkenaz, in contrast to the Sephardic world of Abravanel.115 These two exhibitions were followed by another curated by Landsberger, A Hundred Years of Jewish Art from Berlin Collections, which emphasized works by lesser-known 19th- and early 20th-century artists.116 In March 1938, Olga Bloch, the art critic for C.V.-Zeitung, offered an enthusiastic review titled “Reorganization in the Berlin Jewish Museum.” She praised the new display of Jewish arts and crafts as well as the growing collection of ceremonial objects. She also described a new hall dedicated to the works of Max Liebermann, along with a small photo exhibition about Palestine.117 Her report reflects Landsberger’s determination to convey a sense of business as usual. He continued to plan upcoming

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exhibitions, among them Jewish Artists Experience the Bible,118 at the same time as others, including Wischnitzer-Bernstein, made plans to leave Germany.119 With the deteriorating situation of German Jewry, the museum began to work on a project to collect Judaica from communities throughout Nazi Germany.120 In an article published in April 1938, Bloch underlined the importance of preserving these treasures and the “local memories” they encapsulated for coming generations.121 At about the same time, Max Osborn of the Kulturbund issued a similar call to preserve German Judaica.122 In a way, the exhibition of Jewish ceremonial artifacts from provincial communities could be seen as a return to the museum’s agenda as a central repository of German Jewish cultural artifacts. In contrast to previous attempts to preserve Jewish artifacts by acquiring them for the museum, the acquisition of “these hidden treasures” was the outcome of dramatic changes forced upon German Jewry by the National Socialist regime.123 The directorship of the museum, however, downplayed the threat. As late as November 6, 1938, Landsberger reported in the Gemeindeblatt about recent donations to the museum, merely noting that, in many cases, the “reduction of living space and the growing number of those emigrating” was the impetus behind the gift. Considering the circumstances under which the museum came to acquire these “homeless” yet “quite attractive objects,” Landsberger’s sang-froid is noteworthy.124 Three days after the publication of his article, synagogues across Germany went up in flames, Jewish shops and institutions were looted, and the museum was closed. Its exhibits were confiscated by the Gestapo. As Landsberger later recalled the events of November 10, 1938: I was about to leave home for the Jewish Museum. . . . The telephone rang: my secretary was calling. . . . She advised me to remain at home that day; there were riots in the city, synagogues were going up in flames. A short time after the Gestapo telephoned: I must come to the museum immediately, bring all my keys. Arrived there, I was admitted no farther than the outer hall. Agents of the Gestapo took the keys and dismissed me. I returned home, worried, but believing the museum would be reopened once the unrest had subsided. The same afternoon, however, two men from the Gestapo entered my apartment and ordered me to accompany them to police headquarters.125

Landsberger was interned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp but was released following protests by fellow art historians abroad and allowed to leave Germany for Britain. After several months at Oxford as a guest of the art historian Gilbert Murray, he emigrated to America. In 1940, he joined the faculty of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati as a lecturer on Jewish art.126 Before his departure from Germany, Landsberger returned to Berlin for the last time. “On my return to Berlin, my first concern was with the Jewish museum,” he later wrote. “It was still closed; there were police on guard, admitting no one. The Jewish Community was dealing with the Gestapo, attempting to have the museum sold abroad . . . but no decision was reached. . . . When I left Germany, in March 1939, the fate of the Jewish museum was still uncertain.”127 The museum was not to be opened again. The Nazis removed all the exhibits; many paintings were transported to the building of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) in the western district of Charlottenburg, where they survived the war. In accordance with other Allied restitution organizations and the Council of Jews from Germany, several

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works were donated to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art by the London-based Jewish Trust Corporation. Other beneficiaries were the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, a Jewish old-age home in London, several Jewish institutions in France, and the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem.128

Inventing and Displaying the Jewish Past: Concluding Reflections Among Jewish museums founded across Central Europe prior to the Second World War, the Berlin Jewish museum occupies an ambivalent position. Jewish museums were often founded out of a desire to preserve local Jewish history; in cities such as Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Mainz, and Strasbourg, the demolition of old buildings and neighborhoods triggered fears that local Jewish historical memory might also be endangered. This was not the case with Berlin.129 As a comparatively young community, Berlin Jewry could not refer to a centuries-long urban presence dating back to the Middle Ages. Hence, in search of a “usable past,” the Berlin Jewish museum gave prominence to the few objects able to evoke (or even invent) a sense of tradition. The case of a 16th-century tapestry presented as a gift to the Old Synagogue by the Prussian king in 1718 and subsequently made into a Torah curtain is emblematic of this search for a usable past.130 In addition, the museum began seeking alternative elements that would provide a stable basis for a metropolitan Jewish identity. In an attempt to link the museum to a universal, timeless, and spatially flexible concept of Jewish history and culture, two segments of the museum’s collection—modern Jewish art, and relics of the more distant Jewish past—were accorded particular importance. Berlin Jews were presented with a universalist framework of Jewish history and culture, and it was in this context that local Jewish history was to be perceived. In this sense, the Berlin Jewish museum became an institution “collecting community,” consolidating urban German Jewry by means of its collections and exhibitions. Put somewhat differently, the institution known as a Jewish museum represented an important means in the process of creating and sustaining Jewish Gemeinschaft and a sense of belonging in the urban environment. In sum, the Berlin Jewish museum played a significant role in defining Berlin Jewry’s place within the city as well as within the context of German Jewry. In respect to the latter, the museum played a significant role in legitimatizing claims to leadership by the Berlin Jewish community. Similar to the agenda of the Gesamtarchiv, the museum promoted the view that Jewish institutions located in the capital city had the right and obligation to act as a central repository for the German Jewish past. The museum’s participation in public exhibitions was but one element in attempts to underline the Jewish community’s level of integration within its city. Moreover, Karl Schwarz and others believed that a Jewish museum ought not promote a “return to the ghetto” but rather find its place as an equal entity amid other specialized museums in the capital city. Besides its external function of presenting Jewish history and culture to the broader public, the Berlin Jewish museum became a central institution in the identity search of early 20th-century urban Jews. The museum integrated Berlin Jewish culture into the general course of Jewish history, thereby inventing a local Jewish tradition. In this

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way, it helped locate Jewish Berlin in the shifting and fragmentary territories of the modern city. The museum tried to overcome a central paradox of modern Jewish history by reconciling Jewish particularism and integrationism. It became a workshop for an alternative concept of Jewishness that would be able to stand the test of modernity. In the wake of political events, this extraordinary experiment came under increasing scrutiny. Initially the museum focused on the cultural transmission of Jewish culture both to the non-Jewish surrounding society and within the Jewish community. After 1933, however, the museum was increasingly isolated and forced into a new role: that of sustaining the cohesion of the Jewish community and upholding a concept of urban Jewish culture in the face of increasing marginalization of Jews, their art, and other forms of cultural expression. During the course of its short history, between 1933 and 1938, the Berlin Jewish museum became an example of what Michel Foucault has called “counter-sites.”131 Alongside elements of spiritual resistance to the increasing pressure put on German Jews, the museum attempted to uphold a sense of German Jewish normality in the spirit of the integrationist agenda of earlier years.132 Although its experiment of creating, sustaining, and defending an urban Jewish culture in Berlin was short-lived, its goals continue to reverberate in urban Jewish museums throughout the world.

Notes I would like to thank Sasikarn Kongsak and Joachim Schlör for comments on previous versions of this paper. 1. JTA [Jewish Telegraphic Agency] Daily News Bulletin 12, no. 21 (January 26, 1933), quoted in Hermann Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse. Geschichte einer zerstörten Kulturstätte (Teetz: 2000), 38. Simon’s work, first published in Berlin in 1983, reconstructs meticulously the holdings of the various collections and their fate after the forced closure of the museum by the Nazis in 1938. 2. Jacob Boas, “The Shrinking World of German Jewry, 1933–1938,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 31 (1986), 241–266. 3. Eugen Caspary, “Zum Geleit,” in Jüdisches Jahrbuch für Gross-Berlin auf das Jahr 1926, ed. Jacob Jacobson, Jacob Segall, and Eugen Caspary (Berlin: 1926), 9. On Berlin as a city without history and tradition, see also Karl Scheffler, Berlin, ein Stadtschicksal (Berlin: 1910); Ralf Thies and Dietmar Jazbinsek, “Berlin—das europäische Chicago. Über ein Leitmotiv der Amerikanisierungsdebatte zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Die Stadt als Moloch? Das Land als Kraftquell? Wahrnehmungen und Wirkungen der Grosstädte um 1900, ed. Clemens Zimmermann and Jürgen Reulecke (Basel: 1999), 53–94. For an excellent analysis of strategies to locate and map Jewish Berlin, see Joachim Schlör, “Bilder Berlins als ‘Jüdische Stadt.’ Ein Beitrag zur Wahrnehmungsgeschichte der deutschen Metropole,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 37 (1997), 207–229. 4. Jacques Ehrenfreund has traced the prehistory of the Berlin Jewish museum to the end of the 19th century. During the 1880s, inspired by the Jewish exhibitions previously on display in Paris and London, Berlin Jews began to embrace the idea of musealizing the Jewish past; it was then that the first calls for the foundation of a Jewish museum in the German capital city were raised. See Ehrenfreund’s Mémoire juive et nationalité allemande: les juifs berlinois à la Belle Époque (Paris: 2000), 199–203.

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5. Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: 1998); idem, “Exhibiting History or History in a Showcase,” Jewish History 12, no. 2 (Fall 1998), 97–112; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture (Berkeley: 1998), esp. 79–128; Klaus Hödl, “The Viennese Jews’ Search for Integration through the Jewish Museum in the late 19th Century,” Jewish Studies at the CEU III (2003), 53–65. 6. Karl Schwarz, “Die jüdische Ausstellung in der Whitechapel Art Gallery zu London,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (December 7, 1906), 585. 7. Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (December 7, 1906 and November 29, 1907). 8. Alfred Nossig, “Ausstellung jüdischer Künstler,” Ost und West 7, no. 12 (1907), 743–775. Although the Verein zur Förderung jüdischer Kunst managed to bring a number of works that had been on display at London to Berlin, the exhibitions were not identical. 9. Ausstellung jüdischer Künstler. Berlin, Galerie für alte und neue Kunst (Berlin: 1907), ix–x. 10. Ibid., nos. 47 and 136. The ceremonial objects from the Old Synagogue were listed as nos. 1–15 under the rubric “Jewish Antiquities.” 11. Emily D. Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture 1890–1918 (Berkeley: 1999). 12. Wolfgang Ribbe (ed.), Geschichte Berlins (Berlin: 2002); David Clay Large, Berlin: A Modern History (London: 2001); Gerhard Brunn and Jürgen Reulecke (eds.), Metropolis Berlin (Bonn: 1992). 13. Reinhard Rürup, “Jewish History in Berlin—Berlin in Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 45 (2000), 41; Walter Breslauer, “Die jüdische Gemeinde Berlin,” in Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Rabbiner Dr. Leo Baeck am 23. Mai 1953, ed. Council of Jews from Germany (London: 1953), 43. 14. Heinrich Silbergleit, “Zur Statistik der jüdischen Bevölkerung Berlin. Vortrag gehalten am 14. November 1927 in der jüdischen Volkshochschule in Berlin,” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden. Neue Folge 4, nos. 9–12 (1927), 133–142; idem, Die Bevölkerungs-und Berufsverhältnisse der Juden im Deutschen Reich (Berlin: 1930), Esra Bennathan, “Die demographische und wirtschaftliche Struktur der Juden,” in Entscheidungsjahr 1932, ed. Werner Eugen-Emil Mosse and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen: 1965), 89, “Jüdische Bevölkerung Gross-Berlins im Jahre 1925,” in Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden. Neue Folge 4, nos. 1–2 (1927), 27–28. 15. Arthur Ruppin coined the term “metropolization,” defined by him as an extended version of urbanization. See Ruppin, Soziologie der Juden, vol. 1, Die soziale Struktur der Juden (Berlin: 1930), 6. 16. Zionists, among them the physician Felix A. Theilhaber and the economist Arthur Ruppin, were among the most vigorous critics of urban Jewish life. Steven M. Lowenstein has shown that the discourse of urban challenges to Jewish tradition was also present in 18th-century Berlin, where Jews faced an unprecedented crisis resulting from the dissolution of traditional Judaism, intermarriage, and conversion. As with their early 20th-century successors, Old Regime Berlin Jews responded to this challenge in innovative ways—making them, as Lowenstein puts it, “pioneers of modernity.” See Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, and Crisis, 1770–1830 (Oxford: 1994). 17. Klaus Hödl, “The Turning to History of Viennese Jews,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 3, no. 1 (2004), 17–32. 18. Jens Hoppe, Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur in Museen. Zur nichtjüdischen Museologie des Jüdischen in Deutschland (Münster: 2002), 21 f, 262 f. See also Christoph Daxelmüller’s numerous articles on the subject, among them “Hundert Jahre jüdische Volkskunde—Dr. Max (Meïr) Grunwald und die ‘Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde,’” Aschkenas 9, no. 1 (1999), 133–144; Katharina Rauschenberger, Jüdische Tradition im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Hannover: 2002), ch. 3. 19. Quoted in Karl Schwarz, Führer durch das Jüdische Museum (Berlin: 1933), 3. 20. Obituary for Albert Wolf in Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 71, no. 9 (March 1, 1907) (supplement), 1–2. 21. For biographical details on Stern, see Daniela Gauding, “Moritz Stern (1864–1939),” in Moritz Stern. Geschichte der Alten Synagoge zu Berlin, ed. Hermann Simon (Teetz: 2007), 13–15.

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22. For an overview of Stern’s publication, see Joseph Stern (ed.), Moritz Stern 1864–1939. Bibliographie seiner Schriften und Aufsätze (Jerusalem: 1939). 23. Moritz Stern, Aus dem Berliner Jüdischen Museum (Berlin: 1937), 1. Stern’s successor, the art historian Karl Schwarz, nonetheless excoriated him, declaring that “Stern was a mediocre librarian, for he had little knowledge about library sciences and even less about art.” See Schwarz, Jüdische Kunst, Jüdische Künstler. Erinnerungen des ersten Direktors des Berliner Jüdischen Museums, ed. Chana C. Schütz and Hermann Simon (Teetz: 2001), 181. 24. Moritz Stern, “Zur Eröffnung der Kunstsammlung der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin,” Ost und West 17, no. 3–4 (1917), 89–96. 25. The Gesamtarchiv became part of a complex Jewish infrastructure in the center of Berlin. For an overview of the Jewish institutions and associations located in the area, see Maren Krüger, “Das Leben im Umfeld der Neuen Synagoge,” in “Tuet auf die Pforten.” Die Neue Synagoge 1866–1995, ed. Hermann Simon (Berlin: 1995), 167. 26. Eugen Täubler, “Zur Einführung,” Mitteilungen des Gesamtarchivs der deutschen Juden 1 (1909), 1. As in the case of the Jewish museum, the idea of a central German Jewish archive came not from Berlin but from the Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund (Union of German Jewish communities), based in Leipzig, and the Order B’nai B’rith. Both institutions funded the creation and maintenance of the Gesamtarchiv. It was not until 1910 that the Berlin Jewish community provided office space in its central administrative building for the staff of the archive. Barbara Welker, “Das Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden—Zentralisierungsbemühungen in einem Föderalen Staat,” in Jüdisches Archivwesen, ed. Frank M. Bischoff and Peter Honigmann (Marburg: 2007), 39–73. 27. Moritz Stern, “Die Kunstsammlung der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 13, no. 3–4 (1923), 22. 28. Contract between the Jüdischen Kunstarchiv and the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden (July 6–11, 1913), Centrum Judaicum Archiv [henceforth: CJA], 1,75 C Ge 1, Nr. 886 (no. 886). 29. Statuten Jüdisches Kunstarchiv, CJA, 1,75 A Be 2, Nr. 128 (no. 357). 30. “Ein jüdisches Kunstarchiv,” Jüdische Rundschau (July 4, 1913), 277. 31. For details on the museum’s photo collection, see Jakob Hübner (ed.), Diapositivsammlung des Berliner Jüdischen Museums 1933–1938 im Muzeum Ziemi Lubuskiej. gesammelte Bilder—Verlorene Welten (Berlin: 2009). 32. Correspondence between Erich Toeplitz and Karl Schwarz, CJA, 1,75 A Be 2, Nr. 128 (no. 357). 33. See Nils Roemer, “Between the Provinces and the City: Mapping German-Jewish Memories,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 51 (2006), 61. For a somewhat different perspective on the Gesamtarchiv, see Jacques Ehrenfreund, “Erinnerungspolitik und historisches Gedächtnis. Zur Entstehung einer deutsch-jüdischen Wissenschaft im Kaiserreich (1870–1914),” in Judentum und Historismus, ed. Ulrich Wyrwa (Frankfurt: 2003), 46; idem, Mémoire juive et nationalité allemande, 139–145. 34. Jacob Jacobson, “Das Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden,” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe für Gross-Berlin (September 14, 1933). 35. [Walter Rathenau], “Die Schönste Stadt der Welt,” Die Zukunft 7, no. 15 (1899), 36–48. 36. Rauschenberger, Jüdische Tradition im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik, 53–57. 37. Erich Toeplitz, “Jüdische Museen,” Der Jude 8, no. 5–6 (1924), 339–346. 38. Stern’s articles on the second exhibition, published originally in Ost und West between 1921 and 1922, were reprinted in book form in 1937. See Stern, Aus dem Berliner Jüdischen Museum. Palästinensische Altertümer, Münzen, Medaillen, Siegel, Ringe und Kultusgeräte; Mitteilungen (Berlin: 1937). 39. Moritz Stern, “Die zweite Ausstellung in der Kunstsammlung der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin,” Ost und West 21, no. 3 (1921), 64. 40. Moritz Stern, “Zum 25jährigen Bestehen der Gemeindebibliothek. Kunstsammlung der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin (Wolf’sche Stiftung),” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe für Gross-Berlin (February 3, 1927).

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41. For further details on the 1926 Berlin community elections, see Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: 1980), 149 ff; Gabriel E. Alexander, “Yehudei Berlin ukehilatam beyameha shel republikat Weimar (1919–1933)” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 1995), 217–231. For a detailed analysis of the Jewish People’s Party, see Michael Brenner, “The Jüdische Volkspartei—National-Jewish Communal Politics in Weimar Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 35 (1990), 219–243. 42. Sandler followed the programmatic ideas outlined by Emil Simonsohn, who in 1919 published a pamphlet emphasizing the importance of cultural institutions such as libraries and art collections for the Zionist project of a Jüdische Volksgemeinde (Jewish people’s community). See Simonsohn, Die jüdische Volksgemeinde (Berlin: 1919), 26. 43. Aaron Sandler, “Erinnerungen 1879–1935,” Leo Baeck Institute Archives, MM 66, II (Buch 24). 44. “Repräsentantenversammlung. Sitzung vom 6. Dezember 1928,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 19, no. 2 (1929), 70–78. 45. “Aus der Repräsentantenversammlung. Sitzung vom 14. März 1929,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 19, no. 5 (1929), 234. 46. Max Wollsteiner to Moritz Stern, September 13, 1926, Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem) [henceforth: CAHJP], Moritz Stern Collection, P 17/615, Berlin—Jüdische Gemeinde, Varia. 47. Schwarz, Jüdische Kunst, Jüdische Künstler, 172, 181–185. 48. The fact that both Stern and Schwarz claimed to be the exhibition’s main organizer, reducing the contribution of the other to an auxiliary role, is indicative of the competition and tension between them. See Stern, Aus dem Berliner Jüdischen Museum, 1 and Schwarz, Jüdische Kunst, Jüdische Künstler, 186. 49. Moritz Stern, Bibliothek und Kunstsammlung der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin. die vierte Ausstellung der Kunstsammlung (Berlin: 1927), 19–20. 50. Karl Schwarz, “Jüdische Gemeinden und jüdische Museen,” Der Orden Bne Briss. Mitteilungen der Grossloge für Deutschland VIII U.O.B.B. 10 (October 1928), 175. 51. Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, “20 Jahre Jüdisches Museum,” Jüdische Rundschau (February 12, 1937), 16. At the time, Wischnitzer-Bernstein was an honorary curator of the museum. 52. For the Jewish dimension in the Weimar-era debate inspired by Ferdinand Tönnies’ seminal study Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, see Michael A. Meyer, “Gemeinschaft within Gemeinde: Religious Ferment in Weimar Liberal Judaism,” in In Search of Jewish Community, ed. Michael Brenner and Derek Jonathan Penslar (Bloomington: 1998), 15–35, and the introduction in Noah William Isenberg’s Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of GermanJewish Modernism (Lincoln: 1999). On the role of Gemeinde as a central institution in reviving Gemeinschaft in an “age of Gemeinschaft,” see Leo Baeck, “Kulturzusammenhänge,” Der Morgen 1, no. 1 (1925), 72–83. 53. Alexander Szanto, Im Dienste der Gemeinde 1923–1939 [1968], Leo Baeck Institute Archives, MM 76, chs. iv–v. 54. Schwarz, “Jüdische Gemeinden und jüdische Museen,” 175. 55. Bericht über die Gründungsversammlung (November 28, 1929), CAHJP, D/Be4/378. 56. Satzung [des Jüdischen Museumsvereins Berlin], CAHJP, D/Be4/378. 57. Karl Schwarz, “Die Kunstsammlung der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 17, no. 12 (1927), 293–294. 58. Bericht über die Gründungsversammlung (see n. 55). 59. “Berlin’s Interesting Experiment,” Jewish Chronicle (July 18, 1930), 18. 60. On the 1929 commemorations, see Christhard Hoffmann, “Constructing Jewish Modernity: Mendelssohn Jubilee Celebrations within German Jewry, 1829–1929,” in Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry, ed. Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter (Tübingen: 2003), 48ff. 61. Rauschenberger, Jüdische Tradition im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik, 83. 62. For the exhibition catalog, Stern and Schwarz compiled several hundred prints and artworks by or related to Mendelssohn and his contemporaries. See Moritz Stern and Karl

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Schwarz, Moses-Mendelssohn Ausstellung (Berlin: 1929). In his memoirs, Schwarz recalled the impressive opening ceremonies of both exhibitions, which were attended by numerous officials, among them the minister of the interior; see his Jüdische Kunst, Jüdische Künstler, 192–195. 63. Offizieller Katalog der Berliner Sommerschau 1930 “Altes Berlin.” Fundamente der Weltstadt (Berlin: 1930), 22. For further information concerning the exhibition concept, see Altes Berlin. Zur Vorbesichtigung der Berliner Sommerschau “Altes Berlin,” published by the Ausstellungs-, Messe-und Fremdenverkehrsamt der Stadt Berlin (Berlin: 1930). 64. Cf. Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse, 50ff. For details on the Torah curtain, see Moritz Stern, “Der Thora-Vorhang in der Alten Synagoge,” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe für Gross-Berlin (May 24, 1928) (Berlin edition), 2. 65. Jacob Jacobson, “Urkunden jüdischer Vergangenheit auf der Ausstellung ‘Altes Berlin,’” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 20, no. 7 (1930), 327–329. 66. “Ausstellung ‘Altes Berlin,’” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe für Gross-Berlin (May 28, 1930). 67. Karl Schwarz, “Jüdisches in ‘Altes Berlin,’” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 20, no. 7 (1930), 36. 68. In the December issue of 1930, the Gemeindeblatt published several reproductions of Hanukah lamps designed by contemporary artists, which had been displayed in the exhibition. 69. Lotte Pulvermacher, “Kult und Form. Ausstellung von modernem jüdischen Kultgerät im Kunstgewerbemuseum,” Bayerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung 7, no. 1 (1931), 4–5; Max Osborn, “Modernes Kultgerät,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 21, no. 1 (1931), 10–12, Will Pless, “Neuzeitliche jüdische Kultgeräte,” Menorah 9, no. 3 (1931), 149–150. 70. Olga Bloch, “‘Kult und Form.’ Die Austellung im Berliner Kunstgewerbemuseum,” C.V.-Zeitung (November 14, 1930), Schwarz, Jüdische Kunst, Jüdische Künstler, 198–201. 71. Examples of the full-page reproductions found in the Gemeindeblatt are Lesser Ury’s Jeremias on the cover of the August 1930 issue, a richly illustrated Ketuba (July 1932), Jakob Steinhardt’s Der Prophet (October 1932), a portrait of David Friedländer (December 1932), and the synagogue room of the newly opened Jewish museum (February 1933). On Winz’s impact on the redesigning and modernizing of the Gemeindeblatt, see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: 1996), 55. 72. Wahlaufruf des Liberaler Verein zu den Repräsentantenwahlen der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 1930, CAHJP, D/Be4/66. 73. “Raum für die Kunstsammlung!” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe für Gross-Berlin (March 26, 1931). 74. “Sitzung der Repräsentantenversammlung vom 7. Mai 1931,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 21, no. 6 (1931), 198–199. 75. Schwarz, Jüdische Kunst, Jüdische Künstler, 205. 76. “Das jüdische Museum in Berlin. Deutschlands grösste jüdische Sammlung,” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe für Gross-Berlin (February 2, 1933), 9. 77. Karl Schwarz, “Jüdisches Museum, Berlin. Rekonstruktion einer alten Synagoge,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 23, no. 2 (1933), 34. 78. Cf. Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, 178, who argues that the emphasis on contemporary Jewish painting and sculpture in the entrance hall constituted a distinct contrast to Albert Wolf’s original art collection. 79. Zadikow, formerly a builder, had worked himself up from poverty. After making his acquaintance, Max Liebermann recognized his talent for design and made it possible for him to attend art school. See Karl Schwarz, Jewish Artists of the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: 1949), 122. Besides his David, two other works by Zadikow, busts of James Simon and Paul Nathan, were on display in the Jewish museum. See Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse, 48. 80. Martin Buber, “Lesser Ury,” Ost und West 2, no. 2 (February 1901), 128. 81. Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse, 40, Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, 178.

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82. Karl Schwarz, Führer durch das Jüdische Museum (Berlin: 1933). 83. Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, “Das jüdische Museum eröffnet,” Jüdische Rundschau (January 27, 1933), 38. 84. Karl Schwarz, Jüdische Kunst, Jüdische Künstler, 254. On Schwarz’s role in the cultural transfer between the Berlin Jewish museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, see Joachim Schlör, “Bilder für eine Ausstellung. Berlin—Tel Aviv,” in Wiener Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte, Kultur und Museumskunde 1 (1995), 155–160; Chana C. Schütz, “Von Berlin nach Tel Aviv—der Lebensweg des Museumsdirektors Karl Schwarz,” Kunst und Politik. Jahrburch der Guernica-Gesellschaft 6 (2004), 65–77. 85. Führer durch das Jüdische Museum. Sammlungen der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin, 2nd ed. (Berlin: 1935). 86. For a general appreciation of the work of the Künstlerhilfe, see Hermann Schildberger, “Ein Jahr Künstlerhilfe,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 24, no. 24 (1934), 3–4. See also Volker Dahm, “Kulturelles und geistiges Leben,” in Die Juden in Deutschland, 1933–1945, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Munich: 1993), 94f. 87. “Teenachmittag im Jüdischen Museum,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 24, no. 4 (1934); “Lernt jüdische Maler und Bildhauer kennen,” ibid., no. 26 (1934). 88. The Kulturbund of German Jews was established in different German cities to bring together Jews with cultural pursuits who had been removed, via Nazi legislation, from general cultural activity. In 1935, by order of the Reich Chamber of Culture, the 46 branches of the Kulturbund were forced to join together into the Reich Federation of the Jewish Kulturbund. 89. Reichsausstellung jüdischer Künstler im Jüdischen Museum zu Berlin. Frühjahr 1936 (Berlin: 1936). See also “Aus der Werkstatt jüdischer Bildner. Zur Reichsausstellung in Berlin,” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe für Gross-Berlin (April 30, 1936), which reported that, in order to provide outside colleagues with an opportunity to present their works to the Berlin public, local Jewish artists agreed not to exhibit their own works. 90. “Aus der Werkstatt jüdischer Bildner. Zur Reichsausstellung in Berlin.” 91. Cordula Frowein, “Jüdische Künstler und die Ghetto-Ausstellungen im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland,” in Geschlossene Vorstellung. Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933–1941, ed. Akademie der Künste (Berlin: 1992), 135–154. 92. Akademie der Künste (ed.), Geschlossene Vorstellung. A number of documents reprinted in the appendix provide an overview of the diverse activities of the Kulturbund in 1936. 93. Marianne Awerbuch, Erinnerungen aus einem streitbaren Leben. Von Berlin nach Palästina. Von Israel nach Berlin (Teetz: 2007), 140–143. I thank Joachim Schlör for directing my attention to this fascinating text. 94. Kurt Düwell, “Jewish Cultural Centers in Nazi Germany: Expectations and Accomplishments,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover: 1985), 294–316; Barbara Müller-Wesemann, Theater als Geistiger Widerstand. Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Hamburg 1934–1941 (Stuttgart: 1997). 95. Max Osborn, “Die Spiro-Meidner-Ausstellung,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 24, no. 15 (May 5, 1934), 3. 96. Max Osborn, “Jüdische Köpfe. Ausstellung im Jüdischen Museum,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 24, no. 37 (October 6, 1934), 2; Franz Landsberger, “Jüdische Köpfe. Zur Bildnisausstellung im Jüdischen Museum,” Jüdische Rundschau (September 14, 1934), 13; “Olga Bloch, Porträt-Ausstellung im Berliner Jüdischen Museum,” C.V.-Zeitung (September 21, 1934), 1. Beiblatt. 97. “The Maimonides Celebrations,” Jewish Chronicle (April 5, 1935), 26. 98. “Frühjahrs-Ausstellung Berliner jüdischer Künstler,” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe für Gross-Berlin (March 21, 1935), 9. 99. On different aspects of the journal Milgroym, see Arthur Tilo Alt, “The Berlin Milgroym Group and Modernism in Yiddish,” Yiddish 7, no. 1 (1987), 42–45; Susanne MartenFinnis and Igor Dukhan, “Dream and Experiment: Time and Style in 1920s Berlin Émigré Magazines: Zhar Ptitsa and Milgroym,” East European Jewish Affairs 35, no. 2 (2005), 225–244; and Francesco Melfi, “A Rhetoric of Image and Word: The Magazine Milgroym/

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Rimon, 1922–1924 and the Jewish Search for Inclusivity” (Ph.D. diss., Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1996). 100. See, for instance, Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein’s review of Karl Schwarz’s Die Juden in der Kunst, in Jüdische Rundschau (December 28, 1928), 724. For further details, see Katharina S. Feil, “Art under Siege: The Scholarship Produced by Rahel Wischnitzer during Her Berlin Years 1921–1938,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 45 (2000), 121–133. 101. Franz Landsberger, Einführung in die jüdische Kunst (Berlin: 1935), 58. Landsberger’s reluctance to acknowledge that there was a distinctive Jewish art was still apparent in his major work on the subject, The History of Jewish Art, published after the war. See Landsberger, A History of Jewish Art (Cincinnati: 1946), 3–14. 102. Katharina S. Feil, “Art under Siege: The Art Scholarship of Rachel Wischnitzer in Berlin, 1921–1938,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 44 (1999), 184. 103. A letter written by Wischnitzer-Bernstein while in exile in Paris to Alfred Klee, in which she asks him for a letter of recommendation, hints at tensions between her and Landsberger; she insists that “this letter ought to be signed by you [that is, by Klee, who was a member of the community board responsible for the museum] and not by my former colleague Professor Landsberger.” Moreover, she asks Klee to mention only those two exhibitions she organized independently. Letter from Wischnitzer to Alfred Klee, June 24, 1938, Central Zionist Archive, A 142/58/7–Alfred Klee; quoted in Rauschenberger, Jüdische Tradition im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik, 158. 104. Franz Landsberger, “Unser Museum. Rückblick auf 1935,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 26, no. 1 (January 5, 1936), 18. 105. Thanks to Chana Schütz and Hermann Simon, the catalogs of this exhibition and the works on display have been reprinted, along with a number of articles devoted to various aspects of the 1936 Liebermann exhibition. See Hermann Simon (ed.), ‘Was vom Leben übrig bleibt, sind Bilder und Geschichten.’ Max Liebermann zum 150. Geburtstag. Rekonstruktion der Gedächtnisausstellung des Berliner Jüdischen Museums von 1936 (Berlin: 1997). On the large turnout for the exhibition, see Irmgard Schüler, “Das Jüdische Museum. Zwanzig Jahre jüdische Kunstschau,” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe A (February 25, 1937), 16 a. 106. Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Gedächtnis-Ausstellung Max Fabian. zur Erinnerung an den Todestag 26. März 1926. Vom 20. September bis 18. Oktober 1936 (Berlin: 1936). 107. Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse, 99. 108. See the exhibition catalog that appeared as a special issue in the society’s journal, Jüdische Familien-Forschung (12, no. 43), edited by Albert J. Phiebig. The three institutions had cooperated on an earlier exhibition in 1934, marking the tenth anniversary of the Society for Jewish Genealogy. See “10 Jahre Familienforschung,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 24, no. 24 (1934), 6. 109. Jacob Jacobson, “Unsere Ahnen. Die Handschriften aus der Ausstellung,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 26, no. 46 (1936), 4. 110. Olga Bloch, “Unsere Ahnen. Die Porträt-Ausstellung im Berliner Jüdischen Museum,” C.V.-Zeitung (November 12, 1936). 111. “‘Unsere Ahnen.’ Katalog” in Jüdische Familien-Forschung (see n. 108), 17–18. 112. “‘Wohl dem, der seiner Väter gern gedenkt.’ Aus der Eröffnungsrede von Dr. Arthur Czellitzer,” C.V.-Zeitung (November 12, 1936). 113. Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse, 106. Among those visiting the exhibition was a leading bureaucrat working for the department of Jewish affairs in the SD, Adolf Eichmann. See Rahel Wischnitzer, “From My Archives,” Journal of Jewish Art 6 (1979), 11. 114. For an overview of the exhibits, see the exhibition catalog edited by Rahel WischnitzerBernstein and Josef Fried, Gedenkausstellung Don Jizchaq Abrabanel. Seine Welt, sein Werk (Berlin: 1937). 115. Alfred Klee, “Geleitwort,” in Akiba Eger Ausstellung, ed. Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein and Eugen Pessen (Berlin: 1937). Wischnitzer-Bernstein may have chosen to present Abravanel and Eger as two examples of leaders who upheld Jewish heritage in periods of transition, thus indirectly drawing attention to the present political situation. See Feil, “Art under Siege,”

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185. Along similar lines, Hermann Simon declares that both personalities felt especially committed to the Jewish communities of their days. See Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse, 124f. 116. Franz Landsberger (ed.), Ausstellung im Jüdische Museum, Berlin. Hundert Jahre jüdische Kunst aus Berliner Besitz (Berlin: 1937), 3. 117. Olga Bloch, “Neuordnung im Berliner Jüdischen Museum,” C.V.-Zeitung (March 24, 1938). 118. “Jüdisches Museum Berlin,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 28, no. 44 (October 30, 1938), 5. The following page of the same issue announced that the exhibition had to be postponed. The museum, it reported, would be open according to the usual opening hours. 119. Max Osborn, “Abschieds-Abend für Rahel Wischnitzer,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 28, no. 15 (April 10, 1938), 4; Lutz Weltmann, “Abschied von Rahel Wischnitzer,” Israelitisches Familienblatt. Ausgabe für Gross-Berlin (April 7, 1938). 120. “Kunst aus Kleingemeinden. Das Jüdische Museum inventarisiert,” Jüdische Rundschau (May 10, 1938). 121. Olga Bloch, “Kunstgegenstände aus jüdischen Kleingemeinden. Zu einer Ausstellung im Berliner Jüdischen Museum,” C.V.-Zeitung (April 28, 1938), 13. 122. Max Osborn, “Aus kleinen jüdischen Gemeinden,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 28, no. 19 (May 8, 1938), 7. 123. “Ausstellungen im Jüdischen Museum,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 28, no. 42 (October 16, 1938), 5. 124. Franz Landsberger, “Schenkungen an das Jüdische Museum,” Gemeindeblatt der Jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin 28, no. 45 (November 6, 1938), 4. 125. Franz Landsberger, “Our Art Treasures, 1940,” American Jewish Archives, Manuscript Collection No. 2, Henry Hurwitz, 28/10; quoted in Rauschenberger, Jüdische Tradition im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik, 162 f. 126. Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse, 135f. 127. Franz Landsberger, “Our Art Treasures, 1940.” 128. On the fate of the museum’s holdings both after its forced closure and after the war, see the detailed reconstruction in Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse, 139–151. On the work of the Jewish Trust Corporation, see C. I. Kapralik, The History of the Work of the Jewish Trust Corporation for Germany (London: 1971) and, more generally, Inka Bertz, and Michael Dorrmann (eds.), Raub und Restitution. Kulturgut aus Jüdischem Besitz von 1933 bis heute (Göttingen: 2008). 129. Richard I. Cohen, “Self-Image through Objects: Toward a Social History of Jewish Art Collecting and Jewish Museums,” in The Uses of Tradition, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: 1992), 221f. 130. Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienburger Strasse, 54 f. 131. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), 24. 132. Katharina S. Feil uses the term “spiritual resistance” to describe the museological work of Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein; it is used here for the work of the museum as a whole. See Feil, “A Scholar’s Life: Rachel Wischnitzer and the Development of Jewish Art Scholarship in the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1994), 4.

Jewish Museums in the Federal Republic of Germany Inka Bertz (JEWISH MUSEUM BERLIN)

In 1995, Cilly Kugelmann, presently the vice-director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, characterized postwar Jewish museums in Germany as “objects in an exhibition of contemporary history.”1 That is, the seemingly objective position these institutions assume in the presentation of their narrative cannot hide the fact that they are themselves the outcome of specific historical circumstances. Their content is about Jewish history, but their own history reveals much of the history of postwar Germany. This essay seeks to clarify what kind of history has been exhibited in a variety of postwar German Jewish museums; which—or, more precisely, whose—needs stood at the fore when these museums were first established; what kinds of transformation have taken place over the past half century; and what changes may be in store for them in the coming generation. Between 1945 and 1990, when the Jewish population of the Federal Republic numbered no more than 30,000, nine Jewish museums and Jewish departments (the latter refer to divisions in existing state museums) were established.2 During the next decade, the number rose to close to 50. Most of these museums or departments were housed in former regional synagogues in villages or small towns, with a particular density in southern Germany. Moreover, as with other museums in Germany, the Jewish museums benefited from public funding. The large number of Jewish museums relative to the size of the Jewish population attested to German Jewry’s disproportionate political-symbolic importance in postwar German society.3 Unlike the situation in other countries (for instance, the United States), the establishment of most of these museums did not come about as the result of local Jewish initiatives. In fact, Jewish communities generally kept what might be described as a benevolent distance from museum projects. Most likely this was because the history that was being retold in these places reflected the experience of only a small portion of the Jews living in the Federal Republic, as the post-Holocaust Jewish community contained only a small minority of native-born Jews. Most postwar “German Jews” were actually survivors from Poland who had come to the American and British zones with the intention of continuing to the United States or Israel. Although a majority of these new arrivals eventually left, some remained and helped establish new communities, 80

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especially in Frankfurt and Munich. This core population was greatly increased after 1990, when the dissolving (East) German Democratic Republic allowed Jews from the Soviet Union to immigrate. Approximately one third of the 220,000 new immigrants became (or could become) members of the Jewish communities. Nonetheless, this later group, too, was characterized by a cultural distance from pre-1933 German Jewish history. For all these reasons, the history of the Jewish museums is linked only tenuously with the history of the Jews in postwar Germany. Instead, it is part of a process known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past. This process, which entailed grappling with fraught issues such as the degree of popular support for the Nazi regime, the origins of the Holocaust, repercussions of the Holocaust on postwar German society, and what constituted reasonable forms of remembrance, was often accompanied by controversy and conflict.4 Although the museums themselves did not engage actively in the public battles revolving around Vergangenheitsbewältigung, they were nonetheless affected by them, since any presentation of Jewish history in postwar Germany was perceived against the background of the Holocaust. Thus, the museums were very often the product of non-Jewish concerns and were directed primarily toward the non-Jewish German public. In the pre-1933 period, Jewish museums in Frankfurt, Breslau, Berlin, and elsewhere were the outcome of private initiatives, often belonging to (or at least closely linked with) a given local Jewish community.5 The Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 put an end to these museums. The buildings were closed and their collections were confiscated; many were destroyed by the German authorities. Following the war, numerous items that had been recovered were brought by the western Allies and representatives of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. to collection points in Wiesbaden and Offenbach that had been organized by the U.S. Army. From there, they were distributed under the supervision of the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) to various museums and institutions throughout the western world, principally in Israel, the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America.6 With few exceptions of Judaica collections that remained in municipal and state museums of history and culture, such as those in Mainz, Speyer, Göttingen, and Braunschweig,7 no continuity of inventories from prewar times exists in present-day Germany. Consequently, today’s Jewish museums in places such as Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, Rendsburg, or Dorsten are aptly described by an expression first used by the cultural anthropologist Christoph Daxelmüller: “building out of nothing.” In these museums, the role of providing authentic testimony about the past, which was traditionally fulfilled by material objects, has been reassigned to the survivors’ narratives. The focus is less on the preservation of the material-cultural heritage than on safeguarding an immaterial remembrance: what is paramount is not the collection itself, but rather its pedagogic function. As indicated in this essay’s title, the history of Jewish museums in postwar Germany falls mainly under the rubric of West German history, although a few exhibitions and museum projects on the theme of Jewish history did take place in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) shortly before its dissolution. To some degree, the phases of this history parallel the evolving relationship between the

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German Jewish community and the wider German society, reflecting both the process of coming to terms with the past and the more general cultural history of the Federal Republic.8 More specifically, it is possible to point to four phases distinguishing the history of Jewish museums between 1960 and the present. Public presentations of Jewish history and culture began in the early 1960s, coinciding with the first laborious efforts at examining the history and legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. The second phase began in the mid-1970s, with the founding of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft jüdischer Sammlungen (Working partnership of Jewish collections) and the first steps toward institutionalization of Jewish collections. The broadcast of the American television series Holocaust in 1979 was followed by a decade of conflicts, public scandals, and debates on the meaning of history and the appropriate form of its remembrance. The year 1988—the 50th anniversary of the November 1938 pogrom—highlights this third phase, as it saw the completion of several commemorative projects that had been underway for several years. These projects, in turn, inspired new initiatives that came to fruition only in the mid-1990s. Finally, the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War marked the beginning of the fourth phase, in which the issue of Holocaust remembrance was reconfigured not only in Germany but throughout Europe and beyond. One of the more visible outcomes of this reconfiguration is the federally supported Jewish Museum Berlin, which opened in 2001. These phases are characterized by dramatic changes in museological emphases. The historical exhibitions of the 1960s concentrated on the theme of Judaism and were based on collections, which at that time consisted mainly of objects of Judaica. The first initiatives for the establishment of Jewish museums or Jewish departments began to take shape in Braunschweig, Berlin, Cologne, and Worms in the 1970s. The reappropriation of historic buildings in the 1980s provided an impetus to establish museums in such places as Rendsburg, Fürth, and Veitshöchheim (in Franconia). During the past two decades, the museological emphasis has shifted to contemporary architecture, as in Berlin and Munich.9 In the sections that follow, each of these phases will be described in greater detail.

1960s: The First Exhibitions In 1959, Theodor W. Adorno delivered a lecture titled “What Does Reevaluation of the Past Mean?” before the German Coordination Council of Societies for Christian and Jewish Cooperation in Wiesbaden. The measured tone of this influential address was reflected in Adorno’s use of the term “reevaluation” (Aufarbeitung) in place of the more charged Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Yet Germany was far from settled. Beginning at the end of 1959 and continuing into the following year, a wave of antisemitic attacks against synagogues and community institutions shocked the Jewish community and German public alike and brought into question the success of the democratization of the young Federal Republic. Roughly parallel with these events was a renewal of courtroom confrontations with Nazi crimes, beginning with the Einsatzgruppenprozess, or “Task Force Case” in Ulm in 1958 and followed by the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and the first

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Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in 1963. The social and cultural effects of these trials can hardly be overestimated. Among the best-known cultural reflections were two plays, The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth (1963) and Peter Weiss’ The Investigation (1965). Two years later, a psychological analysis of postwar German society, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s The Inability to Mourn, was published, and remained on the best-seller list for more than a year. The early 1960s were also a time of significant change in the academic sphere. The Germania Judaica library was founded in Cologne in 1959; the Institute for the History of the German Jews opened in Hamburg in 1963. In addition, three chairs in Jewish studies (Judaistik) were established during the 1960s: in Berlin (1963), Cologne (1966), and Frankfurt (1969).10 It was in the midst of such developments that the first postwar German exhibitions of Judaica and Jewish culture made their appearance. Thomas Grochowiak, the director of the Recklinghausen municipal museums, conceived an exhibition, titled Synagoga, that was shown in Recklinghausen in 196011 and in 1961 in Frankfurt.12 According to the exhibition catalog, Synagoga came about as a result of “discomfiture at the fact that there were no more museums or collections devoted to Jewish art objects and works of art in our country, and such a gap really had to be filled.”13 The exhibition featured traditional sections focusing on archeology and religion—“The Bible in the Mirror of Archaeology,” “Manuscripts,” “Printed Matter,” “Tombstones,” and “Cult Objects for Synagogues and Homes.” As Grochowiak’s agenda was to promote modern and abstract art, these historic sections were followed by a large section titled “Themes from the Old Testament and Scenes of Jewish Life in Representations of Fine Arts.” Although this tour d’horizon from the Romans to Chagall included works by several artists who either were forced to flee Germany or else were killed during the Holocaust, the art critic and collector Albert Schulze-Vellinghausen, who wrote an introductory essay in the exhibition catalog, chose to depict these artists as martyrs for the freedom of art rather than as victims of the Nazi persecution and genocide, and he closed his piece by expressing his hopes for “normalization” in the age of non-objective art. Other than Schulze-Vellinghausen’s veiled allusions, several remarks made during the opening ceremony, and a screening of Alain Resnais’ film Nuit et brouillard (Night and fog), the Holocaust was strikingly absent from this exhibition, which opened six days prior to the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom. However, when the exhibition traveled to Frankfurt, it appeared in a different context: it was presented as a continuation of a series of documentary exhibitions addressing the theme of the Holocaust, and the art section was omitted.14 In December 1959, as preparations for the exhibition in Recklinghausen were in full gear, synagogues in Cologne and in other cities were defiled by swastikas.15 Members of the Cologne-based Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, among them, the author and later Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, responded to the attacks by increasing their support for the Germania Judaica library founded by the society a year earlier.16 The second major exhibition on Jewish culture was another reaction to these events; whereas the original plan had been to transfer the Synagoga exhibition to Cologne, the city opted to go ahead with its own cultural and historical exhibition on Jewish life in the Rhine country, titled Monumenta Judaica (Figs. 4.1, 4.2, 4.3).17

Figure 4.1. Monumenta Judaica, Cologne 1963–1964. Section dealing with the Holocaust (©Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne [rba_113819]).

Figure 4.2. Monumenta Judaica, Cologne 1963–1964. Table set for Passover seder, with other Passover artifacts on display (©Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne [rba_113839]). 84

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Figure 4.3. Monumenta Judaica, Cologne 1963–1964. Section titled “The Tradition of the Old Testament in Christian Art,” with Christian images from the early 15th century (©Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne [rba_113805]).

The aim of this exhibition, according to its catalog, was “to provide the general public with an image of nearly 2,000 years of Jewish history and culture along the Rhine; [the exhibition] hopes to make a contribution to Christian-Jewish understanding and the self-understanding of the German Jews themselves, and attempts to illustrate the connections of many hundreds of years.”18 The regional focus of Monumenta Judaica was conducive to historical accuracy, as was particularly evident in the section dealing with Nazi persecution, which was part of a larger unit titled “Documentation of the Political, Legal, Social, and Economic History of the Jews in Germany.” The selection of objects, including documents pertaining to measures taken against Jews in the town of Neuwied, photographs of deportations in Cologne, and letters written by some of those who were deported, provided both a regional and a personal context for the exhibit. As a whole, these objects reflected an attempt to deal squarely with events of the Nazi era, though this effort was somewhat undercut by the apologetic tone of the two following sections of the exhibition, on postwar Jewish communities in the Federal Republic and West Berlin, and on “Memorials and Cenotaphs since 1945.” A year and a half later, the Historia Hebraica exhibition,19 the third in this series of Latin-titled overviews of Judaism, was held in West Berlin. As with the Synagoga exhibition in Frankfurt, Historia Hebraica followed two previous exhibitions on the theme of the Holocaust.20 Featured in the exhibition were objects on loan from the Jewish Museum in Prague—a noteworthy matter, given the lack of diplomatic relations

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between the Federal Republic and Soviet-bloc countries. For this reason, the exhibition was held under the sole aegis of the Jewish community without the patronage of the West German president or any other politician, and the traditional greetings offered by the senator of culture for West Berlin was inserted as a separate, loose page within the exhibition catalog. The last of the major exhibitions in this first historical phase of addressing Judaism and Jewish history, mounted in 1971, was Leistung und Schicksal (Achievement and destiny), conceived in honor of the 300th anniversary of the Jewish community in Berlin.21 In contrast to the previous exhibitions, Leistung und Schicksal placed less emphasis on religion and more on art and culture. Its main focus was achievement. Starting with a section of 46 ceremonial objects followed by 30 historical documents, the bulk of the exhibition consisted of 250 works of art pertaining to “personalities.” In contrast, the aspect of “destiny” was reflected only in 13 objects, books, newspapers, and documents covering the years between 1933 and 1938—omitting the most painful years of deportations and persecution. At the opening, introductory remarks were offered by Heinz Galinski, the head of the West Berlin Jewish community. Galinski, a German-born survivor of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, spoke of the destruction of the German Jewish community and, for the first time, addressed the subject of rebuilding after National Socialism and commitment to life in the Federal Republic: At the time, it was difficult to believe in the future, and the idea that a Jewish community could rise again in this city appeared to attest to nothing more than a deficient sense of reality. (. . .) An ever-closer relationship of trustful cooperation has developed in the course of the years between the Jewish community of Berlin, which is definitively and unreservedly committed to parliamentary democracy as the only humane form of state government, and the political figures in charge of this city and the Christian religious communities.22

These words may have arisen from a situation unique to Berlin and might not have been uttered in Frankfurt or Munich. Nonetheless, they—like the German (as opposed to Latin) title of the exhibition—heralded the beginnings of a new attitude. Each of the exhibitions described above had political and cultural overtones. Many museum curators and academics who had emigrated to other countries reconnected with colleagues in Germany for the first time through these projects,23 and the exhibition catalogs, generally produced jointly by Jewish and non-Jewish academics (especially Monumenta Judaica), remained the standard texts on art and ceremonial objects until well into the 1980s. Considering the fact that 32,000 visitors saw Synagoga in Recklinghausen and 144,450 viewed Monumenta Judaica in Cologne,24 the exhibitions also appeared to have reached a fairly large segment of the public. In this respect, they fulfilled their objective of disseminating knowledge about Jewish culture. For many curators in German museums, they provided the first impetus for a closer examination of the Judaica in their collections. Common to the exhibition projects in the years between 1960 and 1971 was an attempt to free Jewish culture from the “degenerate” and “alien” stigmas imposed on it by the Nazis by means of reintegrating it into German national culture and a more universal western culture. Thus, there was an emphasis on religion, as organizers wished to illustrate the common roots of Christianity and Judaism. This desire may

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explain the stressing of connections, as when Monumenta Judaica celebrated the “Tradition of the Old Testament in Christian Art” while neglecting to raise the issue of religious anti-Judaism as one of the roots of antisemitism. At the same time, the predominance of objects that were unknown or unrecognizable to most visitors may have led to a sense of alienation or a feeling that such objects (and those making use of them) were themselves alien or “exotic.” A similar paradoxical effect was provoked by the attempt to reintegrate secular Jewish culture into the cultural canon.25 There was a phenomenon known to Germans as Beitragsgeschichte, literally “the history of contribution,” which in this sense referred to the study of the contribution made by Jews to general culture. Though the concept of Beitragsgeschichte was often derided in later years, in hindsight, it seemed to have served a necessary function in rewriting the cultural canon and providing the German public with a guide to cultural self-orientation, and Jewish visitors with (as Galinski put it) a “feeling of satisfaction.” The idea that was so central to this satisfaction, namely, the rehabilitation of Jewish culture and its reintegration into the canon of German culture, prepared the ground for a more intricate albeit ambivalent approach taken by many exhibitions and museum projects with regard to German Jewish history, whereby emphasis was placed on the destruction of Jewish culture as a loss for German culture—thus contributing, in a way, to postwar German selfvictimization. However, there was also a second objective of these exhibitions: that of struggling against the recurrent phenomenon of antisemitism. Young people, particularly those in their 20s and 30s, were repeatedly designated as the target group of these efforts. In view of the wave of antisemitism in 1959–1960, previous attempts to educate against prejudice through lectures and roundtable talks were judged to be a failure. Exhibitions, it was hoped, would prove to be more effective.26 Many of the initiators, curators, city officials, or scholars involved in producing the first postwar exhibitions were affiliated with one of the Christian churches or had ties with the Social Democratic movement. Quite a few belonged to the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation. Some individuals, such as Annedore Weber, a publicist and politician from Berlin, were of Jewish origin. As a group, they represented a middle-class liberal milieu that, while rejecting the widespread tacit consent to antisemitism, nonetheless recoiled from public controversy. In this regard, it is significant to note that, during the war, two of the members of the advisory board of Monumenta Judaica, historians Theodor Schieder and Hermann Kellenbenz, had been members of the Nazi party and had carried out academic research on behalf of the regime. Yet this knowledge was kept quiet, or at least was passed on only verbally to trusted intimates.27 In contrast to contemporary literature and theater, the exhibitions on Jewish history did not evince anger and bitterness with regard to the Nazi past. In the early 1960s, authors such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger excoriated Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s Federal Republic of Germany as an “Aryan scrap heap” and, along with other intellectuals, prepared the ground for the change to come in the second half of the decade. But none of this was palpable in the exhibitions on Jewish history. Rather, the overall heading was Versöhnung (conciliation), and their predominant tone was benevolence, even in those sections that touched on the Holocaust—a fact that raised

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the ire of sociologist Alphons Silbermann, who, in reviewing Synagoga,28 derided what he considered to be its evocation of a noncommittal form of universal humanity.

The 1970s: Toward the First Museums The societal upheavals in Germany that characterized the end of the 1960s appeared, at first glance, to have had no direct impact on the history of Jewish museums. During the 1970s, “coming to terms with the past” was most often overlaid by other issues, among them the policy of détente toward the East, terrorism, and the Middle East conflict. Key events of the decade included the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, the beginning of the Majdanek trial in 1975, and the debate on the statute of limitations for violent crimes committed during the war. More than anything, it was the broadcast of the American television series Holocaust in January 1979 (which, among other things, introduced this term into German parlance) that brought sensitive and painful issues of the past into wider public discourse. During the 1970s, interest in Jewish history and culture was mainly confined to the same groups and persons as in the previous decade. The exhibitions of the 1960s had encouraged a number of museums, libraries, and archives to deal more effectively with their own inventories of Judaica. Beginning in 1976, curators, librarians, and archivists in charge of these objects met annually. This group, known as the Working Partnership of Jewish Collections in the Federal Republic and (West) Berlin (Arbeits-gemeinschaft jüdischer Sammlungen in der Bundesrepublik und [West] Berlin), was initiated by the Germania Judaica library and remains active to this day, providing a forum for the exchange of information.29 The common denominator uniting its members is their preoccupation with evidence of Jewish culture in the German-speaking world. In the first decade of the Working Partnership, the most active members were those connected with state historical museums—the Berlin Museum, the Braunschweig state museum, the Göttingen municipal museum, the municipal museum in Cologne, the historical museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, and the municipal archives and Rashi House in Worms—as well as libraries such as the Germania Judaica in Cologne, the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg, and the Frankfurt am Main city and university library. The group also maintained ties with the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation and the Central Council of the Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland). By the second half of the 1980s, the list of active member institutions came to include the Old Synagogue memorial in Essen (opened 1988), the Jewish cultural museum Augsburg-Swabia in the Augsburg synagogue (1985), and the Jewish museum in Rendsburg (1988). Individuals involved in the many initiatives launched after 1988 also joined the group. To some extent, this brief overview of the Working Partnership encapsulates the history of postwar Jewish museums in Germany. The first initiatives were taken by curators from museums in which prewar collections of Judaica were preserved. The most impressive of these, located in Worms and Braunschweig, are worthy of further description.

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Worms, with its medieval synagogue and the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Europe, is a particularly meaningful site for European Jewish culture. Together with the neighboring towns of Speyer and Mainz, it was the center of medieval German Jewry; Rashi (R. Shlomo Yitzhaki), the renowned biblical and talmudic commentator, lived there in the 11th century. It is also one of the few places where, despite the destruction of historic buildings (in particular, the synagogue), personal ties still served as bridges between pre-and postwar times. It was mainly two individuals— Isidor Kiefer, the director of the prewar Jewish museum (which had opened in 1924), and Friedrich M. Illert, the director of the Archive and Museum of the City of Worms—who, over a period of decades starting in the late 1940s, invested great efforts in reconstructing the destroyed synagogue and in retaining the objects that were still preserved.30 As early as 1949, Illert re-erected the portal of the synagogue, though the restoration of the building itself, slowed by litigation, was not completed until 1961. Several years later, in 1968, the Society for the Rashi House of Study was founded in an attempt to establish a study center and meeting place in a building adjacent to the synagogue that was said to have been the house of study in which Rashi taught. Notwithstanding the society’s efforts, the building was demolished in 1971. However, the resultant scandal evidently provided the impetus to reconstruct the building. The building, inaugurated in 1982, houses the municipal archives. The ground and basement floors, in the building’s historic vaulted cellars, accommodate the Rashi House Jewish museum, maintained by the city of Worms. A different example is presented by Braunschweig Museum, which claims to be the oldest Jewish museum in the world on the basis of a collection accumulated by the 18th-century Court purveyor Alexander David.31 The centerpiece of the museum is the reassembled interior of the Hornburg synagogue, originally acquired by the Braunschweig state museum in 1924. Under the Nazis, antisemitic captions were added to the synagogue display; it was also damaged both during the war and afterwards, when various items were improperly stored. Following the war, the Braunschweig state museum remained under the directorship of former Nazis. However, with the appointment of Rolf Hagen as director in 1965, a new chapter began. Together with Ralf Busch, the curator responsible for the museum’s Judaica collection, Hagen set about restoring the synagogue interior, an effort made possible by a generous contribution from the Boas-Reis-Samson families (originally from Wolfenbüttel). The collection of Torah mantles was classified in cooperation with an Israeli specialist in folk art, David Davidovitch of the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in Tel Aviv, and the ceremonial art collection was expanded through individual purchases. Following the acquisition of a new building for the state museum, the Judaica section became a separate entity housed in the museum’s previous building, the former Monastery of St. Egidius, where the synagogue interior was reinstalled in its prewar location.32 In other places as well, such as Frankfurt, Göttingen, Cologne, Kassel, Lübeck, Mayence, and Schnaittach, Judaica objects were retained in the respective state museums of history.33 The establishment of Jewish museums was prompted less by preserved collections than by preserved buildings, most often synagogues (Fig. 4.4). This was the case in Augsburg, where a particularly beautiful synagogue built in 1914–1917 in the late Jugendstil (German art nouveau style) was still intact and used

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Figure 4.4. Jewish Museum Franconia, site of the former synagogue in Schnaittach (1996). From 1939, the site was used by the local museum. After renovation in 1996, the building was left empty in order to preserve and accentuate the traces of its past (©Jewish Museum Franconia, Fürth, and Schnaittach; photographer: Dieter Kachelriess [Nürnberg]).

as a house of prayer: this was a rare instance in which the initiative for a Jewish museum arose from the community itself, due in particular to the efforts of its president, Julius Spokojny. The Jewish cultural museum of Augsburg-Swabia opened in 1985, its own small collection supplemented by loans from the Bavarian national museum in Munich and the Jewish department of the Berlin Museum. Its initial focus was on issues related to the Jewish religion. However, the new, more historically oriented permanent exhibit, which opened in 2006, provides an overview of German Jewish history from the Middle Ages to the postwar years, with special emphasis on the Jews of Bavarian Swabia, the region around Augsburg. Two smaller halls portray the history of the synagogue building and the present-day community. In Essen, in contrast, it was the city that took over the former synagogue building. Designed by Edmund Körner in 1913, it was one of the most impressive synagogues in the German Empire before the First World War. In 1959, after the postwar community decided to erect a new building, it was acquired by the city, stripped of its Jewish decorative elements, and transformed into a museum of industrial design. In 1979, the exhibition was severely damaged by a fire. After this, the city decided to establish a memorial in the building and to rededicate it as a political and historical documentation

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center and a meeting hall. On November 9, 1988—the 50th anniversary of the 1938 pogrom—the restored building, its interior once more recognizable as a former synagogue, was opened; in 2010, it was officially designated a Jewish cultural center. Its permanent exhibit consists of documents, photographs, and films; there is no material collection of cultural, ceremonial, or ritual objects. Most of the museums founded during the early 1980s and beyond followed the principle of division into religious and historical sections. This was the guiding principle for Monumenta Judaica and, more importantly, for the Jewish Historical Museum, which opened in Amsterdam in 1986, and the Jewish museum in Frankfurt, which opened in 1988. Sections dealing with religion generally made use of ceremonial objects to illustrate the Jewish year, the lifecycle, and rituals practiced in the synagogue, whereas the historical sections addressed the local and regional history of the Jews, their persecution and disenfranchisement under the Nazis, and often the history of the building in which the museum was located. On display were documents, photographs, and everyday objects. Sometimes there were also paintings or other valuable objects; more recent displays featured media stations with interviews. This structure remained more or less constant until well into the 1990s.

The 1980s: Searching for Traces of the Past Whereas the 1970s was a decade marked by gradual changes in the ways of dealing with Germany’s Nazi past, the following decade witnessed open conflicts that were ignited, on the one hand, by questions concerning the historic role of National Socialism and the Holocaust in German and European history and, on the other, by the question of what constituted an appropriate culture of remembrance. Not least among the factors provoking such conflicts was the attempt at a conservative “roll-back.” Shortly after assuming office as chancellor of the Federal Republic in 1982, Helmut Kohl—the holder of a Ph.D. in history—became the symbolic leader of a new, conservative historical policy that attempted to provide the country, more or less “from above,” with a new self-image derived from a positive interpretation of German history. However, this “foggy policy of the past, characterized by purposeful instrumentalization and unclear symbolism,”34 primarily gave rise to controversy and a “historians’ dispute” (Historikerstreit) that extended far beyond the realm of academia.35 History and its presentation became the subject of public debates, counter-exhibitions, and critical films36 that were initiated by academics and members of the media, many of whom perceived themselves as liberal-leftist or leftist. The critical counterculture also found its way into historical research via the emergence of the Geschichtswerkstätten (history workshops) and the concept of “history from below.” One key issue concerned the frame of reference with regard to the historical analysis of Nazism. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, most research had focused on the collapse of the Weimar republic. In the latter part of the 1980s, however, the Holocaust became increasingly understood as the central event of Nazism. Accordingly, Jewish history was given greater public attention—not least because historical

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research had begun to turn toward social history and Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history), precipitating a sweeping change in the perception of the victims. In a sense, there was nothing new with regard to the “historians’ disputes” of the 1980s: such disputes, albeit in more moderate or latent form, had been taking place in Germany since the end of the war. What was new was the willingness of some segments of the German Jewish community to step into the fray—quite literally, in 1985, when the Frankfurt theater staged Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (The garbage, the city and death), a play authored by Rainer Werner Fassbinder that was saturated with antisemitic stereotypes.37 Members of the audience, among them prominent members of the Jewish community, seized the stage and prevented the premiere. In the same city the following year, both Jews and non-Jews protested the construction of Börneplatz Square over the ruins of the Judengasse; in the end, a compromise was reached that resulted in the construction of the Judengasse Museum, which became part of the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt.38 At the same time, opposition groups within the Jewish communities, primarily in Frankfurt and Berlin, mounted challenges to the official “establishment” of community representatives and the Central Council. Yet another instance of Jewish assertiveness was the journal founded by a number of Jewish intellectuals in Frankfurt in 1986, called Babylon, which offered a platform for debates from a secular, leftist Jewish perspective shaped by the experience of postwar West Germany. It is a remarkable fact that, outside of Frankfurt, this development had no effect on the Jewish museums. As noted, 1988—marking the 50th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom—was a key year with regard to debates surrounding the proper means of commemorating the Holocaust and initiatives connected with the “rediscovery” of Jewish culture and history. For years, the German Jewish community had commemorated the anniversary with small ceremonies. However, the 50th anniversary became a national “theater of memory,” in the acerbic words of sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann.39 A major role in that “theater” was assigned to the Jewish museums: buildings in Frankfurt (discussed below), Rendsburg, Essen, and Gröbzig (in the GDR) were opened for the first time or reopened after renovations; in East Berlin, the New Synagogue—Centrum Judaicum Foundation was established and the restoration of the New Synagogue was announced; in West Berlin, the architectural competition for what is now the Jewish Museum Berlin was launched. Exhibitions were mounted in both parts of Berlin (discussed below) as well as in Nuremberg and elsewhere. These memorial events prompted German communities to address their local Jewish history for the first time. In 1988 alone, some 400 books, brochures, and essays were published; in subsequent years, the number of such works increased by leaps and bounds.40

The Jewish Museum in Frankfurt The Frankfurt Jewish museum was the first independent Jewish museum to be established in postwar Germany.41 Its history dates back to the Commission for the History of the Jews in Frankfurt within the Frankfurt municipal archives, which was founded in 1961, on the opening day of the Synagoga exhibition in the Frankfurt Historical Museum.42 In 1975, in honor of the National Congress of Protestant Churches, the

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Commission displayed an exhibition of the city’s Jewish history in the Paulskirche (St. Paul’s Church).43 That same year, the Frankfurt historical museum opened a Jewish department, in line with the museum’s newly stated policy of operating as a “museum for a democratic society,” focusing on everyday and social history.44 Several years later, Frankfurt’s municipal leadership underwent a change when the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP) lost to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The city’s new leaders were eager to reanimate downtown Frankfurt, left desolate by the reconstruction, and to re-shape the “banking city” as a city of culture and museums as well. Prominent architects designed a series of museum buildings and institutions, among them a film museum and an architecture museum, which were constructed along the banks of the River Main. The idea of including a Jewish museum in these plans first arose in 1978–1979, following the prominent commemorative ceremonies on the 40th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom and the broadcast of Holocaust. An additional incentive was the generally improved relationship between the municipal government and the Jewish community. All of this led to a resolution in early 1980 to establish a Jewish museum in the former Rothschild Palace, located opposite the “museum mile” on the other bank of the Main, in walking distance from the historical museum. At various stages in the eight years between the initial resolution regarding its establishment and its inauguration in 1988, the Jewish museum was the subject of discussions concerning its concept. One issue centered on material objects: the historical museum, which sought to continue exhibiting Jewish history as part of the history of Frankfurt, did not wish to hand over any of its collection to the new Jewish museum. Hilmar Hoffmann, the city councilor for cultural affairs, was fascinated by the newly opened Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv and suggested a similar exhibition based, as in Tel Aviv, on reconstructions rather than on original objects. The municipal archivist Dietrich Andernacht argued in favor of a research institute with affiliated exhibition halls, whereas municipal politicians preferred a more traditional museum designed to educate the general public. Similar warring views emerged time and again in the history of postwar German Jewish museums. As if the relative absence of material objects and the need for research to regain a basis of historical knowledge was not enough, museums were burdened by multiple and conflicting expectations—expected to serve as exhibitions, educational and documentation centers, and encounter spaces, all at the same time. In Frankfurt and in other places, what evolved was a hybrid institution between a memorial site (Gedenkstätte) focusing on commemorative and educational functions, on the one hand, and a museum trying to perform its classical functions of collecting, preserving, and interpreting objects, on the other (Figs. 4.5, 4.6). The museum’s opening on the anniversary of the November 1938 pogrom once again elucidated the particular situation of Jewish museums in the Federal Republic of Germany. The museum’s director, Georg Heuberger, criticized the tendency to make the Holocaust the focus of a Jewish museum, saying that it “actually ran counter to the concept of the museum.” In his view, the museum’s prime goal was “to be able to show Jews in history as active agents with their own everyday culture, their own political interests and their own interpretations of history.”45 Yet he also acknowledged that it would be “inconceivable to examine Jewish history after the Holocaust

Figure 4.5. Jewish Museum of Frankfurt. Large model of the Judengasse, destroyed in the 19th-20th centuries, is the central object in the section on the pre-modern period; in the background are enlarged reproductions of historic engravings (exhibition design: Ante Josip von Kostelac; ©Jewish Museum Frankfurt; photographer: Uwe Dettmar).

Figure 4.6. Jewish Museum of Frankfurt, permanent exhibition, 1988. In the section dedicated to ceremonial objects and religion, figurines representing the four sons of the Passover hagadah are shown at a seder table (exhibition design: Hanna Feldhammer; ©Jewish Museum Frankfurt; photographer: Michael Lenarz).

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without envisioning the mass annihilations practiced by Nazism,”46 and equally impossible to consider Jewish history without reference to German society and its historical policy. Chancellor Kohl’s participation in the opening ceremony further emphasized the fact that Jewish museums were no longer solely the concern of the Jewish communities. This, despite the fact that in Frankfurt, the “unofficial capital” of West Germany and home to the country’s most culturally and intellectually active Jewish community, there were unusually close ties between the Jewish community and the newly opened museum. As it happened, the establishment of the Jewish museum in Frankfurt coincided with the growing self-confidence exhibited by German Jewry. As noted by Cilly Kugelmann, representatives of the German Jewish community “increasingly invoke[d] the tradition of German Jewry”47 and also began to take part in public protests against antisemitism. In the case of the 1985 protest against Fassbinder’s Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod, “[t]wo moral norms, both constitutive for the postwar history of Germany, came into conflict: the defense of the freedom of art and the struggle against anti-Semitism.”48 Heuberger did not enter this conflict, insisting on giving the museum a strictly scientific orientation and confining its mandate to the struggle against the “appalling lack of knowledge” of Jewish history and culture.49

West Berlin, 1988 Berlin was another center of activity within the context of the 1988 memorial year, although the conditions prevailing in the western and eastern parts of the city were entirely different. In West Berlin, commemorative activities took place not only in the Jewish department of the Berlin Museum but also in the context of various neighborhood historical exhibitions and projects centering on such themes as the Jewish hospital and wartime Jewish resistance. Most of those involved in the neighborhood projects were members of the Berlin Geschichtswerkstatt, who shared a left-wing political orientation and abhorrence for what they considered to be the sugarcoating of German history. Their projects were intended to unsettle, not conciliate—exposing acts of persecution and naming perpetrators, specifying practices that had continued from the Nazi era into that of the Federal Republic, while also containing an element of self-criticism with regard to policies connected with the Left.50 In the meantime, plans were well underway for the establishment of a Jewish museum. Yet here, too, as in Frankfurt, there were numerous and often opposing political interests to negotiate. Since the founding of West Berlin’s historical museum in 1962, there had been plans to integrate Judaism as one of the religions featured in the museum’s historical exhibit. Following the Leistung und Schicksal exhibition of 1971, the Society for a Jewish Museum in Berlin was established in 1976, but it took another three years before a curator was appointed to organize and direct it. The original designated location was the site of the Ephraim Palace, originally the home of a wealthy 18th-century Jewish family, which had been demolished in 1936. The ruins of this building were being held in storage in the western part of the city; the original plan was to reconstruct it on Lindenstrasse, opposite the historical museum. This plan, however, was dropped in 1981. In 1983,

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Figure 4.7. Jewish department of the Berlin Museum, ca. 1984; view of the permanent gallery with synagogue model and photographs (©Jewish Museum Berlin; photographer: Forostudio Bartsch).

both the sculptures and decorations on the building’s façade were handed over to the East Berlin municipality, which subsequently reconstructed the building on its original site. The following year, an exhibition hall for the Jewish department was opened in the Berlin Museum’s building in Lindenstrasse (Fig. 4.7), and in 1986 the Jewish department received three additional exhibition halls on the second floor of the Martin Gropius Building, the former arts and crafts museum, which at this point also housed two other museum collections and a number of large, temporary exhibitions.51 The senate of West Berlin continued to adhere to plans for a “Jewish museum,” although it insisted on a “museum within a museum,” namely, a Jewish museum under the aegis of the city’s historical museum. Projects pushing forward in Frankfurt and East Berlin added a sense of momentum, though the Frankfurt project was also used as an argument against a second independent Jewish museum in Germany. As a compromise solution, an “integrative concept” was formulated as the basis for the architectural competition launched in 1988 under the title “Extension to the Berlin Museum with Jewish museum department”—highlighting the gap between outside expectations (for a museum) and inside planning (for a department). While most of the proposals presented neutral structural elements to contain a Jewish “museum within the museum,” that of Daniel Libeskind was a subversive deconstruction of the competition’s specifications. Libeskind interpreted the concept of “integration” in a much more radical way: what needed to be inscribed into the city’s history was not merely the “German-Jewish symbiosis” of Weimar culture, but also (and equally) its ultimate catastrophe, the Holocaust. The common

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tendency to delegate the Holocaust to the realm of Jewish history soon led to Libeskind’s design being perceived as that of a “Jewish museum.” The public presentations of the project as such, together with the expectations raised for a Jewish museum over the past decades, added to the confusion.52 The conflicts surrounding the plans were resolved only a decade later, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

East Berlin and the German Democratic Republic, 1988 The official culture of remembrance in the German Democratic Republic was centered on the labor movement’s “struggle against Fascism.” Until the 1980s, there were virtually no exhibits on Jewish history and only a few studies written by East German scholars on Jewish historical topics, most of which appeared in western publications or the community newsletter.53 In contrast to West Germany, which considered itself, in legal terms, the successor of the Third Reich—as such taking responsibility for the latter’s crimes and debts—East Germany viewed itself as a state founded by members of the “anti-Fascist resistance.” In consequence, the postwar Jewish community had far less political and symbolic importance. Moreover, even within the rubric of anti-Fascist resistance, Jews were marginalized: members of the Jewish resistance group headed by Herbert Baum, for instance, were valorized exclusively as Communists, not as Jews.54 The same held true for official sites of remembrance, among them Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück, which were primarily dedicated to the resistance fighters rather than the (Jewish) victims. This situation began to change in the second half of the 1980s, when a campaign for commemorative events was initiated in the context of the remembrance of the November 1938 pogrom, motivated by a covert political agenda to further legitimize the East German regime in the eyes of the West. The official East German policy of remembrance focused on three events of 1988: the symbolic cornerstone-laying for the reconstruction of the still-standing entrance of the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, an exhibition titled Und lehrt sie Gedächtnis! (And teach them to remember), and the opening of the Jewish museum in the synagogue in Gröbzig.55 The establishment of the New Synagogue – Centrum Judaicum Foundation “in commemoration of the millions of Jewish victims of Fascism, their martyrdom and their anti-Fascist resistance” was the most far-reaching decision; particularly significant was the preamble’s recognition of Jewish victims before that of resistance fighters. Participating in the symbolic cornerstone-laying ceremony on November 10, 1988 was Erich Honnecker, the East German head of state.56 Und lehrt sie Gedächtnis!, the first exhibition on Jewish history to be held in East Germany, was co-sponsored by the government and by the Association of Jewish Communities in the GDR. The only propagandist part of this otherwise factual exhibition was the closing section on “Jewish heritage and Jewish culture in the German Democratic Republic.” Some of the objects loaned to the exhibition came from West Berlin and Frankfurt; the exhibition was subsequently shown in West Berlin as well.57 The third event, held outside of Berlin in Saxony-Anhalt, was the inauguration of a Jewish museum in a mostly preserved 18th-century synagogue building.58

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Jüdische Lebenswelten, 1992 Although mounted in 1992, the Jüdische Lebenswelten (Worlds of Jewish life) exhibition can be regarded as a fitting conclusion to the third phase of postwar German Jewish museum history.59 In contrast to most of the projects of those years, Jüdische Lebenswelten, mounted by the Berliner Festspiele, the city’s festival organization, was put together by Jewish curators (Andreas Nachama, Julius H. Schoeps, and Edward van Voolen) and was not limited to local Jewish culture. Ranging in time from antiquity to the present, it covered all aspects of Jewish culture and had a global focus, relating to Jewish culture not only in well-known centers such as Vilna, Amsterdam, Berlin, or New York, but also in far more remote locations, including Kaifeng and Yemen (Figs. 4.8, 4.9, 4.10). In this sense, Jüdische Lebenswelten was the fulfillment of a wish shared by many European Jewish curators in those years: to present Jewish history and culture from a Jewish perspective and in an affirmative and positive light. This ran counter to the nearuniversal German pretensions of the time, which favored a focus on the traumatic portions of that history.60 Notwithstanding, the exhibition was not devoid of references to the Holocaust. For one thing, it opened in January 1992, on the 50th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, and served as counterpoint to the opening of the Wannsee Conference House commemorative site. Although the Cold War had ended and Germany had been reunited, Jewish culture in Germany was still being examined against the background of the Holocaust. Moreover, in the coming years, the Holocaust would become the focal point of historical memory both in Germany and beyond.

Figure 4.8. Jüdische Lebenswelten, Berlin 1992. Great hall of Martin Gropius-Bau with tent for presentation of books and manuscripts (©Berliner Festspiele-Martin-Gropius-Bau; photographer: Margret Nissen).

Figure 4.9. Jüdische Lebenswelten, Berlin 1992. Section on Amsterdam, with portrait gallery of Portuguese Jewish notables (©Berliner Festspiele-Martin-Gropius-Bau; photographer: Margret Nissen).

Figure 4.10. Jüdische Lebenswelten, Berlin 1992. Section on New York, with Ben Shahn’s painting The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (©Berliner Festspiele-Martin-Gropius-Bau; photographer: Margret Nissen). 99

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The 1990s: The Policy of Remembrance and Remembrance Politics The fourth phase of the development of German Jewish museums was marked by the end of the Cold War, which reconfigured Europe’s landscape of remembrance. Issues and memories that had been neutralized or otherwise swept under the rug during the era of East-West tensions once again came to the fore: neither the unification of the two German states in October 1990 nor the choice of Berlin as the capital in July 1991 could have been implemented at the international level without the acceptance of responsibility for the crimes of the Second World War. In Berlin, in particular, the unification process and accompanying historical-political developments were also transformative with respect to both its Jewish museums and Holocaust memorials. In what was formerly East Berlin, the New Synagogue – Centrum Judaicum became the focal point of a neighborhood increasingly perceived to be “Jewish” and frequented by growing numbers of tourists. Meanwhile, in what was once West Berlin, the Jewish department of the Berlin Museum was transformed into the supra-regional Jewish Museum Berlin. This process, which took place over a number of years marked by myriad conflicts, will now be examined more thoroughly.61

The Jewish Museum Berlin Back in 1988, it will be recalled, the senate of Berlin had launched an architectural competition for an “extension to the Berlin Museum with Jewish museum department.” The winning proposal was a provocative design by Daniel Libeskind. Representatives of the city’s cultural administration were concerned by the radical nature of Libeskind’s plan. However, their objections were overruled by architects on the international jury, who were interested in constructing a spectacular architectural landmark in the city. In 1991, the Berlin senate considered reallocating funds that had been designated for the construction of the museum building. The decision provoked an outcry: prominent individuals both in Germany and abroad came out in favor of Libeskind’s design. The Berlin senate found itself in a situation in which it had no choice but to build according to the proposed plans, as the political implications of giving up a “Jewish museum” in the recently reunited former capital of the Third Reich would have been devastating. Yet controversy continued over the building’s content. Officially it was to be an annex that was meant to accommodate, in addition to the Jewish department, an exhibit on the modern history of Berlin and the museum’s fashion and theater department. However, both the media and the general public consistently referred to the building under construction as the “Jewish museum.” Complicating the matter was the merger of the West Berlin historical museum with its East Berlin counterpart, the Museum of the Margraviate of Brandenburg (Märkisches Museum). The main outcome of the merger was a much larger museum complex, in which the relative importance of the Jewish department was diminished. Amnon Barzel, the Israeli curator who had been appointed head of the Jewish department in 1994, demanded a rethinking both of the original “integrative concept” and the museum’s administrative status, in addition to promoting a broadening of the museum’s mandate to issues beyond the borders of Berlin (Fig. 4.11). Conflicts between Barzel

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Figure 4.11. ÜberLeben in Sarajevo (Surviving in Sarajevo), an exhibition held on the unfinished construction site of the Jewish Museum Berlin. The exhibition was a statement about the broadening of the museum’s perspective beyond the borders of Berlin and into the present. Curated by Amnon Barzel; photographs by Edward Serotta, April 1995 (©Jewish Museum Berlin; photographer: Fotostudio Bartsch).

and the museum leadership led to his being fired in June 1997. After months of stalemate, the Berlin senate turned to W. Michael Blumenthal, a former U.S. secretary of the treasury. Appointed as director in December 1999, Blumenthal (who had grown up in Berlin) was soon committed to the idea of an independent Jewish museum. He conducted prolonged negotiations with the Berlin senate and with officials in the newly elected federal government, in particular, Michael Naumann, the secretary for culture. In the end, Blumenthal was able to secure the independence of the new institution, which was placed under the administration of the Federal Republic.62 As a result, the museum is currently one of only three museums supported solely by the federal government (the others being the German Historical Museum in Berlin and the Museum of the History of the Federal Republic in Bonn). In February 1999, Libeskind’s building was made accessible to the public for guided architectural tours. The installation of the permanent exhibition was finished in September 2001. Work had begun under the curatorial advice of Shaike Weinberg and Tom Freudenheim and was continued under the direction of Ken Gorbey and Nigel Cox (of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), who introduced a concept of visitor experience that was new to the German museum world at the time— encompassing the museum as a whole, not solely its exhibitions. Special attention was given to the physical and intellectual accessibility of its contents, in part through the

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Figure 4.12. Jewish Museum Berlin, permanent exhibition, 2001. Section on court and country Jews, featuring media station and interactive elements (exhibition design: Würth & Winderoll; ©Jewish Museum Berlin; photographer: Marion Rossler).

use of interactive elements. Gorbey and Cox also promoted a new attitude among the staff in the galleries, who were meant to serve as “hosts” rather than “guards.” Although this overall concept met with much criticism, especially for its use of replicas and the way in which it clashed with Libeskind’s austere architecture, the welcoming atmosphere within the museum proved to be a major factor in its success. It has also contributed to changing the notion of Jewish history—as the history of suffering—by loosening its identification with the Holocaust alone (Figs. 4.12, 4.13).

The Jewish Museum Munich As is the case with the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Jewish Museum Munich is located on a site that has no specific connections to Jewish history, and it features striking contemporary architecture.63 City planning considerations were what enabled the idea of a Jewish museum (first broached early in the 1980s) to be transformed into reality. Starting in 1989, Richard Grimm, a private citizen committed to the cause, had operated a small Jewish museum in his home; in 1998, this museum came under the auspices of the city of Munich.64 When the city and the Jewish community began discussions regarding a Jewish center on the centrally located but derelict square

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Figure 4.13. Jewish Museum Berlin, permanent exhibition, 2009. New section titled Glaubenssachen (Matters of faith). The round seating area enables viewing of short animated films on rituals, objects, and places connected with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions (exhibition design: gewerk; ©Jewish Museum Berlin; photographer: Jens Ziehe).

known as St.-Jakobs-Platz, the plans included not only the community center and the synagogue, but also a museum that was intended, among other things, to strengthen the public nature of the square. The community center, synagogue, and museum, in the prize-winning design of architects Rena Wandel-Hoefer and Wolfgang Lorch, comprise three separate structural elements that are connected to one another by their uniform setting. Each of the two cubes housing the museum and the synagogue is divided into a transparent and an opaque section—the synagogue being open to the sky above, whereas the museum is open to the square below. (This complementary arrangement of the museum and the house of worship follows an ancient topos, which stems, however, more from classical than from Jewish tradition.) In addition, the staircase providing access to all floors of the museum building refers—as is the case in the Libeskind building—to the motif of Jacob’s ladder. In Munich, though, this element has a companion piece in the staircase of the Alter Pinakothek museum, designed by Leo von Klenze. Accordingly, although the building is topologically integrated into the Jewish community center, it evokes associations with classic museum architecture. The Holocaust is not referenced in the architecture of the museum itself, but only in an underground “corridor of memories” between the community center and the synagogue. Nor is it explicitly present in the foreground of the permanent exhibit.

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Rather, the exhibition reflects the notion that history is an open-ended process that can be portrayed only in piecemeal fashion. Following a self-reflexive approach that first had been realized in the permanent exhibition of the Jewish Museum Vienna (opened in 1996), the Munich museum (opened in 2007) has positioned itself as a Jewish museum at the cutting edge of the discourse of museum theory.65

Anomalous Features of Jewish Museums in Germany This overview of contemporary Jewish museums, albeit incomplete, might give its readers the impression that Germany has been covered, with typically Teutonic thoroughness, by a network of Jewish museums. The reality is different. In almost all instances (Munich is the most extreme example), the impetus for Jewish museums can be traced back to individual or small group initiatives, which later, for various reasons, received city, regional, or federal backing. As has been seen, many efforts to establish Jewish museums or memorials were accompanied by controversy; some were never built. An especially striking example is that of Cologne, the German city with the most ancient history vis-à-vis Jewish settlement (the first mention of Jews dates from the year 321 CE). It hosted Monumenta Judaica, one of the first of the postwar Jewish exhibitions, and its municipal museum features a Judaica collection, part of which is of antique provenance,66 as well as significant archaeological findings. It is also the site of the Institute of Jewish Studies and the Germania Judaica library. Given this background, one might well think that Cologne was predestined for an independent Jewish museum. In fact, over the decades, various attempts to establish a museum have failed, the argument typically being that a Jewish museum was unnecessary in a city that already had other Jewish cultural institutions. In other words, a Jewish museum was perceived not primarily as a museum, but as a “Jewish” institution, and since there were already two others in Cologne, the lack of a museum was not felt. Similarly, a memorial dedicated in a building that had served as a Gestapo prison was built only in the face of opposition: supporters of the memorial had to contend with the argument that Cologne had already devoted sufficient resources to “Jewish” themes. According to recent plans, the medieval mikveh will become part of the archeological zone around city hall, but it remains an open question whether a Jewish museum will be added to the mix. In Hamburg, another major German city with a significant Jewish presence, the issue of founding an independent Jewish museum appears not to have arisen in the wake of the establishment of the Institute for the History of the German Jews.67 An examination of where Jewish museums are currently located produces an inconsistent picture that mirrors local initiative rather than relative historical importance. As of now, Halberstadt has a Jewish museum, but Leipzig does not. In northern Germany, where the pre-1933 Jewish communities of Friedrichstadt and Glückstadt were at least as significant, if not more so, than that of Rendsburg, only the last has a Jewish museum. Similarly, in Baden, there are no Jewish museums in Mannheim and Karlsruhe, as opposed to the smaller Jewish communities of Emmendingen and Sulzburg. Thus, the historical development of German

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Jewry—which, from the mid-19th century, was basically an urban community—is no longer reflected in the landscape of today’s Jewish museums. Nonetheless, the significance of these local initiatives should not be underestimated. Without them, many Jewish artifacts, monuments, and even cemeteries would have been lost forever. Even more important, though still very hard to assess, is the role of postwar Jewish museums in the process of re-formulating the historical self-image of the various regions of Germany—and, indeed, the notion of Heimat (homeland) as a whole. In common with innumerable school papers written for history competitions under the auspices of the president of the Federal Republic, Jewish museums appear to have contributed to a broad-based change in the awareness of the general public: to a large extent, Jewish history has become integrated into local memory. This process has taken place over the course of decades, accompanied by conflict, and it has compelled local communities to take a stand in favor of one or another interpretation of history. This, too, may be counted as an accomplishment. If a visit to a Jewish museum can be termed a “civilizing ritual,”68 it may be that the birth pangs attending the museums’ emergence were “civilizing conflicts.” It appears doubtful that any large, central Jewish museum could have had this effect on its own. Historical work on the local level was necessary in order to provide an initial basis for the national level. “History from above” at times encouraged “history from below”; at other times, it nudged it toward resistance. The two maintain a dynamic relationship.

Looking Back, and Into the Future Both history in general and the unique history of postwar Jewish museums place them in the context of the German “reevaluation of the past.” Within this context, every representation of Jewish history is framed by mass annihilation. This fact, in turn, confronts those responsible for mounting exhibitions with nearly insoluble dilemmas. Most fundamental, of course, is the question of how to deal with antisemitism and the Holocaust. The case might be made that, precisely in Germany, these topics properly belong to a German historical museum and ought not be “delegated” to a Jewish museum. In reality, as has been seen, Jewish museums cannot evade the issue. Yet especially in museums that devote themselves extensively to the subject, there is a risk that too much clarification and representation of historical events may render them somehow plausible or even inevitable, at least in the eyes of some museumgoers. Different dilemmas present themselves with regard to the representation of Judaism. The exhibiting of unfamiliar and foreign-looking objects from old times (and often from faraway places) may result in their being regarded as “exotic,” and may strengthen the impression of Judaism as an ossified religion. Yet given the fact that most of those visiting German Jewish museums have little knowledge concerning traditional Jewish practices (not surprising, given the widespread lack of knowledge concerning Christian religious practices), it is a complicated matter to present an exhibition dealing with more modern developments or nuances. Yet another difficulty relates to the material objects in Jewish museums: even where numerous Judaica objects are available, they have generally been randomly

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acquired and the collections remain fragmentary. Their coherence stems less from the objects themselves than from the stories and memories associated with them. Objects serve as points of contact, as catalysts for the narratives that represent the real core of most Jewish museum collections. This situation attests more than anything else to the hybrid character of German Jewish institutions—a cross between museums and memorials.69 Finally, a latent conflict exists between the current state of historical theory and museology, on the one hand, and the political and social expectations with regard to Jewish museums, on the other. Jewish museums, more than any other kind of museum, are assigned a role in the politics of memory and identity, to “educate” and— implicitly—to present a coherent “big story.” Museology and the philosophy of history have long rejected such demands. While Jewish museums invite theorization and critical analysis precisely because of their complicated status, their patrons and supporters have more concrete expectations concerning the manner in which a given museum’s message is conveyed to the public. From the perspective of museum theory and the philosophy of history, the invisible motto of historia magistra vitae (history is life’s teacher) that hovers above the entrance doors of Jewish museums may seem naïve. Nonetheless, it is what gives political legitimacy to the contemporary Jewish museums in Germany. The conceptual approaches of the museums and exhibitions under discussion here follow a trajectory from evidence to experience. Synagoga and Monumenta Judaica presented their objects in a matter-of-fact manner, almost as if they were pieces of evidence in an invisible trial against the prejudices of the past. In this, one can recognize Dan Diner’s description of the trial as a structural model for the early discourse about the Holocaust, with parallels to tendencies in contemporary theater.70 In contrast to the sobriety prevailing in the aesthetics of the 1960s, the 1980s were characterized by a more emotional attitude that at times even evoked nostalgia. In the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt or in the Jüdische Lebenswelten exhibition, objects were framed by an “aesthetics of reconstruction” that aimed at giving visual presence to what otherwise could be known only from texts. The reaction to this can be observed in the museums in Fürth/Schnaittach and Munich, and most radically in Vienna. The self-reflective mode of these museums gives them the character of “post-historical” museums that question the allegedly clear message of objects, insist on the fragmented character of collections, and reject the notion of a coherent narrative in exhibitions. None of this skepticism can be felt in the permanent exhibition of the Jewish Museum Berlin, which adopted approaches developed mainly in Britain and the United States in order to refine the concept of the “narrative exhibition.” Here, the key term was “experience,” which was understood in a very direct, even physical sense: engaging the visitors in activities and provoking their reaction. This approach marks an interesting change in attitudes toward those visiting museums, who are no longer regarded as passive recipients of “lessons about the past,” but rather as partners in a dialogue about the past, thus reducing the traditional distance between museum-goers, on the one hand, and curators and the museum as an institution, on the other. If postwar German Jewish museums are, as Cilly Kugelmann noted, “objects in an exhibition of contemporary history,” what is the outlook for their future? The most

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obvious factor in the direction of change is the imminent demise of the generation of eyewitnesses. Their life histories gave Jewish museums a large part of their legitimacy and authenticity; they were the narrators and the donors of objects. How and whether collections and knowledge will transfer the strategies of the museum in the future, and in which direction, is still open to debate. Moreover, the ethnic and demographic composition of the Jewish community and the general population in Germany continues to be transformed. The immigration of the so-called “refugee contingent” from the former Soviet Union and the process of religious pluralization have already dramatically restructured the nature of the Jewish community. It is still difficult to determine whether and how this will affect the Jewish museums, the composition of their audience, and their employees. In any event, this process is taking place against the background of ethnic and cultural diversity within the Federal Republic. In the future, it will be increasingly determined by people whose family history shares no context with the Holocaust. The contrast between “perpetrators and victims,” which determined the identities and the perspectives of two postwar generations, will die out or be transformed into new configurations. The most important question is whether the Holocaust will continue to constitute the negative point of reference for German and European identity, or alternatively, which other collective places of remembrance this diversified new society will find for itself. Given the already large proportion of Muslims, Jews may well not be able to retain the status of “minority par excellence” in European society. Whether Jewish history can serve as an historic example for other minorities is a matter already under discussion. Postwar Jewish museums in Germany arose under a very specific historical, political, and demographic constellation. This constellation will change in the coming years, and will inevitably affect the institutions inspired by it. In the Jewish museums, Germans have created a “Jewish space”; yet that space is predominantly occupied by their own needs. To date, Jewish museums in Germany, unlike those in the United States or other European countries, have less to do with the “construction of Jewish identity” than with the “reconstruction of German identity.” They are German Jewish museums—which is not the same as being “German-Jewish” museums. No one can foresee how such museums will continue to develop when the constellations that gave rise to them dissolve. We face upheaval and self-reflection. But even 20 years after the end of the Cold War, this does not necessarily mean that the “hot” history recounted in the museums will become “cold.” Jewish museums in Germany will probably remain, in the words of the cultural historian Herman Lebovics, “museums of troubled identities” for many decades yet to come.

Notes This essay was translated from the German by Sharon Neeman. I wish to thank my colleagues and friends—in particular, Amnon Barzel, Helmuth F. Braun, Richard I. Cohen, Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Wilfried Knauer, Cilly Kugelmann, Vivian B. Mann, Reinhard Rürup, Edward van Voolen, Johannes Wachten, and Manfred Jehle—for the many years of insights and experiences they have shared with me.

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1. Cilly Kugelmann, “Das Jüdische Museum als Exponat der Zeitgeschichte—das Beispiel Frankfurt. Ein Lagebericht und Versuch der Einordnung,” in Wiener Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte, Kultur und Museumswesen 2 (1995–1996), 43–56. 2. For a list of these institutions, see the appendix to Sabine Offe’s Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen. Jüdische Museen in Deutschland und Österreich (Berlin: 2000); Klaus-Dieter Alicke (ed.), Lexikon der jüdischen Gemeinden im deutschen Sprachraum, 3 vols. (Gütersloh: 2008); Ulrike Puvogel (ed.), Gedenkstätten für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus. Eine Dokumentation, vol. 1, Baden-Württemberg Bayern Bremen et al. (Berlin 1995), vol. 2: Berlin Brandenburg Mecklenburg-Vorpommern et al. (Berlin 2000). 3. Frank Stern, Im Anfang war Auschwitz. Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus im deutschen Nachkrieg (Gerlingen: 1991); Erica Burgauer, Zwischen Erinnerung und Verdrängung. Juden in Deutschland nach 1945 (Reinbek: 1993). 4. On remembrance, see Helmut König, Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit. Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewusstsein der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt: 2003); Christoph Cornelissen and Susanne Brandt, Erinnerungskulturen. Deutschland Italien und Japan seit 1945 (Frankfurt: 2004); Torben Fischer and Matthias N. Lorenz (eds.), Lexikon der Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland. Debatten-und Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus nach 1945 (Bielefeld: 2007); Irene Diekmann and Elke-Vera Kotowski, Geliebter Feind-gehasster Freund. Antisemitismus und Philosemitismus in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: 2008); Peter Reichel, Der Nationalsozialismus—die zweite Geschichte. Überwindung—Deutung— Erinnerung (Munich: 2009); Ulrike Jureit and Christian Schneider, Gefühlte Opfer. Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Stuttgart: 2010). On conflicts, see Werber Bergmann, Antisemitismus in öffentlichen Konflikten. Kollektives Lernen in der politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik 1949–1989 (Frankfurt: 1997); Thomas Lackmann, Jewrassic Park. Wie baut man (k)ein Jüdisches Museum in Berlin (Berlin: 2000); Horst F. Rupp, Streit um das Jüdische Museum in Creglingen (Würzburg: 2004). 5. Katharina Rauschenberger, Jüdische Tradition im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik. Zur Geschichte des jüdischen Museumswesens in Deutschland (Hannover: 2002). See also the essay by Tobias Metzler in this volume, esp. 56–59. 6. Elisabeth Gallas, “Die Restitution jüdischer Kulturgüter Europas zwischen 1945 und 1952,” in Raub und Restitution. Kulturgut aus jüdischem Besitz von 1933 bis heute, ed. Inka Bertz and Michael Dorrmann (Göttingen: 2008), 209–215; Katharina Rauschenberger, “The Restitution of Jewish Cultural Objects and the Activities of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc.,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 53 (2008) 191–211; Dana Herman, “Hashavat Avedah: A History of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc.” (Ph. D. diss., McGill University, 2009); Julie-Marthe Cohen and Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek (eds.), Neglected Witnesses: The Fate of Jewish Ceremonial Objects during the Second World War and After (Amsterdam: 2011); Chana C. Schütz and Hermann Simon (eds.), Auf der Suche nach einer verlorenen Sammlung. Das Berliner Jüdische Museum (1933–1938) (Berlin: 2011). 7. Jens Hoppe, Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur in Museen. Zur nichtjüdischen Museologie des Jüdischen in Deutschland (Münster: 2002). 8. On the relationship between postwar German Jewry and the wider German society, see Kugelmann, “Das Jüdische Museum als Exponat der Zeitgeschichte”; Burgauer, Zwischen Erinnerung und Verdrängung. On postwar German cultural history, see Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, Die Bundesrepublik—1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: 2009). 9. Given the extensive available material and the historical proximity of events described in this essay, the overview presented here is necessarily sketchy in nature. The majority of critical studies published in the recent past focused on the representation of the Holocaust. For numerous studies published on the Jewish Museum Berlin, see the online catalog of its library. Among others who have dealt with this topic in a more general perspective are Cilly Kugelmann, “Jüdische Museen in Deutschland. Versuch einer Standortbeschreibung,” in Tribüne 149 (1999), 214–222; idem, “Bringschuld, Erbe und Besitz. Jüdische Museen nach 1945,” in Erinnerung als Gegenwart. Jüdische Gedenkkulturen, ed. Sabine Hödl and Eleonore Lappin (Berlin: 2000), 173–192; idem, “Jüdische Museen in Deutschland. Versuch einer Standortbestimmung,” in Denkmale und kulturelles Gedächtnis

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nach dem Ende der Ost-West-Konfrontation, ed. Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper and Edward van Voolen (Berlin: 2000), 239–249; Offe, Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen; Hoppe, Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur in Museen; Bernhard Purin, “Jüdische Museen in Deutschland und Österreich. Mahnmale, Gedenkstätten oder Ärgernisse?” in Nurinst (2004), 9–18. 10. In 1979, the Central Council of the Jews in Germany founded the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg. Seminars on Jewish history had been conducted byAdolf Leschnitzer at the Free University in Berlin since 1952. 11. The exhibition was held in the Recklinghausen Municipal Art Gallery, (Städtische Kunst-halle), November 3, 1960 through January 15, 1961: see the catalog, Synagoga. Kultgeräte u. Kunstwerke von der Zeit der Patriarchen bis zur Gegenwart (Recklinghausen: 1961). 12. In Frankfurt, the exhibition was held at the Historical Museum (Historisches Museum Frankfurt), May 7 through July 16, 1961: see the catalog, Synagoga. Jüdische Altertümer, Handschriften and Kultgeräte (Frankfurt: 1961). On the exhibition, see also Hans Chanoch Meyer, Wilhelm Michaelis, and Franz Lorenz (eds.), Ernte der Synagoga Recklinghausen. Zeugnisse jüdischer Geistigkeit (Frankfurt: 1962). 13. Catalog: Synagoga 1960, report by the exhibition management, no page number. 14. Previous exhibitions were Nacht über Deutschland; Hier fliegen keine Schmetterlinge (children’s drawings from Theresienstadt, known in English as I Never Saw Another Butterfly); and Die Vergangenhiet mahnt; on these exhibitions, see Cornelia Brink, Auschwitz in der Pauls-kirche. Erinnerungspolitik in Fotoausstellungen der sechziger Jahre (Marburg: 2000); Stephan A. Glienke, “Die Darstellung der Shoah im öffentlichen Raum. Die Ausstellung ‘Die Vergangenheit mahnt’ (1960–1962),” in Erfolgsgeschichte Bundesrepublik? Die Nachkriegsgesellschaft im langen Schatten des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Stephan A. Glienke (Göttingen: 2008), 147–184. 15. Shida Kiani, “Zum politischen Umgang mit Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik. Die Schmierwelle im Winter 1959/60,” in Glienke (ed.), Erfolgsgeschichte Bundesrepublik?, 115–145. 16. Alvin Müller-Jerina, Germania Judaica-Kölner Bibliothek zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums. Die Entwicklung und Bedeutung einer wissenschaftlichen Spezialbibliothek (Cologne: 1986), 26–34. In those years, the city of Cologne, located halfway between the national capital, Bonn, and the headquarters of the Central Council of the Jews in Germany in Düsseldorf, played a special role in German-Jewish relations. Israel opened a diplomatic office in Cologne in 1953, and a scholarly exchange program between Cologne and Tel Aviv began around 1960. Full diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic and Israel were established in 1965. 17. Municipal Museum of Cologne (Kölnisches Stadtmuseum), October 15, 1963 through March 15, 1964. See Konrad Schilling (ed.), Monumenta Judaica. 2000 Jahre Geschichte und Kultur der Juden am Rhein; eine Ausstellung im Kölnischen Stadtmuseum, vol. 1 (catalog), vol. 2 (guide) (Cologne: 1963); Monumenta Judaica. 2000 Jahre Geschichte und Kultur der Juden am Rhein, Fazit einer Ausstellung, eds. Kurt Hackenberg, Maria Garding (Cologne: 1964). 18. Schilling (ed.), Monumenta Judaica, introduction (n.p.). 19. The exhibition was held at the Jüdisches Gemeindehaus, September 1–22, 1965. See the catalog edited by Itzchak Pruschnowski, Historia hebraica. Jüdische Kunst-Kultur und Geschichte aus dem Staatlichen Jüdischen Museum Prag (Berlin: 1965). 20. One was the exhibition of children’s drawings shown in Frankfurt, the other an exhibition titled Jüdische Kunst im Feuerofen. See the catalog edited by H.G. Sellenthin, Jüdische Kunst im Feuerofen. Foto-und Dokumentar-Ausstellung. Jüdisches Kulturleben von Bühne und Film in Deutschland bis 1942 (Berlin: 1961). 21. The exhibition was held at the Berlin Museum, September 10 through November 10, 1971. See the catalog, Leistung und Schicksal. 300 Jahre jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin. Dokumente, Gemälde, Druckgraphik, Handzeichnungen, Plastik (Berlin: 1971). 22. Quoted in ibid., 6. 23. For instance, Hermann Gundersheimer, the former curator of the Jewish museum in Frankfurt; Franz Landsberger, the former director of the Berlin Jewish Museum; and the Jerusalem collector Heinrich Feuchtwanger, originally from Munich, all of whom contributed essays

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to both catalogs of Synagoga. Members of the juries established for Synagoga and Monumenta Judaica included Alfred Wiener and E.G. Lowenthal from London, Martin Buber from Jerusalem, Max Tau from Oslo, and Rafael Edelmann from Copenhagen; the members living in Germany included Eleonore Sterling from Frankfurt and Rabbi Ernst Roth of Mainz. 24. Martin Grosse Burlage, Grosse historische Ausstellungen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 1960–2000 (Münster: 2005), 183. 25. Examples of this trend are the Jewish Painters and Graphic Artists exhibitions in the Regensburg Gallery of Art from Eastern Germany (Ostdeutsche Galerie) during Brotherhood Week in 1977. As early as 1966, Thomas Grochowiak exhibited Ludwig Meidner’s work in Recklinghausen. In Berlin, Rudolf Pfefferkorn showed the works of Max Liebermann (1953) and Jakob Steinhardt (1967) in the offices of the Berlin-Wedding District Department of Culture. 26. See the comments by I.E. Lichtigfeld, state rabbi of Hessen, in the introduction to the Frankfurt catalog of Synagoga (n.p.). 27. Hermann Lübbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Nachkriegsbewusstsein,” Historische Zeitschrift 236 (1983), 579–599, esp. 587. The article gives an accurate albeit nonjudgemental description of the situation. 28. Alphons Silbermann, “Monumentale ‘Monumenta Judaica,’” in Tribüne 2, no. 8 (1963) 862–866, esp. 865. 29. Ralf Busch, “20 Jahre Arbeitsgemeinschaft jüdischer Sammlungen in Deutschland. Über ihr Entstehen und die Frühzeit,” in Aschkenas. Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 6, no. 1 (1996), 290. The list of participants indicates how long it took for various regional museums to be established. For example, the first initiators of the Jewish museum in Fürth, which opened in 1998, attended meetings of the Working Partnership as early as 1989. 30. Gerold Bönnen, “Isidor Kiefer und sein Anteil am Wiederaufbau der Wormser Synagoge 1957–1961,” in Aschkenas. Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 12 (2002) 91–113; and Jens Hoppe, “Das jüdische Museum in Worms. Seine Geschichte bis 1938 und die anschliessenden Bemühungen zum die Wiedererrichtung der Wormser Synagoge,” in Der Worms-Gau. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Stadt Worms und des Altertumsvereins Worms 21 (2002), 81–101, esp. 96–99. On the disputes concerning Judaica objects in Worms, see also Katharina Rauschenberger, “‘Hier atmet noch die gute alte Zeit.’ Das Heimatmuseum der israelitischen Gemeinde Worms,” in Aschkenas 12, nos. 1–2 (2002), 45–51. 31. Hoppe, Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur in Museen, 91–112; idem, “Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur in einem nichtjüdischen Museum. Das Vaterländische Museum Braunschweig,” in Historisches Bewusstsein im jüdischen Kontext. Strategien—Aspekte—Diskurse, ed. Klaus Hödl (Innsbruck: 2004), 153–168. 32. Gernd Biegel (ed.), Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum. Abteilung Jüdisches Museum, 4th ed. (Braunschweig: 1996). 33. On Schnaittach, see Gerhard Renda, “Judaica im Heimatmuseum—die Geschichte einer Bewahrung,” in Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums. Nürnberg (1989), 49–57; Offe, Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen, 209–210; Bernhard Purin, Jüdisches Museum Franken in Schnaittach (Fürth: 1996); idem, Judaica aus der Medina Aschpah. Die Sammlung des Jüdischen Museums Franken in Schnaittach (Fürth: 2003). 34. Schildt and Siegfried, Die Bundesrepublik, 434. 35. “Historikerstreit.” Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: 1987); Richard J. Evans, Im Schatten Hitlers? Historikerstreit und Vergangenheitsbewältigung in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt: 1991); Steffen Kailitz (ed.), Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit (Wiesbaden: 2008). 36. Examples include the exhibition in the Bethany Artists’ House, Hurra—Noch ist Preussen nicht verloren, as a critical counter-exhibition to Preussen—Versuch einer Bilanz; Alexander Kluge’s critical documentary Die Menschen, die das Staufer-Jahr vorbereiten. 37. Janusz Bodek, Die Fassbinder-Kontroverse. Entstehung und Wirkung eines literarischen Textes (Frankfurt: 1991); Wanja Hargens, Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod. Rainer Werner Fassbinder und ein Stück deutscher Zeitgeschichte (Berlin: 2010).

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38. Micha Brumlik, “Erinnern und Erklären. Unsystematische Überlegungen eines Beteiligten zum Börneplatz-Konflikt,” in Babylon. Beiträge zur jüdischen Gegenwart 3 (1988), 9–17; Dan Diner, “Schichten der Erinnerung. Zum Börneplatz-Konflikt,” in ibid., 18–26; Dieter Bartetzko and Roswita Nees, Stationen des Vergessens. Der Börneplatzkonflikt (Frankfurt: 1992); Kugelmann, “Das Jüdische Museum als Exponat der Zeitgeschichte,” 48. 39. Y. Michal Bodemann, Gedächtnistheater. Die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung (Hamburg: 1996). 40. Monika Richarz, “Luftaufnahme—oder die Schwierigkeiten der Heimatforscher mit der jüdischen Geschichte,” in Babylon 8 (1991), 27–33. Between 1966 and 1984, Ernst G. Lowenthal published four omnibus reviews in the Leo Baeck Yearbook that covered a total of 270 titles. 41. The museum in Rendsburg, which tried to make this claim by opening a few days earlier, was (and is) a department of the Schleswig-Holstein State Museum. On the Frankfurt museum, see Georg Heuberger, “Zur Vorgeschichte der Gründung des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt,” in Die Pracht der Gebote. Die Judaica-Sammlung des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt am Main, ed. Georg Heuberger (Frankfurt: 2006), 24–39; Cilly Kugelmann,”Das Jüdische Museum Frankfurt. Geschichte und Ausstellungen,” in Jüdisches Leben heute in Deutschland, ed. Uri R. Kaufmann (Bonn: 1993), 131–140. 42. Among the moving spirits of the commission were Frankfurt’s mayor, Walter Leiske, and Rabbi Georg Salzberger of the Leo Baeck Institute in London; additional members included Fritz Ettlinger, Kurt Wilhelm, Max Horkheimer, and Ernst Loewy. 43. No longer in use as a church, the historic meeting place of the first national parliament in 1848 functioned as an assembly and exhibition hall from 1948. 44. Helga Krohn, “Judaica im Museum,” in Die Zukunft beginnt in der Vergangenheit. Museumsgeschichte und Geschichtsmuseum. Hans Stubenvoll gewidmet (Giessen: 1982), 368–375. 45. Heuberger, “Zur Vorgeschichte der Gründung des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt,” 36. 46. Kugelmann, “Das Jüdische Museum als Exponat der Zeitgeschichte,” 46. 47. Ibid., 43. 48. Kugelmann, “Das Jüdische Museum Frankfurt,” 135. 49. Heuberger, “Zur Vorgeschichte der Gründung des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt,” 35. 50. See, for instance, Ästhetik und Kommunikation 14, no. 51 (a special volume titled “Deutsche, Linke, Juden”) (1983). 51. Vera Bendt, Das Jüdische Museum Berlin. Eine Abteilung des Berlin Museums (Berlin: 1986). 52. See, for example, the catalog for the presentation of the project in the Israel Museum: Kirsten Feireis (ed.), Daniel Libeskind. Erweiterung des Berlin Museums mit Abteilung Jüdisches Museum. Extension to the Berlin Museum with Jewish Museum Department (emphasis in original) (Berlin: 1992); James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: 2000), 152–183. 53. See, for example, Helmuth Eschwege (Dresden), “Resistance of German Jews against the Nazi Regime,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 15 (1970), 143–180. 54. See, for instance, Margot Pikarski, Jugend im Berliner Widerstand. Herbert Baum und Kampfgefährten ([East] Berlin 1978); Helmut Eschwege, “Resistance of German Jews against the Nazi Regime,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 15 (1970), 143–180. 55. On the 1988 commemorative ceremonies (and, more generally, on the shifting policies of the GDR vis-à-vis the East German Jewish community), see Karin Hartewig, “A German Jewish Communist of the Second Generation: The Changing Personae of Klaus Gysi,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 20, Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Dan Diner (New York: 2004), esp. 259–260. 56. The restored building, containing a permanent exhibit on the history of the synagogue and the Jewish institutions in the immediate vicinity, was opened to the public several years later on another significant date—May 7, 1995, the 50th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe. On the restored synagogue, see Hermann Simon (ed.), Tuet auf die Pforten. Die Neue Synagoge 1866–1995, a companion volume to the permanent exhibit of the Neue SynagogeCentrum Judaicum Foundation (Berlin: 1995).

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57. The exhibition was shown in the Ephraim Palace (East) Berlin, October 16 through December 11, 1988. See the catalog, “Und lehrt sie. GEDÄCHTNIS!” Eine Ausstellung des Ministeriums für Kultur und dem Staatssekretär für Kirchenfragen in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Verband der Jüdischen Gemeinden in der DDR zum Gedenken an den faschistischen Novemberpogrom vor fünfzig Jahren ([East] Berlin: 1988). 58. In 1934, the synagogue was handed over to the Gröbzig municipality by the shrinking Jewish community. It became a local museum, and thus was saved from destruction during the November 1938 pogrom. Today the building complex includes a synagogue, community center, and school. 59. The exhibition was held at the Martin Gropius Building (Berlin), January 12 through April 26, 1992. See the catalog edited by Andreas Nachama and Gereon Sievernich (vol. 2), Jüdische Lebenswelten. Jüdisches Denken und Glauben, Leben und Arbeiten in den Kulturen der Welt (Frankfurt: 1991) and a companion volume, idem, Jüdische Lebenswelten. Dokumentation der Ausstellung (Frankfurt: 1992). 60. Kugelmann, “Das Jüdische Museum als Exponat der Zeitgeschichte,” 55. 61. Martina Weinland and Kurt Winkler, Das Jüdische Museum im Stadtmuseum Berlin. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: 1997); Thomas Lackmann, Jewrassic Park; Vera Bendt and Rolf Bothe, “Zum Neubau des Jüdischen Museums. Zukunftsperspektiven. Kunstwerk Museum,” in Vera Bendt (ed.), Judaica. Katalog. Berlin Museum. Abteilung Jüdisches Museum (Berlin: 1989) 36–41; idem, “Erinnern und Leben,” in Wiener Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte, Kultur und Museumswesen 3 (1997–1998), 37–57. 62. W. Michael Blumenthal, In achtzig Jahren um die Welt (Berlin: 2010); see also the upcoming work by Daniel Bussenius to be published by the Jewish Museum Berlin; Offe, Ausstellungen Einstellungen, Entstellungen, 145–199; and the account given by the museum itself, online at www.jmberlin.de/main/DE/04-Rund-ums-Museum/02-Museumsgeschichte/00gruendungsgeschichte.php (accessed November 12, 2011). The negotiations over the Jewish museum coincided with a bitter and prolonged public debate regarding the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Eventually, the museum assumed the role of a counterpart to the memorial, which was established several years later. 63. Jutta Fleckenstein and Bernhard Purin (eds.), Jüdisches Museum München (Munich: 2007). 64. Andreas Heusler (ed.), Das Jüdische Museum München 1989 bis 2006. Ein Rückblick (Munich: 2006). 65. See the essay by Richard I. Cohen in this volume, esp. 16–17. 66. Liesel Franzheim, Judaica. Wissenschaftliche Kataloge des Kölnischen Stadtmuseums, vol. 1 (Cologne: 1984), vol. 2 (Cologne: 1990). 67. In addition, in the context of a comprehensive exhibition mounted in 1992, the Hamburg historical museum inaugurated a Jewish department with three halls as part of its permanent exhibit. Here and elsewhere, however, the significance of a “Jewish department” largely depends on the quality of its curator, who is often not assigned to the department on a full-time basis. 68. Offe, Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen, 306–314. 69. Ibid., 36–37; see also Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, “Thoughts on the Role of a European Jewish Museum in the 21st Century,” in this volume, esp. 255–256. 70. Dan Diner, “Ereignis und Erinnerung. Über Variationen des historischen Gedächtnisses,” in Shoah. Formen der Erinnerung. Geschichte, Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst, ed. Nicolas Berg, Jess Jochimsen, and Bernd Stiegler (Munich: 1996) 13–30; Mirjam Wenzel, Gericht und Gedächtnis. Der deutschsprachige Holocaust-Diskurs der sechziger Jahre (Göttingen 2009).

Post-trauma “Precious Legacies”: Jewish Museums in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust and before the Fall of Communism Ruth Ellen Gruber These monuments will thus be preserved for future generations in a new socialist society to which manifestations of racism and national chauvinism will continue to be entirely foreign and whose main aim will be the establishment and maintenance of peaceful relations among all nations and countries and removal of the threat of war once and for all time from the history of mankind. —The State Jewish Museum in Prague1

I vividly remember my first visit to the Jewish museum housed in the restored 17thcentury synagogue in Tykocin, a small village not far from Bialystok in northeastern Poland. It was the spring of 1990, less than a year after the first free elections that spelled the formal end of Poland’s postwar Communist regime. The synagogue, a massive masonry building with a high mansard roof, towered over the village. Desecrated during the Second World War, it had been rebuilt and restored in the 1970s and opened on November 1, 1976 as a branch of the Podlaskie District Museum in Bialystok.2 Its lonely and unexpected splendor in this out-of-the-way location lent (and indeed still lends) haunting power to a potent message of absence and loss. We entered the sanctuary, where brilliantly colored paintings, including the texts of prayers, covered the soaring walls and central four-pillar bimah. Cantorial music played from recordings. Ritual objects were displayed in a few scattered glass cases, with little contextual explanation. In the building’s stubby side tower, one circular room was arrayed like a rabbi’s study, and in another, a table was laid as if for a Passover seder. These installations reflected traditional ways of arranging Jewish exhibits dating back to the late 19th century and earlier.3 Yet the table laid in Tykocin was for a seder that only ghosts might attend. Jews once made up a majority of Tykocin’s population and formed about half the population on the eve of the Second World War. No Jews live in Tykocin now, and very few objects connected with local Jews or the synagogue itself survived the war.4 Those on display in the museum cases came from various sources; a guidebook of the collection, published in 1987, gave only general, if any, identification or provenance.5

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The synagogue formed part of a complex. A museum of local history, with space for temporary exhibitions, was installed in the former beit midrash next door. The material presented there provided little information on the Jewish history of the village, but in an annex to the synagogue a scale model of the town showed how prewar life in Tykocin had been grouped around two poles: the large church and Christian marketplace at one end, and the synagogue and Jewish marketplace at the other. Besides this, what struck me most was a bizarre temporary exhibit—a series of paintings by a local artist named Witold Górynowicz that was described as portraits of 42 “kings of Israel” (Jeroboam, Joas, Menasses, Amon, and so on), almost all of which seemed to portray the same face over and over, as if they were clones, or at least painted from the same model.6 According to the informative material provided at the exhibit, Górynowicz had created the portraits, which were hung in neat rows covering a wall, through “in-depth studies of psychology, history and sociology.” Little of this was evident, and not much in the way of additional information was provided. Jewish museums in post-Holocaust Europe evoke absence and provoke memory; what is presented in them is inevitably viewed through the backward lens of the Shoah. In parts of Europe, every prewar object on display is, in a sense, a “survivor” as well as a reminder—as are the restored and rebuilt synagogues in which some Jewish museums are sited. This haunted reality held particularly true in Communist-dominated East-Central Europe, the historic European Jewish heartland.7 The Jewish museums (or Jewish exhibits in mainstream museums) that existed in Communist-ruled states in the decades following the Second World War were the custodians of relics that had been “salvaged from the graveyard of destroyed Jewish life.”8 These included ritual objects, artwork, documents, books, and Judaica, but also everyday objects—coffeepots, cups, plates, clothing, even shoes–which, in the all but total absence of living Jews, were elevated to the status of venerated artifacts. Jewish history (if this figured at all in the exhibit) was generally treated as a finite experience, relegated to the past. As was the case with the collection of the Czechoslovak State Jewish Museum in Prague, the items displayed represented “symbols of the precious legacy bequeathed by European Jewry.”9 Indeed, The Precious Legacy was the title of a noted exhibition of Judaica from the Prague museum that toured the United States and elsewhere in the 1980s. It was also the title of a television documentary on the Prague museum and, more generally, Jewish Prague, that was broadcast in 1984. Praising the film as “deeply felt and reverently made,” the television critic of the New York Times went on to note that, “[i]n a way, the Jews who are left seem to be living in a museum themselves.”10 In the following essay, I discuss several Jewish museums that functioned in Communist East-Central Europe, examining the ways in which they presented Jewish history, culture, art, and tradition, while also bearing in mind that Jewish museums in general are often political places of memory that provide institutional definitions of both memory and “Jewish culture.” Their exhibits and orientations designate what should—or must—or must not—be remembered, as well as how and why designated objects of memory (and the past itself) should be represented and recalled.11 As we shall see, in the Iron Curtain conditions of post-Holocaust Communist Europe, both the absence of Jews and the pressures of Cold War ideology had an impact on these institutions and their operation.

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Models and Legacies A number of Jewish museums existed in Europe before the Second World War, in addition to collections of Judaica or individual relics in mainstream museums. These included the Jewish museums in Vienna (the first, founded in 1896), Frankfurt (1897), Prague (1906), Worms (1912), Budapest (1916), and Berlin (founded in 1933, just days before Hitler came to power),12 among others. Virtually all were established by or administered within official Jewish communal structures, and a driving force behind them was the effort of acculturated Jews to preserve and present the treasures of a religious tradition from which they had grown distant, at times with the assistance of certain non-Jews. Some Jews were already uncomfortable with the attitude of detachment and veneration accorded these relics. In a book published in 1933, an American Jewish travel writer described the collection of Judaica in the Prague Jewish museum, most of it salvaged from three ancient synagogues destroyed in a late 19th-century urban renewal plan that demolished the medieval Prague ghetto, as “unhappy dibbukim, things imprisoned between life and death, demanding either release into the grave, or back into the world where their beauty may be used again.”13 During the Communist period, Jewish museums existed in major cities including Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Cracow (as a branch of the city’s historical museum), Bucharest, and Sarajevo, and there was also a small historical exhibit in the . Jewish community center in Sofi a. The multifunctional Jewish Historical Institute (Z ydowski Insty. tut Historyczny [Z IH]) in Warsaw, founded in October 1947,14 featured a small museum that opened shortly thereafter, on April 19, 1948, the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, with two exhibitions directly linked to Holocaust commemoration: The Martyrdom and Struggle of Polish Jews from 1939–1945 and Works of Jewish Artists— . Victims of the German Occupation, 1939–45. The Z IH collections included paintings and other artwork (the largest part of the collection) along with ritual objects, including textiles, as well as documents and other material primarily documenting the Holocaust. A permanent exhibit “devoted to the struggle and martyrdom of Polish Jews in the period of the Second World War” was opened in April 1953 and “remained unchanged until the early 1970s.” A new permanent exhibit opened in 1983, following the Solidarity revolution, which included examples of artwork, handicrafts, and ritual objects as well as the Holocaust exhibition.15 In contrast to Warsaw, the Jewish museums in Prague, Sarajevo, Bucharest, and Cracow were situated in disused synagogues, as was the case with a small handful of Jewish museums or exhibitions located in provincial towns. Apart from Tykocin, such exhibits existed in Łan´cut, Poland; in the so-called Schach synagogue in Holešov, Czechoslovakia, which functioned as a branch of the State Jewish Museum in Prague; and in a medieval synagogue in Sopron, Hungary, which had been discovered in the 1950s. There was also a small display of items in the still active synagogue in Iasi, Romania, whereas the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, Poland was administered as a museum of funerary art that was a branch of the local architecture museum. In addition, a number of other synagogues in the region, refurbished for other use, maintained at least some of their fittings and Jewish character: these included sites such as the former great synagogue in Włodowa, Poland (a

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regional museum), the synagogue in Rakovník, Czechoslovakia (a concert hall) and the Moorish-style 19th-century synagogue in Malacky, Slovakia (a school). (The synagogue in Gröbzig, in what became the German Democratic Republic, had been turned into a “town museum” (Heimatmuseum) in 1935, following the official dissolution of the small Jewish community the year before; it functioned as such in the postwar period and was rededicated as a Jewish history museum in 1988, as part of a complex also including the former Jewish school and the cantor’s house [where the Heitmatmuseum was relocated]). These Jewish museums and exhibitions operated in countries where flourishing Jewish communities had, for the most part, been erased, and where the Communist authorities exerted varying degrees of pressure on the few Jews who remained. Jewish religious life and culture were generally suppressed, and the Jewish experience in the Holocaust was often officially ignored, downplayed, or treated as a footnote. Even if not actually imposed, a “collective amnesia” about Jews and the Jewish past was deliberately fostered.16 Following Moscow’s lead, antisemitism (often masked as anti-Zionism) became part of official policy. All Communist countries except Romania broke diplomatic relations with Israel following the SixDay War in 1967; local Jewish leaders routinely voiced support for the state’s official “anti-Zionist” policy. In some countries, Jewish community leaders became, for all practical purposes, agents of the state. Writing in 1971, the essayist and translator Maurice Samuel described Nazism and Communism as “twin malakheykhabole” (angels of destruction), adding: “The instrument of the first was mass murder, the bullet, and the gas chamber; that of the second was and is spiritual and cultural asphyxiation.”17 Almost all of the Jewish museums in Communist states were new, postwar institutions, though they differed in size, administrative status, and type of location. Only those in Prague and Budapest could claim to have a direct relationship to prewar Jewish museums. Some (such as that in Prague) were run by state or civic authorities; others (such as those in Belgrade, Sofia, Budapest, and Bucharest) were sponsored by Jewish communal institutions or functioned mainly as memorial displays. Some (such as those in Tykocin and Cracow) were Judaica branches of bigger museums. A few opened (or reopened) in the first years after the Second World War; others opened sporadically over the following decades: Cracow in 1958–1961; Sarajevo in 1966 (on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Jewish settlement in Bosnia); Tykocin and Bucharest in the late 1970s. Some represented an isolated— even token—recognition of Jewish culture, at times deeply colored by the prevailing party line on Jews. In Prague, an official guidebook to the State Jewish Museum made this duality clear: The piously cared-for collections exhibited in the State Jewish Museum simultaneously witness the profoundly human approach of our socialist society to Jewish monuments which still speak to the hearts not only of Czechoslovak citizens of Jewish faith, who are guaranteed all rights and conditions for the practice of their religion and play a full part in the building-up of a socialist society in Czechoslovakia, but also of all visitors to the State Jewish Museum who appreciate the art-historical and general cultural value of the collections of articles and other exhibits.18

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Yet such attitudes were not monolithic. Particularly with the waning of Communist rule in some countries in the 1980s, some museums operated within the context of an easing of Communist strictures that facilitated a nascent revival of mainstream interest in Judaism, Jewish culture, and the Jewish past, as well as the first stirrings of revival of Jewish communal life. This climate was especially evident in Poland, thanks to the impact of the Solidarity movement’s success in 1980. In the wake of the Solidarity strikes that resulted in the Gdansk agreement signed between Solidarity and the government in August 1980, there was a loosening of censorship that persisted in many ways even after the imposition of martial law in December 1981: books on Jewish culture and heritage were published; Jewish cultural events and Holocaust commemorations took place; scholarly research on Jewish topics was promoted. Moreover, as the 1980s advanced, some Communist governments, including that in Poland, sought to “play the Jewish card” and establish their democratic bona fides by showing increased openness on Jewish issues and allowing certain activities, including Holocaust commemoration, to take place.19 Generally speaking, however, the Jewish museums ended up serving a similar purpose: putting the living Jewish chapter of Europe behind glass; something to be looked at and (maybe) remembered, but at the same time both dead and detached from the contemporary world—and the future. They were like ancient tombs containing the possessions of the deceased. As noted by Richard I. Cohen: “For many visitors attending these [post-Holocaust] museums the encounter with the objects stimulates a form of engagement with the historic process that saw the elimination of Jewish culture from most of Europe.”20 To a considerable extent this was the case even in Budapest, the only city in EastCentral Europe with a sizable (though very assimilated) Jewish community throughout the Communist period; as many as 90,000 Jews were believed to live in the city. The museum, whose collections began to be assembled in 1910, boasted an extremely rich collection of Judaica, documents, artwork and other material. Closed in 1942— with its collections crated up and hidden—it reopened after the Second World War, still a Jewish institution, and still occupying the same annex of the huge Dohány Street synagogue where it had been installed in 1932. (The annex was built on the site where Theodor Herzl had been born.) Over the course of the next decades, the museum staged several major exhibits, though (in addition to the regime’s political constraints) it was plagued by lack of funds, lack of staff, lack of interest, and the progressively deteriorating condition of its premises. “Since its very existence, the institution had always been treated somewhat like an orphan,” Ilona Benoschofsky, who served as museum director from 1963 to 1994, wrote in 1987. “Now it was doubly so. There was hardly any money for its upkeep, much less for further development.”21 For decades, she wrote, there were only three staff members and only two permanent exhibitions on display: one focusing on Jewish history in Hungary before the Second World War and the other an “anti-Fascist” (that is, Holocaust) exhibit originally mounted in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the building suffered progressive structural damage from a leaking roof and other problems. There were no funds to undertake repairs, and galleries, exhibits and, at least on one occasion, the entire museum had to be closed. (The same fate threatened the Dohány Street synagogue next door. The immense and ornate

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temple, the largest in Europe and a symbol of Hungarian Jewry, was left to decay throughout the Communist period; by the 1980s, its ceiling was sagging dangerously, held up by cables and plastic sheeting.) Finally, in the 1980s (along with other limited official openings to Jewish heritage and culture, including a landmark photographic exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum in 1983 on the subject of contemporary Jewish life in Budapest),22 the state cultural administration “came to the conclusion that, because of the value of the collections, including the art treasures, something had to be done, even though the Jewish Museum was not a state institution.” The Culture Ministry and Central Directory of Museums stepped in to reconstruct the museum building, restore collections, and reinstall them in a newly curated permanent exhibition, which had a richly illustrated, hardcover catalog published in 1987 in several languages. The new permanent exhibition also included some photographic material on contemporary Jewish life.23 Even so, the museum was open only between the months of May and October; the official explanation was that the building lacked heating.24 Missing from Benoschofsky’s account was her own recently described role in partially undermining the museum and its collections. Zsuzsanna Toronyi, the current head of the Hungarian Jewish Archives, writes that Benoschofsky—who had been imprisoned and tortured by the Communist regime for “Zionism” during the 1950s—became a secret agent for the Communist state after her release. She oversaw a new inventory of the museum holdings, but in so doing omitted the original inventory numbers of objects as well as details “such as data about their provenance and where they were used, about which community owned the objects and how they had been acquired.” Since the regime did not favor private cultural donations, Toronyi writes, “the name and the occupation or social status of the donors—another source of social history—were also lost.”25 She adds: “As far as I have been able to ascertain, museum staff recycled the objects’ original catalog cards, using the reverse side as notepaper. Most of these cards were thrown away; only a handful survived.”26 Thus, “the Hungarian Jewish Museum became a small, minor museum. The objects could not be published in international academic forums, so although the Museum still possessed an important collection, its importance in the field of Jewish Studies, as well as in the collective memory, had declined.”27

Modes of Memory The mere fact of a synagogue standing empty of Jews, used as an exhibit or housing an exhibit, conveys—whether consciously or unconsciously—a sense of loss. Indeed, in Communist Europe, palpable absence may have been the most important “exhibit” with regard to the Holocaust and post-Holocaust period. Even in instances in which restored synagogues featured colorful wall paintings and striking architectural features, they tended to be hushed and somber settings in which congregations of worshippers were replaced by curious visitors (and the number of visitors was often sparse). In some cases, as in Cracow and Tykocin, a mournful, or at any rate solemn, atmosphere was further evoked by piped-in recordings of minor-key cantorial music.

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Most, if not all, of the museums fit a traditional pattern of arrangement. They featured static exhibits of artifacts and, in some cases, artwork, photographs, and documents. Though there were sections on the Holocaust, there was generally little overall narrative structure and little if any reference to contemporary, post-Holocaust Jewish society.28 A case in point was the Jewish Museum in the Old Synagogue in Cracow: “A large synagogue empty of worshippers, containing books that will not be read and menorahs that will not be lit [and] objects that once belonged in every Jewish home that have here become precious artifacts, displayed behind glass, the exotic remnants of a lost civilization.”29 The gothic building, dating originally from the 15th century and remodeled many times, was the oldest of the seven synagogues in Kazimierz (the city’s old Jewish quarter) that had survived the Second World War, and it was also the oldest existing synagogue in Poland. But Cracow’s 64,000 Jews had been killed; after the war, Kazimierz, though largely intact architecturally, became an underpopulated slum. Moreover, the Old Synagogue had been desecrated by the Nazis and left in ruinous shape: When the Germans entered Cracow in 1939, they ordered an end to prayers and turned the building into a storehouse. All of the Altschul’s precious relics and furnishings were either looted or destroyed by the SS. When the storehouse was closed later in the war, Germans came in and, in an orgy of looting and destruction, stripped the entire building of its metal, wood, gothic vaulting and columns. They stripped away so much that the entire ceiling and roof collapsed. It rained and snowed so much in the Altschul that weeds overtook the dilapidated walls and floor. By the end of the war, the Altschul was popularly used as a public toilet.”30

Painstakingly restored in 1956–1959 by the government’s Monuments Preservation Fund, the building was reopened to house a permanent exhibit of the Judaica collection owned by the Cracow City History Museum. (Before the Second World War, a small museum of ritual objects and other treasures was mounted, as the historian Majer Bałaban put it, “unfortunately very badly,” in a room of the synagogue building.)31 The synagogue itself technically remained the property of the small Jewish population in Cracow, but under a 1958 accord it was “rented” to the state for 99 years for the nominal fee of one zloty a year.32 The restored synagogue stood isolated in the heart of the archetypical Jewish ghost town; with its gothic vaulting, lateRenaissance stone ark and elaborate wrought-iron bimah, the building itself was the museum’s primary exhibit. The extensive collections displayed inside included “a somewhat random display of generalized Judaica”: liturgical objects, Torahs, textiles, shofars, dishes, books and manuscripts, photographs and paintings, plus a memorial section on the Holocaust.33 All were displayed primarily as art objects, as exotica, with little descriptive information and (except for the Holocaust section) little attempt to teach or explain what these objects were used for, by whom, how, and why. “It could be an exhibition of exotic Indian artifacts or material from the South Sea islands,” remarked Samuel D. Gruber, an architectural historian who is now the president of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments, when he and I visited the museum in 1993. At that time, the exhibit was much the same as it had been under Communism. “To look at this,” he added, “you’d think that Jews just sat around menorahs all day. Until there is an understanding about what is or was a Jew, stereotypes will be perpetuated.”34

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Jewish Museums and Communist Rule Czechoslovakia Under Communism, Jewish museums transmitted powerful ideological messages, sometimes implicit and sometimes overt. A good example is that provided by the State Jewish Museum in Prague, the biggest and best-known Jewish museum to function under Communism. Occupying several disused synagogues as well as the historic Jewish cemetery, its collections included priceless Judaica and other material, some of it originating in the collections of the prewar Jewish museum, but the vast majority collected from the 153 Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia that had been destroyed and looted by the Nazis. Founded by the Prague Jewish community in 1906 in the aftermath of the urban renewal of the area that once had been the ghetto, the prewar museum initially represented a symbol of Czech-Jewish acculturation, a means by which modern Czech Jews could preserve and present their own past. During the Second World War, the museum became a symbol of the Holocaust and the destruction of European Jewry. The Nazis took it over and, in 1942, founded the Central Jewish Museum (Jüdisches Zentralmuseum), which was dedicated to the triumphal display of the relics of a “degenerate” people. As the Czech author Jirˇí Weill put it: “The museum was supposed to be a victory memorial, for the objects displayed here belonged to a race scheduled for annihilation. Nothing would remain of that race but these dead things.”35 Jewish scholars—themselves doomed to deportation and death—cataloged the wealth of objects brought to Prague from the provinces. Some of the material was displayed for the private viewing of senior SS officials in the historic Prague synagogues whose congregations had been deported and killed. The accumulation and expansion of the museum’s collection of objects graphically paralleled the destruction of Jewish life. On the eve of the war, when some 118,000 Jews lived in Bohemia and Moravia, the inventory of the Jewish museum included about 1,000 pieces. At the war’s end, the number was estimated to be 200,000, and nearly 80,000 Czech Jews had been murdered: “The disproportion between these two figures is truly frightening, and a measure of the tragic history of the communities here.”36 Following the war, the museum was reinstated under Jewish administration, reopening to the public in 1946. This interval was short-lived: the Communists seized control in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 and took over the museum at the end of 1949. During the course of the next four decades, the State Jewish Museum was a symbol of the constraints placed on and around Jews, Judaism, and Jewish expression by the Communist regime. Though the official reason for the takeover was that the remnant Jewish community could not afford to maintain it, the museum was soon revamped to “become another instrument of Communist propaganda.”37 A report sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and published in 1953 quoted justification for this move as presented in the Prague Jewish community’s own bulletin (Ve˘stnik náboženské obce židovské). In it, the Communist writer Louis Fuernberg “demanded a complete reorganization of the museum.” A contemporary Jewish museum, he wrote, “must not only be a museum of history and art, especially if it is located in Prague” but must rather become “a museum of the official political, economic, and cultural history of

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the Jewish nation.” It must “show the situation of the Jews in feudal and capitalist society, and antisemitism as a phenomenon of social reaction.” And it must also “show the situation of Jews where they live as free and equal citizens of their countries: in the Socialist Soviet Union and in the new people’s democracies. This and only this can be the task of a Jewish Museum.”38 In line with this thinking, the museum was “completely reformed” in 1951. A report in Ve˘stník in May 1952 noted that the museum “had formerly presented only a record of Jewish religious life and customs.” Now, however, it had been reorganized “in harmony with scientific knowledge of our time, i.e., historical materialism.”39 It is important to note that these developments took place amid the Stalinist-inspired mass purge of high-ranking Jewish Communists, including party chief Rudolf Slánský, and thus reflected a much broader campaign that enshrined antisemitism as part of official policy. Slánský and 13 other senior Communist officials were put on show trial in 1952. Eleven of the 14 defendants were Jewish—eight Jews, including Slánský, were subsequently executed.40 Yet the museum’s postwar history also reflected a political climate that, even under Communism, was subject to some change. In Czechoslovakia, these changes took place in particular before and after the Six-Day War in 1967 and during the time of the “Prague spring” thaw and subsequent Soviet invasion and crackdown in 1968, and later in the years immediately preceding the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989. As outlined by the scholar Dirk Rupnow: “[In] 1950, [the museum] was nationalized; at the end of the 1950s, a memorial for the victims of the Holocaust was set up in the Pinkas Synagogue; after 1968, this memorial was systematically dismantled; in the 1980s, the museum gradually ‘opened out’ with important and much appreciated exhibits abroad; and in 1994, the museum was returned to the care of the Jewish congregation in Prague and the memorial in the Pinkas Synagogue was again set up.”41 (In the Pinkas synagogue memorial, the names of all the nearly 80,000 victims from the Czech Lands were inscribed on the synagogue walls. On the pretext of archeological and repair work, it was closed in 1968. “It’s a political question,” the Jewish intellectual Desider Galský told me in November 1989, a week before the Velvet Revolution. Even then, Galský was unwilling to speak on the record about the prolonged closure of the building: under Communism, the restoration of a monument to Czech Jewish victims of the Holocaust was a taboo subject.) Because of its unparalleled collections and ensemble of historic buildings, the museum was a major public cultural institution and a leading tourist attraction—an American Jewish guidebook published in 1962 described the museum exhibits and Old Jewish Cemetery as “the most popular tourist sites in Prague.”42 The museum collections were displayed in the High Synagogue (textiles), the Klausen synagogue (printed books and manuscripts), the Maisel Synagogue (silver ritual objects), and the former ceremonial hall of the Old Jewish Cemetery (Holocaust material, including a collection of drawings by children interned at the Terezín camp). The 13thcentury Old-New Synagogue formed an additional part of the complex. (As noted, there was also a branch in the small town of Holešov in Moravia, where the 16thcentury Schach synagogue was restored and opened to the public in 1964, housing a small exhibit on Moravian Jewish history.) A detailed description of the Prague museum and local Jewish history and lore occupied several pages in the locally

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published English-language guidebook that was available in Prague in 1966. Noting that Prague “possesse[d] the greatest concentration of historical Jewish remains in Europe,” it listed the museum as a three-star attraction—its highest rating.43 Although foreign tourists were encouraged to visit, and the museum, as noted, won international fame in the 1980s with its touring “Precious Legacy” exhibition, access to its buildings and resources was generally barred (or made difficult) to local Czechs, including the few thousand surviving Czech Jews.44 According to Arno Parˇik, a longtime museum researcher and curator: At the beginning of the period of normalization [that is, the reintroduction of hard-line rule following the Soviet-led invasion of 1968] most of the museum’s staff were forced to leave and the museum found itself in deep isolation, all foreign relations having been completely cut off. . . . In addition, most of the permanent exhibitions in the museum’s synagogues were gradually closed down for technical reasons and remained closed for many years. In the second half of the 1980s the museum had only two exhibitions open.45

The museum’s scholarly bulletin, Judaica Bohemiae, established in 1965, was not even published in Czech; articles in it appeared in English, German, and sometimes French, with abstracts in Russian.46 The independent local researcher Jirˇí Fiedler was prohibited from using museum archives in his documentary work in the 1970s and 1980s on synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, and other Jewish heritage sites. Moreover, despite the official welcome given to them, foreign visitors were kept under tight surveillance. A museum curator I spoke to in 1990 recalled to me how, under the Communist regime: “We had to get authorization from the authorities to speak with foreign visitors, and then, afterward, we had to write out reports on our conversations, whether it be with visiting scholars, journalists or whatever. It was the pressure of a totalitarian regime.” The ideological thrust of the museum was made quite clear in the illustrated English-language museum guide brochure available in 1989 (which has been quoted earlier in this essay). Though the brochure was well produced and informative, its introduction was couched in the lofty hyperbole of Communist agitprop: The history and development of Jewish religious communities is understood as the development of religious groups forming an integral part of the population of the Czech Lands and not as the history of the development of members of the so-called “Jewish nation of the world” artificially construed by the ideologists of Zionism. The history of the Old Jewish Town is simultaneously a testimony to the democratic traditions of the wide strata of the Czech people to whom manifestations of national chauvinism and racism are wholly foreign.47

Bulgaria In Sofia, Bulgaria, the party line was more literally visible in the display situated on the top floor of the Jewish community building. Titled the “Permanent Exhibition of the Rescue of Bulgarian Jews, 1941–44,” it celebrated the salvation of the country’s Jews during the Second World War while also exalting the postwar Communist leadership. (During at least part of the Communist period there also existed, in the lobby of the city’s disused Great Synagogue, a “small display of old synagogue appurtenances,

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including richly embroidered garments worn by Jewish brides in medieval days.”)48 Most of Bulgaria’s nearly 50,000 Jews had survived the war thanks to a group of politicians and Orthodox Church figures led by parliamentary vice president Dimitar Peshev. Their protests in March 1943 had forced the government to halt the planned (and imminent) deportations; King Boris III told the Nazi leadership that he needed the Jews as road construction workers and assigned them to work details. Between 1948 and 1956, nearly 40,000 Bulgarian Jews emigrated to Israel. Those few thousand who remained were apparently inclined or committed to Communism. Under Communism in Bulgaria, Jews were regarded strictly as an ethnic, not a religious, group. Most Jewish cemeteries were destroyed, and most synagogues were either destroyed or converted for other use. Bulgarian Jewry had formal, Communistdominated Jewish organizations, but these were culturally, not religiously, oriented, and religious practice and content was minimized if not removed. By the mid-1960s, the “main and only purpose” of Jewish organizations was “to serve as a channel of Communist indoctrination to the Jewish community, and to promote assimilation through mixing with non-Jews.”49 The exhibit at the Jewish community office reflected this party line. It included pistols, rifles, and other resistance artifacts, as well as photographs.50 The role of the church was presented, but the main emphasis was that the Bulgarian Jews had been saved by the Communists. The exhibit “gradually came to embody what it meant to be a Bulgarian Jew under Communist rule, or rather what the Communist Party regarded as a proper expression of Jewishness in Bulgaria,” wrote Charles Hoffman in his book, Gray Dawn, published in 1992. A pamphlet written in four languages (Bulgarian, English, French, and German) and quoted by Hoffman spelled this out. The exhibit, it stated: reveals historical truth: the Jews in Bulgaria were saved owing to the Bulgarian people, who, inspired by the Bulgarian Communist Party [rose] in defense of their Jewish fellow citizens. The exhibition also tells convincingly about the participation of the Bulgarian Jews in the epic struggle of the Bulgarian people for national and social emancipation, about the friendship between Bulgarians and Jews through the ages. Under victorious socialism, that friendship is an everlasting source of patriotism stimulating the Bulgarian Jews to be in the front ranks of the architects of free and flourishing Bulgaria.51

Romania In neighboring Romania, meanwhile, the Jewish museum that opened in Bucharest in 1978 was one of the tools used by Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen in an intricate power game he played with the Communist authorities. Rosen was a larger-than-life figure who later became controversial for his providing public support for the regime in exchange for religious and communal rights being granted to the Jews—among other things, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was given permission to operate in Romania, and Jews were generally allowed to emigrate. (At war’s end, there were approximately 400,000 Jewish survivors in Romania.) The country’s megalomaniacal Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, who came to power in 1965, kept a stranglehold on Romania through a vast secret police network, stringent

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economic measures, and a pervasive personality cult that extolled him as an all-powerful, all-knowing “Conducator,” or Leader—echoing Hitler’s title of “Führer”— who (along with his wife, Elena) must never be questioned, crossed, or disobeyed. At the same time, Ceaus¸escu was the only Communist leader who did not break diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six-Day War. He also permitted the steady emigration of Romanian Jews to Israel, although he extorted large financial payments for each Jew who left the country.52 Ceaus¸escu’s policy toward Jews and Israel was a calculated Cold War tactic aimed at winning support—and money—from the West: it also formed part of the image he cultivated as a “maverick” who bucked Moscow’s foreign policy line.53 Rosen, who served as chief rabbi from 1948 until his death in 1994, was central to this strategy, helping Romania obtain most-favored-nation trade status from the United States. He also created a personality cult of his own that, in Jewish terms, rivaled that around Ceaus¸escu; in a sense, this meant that he was able to speak to Ceaus¸escu with some of the same vocabulary. He wore a large star of David on his chest, hanging from a heavy chain, and he was referred to by Romanian Jews as “His Eminence.” His annual “Hanukiada” tour at Hanukkah to Jewish communities around the country was conducted in the manner of a state visit. Moreover, similar to the way in which the Romanian Communist-controlled media fawned over Ceaus¸escu and marked his every action with headline stories, the Jewish community newspaper devoted such a disproportionate amount of ink to Rosen’s activities that it was sometimes dubbed the “Rosenblatt.”54 Founding a Jewish museum in Bucharest was one of Rosen’s tactics in his duel with the regime. Ceaus¸escu’s official party line was a mix of Communism and Romanian nationalism, all tinged with Ceaus¸escu’s larger-than-life persona. In memoirs published in 1990, Rosen said that he decided in 1977 to “establish a collection of Romanian-Jewish historical documents and to house them in a museum” as a sort of preemptive strike to counter the Communist policy of “minimizing the importance of the Romanian Jewish community.” The Jews, he said, “had lived in the country for 600 years and it was a holy duty to record their achievements, their tragedies and their joys.”55 A disused synagogue, the Holy Union, or Tailors’ Synagogue, was chosen as the site. “Following my well-tried method of taking unilateral action first and receiving approval later, I did not seek any permit for establishing the Jewish museum,” Rosen recalled. Instead, [w]hen all the exhibits were in place, I invited the Minister of Cults to the opening. He came and did not voice any criticism of the fait accompli. I think he realized that the museum was an essential institution. In any case, it was too late for him to display disapproval. To the same “inauguration” ceremony, I also invited the American and Israeli Ambassadors and Philip Klutznick, president of the WJC [World Jewish Congress]. They came and showed their appreciation of a museum which tries to do justice to one of the great Jewish communities of Europe, its religious splendor and cultural achievements.56

A guide to the museum published in 2002 was more explicit in making this point. Looking back, it called the establishment of the museum an act of “civic courage”: “By breaking the Communist Party’s ‘rule of silence’ over the Jews and

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ethnic minorities as a whole, the museum proved that hushing up the facts had hardly any heuristic value. Actually, by redeeming the Romanian-Jewish history from oblivion, it constituted a challenge to, perhaps even a protest against, the government.”57 The exhibits included photographs, ritual objects, works by Jewish artists, and documents, including many documents relating to the Holocaust; the main hall was dominated by a large Holocaust memorial in the form of person veiled head to foot in a talit standing at the end of a carpet. Footprints on the carpet led to the sculpture but did not return. In 1991, the museum’s then-curator, Bernice Stambler, said that the footprints had been made by two women who had survived Auschwitz. “They lead in one direction, the direction of no return, the way to death,” she told me.58 One section of the museum was unapologetically devoted to Rosen’s activities, featuring copies of his books and photographs of his public appearances and meetings with international VIPs.

Yugoslavia The Jewish context in Communist Yugoslavia presented a somewhat different picture from that in the other countries described here. Though it was a Communist-led state under the tight rule of Second World War partisan leader Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia was not part of the Soviet bloc. In 1961, Tito founded the so-called Non-Aligned Movement together with Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Belgrade broke relations with Israel after the Six-Day War. At the same time, more than 4,500 Jews had taken an active role as anti-Nazi/anti-Fascist partisans in the Second World War, and one of Tito’s closest wartime and postwar collaborators was the Jewish Communist and national hero Moša Pijade, for whom streets, squares, and institutions around the country were named. About half of the 12,500 Jews of Yugoslavia who survived the Holocaust left for Israel by 1952, while those who remained were encouraged to rebuild their community as part of the national mosaic of ethnic and religious groups that constituted postwar Yugoslavia. “We were particularly concerned to show that Jewish history here does not only lie in chronicles of bloodshed and graveyards but, above all, in culture and art which is inextricably entwined with that of the Yugoslav nations and nationalities,” wrote Ante Soric´ director of Zagreb’s Museum Gallery Center, in the introduction to the catalog of Jews in Yugoslavia, a major exhibition held in Zagreb in 1988. “Although the Jewish communities were decimated they have continued to live on in Socialist Yugoslavia, to show which is also one of the goals of the exhibition.”59 Milica Mihajlovic´, the longtime director of the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade, wrote in 2003 of an “ambivalent feeling” felt by postwar Jews in Yugoslavia: on the one hand, they are proud and the equals of all the other citizens of this country. They fought against Fascism, took part in the socialist rebuilding of the country and are a part of its economic and cultural life. There are many famous Jews working in the public sector, as politicians, artists and businessmen. On the other hand, diplomatic relations with Israel were broken off in 1967 due to the war in the Middle East, and the government’s official line was to follow an anti-Israeli policy.60

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Still, as noted by Ivan Cˇerešnješ, head of the Sarajevo Jewish community from 1988 until his emigration to Israel in 1996: “Tito’s Yugoslavia . . . afforded Jews opportunities that were the envy of Jewish communities throughout Eastern Europe. The Jewish community in postwar Yugoslavia was officially recognized as both a national and a religious community. It was allowed to conduct its affairs freely. . . .”61 The Jewish Historical Museum, located in the Belgrade building housing the offices of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia, was an important factor in this process. Cultural matters, according to Cˇerešnješ, “occupied a position of greatest importance within the communal framework ever since the war.” The museum fit into a scheme in which major Jewish centers such as Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo had Jewish libraries and reading rooms and individual local Jewish communities sponsored a wide range of lectures, meetings, exhibits, and other activities. The Zagreb Jewish community had “inherited a fine private collection of Judaica from the inter-war period,” and in 1966 a state Jewish Museum for Bosnia-Hercegovina was set up in the city’s 16th-century Old Synagogue.62 (Both museums, in Belgrade and in Sarajevo, were included in an encyclopedic tour guide to Yugoslavia published in 1982).63 The Jewish museum of sorts that was founded in Yugoslavia in 1949 was first conceived primarily as a memorial to the country’s destroyed Jewish communities. Located in Zagreb, it mainly comprised a collection of photographs of destroyed synagogues and cemeteries, plus documentation on lost or destroyed Jewish property. The collection was moved to the Federation building in Belgrade in 1952, and in 1959 the first permanent display of what was then called the Museum of the Federation of the Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia was opened. It had “a permanent exhibit of religious objects and material depicting the history of the Jewish community and its participation in the War of National Liberation.”64 This museum was expanded, redesigned, and reopened with some fanfare on October 7, 1969, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Federation. Now known as the Jewish Historical Museum, it had a new, 200-square meter permanent exhibition created by Vidosava Nedomac´ki, who for many years was the institution’s only curator.65 Its mission statement declared it to be “dedicated to the history of Yugoslav Jews, their juridical and economic position, religious and cultural life, traditions and folklore, their sufferings and struggle for freedom.”66 When it opened, Milica Mihajlovic´ wrote, the museum “was one of the most modern displays in Belgrade.” It began issuing a journal (Zbornik) in 1971 and staged dozens of temporary exhibits. The Encyclopaedia Judaica (published in 1972) described it as containing “well planned and carefully laid out exhibits of Jewish life in terms of economics, religion, history, culture, tradition and folklore. The Holocaust period and the part played by Jews in the war against the Nazis and for the achieving of Jewish freedom in Yugoslavia are also emphasized.”67 The role of Moša Pijade and Jewish partisans, of course, was accorded particular attention. But to these themes were added many old photographs of ordinary people (at work, school, and play) and places that rounded out a picture of a comfortable, middle-class Jewish life.68 Mihajlovic´ wrote that the museum was one of three main institutions run by the Federation that “symbolically showed the aims of the activities and interests of the

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Jews in Yugoslavia.” The other two were a Jewish old-age home in Zagreb and a Jewish summer camp on the Dalmatian coast. All three institutions operated in a secular society in which the Jews, too, were overwhelmingly secular. Thus, even as they strengthened a sense of Jewish communal identity, these institutions were explicitly part of a broader, multiethnic Yugoslav society. In Yugoslavia, Mihajlovic´ noted: “Instead of a religion, Judaism became a trait of nationality.”69

Conclusion In the examples cited in this essay, I have attempted to show how Jewish museums in the post-Holocaust Communist states of East-Central Europe were often political places of memory shaped by both the absence of Jews and the pressures of Cold War ideology. As we have seen, Jewish museums under Communism fulfilled several roles, consciously or not. Though they differed in size, administrative status, and type of location, they all served to conserve the “precious legacy” of the past, to memorialize (if only for a limited audience) the destroyed Jewish people and their world, and (in some cases) also to portray and/or illustrate the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. They were often among the few if not the only institutions to do so in countries whose Jewish populations were, for the most part, annihilated during the Second World War—and where, to varying degrees, postwar Jewish life and expression were suppressed by the Communist state and “collective amnesia” about Jews and the Jewish past generally “seemed to be much stronger than collective memory.”70 Yet these museums were often inadequately funded and understaffed. Moreover, given official pressures, their exhibits and/or operational policies implicitly and sometimes overtly reflected the prevailing party lines toward Jews, though these lines changed somewhat over the years depending on local developments or external “anti-Zionist” and other directives from Moscow. Generally speaking, the Jewish museums in Communist states placed local Jewish life and presence firmly in the past. Some, moreover, were situated in disused synagogues, where this absence was palpable as congregations of worshippers were replaced by tourists and other visitors. Exhibits on the Holocaust period sometimes stressed Jewish heroism—anti-Fascist partisans in Yugoslavia, for example, or the Warsaw ghetto uprising in Poland—as well as the destruction. In Bulgaria, the role that Communists played in the rescue of Bulgarian Jews was exaggerated. But other political and social considerations also played a role. This was seen, for example, in Bucharest, where Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen established a Jewish museum as part of his complex political duel with dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his policy of Communist nationalism; whereas in Yugoslavia, the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade served an identity-building function aimed at the overwhelmingly secular Jewish community as well as at the country’s officially multiethnic mainstream. Moreover, as Communist rule began to crumble in the 1980s, some regimes began to ease their anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist strictures, partly in order to claim legitimacy and demonstrate their “democratic” credentials. This was particularly evident in Hungary, with its significant Budapest-based Jewish population, and in Poland, where the Solidarity movement had breached censorship in the early 1980s

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and opened the way to a revival of mainstream interest in Judaism, Jewish culture, and the Jewish past. In 1988, the Communist leadership of the German Democratic Republic called on East Germans as a nation to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom and, as part of this, to put into motion the multimillion-dollar restoration of the ruined New Synagogue on Berlin’s Oranienburger Strasse. The authorities decreed the formation of the “Berlin New Synagogue-Centrum Judaicum” foundation to establish “a permanent memorial for present and future generations” and to create “a center for the promotion and preservation of Jewish culture.” Communist boss Erich Honecker himself took part in the laying of a symbolic cornerstone on November 9, 1988.71 The Berlin wall came down one year to the day later. After German reunification, the restored synagogue was ultimately reopened in May 1995—as a Jewish museum. A new era of Jewish museums in these countries was already at hand.

Notes Some of the material in this essay is drawn from my book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: 2002). 1. Introduction to The State Jewish Museum in Prague, official guidebook brochure (no date or place of publication listed), purchased in November 1989. 2. See the museum’s website at www.muzeum.bialystok.pl/tykocin/index.php. For a detailed description of the synagogue and museum collection, see Tomasz Wis´niewski, A Guide to Jewish Bialystok and Surroundings in Eastern Poland (Ipswich, Mass.: 1998), 23–33. 3. See, among others, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley: 1998), ch. 2; Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: 1998), esp. chs. 4 and 5, 155–219. 4. Konstanty Gebert, “Ratownicy Atlantydy,” Midrasz (July–August 1998); English translation (“The Rescuers of Atlantis”) appears in The Best of Midrasz 1998 (New York: 1999). Also see Wis´niewski, Guide to Jewish Bialystok. 5. Andrzej Lechowski and Ewa Rogalewska, Przewodnik po Wystawach Muzeum w Tykocinie (Bialystok: 1987). 6. According to my notes, the series of portraits had been commissioned by a Kazimierz Puchalski, with Piotr Kalicki as a consultant. Both men appear to have been active in a cultural association in Bialystok. The exhibition was meant to travel to Warsaw and Cracow after Tykocin, but I have no further information on this matter. 7. My discussion in the essay limits itself to Jewish museums found in the Communist countries of East-Central Europe and does not deal with the Soviet Union. I also do not treat specific Holocaust museums or memorials (such as those at Auschwitz and Terezín). 8. Yeshayahu Weinberg, “Story-Telling Exhibitions and Their Impact on Modern History Museums,” paper delivered at conference titled “The Role of History Museums in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe,” Warsaw, April 24–26, 1996. 9. Linda A. Altshuler and Anna R. Cohn, “The Precious Legacy,” in The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections, ed. David Altschuler (New York: 1983), 24–38. The book is a companion to the traveling exhibition from the Prague museum (called either The Precious Legacy or Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections, depending on the venue) that was seen in North America and Western Europe in the early 1980s.

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10. John Corry, “The Precious Legacy of Czech Jews,” New York Times (May 7, 1986). The award-winning half-hour documentary was directed by Dan Weissman and shown on PBS. 11. See Gruber, Virtually Jewish. On the ritual aspect and political use of museums in the fostering of a positive image of the surrounding society, see Sabine Offe, “Sites of Remembrance? Jewish Museums in Contemporary Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 2 (Winter 1997), 79; Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington: 1991), 88–103. 12. On the Berlin Jewish museum, see Tobias Metzler’s essay in this symposium. 13. Marvin Lowenthal, A World Passed By: Scenes and Memories of Jewish Civilization in Europe and North Africa (New York: 1933), 337. On 19th-century exhibitions of Judaica and the “institutionalization of Jewish art” in early Jewish museums, see Cohen, Jewish Icons, in particular ch. 5, 187–219; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, ch. 2, 81–128. 14. According to Jerzy Tomaszewski, “from its very beginning [the Jewish Historical Institute] performed functions which in Poland and elsewhere are normally divided between various institutions: research centers, museums, archives, and libraries” (“Polish Historiography and the Jewish Historical Institute,” in Jewish Historical Institute: the First Fifty Years 1947–1997, ed. Eleonora Bergman [Warsaw: 1996], 16). 15. For details on the museum’s collections, acquisition, and history in the Communist period, see Magdalena Sieramska, “The Jewish Historical Institute Museum: Collections and Programs,” ibid., 55–61. In Gray Dawn: The Jews of Eastern Europe in the Post-Communist Era (New York: 1992), Charles Hoffman describes it as a “modest exhibit of photographs and Judaica” (p. 252). 16. See Offe, “Sites of Remembrance”; David Clark, “Creating Jewish Spaces in European Cities: Amnesia and Collective Memory,” in Jewish Studies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, Judaism from the Renaissance to Modern Times, ed. Judit Targarona Borras and Angel Saenz-Badillos (Leiden: 1999), 274–281. On (specifically) Holocaust memory and commemoration, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: 1993). 17. Maurice Samuel, In Praise of Yiddish (New York: 1971), 111. 18. The State Jewish Museum in Prague (see n. 1). 19. I have discussed these issues at length in Virtually Jewish and elsewhere. 20. Cohen, Jewish Icons, 219. Cohen was describing post-Holocaust museums in western as well as Communist countries whose Jewish populations had been destroyed. A 1965 tourist guide to Prague described the collections of the State Jewish Museum as follows: In the synagogues in which there is no one left to pray are endless rows of little silver hands, with which the place in the torahs was pointed out, hundreds of mesusah, [sic] which were nailed to the door of dwelling houses wishing peace to the departing one, whole batteries of eight-branch candlesticks, lit on the Feast of Chanuk [sic], hundreds of thousands of prayer books, as well as rare first editions printed in the first Prague Jewish printing works of Zalman Horowitz. There is no museum in the world that has more than a dozen or so of torah curtains. In the Prague museum-synagogues there are 2,800, besides whole kilometers of brocades, embroideries and plain linen. (Alois Svoboda, Prague: An Intimate Guide [Prague: 1965], 27–33). 21. Ilona Benoschofsky and Alexander Scheiber (eds.), The Jewish Museum of Budapest (Budapest: 1987), 22. 22. The exhibition of photographs by Tamás Féner resulted in a book published in several languages in 1984; see Tamás Féner and Sándor Scheiber, And You Shall Tell Your Son: Jewish Customs and Ceremonies in Hungary (Budapest: 1984). At the time, Scheiber, a noted scholar, was head of the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary. 23. Ibid., 23–25. See also Géza Komoróczy (ed.), Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History, trans. Vera Szabó (Budapest: 1994–1999), 297–300. 24. In an interview I carried out on April 9, 1997, the then-director of the Museum, Robert Turan, told me he still felt the Budapest museum was very different from those elsewhere in post-Communist Europe:

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I always used to speak about the big differences between the other so-called Jewish museums and our museum because we are serving a living community. And in Prague, unfortunately, or in dear Warsaw, for instance, they are doing some heroic work but they have no real background anymore. And it’s tragic. So sometimes they have to fight against the state which tried to create a state-controlled jewel from the old Jewish places, like in Prague. It’s terrible to see the Jewish cemetery, and the Altneushul, and the Jewish town hall and everything, without Jewish life; it’s a bit absurd. It’s tragic. And for me that’s why it is not a nice gesture from the state, because it’s not enough. Financially they got the money for this, it’s a very good page in Baedeker’s [guide book], but it’s not Jewish anymore. 25. Zsuzsanna Toronyi, “The Fate of Judaica in Hungary during the Nazi and Soviet Occupations,” in Neglected Witnesses: The Fate of Jewish Ceremonial Objects during the Second World War and After, ed. Julie-Marthe Cohen and Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek (Crickadarn, Wales: 2011), 300. According to Toronyi: Without this knowledge, the spiritual dimensions of the collection were lost to the Museum. . . . Associations and the cultural contexts of the objects and their owners were lost. Without the cultural and historical background and connotations such as ownership, use, linked stories etc., the objects have ‘only’ material value, and the Museum is essentially reduced to a mere treasury of valuable items. As a result of the procedure that was followed, some memorabilia were lost altogether: objects regarded as possessing relatively little aesthetic or material value were not considered worthy of preservation. . . . In addition, information about the way objects had come to the Museum—as loans, donations or purchases, or as rescued objects—was also lost (ibid.). Toronyi’s article is a detailed examination of the Budapest Jewish Museum during the Second World War and in the Communist period. 26. Ibid., 301 (n. 61). 27. Ibid., 305. 28. In Prague, Hana Mayerová wrote that one of the first post-Communist curatorial moves in what was still known as the State Jewish Museum (its name was changed to the Jewish Museum in Prague when it returned to Jewish ownership in 1994) was to modify a temporary exhibit on the traditions of Jewish cooking that had opened in 1989, and to prolong the period of its display. “In 1990, Jewish cooking was not presented as a relic of surpassed culture, but as a presentation of the survival of tradition until the present day” (Mayerová, “The Exhibitions of the State Jewish Museum in 1990,” Judaica Bohemiae 27 [Prague: 1991], 93). 29. Michael C. Steinlauf, participating in a panel titled “Previously Untouchable Subjects in History Museums,” at “The Role of History Museums” conference (see n. 8). 30. Eli Valley, The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe: A Travel Guide and Resource Book to Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, . and Budapest (Riverdale: 1999), 296. 31. Majer Bałaban, Przewodnik po Z ydowskich zabytkach Krakowa (Cracow: 1935), 55–59. 32. Valley, Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe. Valley gives an extremely detailed description of the synagogue’s architecture and details. A lengthy description of the exhibits can be found in Eugeniusz Duda, A Guide to Jewish Cracow (Warsaw: 1990), 36–37. 33. Valley, Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe, 303. 34. See Ruth Ellen Gruber, Upon the Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today (New York: 1994), 205. 35. Jirˇí Weill, Mendelssohn is on the Roof, trans. Marie Winn (London: 1991), 67. 36. Hana Volavková, The Jewish Museum of Prague (Prague: 1948), 5. See also Valley, Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe, 53–55; Altshuler and Cohn, “Precious Legacy.” 37. Peter Meyer, Bernard D. Weinryb, Eugene Duschinsky, and Nicolas Sylvain, The Jews in the Soviet Satellites (Syracuse: 1953), 143. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid.

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40. See ibid. (chs. 9–10), for excerpts of trial transcripts, speeches, and media reports. There were also anti-Jewish purges in Hungary in the early 1950s, and in Poland in 1968, when at least 20,000 Jews were forced to leave the country. 41. Dirk Rupnow, “From Final Depository to Memorial: The History and Significance of the Jewish Museum in Prague,” European Judaism 37, no. 1 (Spring 2004), 149. 42. Bernard Postal and Samuel H. Abramson, The Landmarks of a People: A Guide to Jewish Sites in Europe (New York: 1962), 25. 43. Svoboda, Prague, An Intimate Guide, 27–33, 136. 44. See Hoffman, Gray Dawn, 15. 45. Arno Parˇ ík, “The Struggle to Protect the Monuments of Prague’s Jewish Town,” in Reclaiming Memory: Urban Regeneration in the Historic Jewish Quarters of Central European Cities, ed. Monika Murzyn-Kupisz and Jacek Purchla (Cracow: 2009), 201. 46. Judaica Bohemiae is still published by the Jewish Museum, with articles appearing in English and German. Originally published twice a year, it became an annual in 1994. 47. The State Jewish Museum in Prague. 48. Postal and Abramson, The Landmarks of a People, 19. 49. Hoffman, Gray Dawn, 223. The Bulgarian Jewish activist Robert Djerassi, born in Sofia in 1948, writes of his youth: “I was an enthusiastic true believer, and everything I did, I did in good faith. I sincerely believed that I was helping transform the world into something far more just and good—into a Communist World!” See “A Father’s Story: Three Walls, and the Spiral of Life,” in To Begin Again: Jewish Life in Central and Eastern Europe since the Fall of Communism, ed. Ruth Ellen Gruber (Vienna: 2010), 31. 50. The American novelist Robert Littell makes reference to a Jewish museum in Sofia in his 1975 novel, The October Circle. The novel is set in Sofia in 1968 and recounts the doomed reaction of a group of Sofia intellectuals, artists, and other elites to the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. One of the characters is Lev Mendeleyev, a Second World War partisan hero known as the Flag Holder, who is also a Jewish Auschwitz survivor. At the time of the novel, he is both the director of the Jewish center and the editor of “Sofia’s only Jewish newspaper” and is also one of the founders of the “Sofia Jewish Memorial Museum.” The museum is described as “a collection of photographs and paintings and etchings and maps glued on to plywood panels. . . . The display, which looks at first glance like a labyrinth of scaffolding, is meticulously organized. You come in one door to be confronted by a four-colored map that shows where in Europe the concentration camps were. . . . You follow the red footprints painted on the floor . . . and wind up, eighty-eight footprints later, facing a tall, narrow photograph of a chimney with smoke coming out of it” (p. 83). “We are the custodians of terror,” Littell has Mendeleyev tell a group of visiting American Jews, “terror lodged like a splinter in our memory; terror recollected in tranquility; terror alphabetized, systemized, cataloged, sorted, arranged chronologically, indexed, numbered and codified. And not comprehended.” (p. 84). 51. Hoffman, Gray Dawn, 212–213. It is worth noting that this exhibition is not listed in a 1981 locally published English-language guidebook to Sofia, though its ideological thrust fits well within the orientation of other city museums that are listed. These include the Georgi Dimitrov National Museum (honoring the Communist leader); the National Museum of the Revolutionary Movement; the National Military History Museum; the National Museum of Bulgaro-Soviet Friendship; and the Permanent Exhibition of Revolutionary Vigilance. See Dimiter Mihailov and Pancho Smolenov, Sofia: A Guide (Sofia: 1981), 189–191. 52. See Radu Ioanid, The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain between Romania and Israel (Lanham: 2005). On Rosen and his complex relationship with the Romanian Communist regime, see also Leon Volovici, “Romanian Jewry under Rabbi Moses Rosen during the Ceausescu Regime,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 19, Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 2003), 181–192. Criticism of Rosen began to be voiced openly only in the late 1980s and early 1990s; see Zvi Gitelman, “Reconstructing Jewish Communities and Jewish Identities in PostCommunist East Central Europe,” in Jewish Studies at the CEU: I. Yearbook (Public Lectures 1996–1999), ed. András Kovacs (Budapest: 2001).

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53. See Ioanid, The Ransom of the Jews. 54. Much of the information in this section is based on my firsthand observation as a correspondent based in Belgrade for UPI in 1978–1981, covering the Communist Balkans, including Romania. 55. Dangers, Tests and Miracles: The Remarkable Life Story of Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen of Romania, as told to Joseph Finklestone (London: 1990), 294. 56. Ibid. 294–295. 57. Hary Kuler and Lya Benjamin, The History Museum of the Romanian Jews “ChiefRabbi Dr. Moses Rosen,” trans. Viviane Prager (Bucharest: 2002), 13–14. 58. This is similar to the (fictional) Jewish museum/Holocaust memorial that was situated in Sofia in Robert Littell’s novel (see n. 47), although the novel was published in 1975, before the Bucharest museum was opened. 59. Ante Soric, introduction, Jews in Yugoslavia, ed. Slavko Goldstein (Zagreb: 1989), 9. The exhibition was held at the Muzejski Prostor in Zagreb and then traveled. 60. Milica Mihajlovic´, “Jewish Historical Museum, Belgrade,” in European Judaism 36, no. 2 (Winter 2003), 62–73. Mihajlovic´ retired in 2007 after serving for more than 30 years as curator (1974–1990) and then director (1990–2006) of the museum. Much of the information in this section is taken from this article. 61. Ivan Ceresnjes, Caught in the Winds of War: Jews in the Former Yugoslavia (Jerusalem: 1999), 5, 26. 62. Ibid., 27. Also see the catalog for Jews in Yugoslavia (see n. 55). 63. Nebojsa Tomasevic (ed.), Treasures of Yugoslavia: An Encyclopedic Touring Guide (Belgrade: 1982); published in English, Serbo-Croatian, and German editions. 64. Postal and Abramson, The Landmarks of a People, 258. 65. Nedomac´ki also served as president of the Association of Serbian Museums, a body that ceased to exist in the early 1980s (see Mihajlovic´, “Jewish Historical Museum, Belgrade”). 66. Jewish Historical Museum brochure (no date; obtained at the museum in the late 1980s and probably printed in the 1970s). 67. “Museums,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: 1972), 12:543. 68. This has pretty much remained the museum exhibit until the present. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their aftermath have prevented any change or upgrade. The bloody break-up of Yugoslavia after 1990 created separate states out of Yugoslavia’s former federated republics and also forced the dissolution of the pan-Yugoslav Jewish Federation and the creation of new national Jewish community structures in the new states. Though the museum was still “highly informative and educational,” Mihajlovic´ wrote in her 2003 article, “it is clear that the contemporary informative and educational means used in museums have advanced considerably.” The permanent exhibition, she added, is “past its sell-by date and time has already left its mark. The photographs have got a yellow tinge and are starting to peel off and there are numerous holes in the boards from the frequent adaptations required for various exhibitions” (“Jewish Historical Museum, Belgrade,” 63, 72). 69. Ibid., 64. 70. David Clark, “Creating Jewish Spaces in European Cities,” 275. 71. Hermann Simon, The New Synagogue, Berlin (Berlin: 1992), 20–23.

From Wandering Jew to Immigrant Ethnic: Musealizing Jewish Immigration Robin Ostow (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO) (WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY)

In 1986, almost a century after the first Jewish museum opened in Vienna, the first major immigration museum opened in Adelaide, Australia. In the years since, immigration museums have been proliferating and are now increasingly visible on several continents, both in national capitals and cultural centers and at current and former ports of entry. The Migration Museums network currently lists 20 immigration museums; the newest one, the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, opened in Paris in October 2007.1 In an era of increasing calls in many countries to limit the admission of foreigners, immigration museums respond by celebrating immigrants, showcasing national traditions of tolerance and hospitality, and, more recently, critiquing anti-immigrant government policies. They serve as public faces of diversity management, but they also address larger questions regarding migration and belonging. It is around these concerns that they display Jewish immigration in the context of larger migratory movements and nation-building. In Jewish museums, by contrast, displays of Jewish immigration are framed by Jewish history and by the national history of the country of destination. This essay will explore points of dialogue and dissonance among exhibits of Jewish immigration in Jewish museums and in immigration museums in a selection of western countries with large Jewish populations. The first area of focus will be three white settler societies that have evolved into multicultural democracies: the United States, Canada, and Australia. The discussion will then shift to the United Kingdom and to France, two former imperial powers that are now members of the European Union. Finally, the Federal Republic of Germany will be examined, as it faces special challenges and opportunities with regard to how—or even whether— to display Jewish immigration.2 Categories around Jewish immigration, images of Jewish immigrants, and the memories and stories the museums narrate, sideline, or suppress will be identified and discussed. I will also consider strategies of inclusion and exclusion in the exhibits and in the operations of the respective museums. A major focus will be the category “immigrant”: how that term is understood, how

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immigrants were (and are) admitted and integrated into, or excluded from, a nation and its history. Based on British settlement, the United States, Canada, and Australia all cultivate historical narratives of nation-building through immigration, and today identify themselves as multicultural societies. In each of these states, a Jewish presence has been continuous; Jews are considered an example of successful immigration and settlement, and as one immigrant ethnic group among many. In New York, a major destination for Jewish and non-Jewish migrants, four museums of different sizes and with differing mandates exhibit Jewish immigration. Located on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, an area associated with art and wealth, the Jewish Museum—founded in 1904 and the oldest of its kind in America—incorporates and displays Jewish establishment and success in the United States. It is housed in a building that was once the mansion of Felix Warburg (1871–1937), who came to the United States from Hamburg, Germany and settled in New York in the 1890s. The museum identifies Warburg as a “prominent businessman and philanthropist,” but not as an immigrant.3 Described by its director as “the preeminent museum in the United States devoted exclusively to 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture,”4 the Jewish Museum threads the story of Jewish immigration throughout the permanent exhibit, but treats it as a minor theme. This museum’s exhibit of immigration begins: “For over 300 years, Jewish immigrants have brought to America their talent and drive to succeed, displaying entrepreneurship, patriotism and often a great spirit of adventure.” The narrative begins in 1654, with the arrival in New York (then, New Amsterdam) of 23 Jews from Brazil, and ends with David Davidov, who was born in Tashkent, but today custom-crafts Central Asian musical instruments in his new home in the borough of Queens. Tracing Jewish immigration back to the 17th century, the museum demonstrates a Jewish presence in what eventually became the United States from the very early years of settlement. In doing so, it employs a broad definition of “immigrant” that includes all Americans except Native Americans.5 The displays, encased in conventional vitrines, include documents and photos of individual immigrants (sometimes with family members) alongside objects they brought from the Old World or else fabricated in America. These include, among other items, a wig-making set from late 19th-or early 20th-century Eastern Europe and a Rosh Hashanah greeting engraved on a walrus tusk from Nome, Alaska (1910). But the success of Jewish immigration to the United States is visualized primarily through the elegance of the museum, its location in what was once a patrician Jewish home, and through the many highly valued artworks produced by Jewish immigrants and their children. New York’s second Jewish museum, the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (MJH), opened in 1997 in Battery Park, by the waterfront. In contrast to the museum on Fifth Avenue, which “tells the story of the Jewish people,”6 this museum focuses on the Holocaust. The exhibits of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and of Holocaust survivors in the late 1940s, frame the major narrative of the Holocaust that took place in Europe. These displays position the United States, and specifically New York, as a safe haven for Jews. Voices of Liberty, an innovative immigration installation located in the back gallery of the museum, consists of sound stations triggered by electronic

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sensors. The visitor standing at each station looks out at the Statue of Liberty and hears the voices of post-1940 immigrants recounting their experiences of arriving in New York (some via the harbor and others through the airport) after having lost everything in Europe or the Soviet Union.7 In a later phase, this installation will allow visitors to voice their own feelings as they view the harbor and/or tell the stories of their own immigration to the United States (see Fig. 6.1).8 Complementing the major narrative, the Museum of Jewish Heritage features two special exhibits of immigration. Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow: The Jewish Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges tells the story of a small group of Jewish immigrant scholars from Germany who arrived in the United States in the 1930s and taught at black colleges in the deep South, in an era when black Americans had almost no access to white colleges and universities. More recently, in 2010, the museum mounted a temporary exhibit about the Morgenthau family. Descendants of 19th-century German Jewish immigrants, the Morgenthaus became part of the American elite, dedicating their lives to public and humanitarian service to the nation and within the Jewish community. One of them, Robert Morgenthau (1919–), one of New York’s most distinguished lawyers, served as district attorney for New York County, Borough of Manhattan from 1975–2009. He was also the founding president and chairman of the Museum of Jewish Heritage. As in the case of the Warburgs at the Jewish Museum, the Morgenthaus appear in the role of patricians, not immigrants.

Figure 6.1. Voices of Liberty, Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (photo: Melanie Einzig).

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In the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the contrasting displays of the European Holocaust and panoramic views of the New York harbor showcase immigration to America as the answer to Jewish persecution in Europe and Russia. In the United States, Jews find safety; as Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow and The Morgenthaus: A Legacy of Service demonstrate, they are also able to help integrate others who are disempowered and marginalized because of their race. Opened in 1990, the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York harbor is the largest of its kind worldwide and the iconic immigration museum in the United States.9 Set in the building where, in the years 1892–1924, more than 12 million immigrants, largely from Southern and Eastern Europe, were inspected and cleared for admission (and, in some cases, detained or rejected), it has become a site of pilgrimage for the 100 million Americans who can trace their families’ histories to this point of entry. The displays include, most impressively, the structure itself—especially the large hall in which the processing took place, and an exhibit in twelve small adjoining rooms documenting the immigration experience; the living conditions of those detained on the island (for medical or political reasons); “treasures from home” that arrived in the immigrants’ suitcases; and histories of the island and the building. At the other end of the building, ten large rooms containing blown-up photos and texts, titled Peak Immigration Years: 1880–1924, explains how, after passing through Ellis Island, many of the immigrants settled into ethnic enclaves in New York. These evolved into thriving communities that literally built the city. The exhibit also chronicles opposition to immigration on the part of nativist groups, and shows how, very slowly and with hesitation on both sides, the immigrants joined unions and fought for better wages and working conditions (see Fig. 6.2). While the upper floors are devoted to the mostly white European immigrants admitted at Ellis Island, the statistical installations on the ground floor widen the exhibit to include Africans brought to the United States as slaves and more recent immigrants from non-European countries. In this way, the museum reaches out to a broad range of visitors, and distinguishes voluntary from involuntary arrivals. The blown-up photos of those who passed through Ellis Island, their possessions, their documents, and also their voices (impersonated by actors and heard at sound stations)—all tell a story of people of diverse backgrounds who shared a universalized experience of immigrating to the United States and “becoming American.”10 Because in the pre-First World War era wealthy immigrants were processed on board ship and were spared the unpleasantness of Ellis Island’s Great Hall, this museum pays tribute primarily to the millions of humble people who found freedom and opportunity in the United States and who, in turn, helped build the country. Individual Jewish immigrants and families, the objects they brought with them, and the records of their arrival are integrated into the displays at Ellis Island. Their Jewishness is visible in their religious objects, sometimes in their dress, and in documents written in Yiddish. But as curator Diana Pardue told Joachim Baur: “There was a very specific intent not to talk about ethnic groups. . . . [T]he focus should be looking at their common experience as coming to the United States as immigrants.”11 Gisela Welz points out that Jews as a collectivity tend to disappear among the national South and East European groups featured in the museum, since identification is uniformly by the current name of the immigrants’ places of origin.12 Nonetheless, Jews

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Figure 6.2. New York City clothing workers’ strike, 1913 (photo: Brown Brothers), Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Peak Immigration Years (photo: Herbert Lappe).

are identifiable among the diverse immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who helped transform the United States into a modern industrial power over the course of the first half of the 20th century. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is dedicated to the settling-in of American immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Situated on New York’s Lower East Side (the demographic center of Jewish settlement in those years) in a tenement building in which many Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants lived, this, too, is an in situ museum about being “at home” in America. Six of the ten apartments in the building have been restored to the way they looked at different periods over the seven decades, from 1863 to 1935, when immigrant families lived in them. This is not a museum for visitors to wander through individually. Rather, groups of visitors are taken on tours of parts of the building. The titles of these tours—“Getting By,” “Piecing It Together”—reflect the museum’s anti-heroic approach to immigrant life.13 Guides explain the living conditions in the tenement and how they changed over the years and tell the stories of selected tenant families with the aid of objects and facsimile documents. In one apartment, visitors hear a short tape recording in which Josephine Baldizzi (1926–1998) recalls growing up in those rooms in the 1930s. Of the six families whose lives are displayed and narrated, four are Jewish: the German Jewish Gumpertz family, whose members lived there during the 1860s; the Levine family, which operated a sweatshop in their apartment in the 1890s; the Rogarshevsky family, whose apartment is set up the way it looked during the week

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Figure 6.3. Table in restored Rogarshevsky apartment, Lower East Side Tenement Museum (photo: Steve Long).

of mourning following the death of Mr. Rogarshevsky (from tuberculosis) in 1918 (Fig. 6.3); and the Confino family, Greek Sephardic Jews who lived in the building in the 1910s. The detailed narratives are neither sanitized nor nostalgic: visitors learn how Nathalie Gumpertz struggled to support four young children after her husband disappeared during the economic depression of the 1870s, and the guides explain the uncomfortable and (un)hygienic conditions that characterized the garment industry in the years when the Rogarshevskys and the Levines lived and worked in the building. At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the lives of Jewish immigrants are displayed powerfully and realistically in the context of American history, the development of the Lower East Side as an area of immigrant settlement, and the social history of the garment industry in the United States. The stories of the individual families who lived in the building come to represent the way in which many others settled into this neighborhood, and the intimate presentation of their lives facilitates empathy on the part of the visitors. Beyond explaining the displays of the Lower East Side as it was in the past, the guides relate the stories of these families to issues concerning immigration and the lives of immigrants to the United States today. The location of the museum in a neighborhood that continues to receive immigrants reinforces the message that immigration is an ongoing part of U.S. history. And it links the experiences of this building’s inhabitants to current debates around immigration to the United States. In November 2009, the Greek Romaniote Jewish community opened a museum just a few meters away from the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Located in the women’s section of a Romaniote synagogue built in 1927 (the only one of its kind in

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the western hemisphere), this Greek Jewish museum is a one-room display of Greek Romaniote Jewish history and art, including life in the United States. Because the immigration of Romaniote Jews was generated by poverty and not by pogroms, the display of this immigration focuses on continuity rather than rupture with the country of origin, highlighting a positive Greek identity and containing no reference to the Yiddish-American immigrant culture in the surrounding community.14 Jewish immigration to New York, then, is exhibited in multiple locations where its many meanings and outcomes are refracted. The longer narrative of Jewish establishment, creativity, and success in the United States is showcased on Fifth Avenue; the stories of New York as a safe haven from persecution and the tradition of American Jewish community service are exhibited at Battery Park; entering the United States as a poor person is presented at Ellis Island; and Jewish experiences of settling into the city are displayed and explained on the Lower East Side. The display strategies, the stories, and the framing of Jewish immigration in the exhibits differ. But in each case, the end result of Jewish and non-Jewish immigration is the same: becoming American. Canada has no major Jewish museum. Its immigration museum is located, like the one on Ellis Island, on its east coast—at Pier 21 in Halifax Harbor. From 1928 until 1971, 1.5 million “new Canadians” (as immigrants are now referred to in Canada) entered the country through this pier, which was also the point of departure for those Canadians who fought in Europe during the Second World War. The museum, which opened in 1999, exhibits 20th-century nation-building in Canada, through the confluence at this site of immigrants, the volunteers and officials who cared for them and moved them through the facility, and the soldiers and sailors who protected Canada and participated in the liberation of occupied Europe. At a superficial level, this museum displays Jews simply as one of many ethnic groups admitted to Canada who were often rescued from the worst of 20th-century European history. Yet the exhibit also hints at a more complicated story. At the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, immigration is displayed largely through texts, blown-up photos and documents, reproductions, the experienceoriented holographic film in a ship installation, and a simulated ride in a mock-up of a railway car. The exhibit begins with a series of enlarged photos—not in chronological order – beginning with Canadian soldiers liberating Caen in 1944. Subsequent photos show refugees from the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956; Italian men carrying tool boxes in the 1950s;15 Jewish children being loaded onto a covered truck in the late 1940s; war brides with young children in their arms; and a group of bedraggled displaced persons (DPs). This is the short version of how Canada helped free Europe from oppression and welcomed victims of war and Communism. The visitor then arrives at the observation deck from which Canadian soldiers embarked for deployment in the Second World War. This deck looks out over Halifax harbor; just beyond the mouth of the harbor, German U-boats were waiting to strike. Among the tributes to those who defended Canada (and, in some cases, paid the ultimate price) is a photo and text displaying Canada’s welcoming of hundreds of children evacuated from the U.K. But there is no mention of the fact that British children of African or Jewish descent were excluded from these evacuations.

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The large middle gallery is the hall in which the newly arrived were processed. It contains rows of benches that suggest those provided for the immigrants while they waited to pass through customs and passport control. A desk represents the stations where Canadian officials checked and stamped immigration papers. Today, the museum’s visitors can pick up a simulated passport and present it to a volunteer who impersonates an immigration officer. Every museum visitor is admitted to Canada. By contrast, in the immigration museums in Adelaide and Melbourne, visitors are invited to become participant observers in simulated immigration interviews in which many would-be immigrants are rejected. Another small gallery displays the activities of local volunteers who assisted families with children. But behind the displays of kindness, a darker history is suggested in the back corner of the second large hall, where a collection of small photos and texts points to some of the undersides of Canada’s immigration policies. A photo of Prime Minister Mackenzie King (1921– 1930 and 1935–1948) visiting Germany in the late 1930s contextualizes the much larger photo showing Canada’s acceptance of Jewish Holocaust survivors that is located at the exhibit’s entrance. Recently, historian Irving Abella reminded anyone who may have forgotten that Canada’s record for accepting Jews fleeing the Nazis was the worst in the western world.16 Pier 21’s largest installation, donated by Charles and Andrea Bronfman, whose family, on the basis of bootlegged liquor, accumulated a fortune in Canada already before the war, takes the form of a mock-up of a (generic) ship. Entering by way of a gangplank, visitors find a large auditorium where a 30-minute holographic film plays hourly. The presentation features actors who impersonate the soldiers and immigrants who passed through this site. The immigrant figures—Ukrainian and Italian peasants, Jewish Holocaust survivors, Baltic refugees, and British war brides—are all stereotypically characterized with exaggerated foreign accents and emotionality. In contrast, the Canadian immigration officers and nurses who assist them are portrayed as calm, caring, and more reserved. Pier 21 provides a good example of how historical omissions often result not only from the policies of museum curators, but also from self-censorship on the part of members of immigrant communities. Joachim Baur points out that when Pier 21 opened in July 1999, the keynote speaker at the opening gala was Rosalie Abella, a member of Canada’s supreme court who is also a postwar immigrant and the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Abella expressed profound gratitude to Canada for the safe haven and opportunity it offered her and her family. She referred to her new home as the country “that took one generation’s European horror story and turned it into another generation’s Canadian fairytale.”17 Nowhere in her speech did she recall the book her husband, Irving, coauthored with Harold Troper: None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948. Widely read and discussed when it was published in 1982, this work sharply criticized Canada’s immigration policies regarding European Jews in the years before and after the Second World War. Nor did Abella mention that she and her family passed through Pier 21 in 1950, five years after the war ended, because their visa application was subject to bureaucratic hurdles designed specifically to limit the intake of Jewish Holocaust survivors.18 In January 2011, Canada’s “none is too many” policy regarding accepting Jewish refugees from Europe was finally made explicit at Pier 21. A memorial to the Jews on

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Figure 6.4. The Hon. Jason Kenny, minister of citizenship and immigration, and Daniel Libes-kind architect, unveil the Wheel of Conscience on January 20, 2011 at Pier 21 (photo: ©SteveKaiserPhotography.ca).

the ocean liner St. Louis, who were turned back from Halifax harbor in 1939, was unveiled at the museum. The Wheels of Conscience, designed by Daniel Libeskind, features moving gears (marked “hatred,” “racism,” “xenophobia,” and “antiSemitism”) that disassemble and remake the image of a ship.19 The reverse side reveals the inscribed names of the passengers on the St. Louis (Fig. 6.4). The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 is planning a major expansion of its permanent exhibit to include the larger story of immigration before 1928 and after 1971. This will probably involve a rethinking of the museum’s ambivalent permanent exhibit, which straddles the border between a sanitized and a more nuanced account of immigration, including Jewish immigration, to Canada. Although Australia’s 107,500 Jews20 comprise only 0.5 percent of the national population, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide each enjoy both an immigration museum and a Jewish museum, and in each city, these museums work together closely.21 In the Immigration Museum in Melbourne and the Migration Museum in Adelaide, Jewish display objects, photos, and biographical sketches of Jewish immigrants or families are included in the permanent exhibits, but both museums refrain from using ethnic groups to narrate the story of immigration in the permanent exhibit.22 Both museums, however, reach out to immigrant communities through their temporary exhibits and their access galleries, which are dedicated spaces designed to allow immigrant groups to mount temporary displays of their culture and life in Australia. Displays of Jewish history, culture, and Jewish life in Australia have been mounted as temporary exhibits and in the access galleries in both museums.23 By contrast, the

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Jewish museums in Melbourne and Sydney narrate powerful and complex histories of Jewish immigration. In the Jewish Museum of Australia (Melbourne), the Australian Jewish history gallery greets visitors with a large video screen on which an actor impersonates one of Australia’s first Jews. “Found guilty of stealing 24 yards of black lace,” the text explains, Esther Abrahams, sixteen and pregnant, was sentenced to seven years transportation to New South Wales and was one of the twelve Jews on the First Fleet. During her journey, Esther met Lieutenant George Johnson, who was to become her life’s love. The two had seven children and were eventually married in 1814. For a brief period . . . Johnson served as “Lieutenant Governor” of New South Wales, making Esther Abrahams the colony’s de facto first lady. Australia was indeed a land of opportunity!

In this museum—and in the Sydney Jewish Museum, as well—Australian Jewry is traced to a matriarchal figure, an unwed mother who later married a non-Jew in a church.24 Equally important, Abrahams’ story positions Jews as one of Australia’s founding groups.25 Australian Jewish history, including immigration, is narrated (as many immigration stories are) as a romance: “Jewish convicts, free settlers, refugees and immigrants . . . have made a home here, establishing dynamic communities and participating in shaping all aspects of the country’s life.” But the ambivalences are exhibited, as well. Next to a display of a black leather briefcase, typical of those carried by German Jewish refugees in the 1930s, the text explains: “The Australian Jewish community felt for the Jews caught under the Nazi regime and was generous in providing financial support. However, when it came to pressuring the government to admit Jewish refugees, the establishment was not quite so enthusiastic.” The permanent exhibit ends with Australia’s most recent Jewish immigrants from South Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Israel. A sound station features several of these immigrants narrating their stories. One male voice with an Israeli accent tells visitors that he and his wife have two sons. When it became clear to them that Israel’s wars were unlikely to end anytime soon, they decided to emigrate to Australia, where the climate is similar to Israel’s, but where their sons can grow up in peace. At the Jewish museum in Melbourne, Australia is displayed as a safe haven not only for European, South African, and Russian Jews, but for Israelis, as well. The Jewish Museum of Australia mounted temporary exhibits devoted to specific immigrations. These include The Dunera Experience (1991);26 The Jews and Italians of Carlton (co-sponsored with the Italian Historical Society and the Museum of Victoria, 1992); From Russia with Hope (2002); and an exhibit about the South African immigrants, Everything but the Family (2007). Helen Light, director of the museum from 1983 to 2010, underscored the importance of temporary exhibits not just as products, but as processes. The 1992 exhibit strengthened the relations between the Jewish community, the Italian community, and the Museum of Victoria. And the 2002 exhibit was undertaken specifically at the request of the Jewish Community Council of Australia to help integrate the Russian immigrants. One result of this bilingual exhibit was that many Russian immigrants became regular visitors of the museum, and some are now volunteers.27 In contrast to the Jewish Museum of Australia’s focus on Australian Jewish history and art, the Sydney Jewish Museum centers on the Holocaust. “Long Journey to

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Freedom,” the section of the permanent exhibit devoted to the immediate postwar years, displays the drama and politics of this Jewish immigration to Australia by juxtaposing photos and expressions of gratitude on the part of survivor immigrants with texts explaining Australia’s postwar immigration policies and the conditions of their journeys. In the text beside his portrait, real-estate magnate John Saunders, the founder and major benefactor of the museum, explains: “I have always said that my liberation from Dörnbau concentration camp was the moment I was reborn. . . . I certainly didn’t anticipate coming to Australia and making it my home. I could never have imagined the welcome I received here and the wonderful life I have been able to make for myself and my family.” In counterpoint, the historical text composed by the curators notes: “It was the stated aim of the Australian government to maintain the proportion of Jews within Australian society at no more than 0.5 percent. This aim was achieved by minimizing the intake of Holocaust survivors.”28 Similarly, survivor immigrant Tom Kellerman testifies: “My first impressions were marvelous. I could not believe the beauty of the harbor and the surroundings.” The museum staff continues the story: “Considerable difficulties arose . . . in the attempt to gain a foothold in this new and alien environment. Almost all survivors arrived penniless . . . with little English and lacking recognized qualifications. . . . In the early years, both men and women worked long and hard in menial and unfamiliar jobs.” The exhibit’s final text praises Australia as a “model pluralistic and multicultural society in which the small but vibrant Jewish community could find a secure place at the ‘edge of the diaspora.’” But this claim is questioned by the building housing the museum, a fortified former war memorial in which all the windows have been bricked in as a result of security precautions. Recent years have seen the firebombing of several synagogues and other Jewish buildings as well as desecrations of Jewish cemeteries.29 The museum’s security system was installed by an Israeli firm, I was told—if Israelis immigrate to Melbourne to find peace and safety, in Sydney, they protect the Jews who are already there. In the Jewish museums in Melbourne and Sydney, conventional vitrines, photos, documents, personal belongings, and explanatory texts display powerfully and realistically the achievements of Jewish immigrants in Australia. At the same time, both museums make clear the difficulties, tensions, and ambivalences surrounding the issue of Jewish immigration. France and the United Kingdom have the largest Jewish populations in Western Europe. In both countries, Jewish settlement has been discontinuous, punctuated by periods of expulsion. Neither France nor the U.K. (in contrast to the United States, Canada, and Australia) narrates its history as a process of nation-building through immigration. Rather, immigrants are seen as add-ons to the preexisting national population. Jewish immigration to France is displayed in two large museums in Paris, the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (MAHJ) and the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration.30 Often referred to as the “Jewish Louvre,” the MAHJ emerged from two extensive collections: the Strauss collection of 82 pre-20th-century Jewish ritual objects, and a collection of pre-Second World War East European folk art and ritual objects. These have been extensively supplemented by archeological artifacts from medieval Jewish settlements in France, historical documents (especially concerning

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the Dreyfus affair), 20th-century paintings and sculptures, and a stunning collection of textiles from the Arab world and Central Asia. This museum displays a sober history of Jewish artistic and intellectual achievement and tells a tale of Jewish loyalty and service to France, which sometimes met with recognition, but often was reciprocated with rejection. At the MAHJ, the presence in France of Jews who arrived from abroad is represented first in a large section devoted to the “School of Paris,” the “foreign artists, mainly of Jewish origin . . . who had almost all left Russia and Eastern Europe between 1905 and 1913 to settle in Paris, then the undisputed intellectual and artistic capital of the world.”31 This display includes works by Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, Jules Pascin, Jacques Lipchitz, and Chana Orloff, among others. The influx of Jews is also part of the history of the building that now houses the museum. Built in the 17th century as the residence of the Count d’Avaux, by the late 19th century the mansion had been subdivided into small apartments and workshops in which Jews from Eastern Europe, employed largely in the garment industry, lived and worked. These Jews are referred to not as “immigrants” but as “refugiés.”32 The museum’s major Holocaust installation, Les habitants de l’hôtel de Saint-Aignan en 1939, by the well-known French artist (born of a Jewish father) Christian Boltanski (1998), displays, in the format of death notices, the names, occupations, and dates (where known) of the residents of the building in 1939 who were deported by the Nazis—aided by French officials. These names, written on the wall of the adjacent building, are visible to visitors as they walk through the museum. The final section of the permanent exhibit, Le monde juif contemporain, mentions briefly the many Jews who left the Maghreb countries and established themselves in France after 1948. It ends with contemporary works including photos by Gueorgui Pinkhassov, born in Moscow and now living in France, and by Patrick Zachmann, who works with the Magnum photo agency. Zachmann’s work explores a broad range of themes, among them the identity and life-worlds of current immigrants to France, and Zachmann’s own Jewish identity.33 In 2005, the MAHJ mounted Rencontres, an exhibit of photo portraits by Didier Ben Loulou that featured Jews living in Paris today.34 When I visited the MAHJ in September 2009, some of these portraits (with accompanying statements provided by the subjects) were interspersed throughout the permanent exhibit. In this way, the experiences and comments of Jews living in Paris today have become integrated into, and in some places have interrupted, the historical narrative. Almost all the subjects were born outside France, and many, like Albert Dichy, have globalized biographies: I was born in ’52 in the Jewish quarter of Beirut. I went to school at the Alliance française, then to a Jesuit school. Culturally speaking, I’m a Mediterranean mishmash. . . . And this is one of the reasons I now live at the Bastille, because it’s the heart and meeting place of several districts and more like Beirut than the Marais (Fig. 6.5).

At the MAHJ, Jews who arrived and took up residence in France appear in the permanent exhibition as artists, photographers, refugees, Holocaust victims, and as part of Paris’ Jewish population today. However, they are not categorized as “immigrants,” and their arrival and settling-in experiences are not displayed.

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Figure 6.5. Albert Dichy, Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (photo: Didier Ben Loulou, ©MAHJ).

The Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (CNHI), which opened in 2007, is the only immigration museum in Europe to have national museum status. Located in a large art deco structure built to house France’s Colonial Exhibit in 1931, its aim is to change the perception of immigrants and to enhance social cohesion.35 Narrative text, photos, and biographical vitrines that explain and illustrate immigration are organized thematically in its permanent exhibit. Some immigration museums avoid addressing illegal immigration, but this exhibit features six large photos of sans papiers demonstrating in Paris for their rights.36 Moreover, as in the MAHJ and perhaps most museums in Paris, the experience of immigration is also communicated through art. Large, colorful installations by native-born and immigrant artists occupy the center of the large galleries. The CNHI focuses on recent immigration, largely from France’s former colonies. The longer history of immigration (including Jewish immigration), starting in the 19th century, is narrated in the background and threaded through the exhibit.37 Biographical displays feature Jewish textile workers who arrived from Eastern Europe as well as Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. There are also explanatory texts and photos, especially of the Jewish settlement and Yiddish cultural life in the Marais section of Paris during the interwar period. Where the MAHJ foregrounds established Jews, Jewish art, and the status of Jews in France, the CNHI focuses on working-class immigrants and points to frictions within the Jewish community between the native-born and the newly arrived. One of the texts in the religion section explains: “Generally poor, expressing themselves only in Yiddish, the strangers disturbed the bourgeois and French image of itself that the Jewish community wished to maintain” [my translation].

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A large section of the main exhibit, exploring French racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, includes displays explaining that Marie Curie, the Polish-born immigrant physicist who won the Nobel Prize, was falsely represented as Jewish by her political opponents, and also showcases the Dreyfus affair. But the section on France under Nazi occupation contains little material on French collaboration. It explains the role of Protestant and Catholic churches in aiding and hiding French Jews, but there is no mention at all of the hundreds of Jews who found shelter in the Grand Mosque of Paris, or of the hundreds of Muslims in the French resistance who were involved in helping Jews. In 2009, the CNHI featured a large exhibit devoted to the work of Patrick Zachmann. It paired his exhibit Ma proche banlieue (The banlieue near me),38 163 photos of immigrants to France in the years 1980 to 2007, with two films, Bar Centre des Autocars (2007) and La mémoire de mon père (1996), about Zachmann’s relation to his father, who was a Jewish immigrant.39 At the CNHI, art—including film and photography—is a central medium for communicating the many facets of immigration. At the MAHJ, art created by Jewish immigrants is showcased, but the story of Jewish immigration to France is missing. Against this background, the photography and films of Patrick Zachmann, linking immigration and Jewish identity, represent a major breakthrough. If the MAHJ and the CNHI show limited will and/or ability to highlight the dimensions and the drama of Jewish immigration, some of London’s museums have embraced this story with energy and creativity. With a Jewish population of about 195,000,40 London has become a major Jewish museum city and the site of some of the most interesting and experimental work on the subject of Jewish immigration. The Jewish Museum London represents the merger of the older Jewish Museum London, established in 1932 to house an extensive collection of beautifully crafted ceremonial objects,41 with the London Museum of Jewish Life, a social history museum founded in 1983 to display the lives of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia in London’s East End during the 19th and 20th centuries. The redesigned permanent exhibit opened in March 2010, after an expansion and renovation of the building in Camden Town. This museum takes immigration seriously. The very first text announces: “The contemporary Jewish world has been shaped by three major events,” one of which is “the migration of Eastern European Jews at the turn of the 20th century.” The history section of the museum begins with a vitrine showcasing three objects: the bar mitzvah robe brought to London by Michael Issacharoff, an immigrant from Bukhara, in 1938 (Fig. 6.6); a suitcase belonging to Kurt Abrahamsohn, a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1939; and the medal of the Order of the British Empire awarded to Helen Bamber in 1972 for her work with victims of human rights violations. The second installation expands the trope of immigration, featuring artifacts from the many parts of the world from which Jews have immigrated to the U.K.: North America, Spain and Portugal, Morocco, South Africa, Gibraltar, Germany, Central Europe, Greece, Egypt, Syria, Eastern Europe, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, India, and Central Asia. The Jewish Museum London is a family-oriented museum, and it features, in addition to text, photos, work tools, and objects from domestic life, a “great migration board game,” a reconstructed East End street, and Yiddish karaoke. To strike a balance

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Figure 6.6. Vitrine with bar mitzvah robe of Michael Issacharoff, suitcase of Kurt Abrahamsohn, and medal of Helen Bamber, Jewish Museum London (photo: Ian Lillicrap).

between celebrating this history and pointing to the tensions around it, the display includes a copy of the Aliens Act, which was passed in 1905 to limit Jewish entry to the U.K.42 Similarly, the museum displays the admission of 60,000 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany by means of dolls, photos, and letters and documents about the Kindertransport (the admission of 10,000 Jewish children from Europe in 1938– 1939), but also integrates into the narrative the subsequent internment of 27,000 of the refugees as “enemy aliens.” The exhibit ends with the new migration to the U.K. of Jews from across the globe who have “diversified the Jewish Communities in Britain. They have contributed their distinctive traditions to cultural and religious life, and some communities have set up their own synagogues.” An older and smaller institution, the Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art, is based on a different Jewish immigrant experience. Founded in 1915 by Lazar Berman, a Lithuanian-born Jewish designer and craftsman, its aim was to establish a collection of works by Jewish artists, and additionally, to offer native-born and immigrant Jewish artists, who at that time had no access to mainstream galleries, a place to meet and exhibit their work. On the eve of the Second World War, the Ben Uri Gallery aided in the absorption of refugee Jewish artists. But in the 1970s, as Jewish artists became integrated into the larger London art world, this gallery declined. Relaunched in 2001, it is currently housed in the St. John’s Wood section of the city. Its mission today is to display Jewish art, to help integrate Jewish and non-Jewish immigrant artists, and to build bridges, especially to new immigrant communities. Recent exhibits about immigration include Forced Journey: Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933–45 (2009); Regard and Ritual: Julie Held and Shanti Panchal (2007); and Jacob Epstein and Dora Gordine: Embracing the Exotic (2006).

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Besides mounting exhibits, the Ben Uri Gallery has developed a series of outreach programs. It brings Jewish immigrant art into schools, and it organizes the training of immigrant artists to provide art therapy for the elderly (both immigrants and nonimmigrants) and for traumatized refugees. In this way, it enables immigrant artists to support themselves and also encourages solidarity among groups. When I visited the Ben Uri Gallery in July 2009, it was hosting an 8th-grade class consisting largely of South Asian immigrants (Fig. 6.7). During their week at the museum, the guests were familiarizing themselves with the exhibit and developing marketing strategies for an immigrant art gallery. London does not have a large, established immigration museum like the one at Ellis Island or the CNHI. But the Museum of London opened a new permanent exhibit in June 2010. Its aim is to display London as a crossroads where groups of people have been arriving and departing since the time of the Romans. This exhibit marks a shift away from the traditional approach of focusing on London as the capital of an island fortress, moving the history of migration from the margins to the center of the city’s history. The narrative begins in prehistoric times and continues up until the year 2005; major tropes include environmental changes, social history, and migration, which intersect and are shaped by the dynamics of commerce and capitalism. Two major temporary exhibits mounted by this museum served as first steps in this historical reconfiguration. The Peopling of London: 15,000 Years of Settlement from Overseas (1993) displayed a series of major migrations to London, starting with Roman London

Figure 6.7. Summer Apprentice Project at the Ben Uri Gallery, students from Northwood College, summer 2009, courtesy Ben Uri Gallery, London Jewish Museum of Art.

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and ending with an installation, “The World in a City,” that mapped out the diversity of contemporary London. Belonging: Voices of London’s Refugees (2006) presented voices of London’s refugees from 15 communities through interviews, photos, objects, art, and film. It focused on the refugees’ personal stories of why they came to London, the challenges and barriers they face, and their contributions to the city. Parts of The Peopling of London have been incorporated into the new permanent exhibit, and some of the voices from Belonging are accessible on the museum’s website.43 In the new permanent exhibit, Jews appear among the many groups of immigrants, often in the back corners of the exhibition halls. They are featured as moneylenders who arrived in England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and as turn-of-the-20thcentury immigrants from Poland and Russia. In this museum, the conflicts around immigration are addressed head-on. The exhibit explains the discriminatory taxation, and the murder and the exiling of Jews in the late Middle Ages. It also points to the efforts to Anglicize the Jewish immigrants in London’s East End. The Jewish East End is displayed as “a Microcosm of London itself with all its divisions of class and background.” But the major exhibits of immigration at the Museum of London are those that explore the more recent postcolonial immigrations and the still unresolved conflicts associated with them. The closest thing to a dedicated immigration museum in the U.K. is 19 Princelet Street. This tiny, wobbly building houses what may be the most memorable exhibit of Jewish immigration in London. Located in Spitalfields, in London’s East End, and originally owned by well-to-do Huguenot refugees, this 18th-century Georgian town house was later subdivided. It contained residences and workshops for Irish immigrants fleeing the 19th-century potato famine, and then for Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (who built a synagogue in the back yard). More recently, the building was occupied by Bengali refugees. The museum was established by a Bengali immigrant activist, a Czech-born rabbi, and a Huguenot from South Africa. The building has been left in a dilapidated and dusty state. The permanent exhibit, Suitcases and Sanctuary (2000), is a series of installations created by local Muslim and Jewish schoolchildren, each working on the history of the other, together with their history and art teachers. The installations include a video on a TV monitor of Bengali children singing a Hebrew song about friendship (“Hineh mah tov umah na’im”) and a video of the same children, dressed in shtetl costumes, telling a Jewish joke about antisemitism (Fig. 6.8). Another installation features letters written by the children imagining themselves as 18th-century Huguenot refugees who had just arrived in London. The second floor exhibits three installations by contemporary adult immigrant artists. But the major display object is the house and its history. At 19 Princelet Street, there is no linear narrative of immigration. Rather, this museum is about imagining the experiences of immigration and identifying with immigrants and with marginalized groups. The use of works produced by schoolchildren makes it clear that this kind of imagining and empathetic identification are learning experiences, preparation for citizenship. This museum foregrounds the role of play and of art in building bridges to others.44 The immigration of the Jews is literally concretized in the building, which has served at different times as a home, as a workshop, as a community center, and as a site of the Jewish struggle against fascism in

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Figure 6.8. Kitchen with Bengali child on television monitor, 19 Princelet Street (photo: Joel Pike).

London’s East End in the 1940s. 19 Princelet Street is seriously underfunded, and relies on the energy of 300 volunteers from many communities, including refugees. In London, then, Jewish museums, the municipal museum, and a private immigration museum are at the forefront of displaying Jewish immigration from multiple points of view, in different parts of the city. At the Museum of London, Jews feature as a small group in the city’s churning population and epic history. At the Jewish Museum, the city’s Jewish population itself is seen as the product of multiple waves of immigration. The two smaller museums explore the role of art and of museums in forging solidarity with immigrant and refugee groups. If some museums in London are reorganizing their permanent exhibits to foreground immigration, displaying Jewish immigration in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) remains difficult. Rosmarie Beier-de-Haan, senior curator at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, points out that, although migration to Germany dates back to at least 1500, and the country experienced the greatest waves of immigration (after the United States) in the early 20th century, it never developed a concept of “immigration.” In fact, Germans avoid even using the word “immigration” (Einwanderung). They much prefer the term Zuwanderung (in-migration), which references immigration, but also less permanent migration.45 Especially postSecond World War migrants to the FRG were not categorized as immigrants. Rather they were: Vertriebene (German expellees from territories in what is now Poland and the Czech Republic that Germany lost at the end of the war); Gastarbeiter (“guest workers” who came as temporary labor); Übersiedler (Germans from the German Democratic Republic); Aussiedler (people of German descent from Eastern Europe); Spätaussiedler (people of German descent from Eastern Europe and the

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former Soviet Union after 1989); Asylbewerber (asylum seekers, many from outside Europe); or Kontingentflüchtlinge (“contingency refugees,” comprising mainly Vietnamese boat people and post-Soviet Jews). And, beyond the larger problem of acknowledging immigration are the inhibitions around even thinking about Jews coming to live in post-Holocaust Germany—despite the fact that more than 100,000 Jews live in Germany today, very few of them descendants of prewar German Jews.46 Recent years have seen initiatives and discussions about the importance of having a national immigration museum in Germany, but no plans to build one have emerged.47 To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome (which became the basis for the guest worker program) and to acknowledge Germany’s new citizenship law enacted in 2004, the German Historical Museum mounted a major exhibition on migration to Germany in 2005.48 In-migration Country Germany: Migrations 1500–2005 was a top-down, long-term view of migration to Germany and the role of migrants in shaping German history.49 The display was a conventional, chronologically organized collection of images around the migrations and the migrants. These included engravings and (later) photos of the migrants, as well as documents and posters communicating government policies and detailing the migrants’ statuses and fields of employment. The exhibit also highlighted the active, and often forced, recruitment of foreigners to drive Germany’s modernization and to maintain production during wartime, as well as the racially organized resettlement policies of the Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s. In this exhibit—in contrast to groups such as the Huguenots, the Czechs, and the Bohemians—Jews appear mostly as people who passed through Germany but did not settle there. A postcard from Trier (1899) shows Russian Jews in transit through Germany on their way to overseas destinations. The accompanying text explains that, on racial grounds, the admission of East European Jews to Germany was restricted. A photo from Munich (1948) shows Jewish Holocaust survivors at the train station, on their way to Israel via Paris. Germany’s newest Jewish museum, the Jewish Museum Munich, displays Bavaria’s capital as a crossroads where Jews (and non-Jews) are on the move. For centuries, Munich was a rest stop on the pilgrim route from Central Europe to St. Iago de Compostella, a major pilgrimage site in northwestern Spain. The timeline in the museum’s permanent exhibit indicates that, in 1905, approximately 25 percent of the Jews in Munich were immigrants from Eastern Europe; in 1920, there was an unsuccessful attempt to deport these East European Jews; and in 1989, Soviet Jews came to Germany as contingency refugees. Many of the images in the permanent exhibit show Jews arriving, leaving, being expelled, or visiting. The first section of the permanent exhibit is a whitewashed narrow corridor that suggests an airport. As visitors walk through, sound stations hanging from the ceiling allow them to hear the voices of Jews arriving in Munich over the last two centuries, narrating their first impressions of the city.50 A large map installation on an open space behind the corridor allows visitors to explore sites of Jewish history in Munich. But there are no displays of settling in, and very few images of Jewish homes. Many long-term Jewish residents of Munich do not find their voices, their friends, or their own experiences in postwar Germany in the museum’s installations.51 By contrast, Germany’s largest Jewish museum, the Jewish Museum Berlin, focuses on Jewish life in Germany. A short section of the permanent exhibit displays

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Jewish immigrant workers in the Ruhr Valley in the early part of the 20th century. The cover of the catalog features a photo from 1938 of young German Jews preparing to leave Germany for Palestine. Jewish immigration to Germany becomes incorporated into this museum’s narrative in conjunction with the end of the Cold War: “Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, German society has been in upheaval. . . . The Jewish communities . . . are no longer emigrant, but rather immigrant communities. . . .The ‘Russians’ didn’t come to Germany because history condemned them to do so, but rather because they want to make use of the chances an open Europe has to offer, just like any other immigrants.”52 The visual is a photo of Berlin’s most visible postSoviet Jewish immigrant, the author, columnist, and disco host Wladimir Kaminer. Post-Soviet Jewish immigration was also the subject of an exhibition mounted in the Jewish Museum Frankfurt in March 2010, titled Of all Places, Germany! JewishRussian Immigration to the Federal Republic.53 This exhibition, curated by a post-Soviet Jewish immigrant, displays the immigration and the debates around it from multiple points of view, with texts in German, Russian, and English. Photos, passports, and talking heads on TV monitors present the voices and experiences of the immigrants, of the politicians involved in the decisions to admit them, and of the Jews and non-Jewish Germans among whom they live. Beyond documenting the immigration experience, this exhibit highlights the tensions resulting from the influx of almost 250,000 people, and the integration of 95,000 of them into the Federal Republic’s small Jewish communities, and asks whether this influx will result in a new Jewish culture in Germany (Fig. 6.9). In the postwar and Cold War Federal Republic, Jewish immigration was unthinkable, but it was taking place. In 2011, six years after Germany acknowledged that it

Figure 6.9. “Departure/Germany’s Embassy,” Of All Places, Germany!, Jewish Museum Frankfurt (photo: Uwe Dettmar).

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is a country of immigration, it was still a non-topic in national museums. But recent Jewish immigration is beginning to be displayed and discussed in Germany’s Jewish museums, sometimes in exhibits curated by the immigrants themselves. In Jewish museum and immigration museum exhibits of the last 25 years, the premodern and antisemitic image of the wandering Jew as the “Other” who was excluded from settled, Christian Europe has given way to the image of the Jew as a successful immigrant in modern and postmodern societies. Immigration exhibits are often romances. They narrate difficult journeys to lands of promise. The many stories they tell are nationally inflected. They are often about nation-building and modernization, with immigration presented as positive and integrative. The narratives can reflect the receiving countries’ traditions of tolerance and compassion, or occasionally—as in the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme—its betrayal of those who seek refuge and a better life. Jewish museums and immigration museums make use of a broad range of display strategies. They present photos, documents, and artifacts brought by immigrants; they play immigrants’ voices; and they display immigrants’ cultural productions, especially their art. Jewish immigration exhibits sometimes include performances (such as Bangladeshi children singing Hebrew songs in East London), and some museums bring immigration stories and artifacts into schools. In many cases, the most powerful display object is the building in which the museum is housed. In Paris, the stately Hôtel de Saint-Aignan integrates Jews and their artifacts into the landscape of France’s aristocratic architectural heritage. But it is also a building that has been emptied of the immigrant Jews who lived and worked there in the 1930s. In Sydney, the visibly fortified structure housing the Jewish Museum interrupts the narrative of Australia as a tolerant and safe society.54 Jewish—like non-Jewish—–immigrants tend to be displayed as poor people, as artists, as families, as workers. Most often, the “good” immigrants are featured: those who are successful, articulate, and photogenic. Immigrants who get in trouble with the law, return migrants, those who continue on to another country, and those who succumb to the rigors of immigration and resettlement and become mental patients or drug addicts are usually absent. Intragroup conflicts are often ignored or downplayed, as are conflicts with other immigrant communities. And as museums, including immigration museums, come under pressure to be more inclusive, to attract larger numbers of visitors and supporters, the category “immigrant,” a legal and administrative status, is often stretched to include pioneers, settlers, and refugees. The major Jewish immigration displayed in these museums is the great migration of Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This immigration reshaped the Jewish populations of the United States, Canada, Australia, France, England, and Germany. Because they were so many, and also because of the economic expansion of that era, these immigrants became citizens and their children became integrated into the country of destination. Some of their descendants are today involved in the establishment of museums and displays of immigration.55 The exhibits and social histories of many Jewish museums reflect the Jewish communities of their respective countries as a merging of these immigrants and their culture with that of the Jews of Anglo and German descent who had arrived earlier.

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The migrations of the years just before and after the Second World War, though smaller, are also prominently displayed. Many of these “refugees” from Western Europe were highly educated and enhanced the cultural profile of the Jewish communities in their new countries. There are fewer exhibits about the immigration of Jews from the Middle East in the decades after the establishment of the state of Israel. The large post-Soviet Jewish immigration is just beginning to be displayed in museums in Berlin, Melbourne, and Frankfurt. The Jewish museums in Australia and London also address immigration from Israel. On the basis of his detailed analysis of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, and the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Joachim Baur argues that immigration museums represent a response to a crisis of representation of the immigrant-receiving nation.56 In an era in which nations can no longer be represented as homogeneous, descent-based cultural groups, immigration museums display nations as heterogeneous collectives based on populations that are mobile and can adjust to new situations. These diverse groups are presented as interchangeable and are integrated as equals into the national history. In the service of this narrative, hierarchies and conflicts within and among immigrant communities are played down. Hence, at Ellis Island, at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, and in the immigration museums in Australia, Jews are displayed as one of many ethnic groups. Some of the newer Jewish displays are also informed by this approach, celebrating the diversity among Jewish immigrants. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Jewish Museum London, and the Jewish museums in Melbourne and Sydney foreground the diversity within their Jewish communities, the subjectivities and dynamism of Jewish immigrants. By contrast, some more elite Jewish museums, for example, the Jewish Museum in New York and the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, downplay immigration in favor of showcasing Jewish presence dating back to the formative years of the nation, focusing on Jews as an integrated and established minority. The work of Patrick Zachmann in Paris and the exhibit Of All Places, Germany! are pioneering events exploring Jewish identity and immigration in France and Germany, respectively. Some of the most innovative approaches to Jewish and nonJewish immigration are found today in Australia’s immigration museums and in the smaller and less bureaucratic neighborhood museums—The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 19 Princelet Street, and the London Jewish Museum of Art. These museums are closer to the immigrants, and they often work in partnership with other groups. By encouraging immigrants to display their own cultures and stories, to identify with other communities, and to use art to build bridges of solidarity, these museums go beyond exhibiting the integration of immigrants. They practice it.

Notes Many thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting the research for this contribution. Thanks also to the many museum staff members who gave me so much of their time. Joachim Baur, Barbara Kowalenko, Naomi Lubrich, Oliver

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Lubrich, and Andrea Meza Torres discussed many of the ideas and arguments with me. Natascha Bodemann helped with translating from the French. Herbert Lappe served as art director. 1. See Migration Museums Web Community, www.migrationmuseums.org (accessed December 13, 2010). 2. Omitted from this essay is the modern state of Israel, whose very existence is based on Jewish immigration. Israel presents a special case worthy of separate investigation. 3. See the website of the Jewish Museum, www.thejewishmuseum.org/History (accessed December 15, 2010). 4. See Joan Rosenbaum, “Director’s Message,” at www.thejewishmuseum.org/Directorsmessage. 5. In postcolonial societies, Europeans who arrived and cleared the land (of forests, swamps, and indigenous peoples) are usually referred to as “pioneers” and “settlers.” The word “immigrants” denotes those who arrived after the formation of the state. The decision taken in many Jewish museums and immigration museums to identify everyone who arrived from somewhere else (that is, all except the indigenous population) as “immigrants” allows the maximum number of visitors to identify with the narrative. For a critical discussion of some of the consequences of this categorization, see Joachim Baur, Die Musealisierung der Migration. Einwanderungsmuseen und die Inszenierung der multikulturellen Nation (Bielefeld: 2009), 302–305. 6. www.thejewishmuseum.org, “Director’s Message” (accessed May 8, 2010). 7. Among other sources, these excerpts have been culled from the University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation and the museum’s own collection. 8. Museum of Jewish Heritage (MJH) press release (October 13, 2009). 9. In addition to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Baur points to the establishment of the New Americans Museum in San Diego (currently closed), and the Angel Island Museum in San Francisco Bay (Die Musealisierung der Migration, 197). There are also a number of other museums of immigration located in smaller U.S. communities. 10. For broader discussions of the displays and narratives, see Baur, Die Musealisierung der Migration, 79–198; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: 1998), 177–187; and Gisela Welz, Inszenierungen Kultureller Vielfalt. Frankfurt am Main und New York City (Berlin: 1996), 170–188. 11. Baur, Die Musealisierung der Migration, 115. 12. Welz, Inszenierungen Kultureller Vielfalt, 182. 13. For an opposing point of view, see Joachim Baur, “Commemorating Immigration in the Immigrant Society: Narratives of Transformation at Ellis Island and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum,” in Enlarging European Memory: Migration Movements in Historical Perspective, ed. Mareike König and Rainer Ohliger (Ostfildern: 2006), 137–146. Baur’s fieldwork predated mine by three years. In the interim, the exhibit changed. 14. See Marcia Haddad Ikonomopoulos, “Greek-Jewish Immigration to New York City” (paper presented to Modern Greek Studies Association Symposium, October 13–16, 2011, New York University), and the website of Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum at www.kkjsm.org (accessed December 13, 2010). 15. This photo can also be found in the “Peak Immigration Years” section of the permanent exhibit at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. 16. See Abella’s article, “Confronting Our Dark Past,” The Globe and Mail (January 18, 2011). 17. Quoted in Baur, Die Musealisierung der Migration, 216. 18. An obituary for Abella’s mother, Fanny Silberman, explains: “It took the family four long years to win the right to become Canadian immigrants—a battle against Ottawa’s inertial None is Too Many (Jews) mentality.” See Michael Posner, “Surviving the Nazis Helped Make Her Unstoppable,” The Globe and Mail (March 5, 2010), S6. 19. See Olivia Moore, “From Daniel Libeskind, A Machine of Shame,” The Globe and Mail (January 19, 2011).

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20. According to the most current figures published by the North American Jewish Data Bank, online at www.jewishdatabank.org/Reports/World_Jewish_Population_2010.pdf (p. 56). 21. The Migration Heritage Center in Sydney and the Adelaide Jewish Museum are online museums. The other four are conventional land-based museums. Cooperation among the two museums in each city usually takes the form of exchanging display objects, co-sponsoring temporary exhibits, and coordinating their collections. 22. The decision against profiling specific ethnic groups in permanent displays was made partly for practical reasons, given the hundreds of ethnic groups in Australia that would expect their story to be told and the points of disagreement between and within ethnic communities. But there is also an ideological component: the Migration Museum (Adelaide) quite deliberately refrains from reifying ethnic groups, which it views as social constructs. In the section of the permanent exhibit on “Cultural Interaction and Intermarriage,” the text reads: “Cultural historians find it easy to categorize people . . . into separate groups with different languages, ideas, religious beliefs and dress. But life did not fall into such neat categories in the colonial world any more than it does now. Men and women from different cultural backgrounds lived and worked together—and loved and hated together as well.” 23. The 1992 exhibit in Melbourne, Bridging Two Worlds: Jews, Italians and Carlton, co-sponsored by the Jewish Museum, the Italian Historical Society, and the Museum of Victoria (the parent museum of the Immigration Museum), was one of the events that sparked interest in building the Immigration Museum. In 2005, the Immigration Museum mounted The Buchenwald Boys: A Story of Survival. The Migration Museum in Adelaide hosted Trees of Life in its community access gallery, and a temporary exhibit titled Remember the Holocaust (June 6–August 31, 2010). 24. The text explains that the first Jewish prayer services in New South Wales were held in the 1830s. 25. Étienne Balibar points out that the reproductive family serves both as a major link between the individual and the state and as a vehicle for narrating the nation. See “The Nation Form,” in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: 1991), 96–100. 26. The ship Dunera arrived in Sydney in 1940, carrying 2,542 “refugee internees . . . a mixture of German and Austrian refugees, prisoners of war and Nazis”—who had been interned in the U.K. and then transported to Australia. The living conditions on board were appalling; once in Australia, the passengers were sent to detention camps as part of the internment of aliens during the Second World War. See Eric Richards, Destination Australia (Sydney: 2008), 151–152. See also Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain (London: 2004), 313–315. 27. Personal communication with Helen Light (April 18, 2010). 28. Much of the text on Australian Jewish life and history in this museum’s permanent exhibit comes from the work of Suzanne Rutland, the chair of the department of Hebrew, biblical and Jewish studies at the University of Sydney and an active adviser at the Jewish Museum Sydney. Her major publication is Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (Sydney: 2001). See also Richards, Destination Australia for a similar account. 29. See Suzanne Rutland, The Jews in Australia (Melbourne: 2005), 154–161. 30. A third museum, the Mémorial de la SHOAH. Musée, Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (Memorial Museum of the Shoah), a major facility for commemoration and documentation of the Shoah, does not seriously address Jewish migration to France. 31. “Museum of Jewish Art and History,” a special English-language issue of Connaissance des Arts (Paris) (1998), 58. 32. Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (MAHJ), Guide des Collections (Paris: 1998), 145. 33. See www.magnumphotos.com/PatrickZachmann (accessed December 13, 2010). 34. See www.didierbenloulou.com/dictio-en-18.html (accessed December 13, 2010). 35. On the history and politics of this museum, see Mary Stevens, Re-membering the Nation: The Project for the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (London: 2008), and idem, Stories Old and New: Migration and Identity in the UK Heritage Sector: A Report for the Migration Museum Working Group (London: 2009).

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36. From October 2010 to January 2011, 500 sans papiers occupied the museum to demand official recognition. The museum staff supported them, and public events were organized to publicize their struggle. 37. See Gérard Noiriel, “L’Immigration: naissance d’un ‘problème’ (1881–1883),” in Agone: Histoire, Politique & Sociologie 4 (2008), 15–40. This article argues that the word “immigration” entered France’s political vocabulary in the early 1880s in reference to widespread concerns over the influx of foreigners into France and the integration of these “strangers” and their children into French society. 38. A banlieue is a poor immigrant suburb of a French city. The banlieues are underserviced and often violent, and have been the site of numerous clashes between the police and local youths. Riots in the banlieues of Paris in 2005 reinforced the feeling among many French citizens that integration initiatives, among them, the CNHI, were necessary and urgent. 39. This exhibit sparked criticism within and outside the museum. Anthropologist and museum staff member Fabrice Grognet noted that some of those photographed in this exhibit complained to the museum that they were not immigrants and had nothing to do with the museum’s narrative. This incident suggests that, contrary to the CNHI’s mandate to make immigrants French, Patrick Zachmann’s exhibit may be making some French people into immigrants. Further questions include whether certain banlieues are being marginalized by being linked to immigration, and whether all dark people living in certain banlieues are assumed to be immigrants. See Andrea Meza Torres, “The Musealization of Migration in Paris and Berlin and the Crisis of Representation” (unpublished ms., 2011). In contrast to Australia, where groups of immigrants approach immigration museums with requests to be included in the exhibits, at least some people in Paris refuse to be assigned immigrant identities. 40. North American Jewish Data Bank (see n. 20), Table 5 (p. 21). 41. Part of this collection was originally exhibited in 1887 at the Anglo-Jewish exhibition that coincided with the celebration of Queen Victoria’s jubilee. 42. The recent temporary exhibit Closing the Door? Immigration to Britain 1905–2005, mounted to mark the centenary of the Aliens Act, explored how migrant and refugee communities struggled and survived despite restrictions on their entry. 43. See www.museumoflondon.org.uk/english/EventsExhibitions/Community/Belonging (accessed January 21, 2011). 44. For an exploration of the point at which play, art, trauma, and education meet, see Ernst van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust,” in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, ed. Norman Kleeblatt (Stanford: 1997), 65–83. 45. See Rosmarie Beier-de-Haan (ed.), Zuwanderungsland Deutschland. Migrationen 1500–2005 (exhibition catalog) (Berlin: 2005), 9–17. 46. See Micha Brumlik, “The Situation of Jews in Today’s Germany,” in Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany, ed. Michal Bodemann (Ann Arbor: 1996), 1–16. Brumlik outlines the waves of Jews who arrived in the Federal Republic of Germany from DP camps and from many countries, including Hungary after the 1956 uprising, Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Prague Spring of 1968, and Poland. He also discusses the inner conflicts and the myth of living “with packed suitcases” that informed the daily life of Jews in Germany in the postwar years. In 2003, the Journal of East European Jewish Affairs published a special issue (vol. 33, no. 2 [Winter 2003], guest editor: Robin Ostow), devoted to the dynamics of post-Soviet Jewish immigration to Germany. 47. There are local museums and permanent exhibits of immigration to Germany, among them the Jugendmuseum Schöneberg and the district museum Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in Berlin. A museum to display the experiences of the Vertriebene is under construction in Berlin (under the auspices of the German Historical Museum) and concepts are being developed for a small museum at Friedland, the crossing point into Germany from Poland, where many refugees from Eastern Europe were admitted. Germany does have two emigration museums. The Deutsches Auswanderer Haus (German Emigration Center) in Bremerhaven, which opened in 2005, was built in collaboration with the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York and financed by the city of Bremerhaven and the Land (province) of Bremen. Focusing on emigration from Germany starting in the mid-19th

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century, it features a simulated boat journey to Ellis Island. The BallinStadt-Port of Dreams museum, opened in Hamburg in 2007, is located on the site at which a total of some five million emigrants were quartered, processed, and inspected before boarding ships to the New World. Many of those departing from Hamburg in the late 19th and early 20th century were Jews from Eastern Europe; the original site housed a synagogue and kosher eating facilities. As with the Bremenhaven museum, the Port of Dreams museum offers a simulated and sanitized voyage to Ellis Island. 48. Until 2004, the Federal Republic of Germany, relying on the Civil Code of 1913, based citizenship on ancestry—jus sanguinis—and insisted that it was not a country of immigration, despite the fact that, by 2004, some 20 million newcomers (since 1945) had settled in the country. The new citizenship law, which came into effect on January 1, 2005, recognizes and regulates immigration, affirming that foreigners who are admitted can become citizens, rather than only being allowed to work or to stay in Germany on a (precarious) temporary basis. 49. See Beier-de-Haan (ed.), Zuwanderungsland. Parallel to this exhibition, in which migration was presented as an orderly process leading to citizenship and new births (which Germany desperately needs), a panoply of 120 exhibitions and performances on the theme of postwar migration, titled Projekt Migration (Project Migration) took place in 2005–2006 in Cologne, located in the western part of the country, where many guest workers are deployed in heavy industry. The project was funded by a four-year grant of 5,000,000 euros from the Bundeskulturstiftung, the cultural foundation of the federal government, to the four sponsoring institutions—the Art Society of Cologne, the Documentation Centre and Museum of Immigration to Germany, and the universities of Frankfurt/Main and Zurich. Many of the display objects were donated by guest workers and their children, but large parts of the exhibition, organized by scholars, artists, and social activists, were intended to visualize the findings of scholarly research. This exhibit focused on the experiences of the guest workers, and more recently, of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. It sparked an initiative to establish a national immigration museum, but it did not address Jewish migration. See Barbara Wolbert, “Weightless Monuments: Stories of Labor Migration to Germany as Materialized in the Exhibit ‘Projekt Migration’ (2005–2006),” in Arts de mémoire: Matériaux, medias, mythologie, ed. Phillippe Despoix and Christine Bernier (Montreal: 2007), 161–182. 50. Some of the voices are actors reading from memoirs; others are excerpts from interviews with Jews who are living in Munich today. 51. For accounts of some of these experiences and feelings, see Rafael Seligmann, Rubensteins Versteigerung (Frankfurt: 1989) and Leo Sucharewicz, Israelische Geschichten aus Deutschland. Kurzgeschichten zwischen Krieg und Frieden (Munich: 1992). On the Jewish Museum Munich, see also the essay by Inka Bertz in this volume, 102–104. 52. Jewish Museum Berlin, Stories of an Exhibition (Berlin: 2001), 174–175. 53. See Dmitrij Belkin and Raphael Gross (eds.), Ausgerechnet Deutschland! Jüdisch-russische Einwanderung in die Bundesrepublik (exhibition catalog) (Berlin: 2010). 54. Many Jewish museums have security installations, but their visibility varies widely. 55. Viv Szekeres, for many years director of the Migration Museum Adelaide; Helen Light, for many years director of the Jewish Museum of Australia; Ruth Goldbloom, one of the founders of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21; and Ruth J. Abram, one of the founders of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, are all descendants of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants from Russia. 56. Baur, Die Musealisierung der Migration, 349.

Six Exhibitions, Six Decades: Toward the Recanonization of Contemporary Israeli Art Ruth Direktor (HAIFA MUSEUM OF ART)

In 2007, Yigal Zalmona, chief curator-at-large of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, proposed a major art event to mark the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel: a set of exhibitions portraying Israeli art from 1948 through 2008, to be held at six leading museums across Israel, with each exhibition dedicated to one decade of Israeli art. Approved by the government, the project became known as the Six Decades exhibitions. It was the most comprehensive and ambitious art initiative the government had ever undertaken, and it aroused major interest both in the art world and among the general public. The six museums chosen were the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Haifa Museum of Art; the Ashdod Art Museum; the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Museum of Art, Ein Harod. The decades were divided among the different museums based upon the perceived connections between the art of the decade and the artistic spirit of each museum, as well as the age and artistic inclinations of each of the curators. The first exhibition, Real Time: Art in Israel 1998–2008 (curators: Amitai Mendelsohn and Efrat Natan), opened at the Israel Museum in May 2008. Shortly thereafter, the second exhibition, Eventually We’ll Die: Young Art in Israel of the Nineties (curator: Doron Rabina), opened at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. Exhibitions portraying the other four decades opened afterward: My Own Body: Art in Israel in the 1970s (curator: Mordechai Omer) at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Check-Post: Art in Israel in the 1980s (curator: Ilana Tenenbaum) at the Haifa Museum of Art; The Birth of Now: Art in Israel in the 1960s (curators: Yona Fischer and Tamar Manor-Friedman) at the Ashdod Art Museum; and The First Decade: A Hegemony and a Plurality (curators: Galia Bar Or and Gideon Ofrat) at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod.1 Six Decades doubled visitor attendance at museums; many came in groups on guided tours. The quantities of catalogs sold warranted the printing of a second edition. As expected, the project also dominated the discourse of art during the year 2008, both because of its broad scope and because of the unusual level of cooperation

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among major art institutions. Yet in contrast to the enthusiastic interest and response on the part of the general public, opinions in the art world were divided, and the exhibitions became a topic of debate. Some critics expressed reservations about the chronology that had been forced upon the artworks, saying that it was uninspiring and superficial. Others objected to the inclusion of specific participating artists and took exception to the exclusion of others. Still others felt uncomfortable that the artists and curators had been recruited for a project that was nationalist in nature. In this essay, I will examine the six exhibitions and consider some of the issues they raise with respect to Israeli art, art historiography, the relations between art and state, hegemony, and canonization.

Division into Decades The first issue to be raised in a project of this nature is the very division of art into decades, a division that is arbitrary rather than integral. Indeed, even those chosen to curate the exhibitions pointed to the difficulties in classifying artworks into periods of ten years that began in 1948 and were arbitrarily cut off according to the next year ending in the digit “8.” In this regard, it should be noted that the setting of divisions and classifications in art, whether according to topic, period, or type of medium, is inevitably artificial because it is designed to create order within an artistic continuum that by its very nature is amorphous and unorganized, and that certainly does not change with each new decade. These divisions ultimately serve as mechanisms of mediation in art for didactic, ideological, or media purposes. Division, classification, and cataloguing are modern practices associated with the desire to understand and explain as well as with the need to organize research topics and classify research insights. The teaching of art history as a scientific discipline is tied to enlightened ideas. The professionalization of the field involves making order of the broad and fluid world of art by means of classification according to time periods and styles, division into topics and categories, and the like. Each division is based upon a perspective whose purpose is to clarify a particular aspect of art: content, historical context, formal style, technique. Attempts to create classifications that are ostensibly objective and neutral ultimately fail, because any attempt to segment art must be based on set parameters that in themselves represent a particular stance on the preferred way to look at art. Theme-oriented exhibitions have been prevalent in Israel since the 1980s, when postmodern ideas became anchored in the discourse of art and when questions of identity, gender, biography, and politics in its broadest sense began to gain public legitimacy. In an attempt to elicit new insights on Israeli art, such exhibitions incorporated the works of a large group of artists and offered them for examination under a variety of common denominators. To be sure, applying such a filter of content was contrary to the essence of Israeli modernism inspired by artists such as Yossef Zaritsky, Arie Aroch, Moshe Kupferman, Yehiel Shemi, Aviva Uri, and Raffi Lavie. These artists preferred focusing on matters of form, while playing down the content of their works. It is perhaps fitting that one of the first theme-oriented exhibitions, The Want

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of Matter (1986), curated by Sarah Breitberg Semel at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, featured works by Aroch, Lavie, and Kupferman.2 This exhibition attempted to pinpoint the specific “visibility” and profound content of the art as opposed to its subject matter, seeking to designate and define the visual appearance, material preferences, and mental state characterizing a group of artists from different generations. A similar approach was apparent in the OverCraft exhibition curated by Tami KatzFreiman for the Art Gallery at Haifa University in 2003, which sought to draw the viewer’s attention to visibility, material and form, artistic style, and similar means of craft.3 The artworks chosen by Katz-Freiman included types of practice commonly considered to be “feminine”—work that was labor-intensive and tending toward ornamentation and kitsch. These works emphasized visibility and work practices totally different from those shown in the Want of Matter exhibition, with abundance taking the place of asceticism, and with the preference for what was conceptual and minimalistic replaced by a sumptuous, colorful, and sensuous materialism. Other prominent examples of theme-oriented exhibitions since the 1980s included Routes of Wandering: Nomadism, Journeys and Transitions (1991), curated by Sarit Shapira, and Forward—The East-Orientalism in Art in Israel (1995), curated by Yigal Zalmona and Tamar Manor-Friedman.4 Both exhibitions were mounted at the Israel Museum. In Routes of Wandering, Shapira attempted to focus on the experience of wandering as a major theme in Israeli art. Forward, in contrast, offered a broad spectrum of the Orient as perceived in Israeli art from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. Also worthy of mention are a variety of exhibitions curated by Gideon Ofrat since the 1980s, whose diverse themes include the sacrifice of Isaac (’akedat Yitzh.ak); the archetype of the pioneer; apocalyptic visions; mythological themes in Israeli art; destruction, desolation, and ruin; and the reinterpretation of Judaism in Israeli art.5 An exhibition mounted in 2005 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Togetherness, curated by Tali Tamir, focused on the kibbutz experience and its impact on the work of 24 artists, most of whom had grown up in kibbutzim.6 Several other exhibitions curated by Tami Katz-Freiman (Postscripts, Meta-Sex, Desert Cliché, Antipathos, and Love is in the Air)7 were also clearly theme-oriented. In contrast to these exhibitions, the Six Decades exhibitions offered a classification that was neither thematic nor stylistic but rather chronological. This orientation is more traditional and also ostensibly less restrictive and more neutral; it reflects the natural desire to characterize and define by means of separation and the setting of boundaries. Dividing art according to decades is similar to placing a timeline on the body of art and stopping to summarize and organize at the conclusion of each allotted period of time. To be sure, dividing a period as short as sixty years into decades underscores the artificial nature of the division. Even if classification into decades is not necessarily more arbitrary or more artificial than any other means of grouping a large number of artists according to a given common denominator, it is certainly more oriented toward marketing and the media. The difficulty in adapting the exhibitions by placing them on the Procrustean bed of decades beginning with the year 1948 emerges in the exhibitions and is even reflected in the curators’ texts, some of which were written in an almost apologetic tone. Mordechai Omer (1941–2011), curator of the 1970s exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, was the only one who took the liberty of turning the decade

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exhibition into a theme-oriented exhibition titled My Own Body. His decision can be understood in the light of a major exhibition (Tikkun), featuring the art of the 1970s, that had been held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art ten years earlier, in 1998, to commemorate Israel’s jubilee year. Evidently, Omer felt the need to distinguish the current exhibition from the earlier one. The previous exhibition had been divided into three parts: The Eyes of the Nation (curated by Ellen Ginton), which focused on the political aspect of art in the 1970s, and The Boundaries of Language and Tikkun (both curated by Omer), which sought to expand the boundaries and definitions of artistic language.8 This three-part exhibition extended the boundaries of the decade to include the period from the Six-Day War in 1967 through the first Lebanon War in 1982. Delimiting the 1970s between two military events determined that The Eyes of the Nation exhibition would be political in orientation and that its title would include a quote with both artistic and political significance. In the artistic context, the exhibition’s title was derived from a conceptual work by Michal Neeman, who in 1974 placed two signs on the beach in Tel Aviv, each inscribed with the handwritten phrase, “The Eyes of the Nation.” Yet the expression itself was a quote from a soldier in the Golani unit of the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. Following the war, when he was asked in an interview why he had willingly stormed forward, he replied that, prior to the battle of Mt. Hermon, his battalion commander had described the mountain as “the eyes of the nation.” Neeman took this expression out of its original context and created a twofold transformation: from the battlefield to the art arena, and from Mt. Hermon to the Tel Aviv beach. The signs themselves disappeared within a few days, but the photograph of her work was etched in the collective memory of the world of art as a highly significant metaphor signifying the position and role of eyes in the service of the nation and in the service of art. The use of “The Eyes of the Nation” as a title and as a new direction stood in contrast to the My Own Body exhibition, in which Omer emphasized the body and the self as the major presence in the art of that decade. My Own Body opened with a series of self-portraits, including those of Ofer Lalush, Avigdor Arikha, Liliane Klapisch, and Ori Reisman—artists not usually associated with the public’s concepts and myths about the 1970s. Hence, this exhibition added new complications to the decade classification: Which artists should be attributed to which decade? What decade should be associated with an artist who worked throughout several decades? How is the axiomatic correlation between artist and decade created, and what happens when this correlation is undermined or compromised? Apart from being a thematic bubble in a sea of chronological arrangements, My Own Body also served as the mediating link between the art of the relatively distant past—the 1950s and 1960s—and the more recent past of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. As will later be explained at greater length, the 1970s has a special status within the Israeli art community, enjoying an aura of experimentation, radicalism, and conceptualism. For all these reasons, My Own Body prompted more passionate debate than the other exhibitions. In contrast to Omer’s thematic approach, Doron Rabina, curator of the 1990s exhibition at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, made direct reference to the link between artist and decade and, more specifically, to the dilemma involved in

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assigning any given artist to a particular decade. Rabina wrote that, during the 1990s, the concepts of “young artist” and “youthfulness” had become established and were used to characterize the decade. In retrospect, the thesis of the youthfulness of 1990s art turned into a sweeping theme marking most of the Six Decades exhibitions. The Israel Museum exhibited young artists of the 2000s, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art featured young artists from the 1990s, the Haifa Museum of Art displayed the works of artists who had emerged in the 1980s, and so on. Indeed, for the most part, the six exhibitions exhibited the works of artists at the beginning of their careers, whose endeavors were, in the words of Rabina, “at the originary moment of eruption.”9 Apparently, artists were identified with the decade in which they began their artistic work, and thus the Six Decades project was for the most part an exhibition of young artists. It does seem that many artists do their most outstanding work soon after they complete their studies or in their first years in the world of art, and often their early works include all the major themes that continue to preoccupy them in the coming years. Yet such a retrospective view highlights an additional factor that is equally essential to art: the ability to survive. Thus, the attribute of “freshness” must be weighed against that of “maturity.” With this in mind, perhaps the 2000s might also be considered the years of the outstanding survivors? After all, these were the years in which Raffi Lavie, who passed away in 2007, produced some of the best paintings of his career; the years in which Moshe Gershuni (b. 1936) produced his most abstract and amorphous works—works no less outstanding than the spare works he created in the 1970s or his more expressive works of the 1980s. And perhaps these are also the years of Pinhas Cohen Gan and Michal Neeman, of Deganit Berest, Yaacov Mishori, David Ginton, and Asaf Ben Zvi, indeed of all those who survived through three or four decades to reach this point and who are continuing to produce serious artistic work. The photographer Barry Friedlander is a case in point. Friedlander was included in the exhibition on the 1970s, the decade in which he began working as a photographer, but he was also rightfully included in the Real Time exhibition in Jerusalem, for he has done his best work in the past decade. Apart from Barry Friedlander, only a few other artists were exhibited in more than one of the Decade exhibitions; such representation in different decades highlights the extent to which limiting an artist to a single decade serves to flatten his or her art. Moshe Gershuni, for example, was exhibited in the exhibitions for the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, as befitting an artist who has had a decisive presence over time. Raffi Lavie was exhibited in the 1960s and 1970s exhibitions, but his absence was noticeable in the later decades, during which he had a major impact on the local painting scene. Yair Garbuz’s work was included in the exhibitions for the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In retrospect, it is clear that the inclusion of a number of artists in more than one exhibition was a way to indicate the importance and centrality of their work. Doron Rabina’s thesis about youth refers to the moment the artist emerges. It is based upon the initial dazzle and on the effects of invention and innovation, and it answers the fundamental stipulation of modern art—to rejuvenate and to surprise. Not only does Rabina point to a trend, he also underscores and reinforces it by exhibiting the works of artists who are no longer active in the art world: Daniel

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Sack, Elisha Dagan, Aya & Gal, Dana and Boaz Zonshine, Max Friedman, and Jasser Abu Rabia. The curator’s guiding principle was to consider the works in the context in which they were first exhibited and to disregard the fact that the artists themselves did not continue into the next decade. The message is that their art remains unchanged and is therefore valid and worthy of mention. The artists noted above began and ended their artistic careers during the 1990s, thus turning them into typical representatives of the decade, for their art is the art of one decade only. At the same time, because their art lacks the historical context of development and continuity, it is seen merely as a momentary spark. The exhibitions, then, served as a tool for filtering, marking, and mapping. The artists were classified and designated according to general categories (the 1970s, the 1980s, and so on). Moreover, the entire field of art was mapped and cataloged by virtue of matching museums to decades and creating connections between curators, museums, and decades. During the 1990s, the Herzliya Museum became the leading museum of contemporary art in Israel in that it offered a new model for how museums should be run. Thus it was picked as the venue for the 1990s exhibition. (Doron Rabina, who was chosen to curate the exhibition, had also begun his career in the field of art in the 1990s, first as an artist and later as a curator as well.) The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel’s most important museum of modern art, had moved to its current premises in 1972 and thus was selected as the venue for exhibiting the art of the 1970s, which was considered to be the most radical art produced in Israel. Yet in retrospect and in view of the 1970s art exhibition that had been shown there ten years previously, something seemed to have been missing in the My Own Body exhibition. The Museum of Art, Ein Harod, founded in 1948, became the venue for the 1950s exhibition. Galia Bar Or, the museum’s director since the 1980s and a member of Kibbutz Ein Harod, was chosen as a co-curator together with Gideon Ofrat, a renowned curator and art historian who had studied and exhibited a wide variety of artists from different periods and with distinct styles. Over the years, Bar Or and Ofrat had each been heavily involved with the artists of the 1950s and with the connections between nation, ideology, and art. Solo exhibitions of artists who had begun working in the 1950s (among them Naftali Bezem and Avraham Ofek) as well as of artists already active and identified with the spirit of the times (such as Shalom Sebba, Miron Sima, and Ruth Schloss) had already been held at the museum, in keeping with its declared policy to give expression to less accepted currents in Israeli art. Moreover, the museum’s building, designed by architect Shmuel Bickels, reflects the architectural trends of that period: restraint and modesty together with the sanctified formality reserved for a center of culture known as hamishkan (the biblical term used for the Tabernacle). Indeed, the “mishkan” at Ein Harod, the curators, and the art of the decade on exhibit there were in perfect harmony. The 1960s exhibition at the Ashdod Art Museum was a slightly different case. The city of Ashdod was founded at the end of the 1950s and developed throughout the 1960s. Yet the city never showed any affinity toward the world of art, and the museum did not open until 2003. Furthermore, the gap between the architectural complex housing the museum and the spirit guiding the art of the 1960s was quite apparent, as was the gap between the old Israel emerging from the artwork and the new Israel evidenced by the architecture of the Ashdod Art Museum. A similar

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discrepancy existed between the museum’s status of having just emerged on the scene and the central position in the world of art held by Yona Fischer, the museum’s chief curator. Hence, the selection of the Ashdod Art Museum for the 1960s exhibition was to a great extent based on the selection of Yona Fischer, who had begun working as a curator in the 1960s at the Israel Museum, and who was considered the father of modern Israeli curatorship (in 1977, he was awarded the Israel Prize for his work as a curator). Thus the world of art was busy classifying, categorizing, designating, and determining who belonged where and why. The world of art was being vigorously stirred, simply for the purpose of reorganization.

Israeli Art and the Political Conflict The national-political context of the exhibition, the project’s raison d’être, was also its most problematic attribute and the source of considerable unease. In an age in which art is political and operates in the global arena, it tends to be critical rather than art engagé or sponsored art. Hence, the very existence of this exhibition in the context of Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations was problematic. It is difficult to imagine such an exhibition in any of the western nations with which Israeli artists aspire to carry on a dialogue. The very willingness of the museums, curators, art critics, and artists comprising the art world to accept this link to the nationalist context pointed to the deep and complex association between Israeli art and the national entity. Such an association dates back to the founding of the Bezalel Academy of Art by Boris Schatz in 1906. The notion of establishing a school for art and design in Jerusalem in the early 20th century was endorsed by Theodor Herzl and was integral to the Zionist vision; Zionist organizations provided the funding to establish Bezalel, and the year 1906 was subsequently regarded as the beginning of “Israeli” art. In similar fashion, the Six Decades exhibitions determined that 1948 was the date at which (Israeli) time began. Each ten-year interval only reinforced the significance of the digit “8,” practically turning it into a law of nature. Indeed, it revealed the extent to which Israeli art has immersed itself, for better or for worse, consciously or unconsciously, in politics and in ideology. The year 1948 reverberated throughout the Six Decades exhibitions, as did the correlation between Israeli art and dates bearing national significance. The natural acceptance of the celebration of art as an inseparable part of the nation’s anniversary celebrations served to clarify the special place occupied by Israeli art compared to that of art elsewhere in the world. Both used the same contemporary language and operated within the same global space, but the Israeli art arena was fundamentally atypical compared with other centers in the world of art. Even if some of the Israeli artists recognized the unnaturalness of this ostensibly natural classification, all accepted the invitation to participate in the exhibitions. All, that is, except for the Arab artists. Of these, the most interesting and compelling case is that of Sharif Waked. Born in Nazareth in 1964, Sharif Waked is a Palestinian artist who lives and works in Haifa and in Nazareth. He is mainly a video artist, and he touches in all his works upon Palestinian identity or aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while quoting from

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or referring to western cultural sources. Waked declined the invitation to participate in the Six Decades exhibition at the Israel Museum because he refused to be part of Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations. Nevertheless, one of his works, Jericho First, was exhibited as part of the Real Time exhibition since it was part of the Israel Museum’s permanent collection. This raised an interesting discussion regarding ownership rights, copyright, and intellectual property with respect to works of art. The Jericho First installation (2002) was first exhibited at the Hagar Art Gallery, a Jaffa art gallery founded by curator Tal Ben Zvi that operated in the early 2000s. The installation consists of 30 small paintings and two large paintings divided into two sets. Each features a single figure, either red or black, depicting a lion attacking a fleeing gazelle.10 The image was inspired by an 8th-century Islamic floor mosaic from the Hashem Palace in Jericho. In Waked’s work, the lion and the gazelle gradually intertwine, as in a series of illustrated episodes of a story, until they are united into a single image. In the red set, the images inflate into one another until they turn into an elliptical ball. In the black set, they shrink and are stretched out almost into a line. The graphic style of the image and the gradual progression of the story, inspired by comic strips or animation, do nothing to camouflage the message of this work, and perhaps even augment it. The strong attack and swallow up the weak, or the weak and the strong are both worn down by the struggle. The name of the installation, Jericho First, asserts the work’s clearly political context. This installation, as noted, was acquired by the Israel Museum. When it became evident that the work was to be exhibited as part of the Six Decades exhibition, Waked sent out an email to a wide range of people in the world of art, stating that the work was being exhibited against his will. Shortly before this, Waked had exhibited his video installation, Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints, at the Haifa Museum of Art, as part of a group exhibition of artists who had been awarded prizes in 2007 by the Ministry of Science, Culture, and Sport. Since its creation in 2003, this work had been exhibited on various occasions at group exhibitions in Israel and abroad. The work portrays young men marching to the sounds of music and modeling clothing designed especially for the work. On first glance, this appears to be an ordinary fashion show, but eventually it becomes evident that the clothes were designed especially for border crossings and checkpoints, including shirts that opened easily, clothing with exposed backs and fronts, zippers that unzipped with one tug, and the like. The video was filmed as if it were a clip for a fashion channel. When the music stops, the video shows documentary shots of Palestinian men filmed at checkpoints in Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus, Gaza, and Jerusalem, lifting their shirts and being scrutinized by the watchful eyes of Israeli soldiers.11 The title’s play on words between the military checkpoint and the fashionable notion of “chic” holds an entire array of associations, ranging from the intimidating to the frivolous, from the absurdity of the occupation to the escapism of normalization. The complex circumstances surrounding the exhibition of Waked’s work in these two cases convey the problematic reality in which Arab artists find themselves. Every career step they take involves decisions with political repercussions. Waked, for example, decided that participating in an exhibition of those awarded prizes by the state was acceptable, while participating in one celebrating the state’s independence was not. These decisions reflect the imbroglio in which Israeli Palestinian artists find

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themselves in their relationship to the Israeli art establishment. They must choose either to cooperate or to refuse and abstain. The Israeli art world finds itself caught in this same complex situation with respect to Palestinian artists. Steps taken to promote mutual communication are liable to be interpreted as arrogance or a lack of sensitivity. A parallel situation occurred around a year after the Six Decades exhibitions were held, when the Israeli film Ajami was nominated for an Academy award in the category of best foreign-language film for 2010. Shortly before the ceremony was to begin, Scandar Copti, one of the film’s two directors, stated that the film, which had been funded by the state, did not represent Israel because “I cannot represent a country that does not represent me.” As could be expected, his comment prompted numerous responses and again called attention to the complex relationship between the state and artists, in particular when it comes to political issues and national identity. To complicate matters, the Six Decades exhibitions project had been initiated by the Ministry of Science, Culture, and Sport, headed at the time by Raleb Majadele, the first Arab to hold that post. The catalogs of the six exhibitions each bore the national emblem of the state of Israel and the logo marking Israel’s 60th anniversary, along with greetings from Ruhama Avraham Balila, the minister in charge of the events marking sixty years of Israel’s independence. In December 2008, when several of the Six Decades exhibitions were still open, Abed Abdi, an Arab artist from Haifa, was announced as recipient of the Israel Ministry of Science, Culture, and Sport prize in art and design for 2008. This prize of 67,000 shekels has been awarded every year since 1987 to artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of art in Israel. Except for the Lifetime Achievement Award, it is the most prestigious of the honors bestowed by the Ministry; this was the first time an Arab was the recipient. In newspaper interviews, Abdi stated that it was a mark of shame for the nation that only now was this prize being awarded to an Arab.12 Since the 1980s, Arab artists have been part of the Israeli artistic scene, have studied in Israeli art schools, and have developed within the world of Israeli art. Some express their Palestinian identity and their political leanings in their artwork. Works by Sharif Waked, Jumana Emil Abboud, Jasser Abu Rabia, all from the museums’ permanent collections, were on display in some of the exhibitions, as was the work of the deceased artist Assam Abu-Shakra. The refusal of Palestinian artists to take part in the Six Decades exhibitions brought to light what the project was attempting to deemphasize, namely, that Israeli art could not escape its placement in the center of political turmoil. Willingly or not, art has been thrust into a political reality that has pervaded even the most symbolic and cultural situations, and indeed perhaps such situations in particular. The glaring absence of Israeli Arab artists underscores the fact that 1948 is not only the year Israel was established as an independent state, but also the year of the nakba (“catastrophe,” in Arabic). The narrative of one people is not the narrative of the other. The entangled political reality pervaded the festive art project, making it clear that any event associated with the state of Israel cannot avoid being clouded by political issues. Art cannot concern itself simply with neutral classification into decades when the date upon which this classification is based is so nationally and politically significant. Such classification places it within a history and a reality extending beyond the world of museums.

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Art from the Not-So-Distant Past In retrospect, a distinction can be made between the two exhibitions representing the earlier art of the 1950s and 1960s and those representing the more recent art from the 1970s through the 2000s. The time that had elapsed favored the earlier exhibitions, whereas the later exhibitions that focused on art and events from not so long ago naturally aroused more opposition and criticism. The 1970s exhibition fell somewhere in the middle: from the perspective of time, the ensuing 40 years seemed to suffice in turning that decade into history, even though most of the artists from the 1970s are still active. The special status of 1970s art in the collective memory is significant and noteworthy. In Israeli public consciousness, art of the 1970s is associated with radicalism, experimentalism, political activism, and the breaking of traditional boundaries. No other decade has been associated with so many artistic triumphs, and most of the artists who began their careers then are among the most venerable artists working today. Thus, the 1970s exhibition drew most of the negative responses, while those of the two preceding decades won most of the praise. An undeniable element of nostalgia and of reconciliation with the past also played a role in this. Galia Bar Or and Gideon Ofrat named their 1950s exhibition A Hegemony and a Plurality and considered the ideological struggles marking the decade. But the struggles that once seemed so crucial have in retrospect lost their sting, and the paintings of Streichman and Janco, to name two artists who represented two opposing artistic approaches, equally expressed the spirit of the 1950s. Two other artists can be mentioned in a similar vein. Naftali Bezem (b. 1924) was considered an artist engaged by social issues, and his large painting To the Aid of the Seamen (1952) (exhibited at the Ein Harod exhibition) was a rare case of historical, political, and social painting in Israel. Yossef Zaritsky (1891–1985), in contrast, was the most characteristic representative of the trend toward abstraction and the attempt to formulate a language of painting that diverges from the local scene. Yet in retrospect the differences and the disputes between the two have become blurred. One painted in the abstract style and the other used figurative language, yet both painted in oils on canvas and both still met the definition of traditional painting. In view of everything that happened subsequently in art, from the breaking of the media barrier to the challenging of the definition of the artistic object, these paintings seem much more similar than they did at the time of their creation. The Ein Harod and Ashdod exhibitions were charged with an assignment that differed somewhat from that of the other museums. The exhibited materials were from the past and were not within the range of memory for most people visiting the exhibitions, including those from the world of art. The works had already been screened by the dual filters of time: commemoration and forgetting. The forgotten were overlooked, those that survived were cataloged, and the princes were crowned. Can an exhibition that highlights hegemony (Zaritsky and the New Horizons movement) and at the same time proposes pluralism (social realism, figurative painting, and sociopolitical content) manage to change anything in the existing canon? Alternatively, will those on the margin win recognition but continue to represent otherness and marginality?

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Several artists of the New Horizons movement that dominated Israeli art in the mid-20th century appeared in Hegemony and Plurality. New Horizons was established in 1948 in response to an invitation extended to Israeli artists to participate in the Venice Biennale.13 The group did not have a fixed number of members; over the years, dozens of artists participated in New Horizons exhibitions, through the tenth and last exhibition in 1963. The group’s undisputed leader was Zaritsky, who developed an abstract style influenced by French painting and believed that art should aspire to a universal language and thus be part of modern artistic trends. Yet it is impossible to talk about the art of the New Horizons movement as something homogeneous, for in addition to the direction led by Zaritsky toward abstraction and universalism, other artists, among them Aharon Kahana, Marcel Janco, and Yohanan Simon, represented contrasting directions, including figurative painting and local content. The exhibition at Ein Harod placed emphasis on the mainstream and on the numerous styles marking the first decade, and along with mainstream artists also displayed the work of those who had been less popular at the time. These artists— including Naftali Bezem, Ruth Schloss, Gershon Knispel, Moshe Gat, Shimon Tsabar, and Miron Sima—painted Holocaust survivors, the unemployed, striking sailors, laborers, pioneers (h.alutzim), and immigrant transit camps (ma’abarot), and indeed everything Zaritsky believed should not be represented in art. These artists and others had already been on display in the galleries of Ein Harod as part of the 1998 Hebrew Work exhibition curated by Galia Bar Or. In this exhibition, Bar Or had formulated her claim that canonic Israeli art had rejected representations of pain and suffering and that artists who were attentive to social and political injustice had been marginalized. According to Bar Or, the young state preferred to distance itself from the weak and the scarred in order to construct its self-image as a young and vigorous nation—unbowed, erect, and holding its head high.14 Countering this historic tendency, Ein Harod exhibited the art of Ofek, Bezem, Sima, Sebba, and Schloss in A Hegemony and a Plurality, all of whom, in their own ways, represented the “otherness” in Israeli art.15 A more exceptional case is that of Ori Reisman, whose landscape paintings are devoid of details and whose portraits are unrealistic, such that the style and nature of his work are not compatible with this trend. Yet his work was also exhibited at Ein Harod in 1981, when he was not yet known and was still far from the public eye. Over the years he became one of Israel’s most admired and esteemed artists, and his works were exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.16 This type of cross-over, however, was rare: although the painting of Reisman appealed to the preferences of the Israeli art world, the art of other Ein Harod artists remained fixed at the margins of public consciousness. Identifying with what was different and not part of the canon set the tone for how the Museum of Art, Ein Harod operated, even though in later years it exhibited works of such popular and esteemed artists as Aviva Uri, Meira Shemesh, and Michael Drucks. In this context it should be noted that the last New Horizons exhibition in 1963 was at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod, indicating that the museum had a history of dialectic between center and margins, core and otherness. In the A Hegemony and a Plurality exhibition, Lilienblum Street by Yohanan Simon, The Dead Soldier by Marcel Janco (clearly inspired by Picasso’s Guernica), and Condolence Visit by Miron Sima were exhibited at Ein Harod for a second time. This time

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they were placed in diametrical contrast to the bright abstractions of Streichman and Steimatzky and to Arie Aroch’s influential Bus in the Mountains—paintings that drew glances of recognition, since they served as an introduction to a major share of subsequent Israeli art. Meanwhile, the part of the exhibition devoted to kibbutz artists was displayed in a separate gallery, and it suggested a new division in what people had until then become accustomed to seeing as a single entity. As curator, Galia Bar Or decided to distinguish between the work of artists from the United Kibbutz Movement (Hakibbutz Hameuhad), of which Kibbutz Ein Harod was a representative example, and the work of artists from the Kibbutz Artzi Federation (founded by the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement), represented by Kibbutz Gan Shmuel and Yohanan Simon. The artists of the United Kibbutz Movement, among them Moshe Kupferman and Yehiel Shemi, promoted the language of art and espoused a broad and open humanistic approach. In contrast, the artists of the Kibbutz Artzi were first and foremost committed to the good of society and the general public, and therefore to ideology. A group of self-portraits represented the individualistic direction of the artists from the United Kibbutz Movement, while the Kibbutz Artzi’s paintings of work and way of life represented the contrasting direction. The internal division of the kibbutz artists around the tension between what is individual and artistic and what is collective reflected the broader conflicts of the period. The lines became blurred between that which was relatively universal and that which was more local, the difference disappearing like one babushka doll nesting inside another. The inner tension between what had already been determined as canonic and what was marginal and different was also evident in the exhibition at the Ashdod Art Museum, which was to a large part an exhibition concerning taste. The Ashdod Art Museum was built as a patchwork of architectural spaces, above all reminiscent of an eccentric residence, with a short hall in one place and an angular corner and windows in another, along with wood-paneled walls and marble floors. The exhibition itself contained mostly paintings and only a few sculptures, thus serving as a reminder that the 1960s was the last decade in which artistic objects were still traditional and modest in size. Despite the discrepancy between the aesthetics of the paintings and that of the building, the museum’s small and low rooms clearly expressed the domestic and bourgeois dimension of the works that were hung on the museum’s walls. While the exhibition’s title, The Birth of “Now,” points to new directions beginning in the 1960s, in retrospect the decade was perceived primarily as the last decade dominated by painting. Yona Fischer and Tamar Manor-Friedman were the co-curators of The Birth of “Now,” and more than the birth of “now,” their exhibition seemed to define the foundations of Israeli taste. The exhibition began with a nod to the New Horizons exhibition of 1958 by including paintings by Zaritsky, Streichman, Okashi, and Krize. These paintings expressed the distinct aesthetics of the threshold of abstraction, with its particular picturesque sensitivity and murky colorfulness—all the components that had been fixed here as the preferred taste, which had come to be known as “lyrical abstraction.” By the 1960s, the New Horizons artists were already part of the old guard. They represented the canon and the dominant taste, and were at variance with the younger artists. The younger artists of the 1960s, among them Aviva Uri, Arie

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Aroch, Raffi Lavie, Yair Garbuz, and Zvi Tolkovsky, stand in contrast to this old guard and move forward from them, while enhancing the essence of Israeli taste. The curators chose not to disagree with the selection already made by history, and displayed the best works of Uri, Leah Nikel, Uri Lifshitz, and Yigal Tumarkin at the exhibition. Works by Lifshitz, Garbuz, and Lavie were made when they were in their early 20s; their paintings were full of the enthusiasm of upstart beginners. A painting titled “Anonymity” included an infinite number of “Uri Lifshitz” signatures on the canvas, representing an act of self-creation or self-baptism within the painting. The innovative and daring black-and-red Tumarkin assemblages were also exhibited, with khaki trousers and barbed wire glued on. In the iconic He Walked in the Fields of 1967, Tumarkin foretells everything that was to come afterwards; with his artistic sense, he seems to know something that those around him do not yet know. The content he portrays is grim and profound, but the art is still exciting and stirring, offering unlimited possibilities. The sculpture in the exhibition was sculpture in the traditional sense of the word, before it became assimilated into installations or was incorporated into environmental art. The more ambitious attempts at sculpture from that period by artists such as Ezra Orion, Dani Karavan, and Kosso Eloul were displayed in the exhibition through photographs, drawings, or models. The only works that undeniably heralded “the birth of now” were reconstructions of two installations: Rainwater, by Yehoshua Neustein (1968) and The Spirit Is Willing but the Flesh Is Weak, by Moshe Gershuni (1969). Neustein’s Rainwater, originally installed at the Artists House in Jerusalem, consisted of a metal pipe for rainwater runoff, hanging from the ceiling and suspended over a silver tray. Gershuni’s installation, originally displayed at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion in Tel Aviv, comprised a series of black inner tubes piled on top of each other and stretched along the length of a low rectangular space. The ceiling pressed on them from above, so that looking at them is suffocating and dramatic. At once the atmosphere changes—the 1970s have arrived, both conceptually and from the perspective of the object in space. In the 1960s, photography as an artistic medium was still in its infancy and was mainly used to serve the nation, as seen in the works of David Rubinger, Micha BarAm, Fritz Cohen, and Werner Braun. Bar-Am photographed Ben-Gurion at Sedeh Boker, and Braun photographed the Eichmann trial. At the same time, photography took its first steps toward art. This is manifested in the show with the work of BarAm, Peter Marom, and the efforts of Henry Shlezniak (before he became a painter), each moving in his own direction. The photographs taken by Fritz Cohen of Ashdod, depicting its progress from an archeological site to a city emerging from the dunes, delineate the relationship between the 1960s exhibition and the city. The tremendous journey made by photography since then can also be seen in the work that closed the exhibition. This, too, was a reconstruction, of an installation called 1968 Reversed Parade, by Shuka Glotman, which was exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1999. Glotman is a photographer, and while the installation he built bears an indirect relationship with photography, it behaves like an installation in all respects. In 1968 Reversed Parade, Glotman set up a room typical of the 1960s, with a television set in the center broadcasting in reverse the military parade that had inaugurated Israeli television broadcasting. Other accurate signs of the times

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fill the room: a munitions shell with thorns glued onto it, victory albums (that old form of photography in the service of the people and the nation), formica-topped furniture, a curtain made from decorative cloth, a bottle with Eilat sand and wooden camels made at Bezalel Art Academy on the bookcase, and more. The Six-Day War marks the end of the decade and the end of an era. Furthermore, Glotman’s domestic living room underscores the nature of The Birth of Now exhibition as representing art that, at least from the perspective of format and medium, still is intended for domestic spaces and living room walls. The reproduction of an installation from 1999, which in itself is the recreation of a living room from the 1960s, again testifies to the uncontrollable urge of the exhibitions’ curators to break through the dictated barriers of the decade. The spilling over of one decade into another, even in the form of artistic materials, is inevitable.

The Problem of Art Moshe Gershuni presents an interesting case for understanding the major problem posed by the Six Decades exhibitions. Gershuni appeared on the art scene in the 1960s and has worked in all the decades since then; even today he is a major presence in Israeli art. As noted, his black inner tube installation, included in the 1960s exhibition, marked the beginning of his career as a sculptor. His conceptual works were displayed in the 1970s exhibition, while the 1980s exhibition included his expressive papers and his ceramic plates marked with swastikas and passages from prayers. In the My Own Body exhibition, Gershuni’s 1972 slide show, The Main (and Real) Problems are with the Tongue and Toes, was screened in a separate hall at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The photographs focused on close-ups of the photographer’s tongue rolled up in his mouth or of his toes partially concealed by paper. Both the mouth and the toes look like elements in a sculpture. In The Eyes of the Nation exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1998, curator Ellen Ginton chose to exhibit another work by Gershuni in which a similar yet different sentence appeared: “The problem of painting is the Palestinian problem.” The sentence is written in handwriting on red cardboard, and the cardboard is what remains from an exercise Gershuni assigned to his students at Bezalel in 1977, in which they were asked to distribute pieces of cardboard with this sentence all around Jerusalem and its environs. The similar wording of the two sentences is misleading. What, exactly, is the problem? The tongue and the toes, or the Palestinian problem? Both statements are absurd and outlandish. Formulating them in the form of scientifically proven facts makes them even more absurd, more upsetting, and more disturbing. Gershuni’s work tugs at the two extremes along which the art of the 1970s, and perhaps Israeli art as a whole, progresses: on the one hand, concern with the body and with what is individual and private, and on the other hand, concern with what is political. Yet a comparison between the two turns them into two extremes of the same thing, where that which is the most individual and corporal is also the most political. The main problem is with the tongue and the toes, exactly as the problem with painting is the Palestinian problem.

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This dilemma already emerged at the Ein Harod exhibition, where the first decade was represented by means of a basic conflict in art—that between art engaged by ideology and art as an expression of individualism, or, in more general terms, between ethics and aesthetics. The art of that period was pure painting and sculpture, without any photography and certainly without installations (Fig. 7.1). Video cameras had yet to come on the scene, so that at least with respect to the use of media, the world of art still projected stability. From other perspectives, the art of the period was caught up in inner conflicts, torn between its commitment to the historical moment and its desire to work quietly with itself and its own concerns. Bar Or and Ofrat, both known for their battles against the ruling hegemony, presented the first decade as one in which a clear division was drawn between what would become popular and established and what was destined to remain on the sidelines. A case in point: hanging at the end of the stairway in Ein Harod’s central gallery, with its modest yet stately row of columns, was a huge enlargement of a blackand-white photograph from 1958 (Fig. 7.2). The photograph was taken by Werner Braun at the exhibition in honor of Israel’s tenth anniversary held at the Jerusalem International Convention Center. At the photograph’s center is a large painting by Zaritsky titled Might (Otzma). Beneath the painting is a planter with wilting plants. Several people are facing the painting, raising their heads toward the large geometric

Figure 7.1. View of the First Decade exhibition held at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod, 2008 (photo: Ruth Direktor).

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Figure 7.2. Yossef Zaritsky, Might (1958), from the First Decade exhibition held in Jerusalem, 1958 (photo: Werner Braun).

shapes rising above them. This photograph is a rare document—the only remnant of a painting that has since been destroyed, and testimony to one of the unforgettable moments of conflict between art and nation. Zaritsky, the leading artist of the period, had been commissioned to paint this work for the tenth anniversary exhibition. The work was to be exhibited in the “Economy” section, one of the major subdivisions of the exhibition. The exhibition itself was meant to reflect the accomplishments of the young nation, and its organizers appointed the period’s leading artists to be responsible for the major exhibit areas. Thus, many of the New Horizons abstract painters found themselves “decorating” the exhibition’s galleries, which were dedicated in part to the National Insurance Institute, to the country’s economic achievements, or to the Solel Boneh construction company. Zaritsky painted the work on wooden boards, six meters wide and five meters high, using his typical style, for which he was awarded the Israel Prize a year later. The painting was huge and powerful, based on the landscapes of Yehiam, with geometrical shapes in shades of green and gray. Shortly before the official opening, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion toured the exhibition at the Convention Center, and when he saw the painting he expressed his discontent: “Well, modern art. You can take it or leave it. You can live with it or without it.”17 Teddy Kollek, then director general of the prime minister’s office, understood Ben-Gurion’s remarks as expressing

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doubts about whether such a modern and abstract painting should be placed in such a central location, and he gave instructions to remove the painting and move it to a side section. One can only speculate how deeply insulted Zaritsky was, for when the exhibition was dismantled, he destroyed the painting. The decision of the curators at Ein Harod to enlarge the photograph was not only meant to be a gesture to Zaritsky, who passed away in 1985, and not only a necessary step in an exhibition whose declared subject was the relationship between ideology and creativity. It also provided viewers with a reflexive view of the festive project in which the photograph was displayed and in which they themselves were a part. Ostensibly there was a great distance between the 1958 exhibition, which celebrated the state’s tenth anniversary while conveying an official view hostile to the art of the period, and the liberal atmosphere dominating the Six Decades exhibitions in 2008. The reminder of the tenth anniversary exhibition and the insult to Zaritsky served to underline the fact that, even here and now, we were dealing with art exhibited at the initiative and under the sponsorship of the state. Following Ben-Gurion’s comment and the painting’s relocation, efforts to appease Zaritsky were made many times over. As if in compensation for the insult, he was awarded many official prizes, including, as mentioned, the Israel Prize in 1959. But in the context of an official project such as the 2008 Six Decades exhibitions, the reminder of this sharply discordant encounter between state and art is clearly important. Indeed, here lies the heart of the matter: at the end of the stairway in the elongated gallery of the kibbutz museum building, representing the best modern architecture has to offer and filled with sculptures and paintings verging on the abstract, hangs a gigantic photograph of a work bearing the heroic and confident title Might. This photograph, rendered in the black and white of times gone by, represents the spectators of times gone by and the conflicts of times gone by—and those of today as well. Another paradox can be derived from this image. Zaritsky espoused universalism and saw abstraction as the emergence of modern art and the chance for Israeli art to gradually integrate into international art. He considered figurative art marked by what he identified as local elements or those related to Jewish tradition as conservative, out of date, and unworthy. His main opponent was Mordecai Ardon (1896– 1992), who had grown up in the German artistic tradition and whose paintings were tied to Jewish sources. Nevertheless, despite his declared stance, Zaritsky seemed to see no contradiction between modern universalism and the creation of a painting called Might in honor of the nation’s tenth anniversary, just as the artists of the 2000s reconciled themselves to the inner conflicts involved in participating in an exhibition sponsored by and in honor of the state. Ironically, Zaritsky’s “universal” qualities and those of the New Horizon artists are today seen as the essence of local aesthetics.

Selection and Canonization, Us and the World Ernest H. Gombrich’s renowned book, The Story of Art, surveys art from prehistoric times through the 20th century. The book opens with the following sentence: “Strictly speaking there is no such thing as art. There are only artists.”18 Gombrich’s intention

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was to point to the changing status and embodiment of art throughout the generations, but even when he speaks of the varying perceptions of artists, he looks back with assurance, equipped with the perspective of hundreds of years, or of decades at the very least. The artists he writes about have passed through the filter of time. As an art historian, he is not required to separate the wheat from the chaff, but simply to analyze and explain what has already been certified as good and deserving. Gombrich is an outstanding example of a historical researcher who works within the large body of works comprising the history of art in a way that underlines the totally different atmosphere in which contemporary curators operate. The curators of the Six Decades exhibitions had, in the best of cases, five or six decades to consider, and in most instances they did not have the luxury of historical perspective. Everything is still subject to change. Stars can disappear, promising artists can disappoint us, and others can emerge as long-distance runners. Styles in taste and ideologies can also change, and along with them the esteem in which artists are held can rise or fall. This is one of the difficulties, and also one of the challenges and attractions, of contemporary art. It comes into being before our very eyes. There is no way of knowing whether it will last or be valid over time, and there is no way of predicting how or even whether artists working today will continue their work. Contemporary art exhibitions do not usually deal with questions of survival, but rather simply exhibit the works. But the festive and historical context of the Six Decades exhibitions forced even the exhibitions of the 1990s and the 2000s into a long-term perspective. The risk involved in dealing with fragile materials such as contemporary art is apparent in the exhibition curated by Doron Rabina, which exhibited the works of artists who worked in the 1990s but who today are no longer part of the world of art. Artists disappear from the art scene for many reasons. They may drop out because they are disappointed or because they sober up, because they lose interest in pursuing a career in art, or because the world of art is no longer interested in them. Some make a conscious decision to leave, while others have no choice. They leave behind a small body of work, which in some cases was exhibited, made its mark, and even became etched in memory. In the context of Gombrich’s statement, Rabina’s obligation was to art and to artistic creations, not to the artists. At the entrance to the Herzliya exhibition, he put on display postcards that Daniel Sack had sent in 1994 to leading figures in the art field, which had previously been exhibited at the Helena Rubinstein pavilion. Daniel Sack no longer works as an artist, but the postcards he sent to curators and artists, the question he posed to them—“Am I a young artist?”—and the answers he received even then, and certainly now in retrospect, had a reflective dimension with respect to the status of the young artist and the world of art as a field in which many forces are at work. Further in the exhibition, Elisha Dagan’s word sculpture was displayed, as were video works by Aya & Gal and by Dana and Boaz Zonshine. All of these artists were active for only a short period before leaving the world of art. This leaves us to wonder to what extent works can live on in the public consciousness without an artist to imbue them with a living spirit through new works. How long will such works remain in the collective memory before they ultimately fall by the wayside because there is no artist to construct a dynamic context for them? What is the fate of such works? Just like people who have died in the prime of life, these

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works will also likely remain forever young and will be accompanied by the tragic sense of missed opportunities. The works of Meira Shemesh and Asim Abu-Shakra were also exhibited at the Herzilya exhibition. Both artists died young, Shemesh in 1996 at the age of 34 and Abu-Shakra in 1990 at the age of 29, and both left behind a decade-long body of work. In contrast to a body of work cut short because the artist retired from the world of art, a body of work cut short because of the artist’s death, even if the artist died young, assumes a mark of irrevocability. The interruption takes on the dimensions of finality. The work of Hagit Lalo, an artist who died in 1961 at the age of 30, was exhibited at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod. Her work was displayed next to that of two other female artists, Aviva Uri and Leah Nikel, who, unlike Lalo, won wide recognition and acclaim in the Israeli art world. By exhibiting Lalo at the Six Decades exhibition, Galia Bar Or sought to renew public awareness of Lalo’s work, and by displaying her work next to that of Uri and Nikel, she attempted to undermine existing patterns and to reorganize history. From Doron Rabina’s special attachment to artists who are no longer active, it is evident that even if artists are no longer in the art arena, their work survives them. Yet the title of the exhibition, combining “young art” with “eventually we’ll die,” seems paradoxical. It hovers over this exhibition of eternal youth like a memento mori, a reminder of death, lying in wait and painting this festival of youth in morbid tones. “Eventually we’ll die” is also reminiscent of the line “and tomorrow we’ll die” from the poem by Avraham Ben Yitzhak—words that appear in the papers of Moshe Gershuni, among other places. Between the pessimistic certainty of “and tomorrow we’ll die” and the irony of “eventually we’ll die,” the motif of youth is colored in the gray tones of pessimism. As to taking a historical view, the last of the Six Decades exhibitions faced an almost impossible task. The Real Time exhibition was charged with providing an overall view of events and feelings without the moderating perspective of time. More than anything, the title reflected the work of the curators. Vered VinitzkySeroussi, who wrote the introductory article for the catalog, described the last decade in terms of dulled social and political senses and boredom, calling it the blasé period of those who have already seen everything so that nothing could move them.19 And in his article, co-curator Amitai Mendelsohn, focused on the overwhelming feeling of apocalyptic anxiety as the basis for the work of many artists. He stressed the integration of Israeli artists into the universal spirit of the times and the prevailing global artistic trends.20 An unexpected result of the debates raised by the first decade exhibition was the growing attention to Israeli artists on the international art scene. Yet it is instructive to see how Israeli art throughout the decades has examined itself vis-à-vis what is happening around the world: Paris in the first half of the 20th century, and subsequently New York and European art centers. The disparity between leading trends worldwide and local interpretations of these trends has dominated the discourse of art in Israel. Indeed, historical considerations of locality versus universality continue to pervade the discourse of art to the present day, though with some variations. The term “universalism” has been replaced by “globalism,” but the examination of “here” against “there” still stands.

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The Six Decades exhibitions provided an opportunity to examine how Israeli art diverged from the global art scene and how local artists responded. The artists of the first decade were torn between what seemed to be two contrasting poles, and the New Horizon movement therefore distanced itself from local artists such as Marcel Janco, Aharon Kahana, and Yohanan Simon. By the sixth decade, however, the spirit of the times embraced the symbiosis found in the term “glocalization.” The global and the local have merged in the work of Israeli artists (and, of course, others). All speak more or less the same language, the language of global art, which they use to express different texts using distinct and local dialects. The concept of “glocalism” can be attributed to mass communication and the flow of available information, as well as to the undermining traditional divisions between the mainstream and the margins. The traditional centers of the world of art are today showing interest in art originating in regions that were once marginal, and the margins are no longer working out of a sense of inferiority. This is a dual movement, from the core to the periphery and vice versa, and it has dramatically changed the way in which Israeli artists behave, as evidenced by the fact that many of the artists exhibited in Real Time work both in Israel and abroad. If this situation were obvious, there would be no reason to note it. But the mere fact that it is noted is an indication that the sense of being on the periphery is still part of the makeup of Israeli art. The curators of the Six Decades exhibitions worked within the perspective of the more or less limited time period at their disposal. Nonetheless, due to the scope and overall perspective of the project and in view of the unavoidable attrition of forgetting during the short time that elapsed, the exhibitions acted as a canonization mechanism. The project was in a position to place the Israeli art of the preceding sixty years within a historical context, and the exhibitions’ six catalogs today constitute an authoritative and hegemonic document on Israeli art that is meant to be used by students, artists, and art lovers. The images printed in the catalogs are images that will be remembered. Currently the major museums in Israel (the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum) cannot offer a broad and significant representation of Israeli art at any given moment. Hence the catalogs provide perspective and serve as a source of images that those interested in Israeli art can use as reference. In addition to images, the catalogs also contain a variety of articles about art and about other broad cultural contexts, including the history of relevant events during the decade, such as important exhibitions and milestones related to art against the background of historical events. Beyond all the problems mentioned here, the Six Decades exhibitions did indeed provide Israeli art greater exposure than it had ever known. The artists may not necessarily have benefited as individuals, since assigning them to one decade or another tended to brand them and did not do justice to the entire opus of an individual artist. Nonetheless, Israeli art as a whole did benefit. For even though art is an area of culture that usually does not make a great impact, during the period of a few months in 2008, the Six Decades exhibitions, and the vibrant debate they generated, focused the spotlight on Israeli art.

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Notes This article was translated by Donna Bossin. 1. See the following catalogs (arranged in chronological order of the decades, beginning with the 1950s): Galia Bar Or and Gideon Ofrat, Ha’asor harishon: hegemoniyah veribuy (Ein Harod: 2008); Yona Fischer and Tamar Manor-Friedman (eds.), Leidat ha’akhshav: shenot hashishim beomanut yisrael (Ashdod: 2008); Mordechai Omer (ed.), Gufi-’atzmi: omanut beyisrael, 1968–1978 (Tel Aviv: 2008); Ilana Tenenbaum and Yael Guilat (eds.), Check-post: shenot hashemonim beomanut yisrael (Haifa: 2008); Doron Rabina (ed.), Uvasof namut: omanut tzi’irah bishnot hatish’im beyisrael (Herzliya: 2008); Amitai Mendelsohn (ed.), Zeman emet: omanut beyisrael 1998–2008 (Jerusalem: 2008). 2. Sarah Breitberg Semel, “Ki karov elekha hadavar meod”: dalut hah.omer keeikhut baomanut hayisreelit (Tel Aviv: 1986). 3. Tami Katz-Freiman, Overkraft: obsesiyah, dekoratziyah veyofi nashkhani (Haifa: 2003). 4. Sarit Shapira, Maslulei nedudim: hagirah, masa’ot uma’avarim beomanut yisreelit ’akhshavit (Jerusalem: 1991); Yigal Zalmona and Tamar Manor-Friedman, Kadimah: hamizrah. beomanut yisrael (Jerusalem: 1998). 5. See the catalogs authored by the exhibitions’ curator, Gideon Ofrat: ’Akedat Yitzh.ak baomanut hayisreelit (Ramat Gan: 1987); Demut heh.alutz baomanut hayisreelit (Jerusalem: 1983); Katastrofah (Jerusalem: 1984); El mitos lelo el: hashivah el hatokhen hamitologi baomanut hayisreelit ha’akhshavit (Jerusalem: 1985); Meh.orvotayikh ebanekh; Ken ta’aseh lekhah (Tel Aviv: 2003). 6. Tali Tamir (ed.), Linah meshutefet: kevutzah vekibutz batoda’ah hayisreelit (Tel Aviv: 2005). 7. See the catalogs authored by the exhibitions’ curator, Tami Katz-Freiman, Antipatos: humor afel, ironiyah vetziniyut beomanut yisreelit ’akhshavit (Jerusalem: 1993); Dezert klisheh: yisrael ’akhshav—dimuyim mekomiyim (Tel Aviv: 1996); Love is in the Air: zeman leahavah: dimuyim shel ahavah romantit beomanut yisreelit ’akhshavit (Tel Aviv: 2004). 8. Ellen Ginton, “Ha’einayim shel hamedinah”: omanut h.azutit bimdinah lelo gevulot (Tel Aviv: 1998); Mordechai Omer, Tikun: heibetim baomanut hayisreelit shel shenot hashiv’im (Tel Aviv: 1998). 9. Doron Rabina, “Introduction to ‘Eventually We’ll Die: Young Art in Israel of the Nineties’ (2008),” online at www.artisrael.org/feature/press/introduction-to-eventually-welldie-young-art-in-israel-of-the-nineties-2008 (accessed November 14, 2011). 10. Sharif Waked, Yerih.o teh.ilah (Tel Aviv: 2007). 11. Sharif Waked, Shik point: ofnah lemah.somim yisreelim (Tel Aviv: 2007). 12. See www.nrg.co.il/online/47/ART1/827/114.html (accessed July 25, 2011). 13. Gila Ballas, Ofakim h.adashim (Tel Aviv: 1979). 14. Galia Bar Or (ed.), ’Avodah ’ivrit: omanut yisreelit mishnot ha20 ’ad shenot ha90 (Ein Harod: 1998). 15. Galia Bar Or, Miron Sima: midrezden lirushalayim (Ein Harod: 1997); idem and Gideon Ofrat, Shalom Sebba (Ein Harod: 1994). 16. Ellen Ginton (ed.), Ori Reisman: retrospektivah (Tel Aviv: 2004). 17. See Gideon Ofrat, “Ta’arukhat ha’asor,” in Bar Or and Ofrat, Ha’asor harishon, 241. 18. Ernest H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 16th ed. (London: 1995), 21. 19. Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, “Ha’asor hakeheh: 1998–2007,” in Mendelsohn (ed.), Zeman emet, 61–65. 20. Amitai Mendelsohn, “H . ezyonot ah.arit vereishit: hirhurim ’al omanut beyisrael,” in ibid., 67–71.

In Between Past and Future: Time and Relatedness in the Six Decades Exhibitions Osnat Zukerman Rechter (THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY)

Brigadier: What will you do if the Egyptians advance toward our post? Victor: What we did in ’56. . . . Brigadier: What did you do in’56? Victor: What we did in ’48. . . . There’s nothing better than that, for sure. Brigadier: And what did you do in 1948? Victor: Thirty years ago . . . that far back . . . who remembers?1 This essay, the title of which recalls that of a book by Hannah Arendt,2 is part of a broader research project aimed at examining curatorship as an action. In my dissertation, “The Curatorial Action,” I discuss curatorship in the context of Arendt’s concept of action as formulated in her book The Human Condition (1958), where, after presenting the traditional distinction between vita activa (active life) and vita contemplativa (contemplative life), she proceeds to conduct an in-depth discussion on the former and its various forms, dividing it into three levels of interdependent activities: labor, work, and action. For Arendt, action is “political” (as distinct from politics), is dependent on plurality (as opposed to unanimity), and belongs to the public realm. It also has a dimension of newness,3 and it is inextricably tied to speech. In this essay, my reference to the curatorial action should be understood in light of these concepts. It should be stressed that this is not an attempt to force Arendt’s “action” on curatorship outright, nor even an attempt to offer a “test case” for Arendt’s assertions. Although the repercussions of Arendt’s concepts echo throughout this essay, they will be developed and discussed only with respect to their relevancy to the more specific topic at hand. In 2008, the year marking the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel, six exhibitions were held in six different museums throughout Israel that placed their curators at the center of a “national assignment,” as it were. Their presumed task was to weave a “supra-narrative” of Israeli art. The exhibitions were considered one joint project, and approved accordingly. Each participating museum

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assumed responsibility for one of the six decades of the state of Israel’s official existence. The decisions made at various levels of the project—which museums would participate, which decade each would focus on, who the curators would be, which curators would work with which museum, which artists would be displayed, and by which and how many artworks—provide us with numerous insights into the conduct and preferences of the art establishment in Israel as it dealt with a wide range of issues, both internal and external to the system. The present discussion differs from the companion essay in this symposium authored by Ruth Direktor in that it will be limited to questions relating to the curatorship of the exhibitions, and will examine the different practices employed for dealing with the task. The curators’ assignment as arbiters of the history of Israeli art yielded an assortment of results having one thing in common: multiplicity. Each of the six exhibitions displayed a large number of artists and works. No attempt was made to present a decade through one or two artists, or even through a small group, perhaps because such a strategy may have highlighted from the outset the invalidity of the incentive to build a supra-narrative or hegemonic canon. From the point of view of spectators trying to follow the logic of the exhibitions—which combined into one declaration the large collection of works displayed in each exhibition, and which connected dozens of artists who were often represented by one single work—it is clear that the curators, not the artists, served in these exhibitions as key figures who both deciphered and reconfigured our memory of local art. In this manner, whether intentionally or not, the Six Decades exhibitions provided an opportunity to examine more general questions of local curatorship, beyond questions specific to the project. In particular, the enlistment of Israel’s major art museums and curators to a project hinging on the connection between the state of Israel and art raises fundamental questions about the presence of political elements in the artistic scene in Israel and, in the context of the present discussion, about the relationship between politics and curatorship. Like all actions, the curatorial action has performative characteristics. It has a brief existence; it is temporary; and in consequence, it is dependent on mechanisms of memory for its preservation. The question of the connection between time and memory, and of its expression in public spaces, is especially relevant to the curatorship of the Six Decades exhibitions. That is, the curators dealt with time not only as a subject but also in the broader sense of memory and history, history and historiography, with all of these coming together in the form of reflection (and sometimes self-reflection) on curatorship activities that had taken place in the past. In addition, the connections between time, memory, history, and historiography were equally relevant to the issue of the complex and frequently conflicted relationship between art and the state. My discussion of the exhibitions will have two guiding concepts—time and relatedness—and will explore how the varying approaches of the curators resulted in a range of strategies with regard to what is remembered, what should be remembered, how it should be remembered, and by what means. As noted by Direktor in her accompanying essay, the idea of the Six Decades exhibitions was conceived by Yigal Zalmona, chief curator-at-large of the Israel Museum and chairman of the steering committee for the Sixty Years of Art in Israel

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events.4 This essay will refer mainly to the various exhibitions in terms of the decade each represented rather than by their exhibition titles. Nonetheless, it may be useful for readers to have the names and curators set forth at the outset: • The First Decade (1948–1958): Museum of Art, Ein Harod Curators: Galia Bar Or and Gideon Ofrat Exhibition name: The First Decade: A Hegemony and a Plurality • The Second Decade (1958–1968): Ashdod Art Museum Curators: Yona Fischer and Tamar Manor-Friedman Exhibition name: The Birth of Now: Art in Israel in the 1960s • The Third Decade (1968–1978): Tel Aviv Museum of Art Curator: Mordechai Omer Exhibition name: My Own Body: Art in Israel in the 1970s • The Fourth Decade (1978–1988): Haifa Museum of Art Curator: Ilana Tenenbaum Exhibition name: Check-Post: Art in Israel in the 1980s • The Fifth Decade (1988–1998): Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art Curator: Doron Rabina Exhibition name: Eventually We’ll Die: Young Art in Israel of the Nineties • The Sixth Decade (1998–2008): Israel Museum, Jerusalem Curators: Amitai Mendelsohn and Efrat Natan Exhibition name: Real Time: Art in Israel 1998–2008 Of the six museums chosen for the task, three were spread among Israel’s three largest cities (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa), two were located in large satellite cities (Herzliya and Ashdod), and one belonged to a kibbutz (Ein Harod). Curators were appointed individually by each museum, and not by the central steering committee. Of the nine curators (five men, four women), three functioned simultaneously (in 2008) as directors and chief curators of the same museums in which the Six Decades exhibitions were held: Galia Bar Or at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod; Yona Fischer at the Ashdod Art Museum; and Mordechai Omer at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Of the remaining six curators, two (Amitai Mendelsohn and Ilana Tenenbaum) served as in-house curators at the museums in which the exhibitions were held, whereas the other four (Efrat Natan, Tamar Manor-Friedman, Doron Rabina, and Gideon Ofrat) were invited as guest curators. Efrat Natan and Doron Rabina were also active artists at the time; this fact (especially in the case of Rabina) rendered them more inclined to the polemical in their curatorial choices. Besides mounting the exhibition on its premises, each museum was responsible for producing its own catalog, according to a fixed format, which was sold together with those of the other five museums in one package. All six catalogs were mainly in Hebrew, though all of them contained a section in English. The catalog for the fifth decade was the only one to contain some Arabic. It was agreed that, in addition to illustrations and articles, each catalog would also contain some sort of timeline indicating significant cultural and historical milestones. Each museum and curator adopted a different approach to this general agreement. Two catalogs, for the second and fourth decades (Ashdod and Haifa museums,

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respectively), contained a relatively detailed, comprehensive calendar of events and happenings in the political, social, and cultural arenas, together with references to artistic milestones such as the opening of specific exhibitions. The first decade catalog (Museum of Art, Ein Harod) was split into two sections, with political and social milestones appearing at the beginning, and cultural and artistic milestones appearing at the end. The two “young decades” catalogs—the fifth (Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art) and the sixth (Israel Museum, Jerusalem)—offered a professedly selective, illustrated chronology that related solely to the field of art. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s catalog, for the third decade, did not contain any chronology. Finally, there was a clear connection between each fundamental curatorial approach and the strategy actually reflected in the exhibition in question. I will attempt to define this relationship below.

Time 1 This was not the first time that Israeli art exhibitions were required to have a decadal theme. The birth of the state of Israel has been commemorated practically every decade, to one extent or another, by an exhibition.5 Moshe Zuckermann, who dealt with this issue a decade previously with regard to the exhibition Women Artists in Israeli Art (curator: Ilana Taicher, Haifa, 1998), made a distinction between the “intra-artistic” and the “extra-artistic” considerations, as he termed them, in curating the exhibition. According to him, intra-artistic considerations referred to a “reasonable connection between the pretext for the exhibition and its object,” whereas no such connection existed in the case of the “state’s birthday” exhibition: For there is no reason to assume that the jubilee of the abstract political entity, “the state of Israel,” is also necessarily the right time to deal with events in the sphere of the various artistic practices of the Israeli experience, let alone conduct an interim “summary.” The internal logic of the development of the sphere of art, influenced and intertwined as it may be with developments in other areas, is in no way conclusively determined by these developments. And just as one may be skeptical about the 50th anniversary of the existence of the “state” being precisely the proper historical moment to mark an especially important stage in its political, economic, or social development, similarly there is good reason to assume that there is no especially pronounced connection between the state’s chronological, and fundamentally artificial, age and the condition of the art created in it.6

In the context of the exhibition in question, Zuckermann distinguishes between the abstract political entity, the state, and the sphere of artistic practices, avowedly grounding himself on Adorno’s concept of the “autonomy of art,” which is antithetical to the “culture industry” and its hypercommercialized products. Zuckermann’s assertions concerning “extra-artistic considerations” are meaningful, as he himself notes, only insofar as we embrace the concept of the autonomy of art (as reflecting an inherent refusal to be reduced to other areas), as well as the assumption that art is fundamentally impervious to foreign influences—that is, it establishes an internal logic that resists actuality, thus serving as an alternative to a reality that is perceived as oppressive.7

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Zuckermann’s extra-artistic reasoning can be applied readily to the Six Decades exhibitions, which create an artificial connection between a matter relating to the social, economic, political, territorial entity called the state of Israel, on the one hand, and art, on the other. Doron Rabina, curator of the fifth decade exhibition, said in an interview conducted at the planning and material-assembling stage: “Thinking in terms of decades, of defined time spans, thinking of art as closing ranks around historical categories, is foreign to me. I am coping with this for the first time, with uneasiness and a sense of recoiling, as I work on this exhibition.”8 When the project was over, Rabina expressed himself even more strongly: “The project is problematic, possibly to the point of being reprehensible. Connecting it to 1948, tying together art and state. . . .”9 Notwithstanding, the case of the Six Decades exhibitions, whether attacked from the “autonomy of art” angle as propagandist-manipulative; criticized for its capitulation to the power of the museological establishment, in the spirit of institutional critique theory; or assaulted for its hegemonic art history dimension, in the spirit of “visual culture” theory, is different from that of Women Artists in Israeli Art, and is also different from previous “decade summary” exhibitions. The scope of the projects and the extent of the cooperation of the artistic establishment made it clear that, as Andrea Fraser, a major representative of the second generation of institutional critique, once noted: “It is not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kind of rewards we aspire to.”10 In the Six Decades project, the simultaneity of the exhibitions in six different museums and their division into decades put the spotlight precisely on the question of time, not place. Simplistically and schematically put, the Six Decades exhibitions could have focused on two possible common denominators: place and time. In the present case, the parameter of place, that is, the state of Israel, remained fixed in all six exhibitions, whereas the active variable was time—that is, the time interval with which each exhibition dealt. Consequently, the dynamic variable, time in its relationship to place, was what was represented as the subject in each exhibition. By placing their focus on time rather than the state, the curators undercut the propagandistic element of the Six Decades exhibitions. For even though “statism” (mamlakhtiyut) was a natural and integral part of a project that was (at least in part) sponsored and funded by the government, the ultimate product had more to do with time as a temporal, compelling intangible that required a conduit through which to be decoded. That conduit was the curator. In other words, the fact that the museum establishment conceived the idea of the exhibitions, and that selected museums and their curators cooperated with and implemented it, can (and perhaps should be) interpreted as suppressive, in the sense that art was decoded, experienced, and defined (and perhaps also produced) with double institutional reference: to the museum in question and to the state. At the same time, it is no less relevant and interesting to view the exhibitions as a challenge that called for shrewd, careful, and self-conscious action, and for a reflective look at time in its different presentations through the personalities of the art curators. Neither of these possibilities negates the other. They can co-exist. The dismantlement of time into

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decades, and each exhibition’s focus on a single decade, exempted the curators from the possible demand to outline a historical, developmental, linear movement and enabled them to focus on simultaneous events. As Galia Bar Or remarked: On the face of it, the division by decades forces an arbitrary constraint of historical periodization, connecting a foreign meaning to deep processes that are by their nature dynamic and long-term. In our case, however, this division made it possible to deviate from the prevalent framework of a narrative that crosses decades—the familiar hegemonic narrative, which became established in the first decade and described the history of Israeli art as “progress” towards distilled modernist utterance. It seems now that the synchronic focus on a single decade has enabled us to actually explore the lateral plurality, the diversity of orientations that were suppressed, ignored or forgotten in the teleological trajectory which became enshrined in the Israeli art discourse.11

In the short history of contemporary curatorship (in which the major change of direction with regard to the curator’s role is credited to Harald Szeemann),12 concept exhibitions have gradually and fundamentally changed the image of curatorship as a profession. Concept exhibitions, as opposed to period or retrospective exhibitions, or exhibitions of various artistic groups, deflect the emphasis from the artist or the object displayed to the exhibition as an overall declaration—as a creation unto itself, thus contributing to an enhancement of the authority and status of the curator.13 The team of curators of the Six Decades exhibitions held in 2008 had been active for years in the field of curatorship and had curated many thematic-conceptual exhibitions. Therefore, for them, time as a concept and as a subject of an exhibition was fundamentally distinct from time as an organizational parameter or as a secondary subject, as is the case in traditional chronological or retrospective exhibitions. Assuming time is a subject, and that the curator is our point of reference as we view time as a subject, it becomes possible to examine what is pre-supposed in the curatorial action: relatedness.

Relatedness Then and Now In its shifting expression as distant from or close to us, time establishes webs of relationships and contains the potential to shape our identity. Thus, while there is a clear sense of arbitrariness in dividing time into decades, such a division can also allow for an examination of the ways in which various agents—in this case, curators, artists, the public, and critics—feel varying degrees of relatedness: distant from, close to, or even “belonging to” different periods of time. In two of the Six Decades exhibitions, curators chose to highlight this relational aspect of time. Writing on the second decade exhibition, Ory Dessau refers to “two harmonious fits,”14 one in the exhibition relating to the 1990s, and the other in the exhibition relating to the 1960s. According to Dessau, the first harmonious fit relates to the theme of the 1990s exhibition and its location in the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1994, when Dalia Levin was appointed its director and chief curator, the museum underwent a transformation, shifting its focus from Israeli art to contemporary art in general and to young artists in particular. During this same period, Doron

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Rabina completed his studies at the Beit Berl Academic College School of Art (in 2009, he was appointed its director) and began his swift journey to the center of artistic creativity, both as artist and curator. In the following decade, Levin chose Rabina as the curator of Eventually We’ll Die: Young Art in Israel of the Nineties exhibition, precisely because of Rabina’s link with this decade. From the outset, Levin’s curatorial choice contained an element of self-reflection, which Rabina adopted as the conceptual focus of the curatorship action he executed. Among other things, he resorted to reconstructing, partially reconstructing and, in some instances, distorting artworks in order to prevent them from becoming fixated in people’s memory in the original context in which they were displayed.15 For instance, in the case of the artist Eliezer Sonnenschein, Rabina decided to re-create a fragment of Port, a large installation that had originally been displayed as part of a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2002. With the artist’s approval, only part of the original installation, renamed Update, Update, Update, was reconstructed (though not by Sonnenschein). In another instance, Sigalit Landau’s installation, Iron Door Tent, which had been displayed at the Israel Museum in 1995, a new element in the form of a charred wall hanging was added by the artist (Fig. 8.1). Another installation originally displayed in the Israel Museum in 1995, Guy Bar Amotz’s Garden of Idan, was reconstructed by the artist, but was not identical to the original work. These examples illustrate the ways in which Rabina attempted to synthesize the art of the 1990s in all its dynamism, and in this way forestall its being frozen and sealed in history.

Figure 8.1. Sigalit Landau, Iron Door Tent, from Temple Mount, Israel Museum, 1995; installation view at the fifth decade exhibition, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008 (photo: Yigal Pardo).

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The second “harmonious fit” referred to by Dessau relates to Yona Fischer, the cocurator of the 1960s exhibition held at the Ashdod Art Museum: Yona Fischer, who curated the exhibition in cooperation with Tamar Manor-Friedman, acted not only as the curator of the decade he was about to unfurl in the niche-and-anglefilled spaces of the Ashdod Art Museum at the Monart Center, but was also responsible for the top artistic moments of this decade, and is perhaps the person who exercised the most influence on [this decade’s] complex image in Israeli art.16

Fischer, who has left his mark not only on the 1960s but on the field of art in Israel as a whole,17 tried from the outset to create a double view in the second decade exhibition: then and now. “Our perspective on the 1960s is influenced by developments in the contemporary art scene, so that we often tend to attribute to the past the insights and concepts that we have today,”18 Fischer noted. This is not a loose formulation of the principle of anachronism but, again, as in the case of Rabina, an expression of self-reflection that takes into account the fact that the person viewing in the present what was viewed in the past is, in both cases, Fischer himself. One of Fischer and Manor-Friedman’s most significant insights related to the crystallization of the concept “now.” This arose in the context of their discussing the activity of the Ten Plus group of the mid-1960s19 and was also emphasized in the name chosen for the second decade exhibition, The Birth of Now: [The Ten Plus exhibitions] were in fact a declaration that the artist is free to act without an ideological platform or an artistic program, without any obligatory standards, but rather activating himself in response to the immediate circumstances. The “circumstances” which the group created express an early discovery of the concept that emerges in the 1960s—the concept of “now,” and the awareness that “now” is the most important moment.”20

The relationship between the “now of then” and the “now of now” are embodied in Fischer, who in this exhibition constitutes a meeting point of past and present through his personality, preferences, and, in particular, his continuous role as curator since the early 1960s. He is the medium for reading the past and reevaluating events and processes that he himself influenced. As with Rabina in the fifth decade exhibition, Fischer’s role as a medium is explicitly acknowledged—as attested to by the main text in the catalog, which is presented as a dialogue between the two curators, with Tamar Manor-Friedman in the role of the interviewer and Fischer in the role of the interviewee. Thus, Fischer stands as the narrator of the 1960s in Israeli art. The importance of the “now” becomes even stronger in the duplication created by the emphasis on the “birth of the now” then, in the 1960s, and its renewed validation in the “now” of our period. It is further reinforced by Fischer’s simultaneous relatedness to the “now” of then and to the “now” of today, as reflected in his and Manor-Friedman’s curatorial decisions. A large-scale photograph of Dani Karavan’s Negev Monument (1963–1968), for instance, is placed alongside visual images of other concrete sculptures located in the desert, among them a plaster model of Ezra Orion’s Sculpture Field (1968–1972) and Yigal Tumarkin’s Arad Panorama (1962–1968). This placement, rather than emphasizing the collective memory of mourning and bereavement that is present in all of these sculptures, focuses on more abstract and formal aspects of the works, in particular their open-air desert setting—working in nature,

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according to Fischer, was a central and vivid element of the artistic experience of the 1960s. A similar approach is evident in their placement of artworks connected to the Six-Day War. What Dessau terms “harmonious fits” are instances of relatedness—that is, they illustrate a situation in which time is translated into a web of frameworks that foster an identity, as in a link to a certain institution, to an exhibition site, or to an artistic group, or as in belonging to a certain generation of artists, and so forth. Instead of a relationship between two parameters (what happened in the past, and the present perspective on what happened in the past), the curatorship practiced by Rabina and by Fischer creates a triangular relationship between their own deeds in the past, their perspective then, and their present view of their perspective back then. This, in turn, recreates the historical as a personal narrative, as a poetic act, something akin to an “auto-retrospective.” What does all this mean? In order to sharpen and clarify the point, I will deviate for a moment from my main discussion on curatorship to quote Arendt, who establishes a distinction between two types of history: history as a field of knowledge of the process of human existence and history as a category of human existence.

The Historical as Poetic In her book Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt refers to the encounter between the present of “then” and the present of now, illustrating it with what she perceives as a paradigmatic case: Ulysses’ visit to the Phaeacians in the Homeric tale: History as a category of human existence is of course older than the written word, older than Herodotus, older even than Homer. Not historically but poetically speaking, its beginning lies rather in the moment when Ulysses, at the court of the king of the Phaeacians, listened to the story of his own deeds and sufferings, to the story of his life, now a thing outside himself, an “object” for all to see and to hear. What had been sheer occurrence now became “history.” . . . The scene where Ulysses listens to the story of his own life is paradigmatic for both history and poetry; the “reconciliation with reality,” the catharsis, which, according to Aristotle, was the essence of tragedy, and according to Hegel, was the ultimate purpose of history, came about through the tears of remembrance. The deepest human motive for history and poetry appears here in unparalleled purity: since listener, actor, and sufferer are the same person, all motives of sheer curiosity and lust for new information, which, of course, have always played a large role in both historical inquiry and aesthetic pleasure, are naturally absent in Ulysses himself, who would have been bored rather than moved if history were only news and poetry only entertainment.21

Arendt perceives history as a category of human existence that preceded the written word. Consequently, she views the beginning of human existence as different from our usual comprehension of history as a field of knowledge that investigates the past of the human race. History, as a category of human existence, is itself an event or the repetition of an event in words, of an event that took place in the past and that is being narrated. Being narrated, it possesses relatedness because, for Arendt, someone compiles it. Ulysses’ visit to the palace of Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, is an excellent example of such a moment in which an encounter takes place between reality and

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narrativeness, between the historical and the poetical. At the moment when Ulysses, having heard part of his own story being recited by someone else, reveals his true identity and takes up the narration, he exists simultaneously as subject, predicate, and object. The triangular relationship that develops creates a connection between the individual, the historical, and the poetical, combining the two “nows”—that of the action (storytelling) and that of the word (the story itself)—through the narrator, Ulysses. Moreover, the narrative act has a performative character. The narrative of the action, like the action itself, has a spatial dimension, singling out the narrator as well as the performer of the action. In spite of my uneasiness at the idea of positing an analogy with Ulysses, I believe that the curatorial situation in which Fischer and Rabina found themselves in the Six Decades project resembled in principle the one described above. Under the broad, ambitious cover of a mission with a historical dimension, in the service of an initiative that could be understood as having a national character, each curator took his own personal experience and turned it into an object to be observed and reflected upon. As Rabina noted: “I am facing a mission that involves the creation of an image for the decade of artists of my generation, my ideological partners or rivals, whose actions opened my eyes or else fomented real-time debate or opposition. Suddenly this real time has become a story that can be narrated.”22 Two crucial differences distinguish Rabina’s and Fischer’s acts. First, Fischer, in contrast to Rabina, did not curate the second decade exhibition on his own. Rather, he held a dialogue with Tamar Manor-Friedman, who, in her position as “interviewer” and partner, expropriates his story of its exclusivity. Second, in the first “now” just as in the present “now,” Fischer’s role was that of curator, whereas Rabina then—in the 1990s—was both curator and artist. In choosing to display a piece created by himself in the exhibition, Rabina referred to his status as an artist while indicating the complicated web of relationships between artist and curator. Moreover, Rabina’s decision to display works by artists who, in the 1990s, were at the beginning of their professional career—some of whom (for instance, Guy Ben-Ner, Avner Ben-Gal, and Sigalit Landau) became established artists, while others (among them Daniel Sack, Elisha Dagan, and Guy Bar Amotz) disappeared from the artistic scene—sharpened the sense of elapsed time and in this sense largely undermined his avowed attempt not to present them as frozen in history. Fischer has often argued that curators of contemporary art must belong to the same generation as the artists they work with or, at most, one generation later.23 Therefore, when Fischer, in the second decade exhibition, displayed works by artists such as Moshe Gershuni, Raffi Lavie, Uri Lifshitz, and Moshe Kupferman, artists more or less of his own generation, whose first exhibition he had curated in the Israel Museum back in the late 1960s or early 1970s; or a piece by David Avidan, who belonged to the visual arts scene for only a short period (becoming famous mainly as a poet), the accumulated significance of this curatorial act was a renewed choice that reinforced his choices in the past and stressed the dialogue he continued to hold with the artists of the generation that were identified with him. Fischer and Rabina, as mediums and as mediators, through remembrance, between events in the past and the present, became, by their action, people who merge, or replace, the historic with the poetic. Indeed, paraphrasing Arendt, it is reasonable to

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assume that they would have been bored and unchallenged had their curatorship been limited to collecting information, and had the exhibition been merely the presentation of information to the public. In their action of curatorship, Fischer and Rabina synthesized the two “nows” by means of themselves. Consequently, in these two exhibitions, the presence of the concept of “now” as crucial was filtered in a more formative manner than in the four other exhibitions. The repetition of the “now” cut the continuum of the historical process, dismantling it into individual moments that appeared to be disconnected from one another. At the same time, the modern concept of history as a process also unavoidably, and simultaneously, continued to exist in the viewer’s consciousness. Therefore, to quote Fischer, “the awareness that ‘now’ is the most important moment”24 perpetuated the dominance of the present as a “now” aspiring to cut itself off from remembrance and to abolish the very existence of the past. I will return to this point later.

Place (Makom) The “harmonious fits” noted by Ory Dessau with regard to the second and fifth decade exhibitions, which can be understood as layers of relatedness between curators and the decades they dealt with (even if each decade was different in character), apply as well to the first decade exhibition co-curated by Galia Bar Or and Gideon Ofrat. For years, Bar Or and Ofrat had been engaged in separate attempts to widen the scope of art in Israel to include corpuses rejected from the canon, omitted from the “official” history, or relegated to the margins of the art scene discourse.25 The title of the first decade exhibition, A Hegemony and a Plurality, sounded like a manifesto—which was appropriate, as both Bar Or and Ofrat had long sought to shatter the centers of hegemony that had developed in Israel’s art community. Indeed, it is almost impossible to think of a better match between art in Israel during the 1950s and the two individuals chosen to curate the exhibition dedicated to this decade. Yet beyond the fit between theme and curators was an additional link, connected (albeit in differing ways) with the notion of place. Bar Or, the chief director and curator of the Museum of Art, Ein Harod since 1985, was born and raised on Kibbutz Ein Harod, where she continues to reside. Thus, the curatorial action distinguishing her is closely connected to her belonging both to the kibbutz and to the Museum of Art. Ofrat, in contrast, has no specific “home base” as a curator, yet has consistently been involved with theme-oriented exhibitions connected to place and to localness, and more specifically to Eretz Israel, Judaism, and the Bible. Both curators, who had worked together several times in the past,26 were intimately acquainted with the “scene of the action”—not only the physical site of the museum but also the history and research of the first decade period. Their collaboration in the Six Decades project resulted in the most radical of the six exhibitions. In both the exhibition and the catalog, the equally assertive voices of Bar Or and Ofrat engaged in a form of dialogue. Walking through the various exhibition halls, viewers could easily discern which sections “belonged” to each of the curators. A glance at the catalog confirmed this impression. Bar Or’s topics included kibbutz art, the issue of the representation of displaced persons and refugees in art, and women artists, whereas the subjects covered by Ofrat included the return to the image of man

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Figure 8.2. The first decade exhibition, view of galleries dedicated to the subject “Towards 1958—On the Human Condition,” Museum of Art, Ein Harod, 2008 (photo: Avraham Hay).

and his condition (Fig. 8.2); the hegemony of the New Horizons group;27 abstraction versus the many alternatives that had developed simultaneously but only began attracting attention some 20 years later; and (in a historiographical piece laced with humorous asides), two early art exhibitions in Israel, The Conquest of the Wilderness (1953) and The First Decade (1958). The voices of Ofrat and Bar Or could not have been more distinct, with their separateness further emphasized by the employment of different fonts for their contributions to the catalog. This deliberate (and indeed, collaborative) split between the curators reflected back to the title of the exhibition, “a hegemony and a plurality,” and suggested the more radical possibility of splitting the hegemony—not only at the level of the contents of the decade, but also at that of the relationship between curator and exhibition, between curator and public, and between curator and space. In addition, the dialogue between Bar Or and Ofrat, as expressed in the catalog and via the exhibition material, dismantled not only the hegemonic dialogue on the art of the first decade, but also the role of the curator as “one” (this, in contrast with the other decade exhibitions cocurated by a male-female team, in which the male curator was clearly dominant). In this sense, it invited the public to engage in discussion on the subject of Israel’s first decade in art, and equally on questions regarding curatorial focuses and leanings, matters of tastes and preferences, and the incompleteness inherent in any given point of view. Adding to the complexity of the exhibition was its divided physical layout, which prevented topics from becoming united into a narrative trajectory. Indeed, there was a sense of an almost absurd inability to “capture” the period of time being displayed.

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For instance, paintings by Avraham Amarant (Tushek), David Navot, and Meir Ben-Uri (which were created to decorate kibbutz dining rooms on various Jewish holidays) were displayed alongside some of the canonical paintings and sculptures of the period, in a move that jolted artistic conventions. Bar Or and Ofrat also amused themselves with different exhibition genres— historical, artistic, crafts—ultimately combining them into one visual creation that clarified, perhaps better than any other attempt, how it was at all possible for the artistic establishment in Israel to conceive, cooperate on, and implement an idea such as that of the Six Decades exhibitions. Finally, although differing in their attitudes with regard to belonging to a “place,” both curators attached great importance to the issue. Consequently, alongside its sometimes light-hearted criticism, the first decade exhibition presented a sober and penetrating look at the broader and deeper meanings ascribed to place, thus demonstrating the relevance of examining the charged issue of the relationship between art and state precisely through the medium of a public, but non-“statist,” exhibition. Bar Or and Ofrat’s act of “breaking the hegemony” entailed a battle with accepted memory. A Hegemony and a Plurality contradicted tradition, that of “the familiar hegemonic narrative, which became established in the first decade,” to quote Bar Or, as hegemony was connected to authority, and authority was an element that was inseparable from tradition.28 In her article “What is Authority?,” Hannah Arendt discusses the connection between authority and hierarchy, as well as between authority, tradition, and memory.29 Among other things, Arendt’s multilayered discussion is intended to criticize the modern world. Most relevant to our topic is the distinction she makes between memory as our connection to the past and history as a discipline that regulates how we examine the past; and between both memory and history, on the one hand, and, on the other, tradition—a kind of “lived life” that no longer exists, but which once provided a different means of connection to the past:30 Thus the undeniable loss of tradition in the modern world does not at all entail a loss of the past, for tradition and past are not the same. . . . With the loss of tradition we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the vast realms of the past, but this thread was also the chain fettering each successive generation to a predetermined aspect of the past. It could be that only now will the past open up to us with unexpected freshness and tell us things no one has yet had ears to hear. But it cannot be denied that without a securely anchored tradition—and the loss of this security occurred several hundred years ago—the whole dimension of the past has also been endangered. We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion—quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost—would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance.31

According to Arendt, tradition means leaning on the past, on our forefathers, on a certain predetermined remembrance of our common human origins.32 But tradition and the past are distinct from one another. Moreover, according to Arendt, although tradition leaned on the past in a way that precluded any real potential for flexibility, this very rigidity provided man and his activities with a certain stability and security.

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Once tradition stopped serving as a relative barrier to oblivion, new paths were blazed to the past and to the future. However, this was at the expense of stability, and the shared memory holding our lives together was undermined. Arendt further contends that, beyond the loss of specific contents, the impossibility of remembering menaces a whole dimension of human experience, that of depth, because depth always depends on remembrance. History as the recorder of the past cannot fill the role of tradition,33 because the modern concept of time as an infinite process does not offer stability or even an effective anchor for remembrance.34 Lacking a hierarchy to shape a preference for us to remember one thing rather than another, anything—and everything—goes. With regard to the struggle for remembrance, Bar Or and Ofrat employed a strategy relating to the significance of place. Seeking to broaden visitors’ perspectives beyond works of art that were identified and fixed in the public memory of the 1950s, they presented artworks that were anchored in a uniquely local context, the kibbutz. They also displayed works (which had been rejected from the canon for many years) featuring displaced persons and refugees who had come to Palestine/ Israel. As suggested by the Hebrew word makom, “place” is connected to kiyum, or existence. Hence the perception that “place” existed before us and continues to exist after us. We build and rebuild “place”; it builds and rebuilds us. We preserve it, and it preserves our actions. Both by means of place and relative to it, humans create webs of interpersonal relationships that exist before our birth and continue after our death, anchoring our lives as individuals and lending meaning to our actions. Indeed, the very reality of our world is established via place, which is perceived as more enduring and rigid than “the reality of our life.”35 The exhibition suggested that “place” can be understood as what Arendt terms the “space of appearance” of our activity.36 The radicalism of the first decade exhibition was reflected not only in its breaking of the hegemony but also in its aspiration, by means of “place,” to restore both the horizons and the depth of the past as a means of coping with the despotism of the now. In this context, Ofrat’s decision to focus on Yossef Zaritsky’s monumental painting Might (created especially for The First Decade exhibition of 1958, and destroyed by Zaritsky once the exhibition was over) is fascinating and perhaps also symbolic. This painting exhibits a tense encounter between “art” and “state,” yet Ofrat chose to direct his attention toward issues of memory: instead of presenting Zaritsky and the consensus regarding his art through any of Zaritsky’s still-existing paintings, he selected a large photograph of Might (taken by Werner Braun) showing the painting being installed at The First Decade exhibition (seen in the background of Fig. 8.3).37 What this suggests is that, paradoxically, the suppressive element is neither the link between art and state (“state” is different from “place,” covering only a limited range of the meanings embodied in the latter concept), nor the split into decades, but rather—as I will show below—what may be termed the “labor of now.” The radical suggestion emerging from the first decade exhibition, which reflected as well the longstanding activity of its two curators, was that the coupling of “state” and “art” might well be replaced by a (non-mythical) coupling of “place” (makom) and “existence” (kiyum)—in this way expanding both the concept of curatorship and the field of activity of art.

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Figure 8.3. The first decade exhibition, view of the main corridor, Museum of Art, Ein Harod, 2008 (photograph: Avraham Hay).

Time 2 Before discussing the fourth and sixth decade exhibitions, I would like to return to the exhibitions mounted by the Ten Plus group, and the manner in which Yona Fischer characterized them in the second decade catalog, in order to create a distinction between two types of “now.” Fischer contended that the Ten Plus exhibitions “were in fact a declaration that the artist is free to act without an ideological platform or an artistic program, without any obligatory standards, but rather activating himself in response to the immediate circumstances.”38 This utterance, which expresses the freedom not to be dependent, also embodies the essence of the enormous threat of the despotism of the “now”: oblivion. In a reality devoid of a binding standard, relatedness, and anchors, and where everything is subject to the circumstances of the moment, nothing is permanent. Indeed, even the ability to improvise in accordance with the “circumstances of the moment” must be anchored in a solid infrastructure, otherwise improvisation is nothing but a momentary survival. Methodologically, a distinction can be made between a “now” aimed at retrieving memory and a “now” aspiring to be rid of the restrictions of memory, seeking its erasure and even oblivion. This second “now” is what I regard as despotic or patronizing. The “despotism of now” is a situation in which matters are determined now, on the whim of a moment, without relatedness. It is “survivalist” (as opposed to productive) in the sense that it leaves us stranded in a repetitive whirl of activity (as opposed to action), constantly producing products that are, in turn, rapidly consumed. This situation is similar to what Arendt terms “labor.”39 Although the exhibitions initiated

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by the Ten Plus group, featuring arbitrary subjects (Big Works, Miniatures, Red, Circle, and For and Against) as a common denominator for the works displayed, anteceded today’s conceptual curatorship, they pointed to the dangers such curatorship entailed. The fourth and sixth decade exhibitions illustrated, albeit in differing ways, the despotism of the now. In the fourth decade exhibition, curator Ilana Tenenbaum took the notion of “index” (in its various senses) as an organizational principle, whereas in the sixth decade exhibition, curators Amitai Mendelsohn and Efrat Natan fastened onto the concept of spectacle or, more precisely, the “splendid catastrophe.” The two exhibitions illustrated “curatorial labor,” that is, the curatorial act as arbitrary, and curatorship as trapped in a metabolic process tied to vital necessities. Both exhibitions demonstrated a gap, even an internal contradiction, between a theoretical approach that was conscious of a “plurality with no single narrative” and a curatorial determination to provide some kind of general summing-up statement. Finally, in both exhibitions, there was no relatedness between the “now” of the exhibition and the “now” of the decade under consideration. An effective starting point to illustrate the problems inherent in the fourth and sixth decade exhibitions is the use each of them made of reconstructed works. In an interview conducted several months before the Six Decades exhibitions, Tenenbaum described her unsuccessful attempt to obtain a work by Moshe Gershuni: I was very interested in reconstructing Moshe Gershuni’s installation With the Blood of My Heart from 1980, which was displayed in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art as part of the series News, curated by Sara Breitberg-Semel, or else his installation from the Venice Biennale of that year. These were innovative works from the point of view of their dealing with the Holocaust. Gershuni hesitated and in the end decided not to reconstruct them, thereby preserving the singularity of the event.40

It appears that Gershuni’s hesitation about the possibility of reconstructing his installations was related to the question of remembrance as a whole, and not particularly to the question of how the Holocaust was to be remembered. To be sure, the reconstruction and remounting of his installations in the context of the Six Decades exhibitions could have exposed them to new, broader publics, thus contributing to their wider visibility. His choice, however, was to preserve the “singularity of the event”— favoring depth of memory over publicity. In contrast, Tenenbaum’s strategy with regard to installations was a kind of “cut and paste” recreation of works that could be perceived as an undermining of memory and a disruption of the singularity of an original event. A prominent example was the reinstallment of a work by Gideon Gechtman, Draft No. 1 to Mausoleum (1988) (Fig. 8.4). In her comments on this work, Tenenbaum quoted Theodor Adorno’s famous words with regard to the association between mausoleums and museums, in which he characterized museums as “family sepulchers of works of art”41 that owe their preservation to historical considerations. According to Tenenbaum: Gechtman’s bodily products, such as urine samples placed in a wooden structure (a hybrid combination of a synagogue prayer bench, Torah-reading podium, prayer stand, and cathedra), are displayed alongside articles that seem ready-made but were in fact

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Figure 8.4. Gideon Gechtman, Draft No. 1, Mausoleum No. 1 (1988); installation view, The Jerusalem Artists’ House (photo courtesy Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art). constructed by him with the investment of much work . . . a sort of simulacra that presents the gap between representation and reality. The display structure is also based on the hybridization of different constructions. The mausoleum building reconstructed in this exhibition is based on the organization of space in religious structures. . . . Yet the columns placed in Gechtman’s mausoleum bring to mind not only places of prayer, but also the demarcation of lines in commercial places such as banks. That is to say, he also positions his work in the space of the culture of consumption.42

Similarly, in an article titled “The Time of the Post,” Tenenbaum approaches the 1980s equipped with the best conceptual repertory identified with postmodernism: hybridism, simulacra, multiplicity of interpretations, the museum as a mausoleum, art as an active partner in the culture of consumption, and culture as a commodity. Paradoxically, these ideas, which undoubtedly were used extensively in the context of art criticism in the last two decades of the 20th century, reinforce Adorno’s criticism of museums—with particular reference to the fourth decade exhibition. Tenenbaum’s curatorial approach was to present a selection of works of many artists, in which almost every single work was interpreted as standing for a specific theme or trend (for instance, Yitzhak Livneh’s untitled painting of 1988 marked “the return to painting”). She attempted to cope with the arbitrariness of the division into decades by employing arbitrary indexing as a curatorial practice, thereby assuming, as did Adorno, a frozen, inanimate, dead-ended concept of history. In other words, her approach contained the paradox at the basis of archival memory that was formulated by Pierre Nora: “The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs. . . . What we call memory is in fact the gigantic and breathtaking storehouse of a material stock of

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what it would be impossible for us to remember, an unlimited repertoire of what might need to be recalled.”43 Reconstructed and remounted in the context of an arbitrary archival selection, works such as Draft No. 1 to Mausoleum, Micha Kirshner’s photograph, Tami Ben Ami (1982), and Arnon Ben-David’s work, Jewish Art (1988)—all of which were identified by Tenenbaum as key works representing or capturing the spirit of the 1980s—were emptied of their critical content. Preserved without being resuscitated, they were no more than embalmed memories. Tenenbaum’s approach toward reconstruction was markedly different from that of other curators and that of Rabina, in particular. From the outset, Rabina made clear his opposition to any attempt at summarizing or canonizing. Consequently, the different practices that he made use of (reference, reconstruction, mapping, and distortion), together with the intentional omission of details of artworks that were being reconstructed or remounted, and the ascription of “memory” to himself (by means of appropriating his own private memories), avoided “recycling” the works and allowed for the possibility of new interpretations. Tenenbaum, in contrast, held to the concept of history as thread-like, linear, and closed. In her words: “The project is a kind of ‘individual stalking’ into history, history being perceived as a thread on which the six decades are beaded, each withdrawn into itself.”44 Yet the gap between Tenenbaum’s linear image of beads on thread and her employment of “indexing” wreaked havoc with memory. The installations in the sixth decade exhibition were reconstructed in quite a similar manner, although with a different guiding principle. Amitai Mendelsohn, curator of Israeli art in the Israel Museum and co-curator of the exhibition, wrote in the catalog: In contrast with the unique enormity of September 11, Israel appears to have been locked for the past decade in a vicious but routine cycle of attack and reprisal. As Vered VinitzkySeroussi points out in her essay, this frustrating routine of cyclical time dulls sensibilities and obscures the uniqueness of each event, grave though it may be. But for many young artists, the pattern of disaster is translated into another kind of time: a mythical and prophetic chronology marked by epic moments at which time appears to stop its natural course. Dread of a global disaster and fears of approaching doom have been expressed in Israeli art in the past, but it is only in the last decade that overwhelming apocalyptic spectacles—in keeping with the prevalence of spectacular, all-embracing installations at art centers around the world—appear to have entered the Israeli creative area.45

Mendelsohn’s declaration of intent (co-curator Efrat Natan is not mentioned as an editor of the catalog, nor does her signature appear on any text, except for the brief introduction) seems to relate to the ancient concept of history that Arendt discusses. In this conception, history is placed in linear counterpoint with nature and its cyclical processes. The highlights of history are those great, singular moments that manage to stop the stream of time and gain immortality; its heroes are those connected with those moments, who are thereby extricated from the abyss of oblivion. On the face of it, the sixth decade curators established a real alternative to Tenenbaum’s problematic approach. However, on closer examination, there was a gaping and almost comic distance between Mendelsohn’s declaration of intent and the fact of what was actually displayed—“mythical immortality” being assigned, in this exhibition, to artworks that had barely come into being.

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Among the very large and spectacular installations displayed at the sixth decade exhibition was a mixed-media work by Sigalit Landau from her exhibition The Dining Hall (Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2007), and Ohad Meromi’s six-meter-high polystyrene depiction of a black, refugee-like figure, The Boy from South Tel Aviv (from the Helena exhibition, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, 2002). These works had stood out in the first years of the 2000s and, given the very short interval of time that had elapsed, were still remembered. Yet a distinction must be made between attempts made by artists to cope with routine and plurality by means of spectacular creations (or how such attempts are interpreted) and the curatorial decision to adopt “spectacular” as a leitmotiv of their exhibition. As with the fourth decade exhibition and perhaps to an even greater extent, it was the recycling of artworks (an act requiring practically no investment on the part of the artists, and which was also presumably less meaningful than the original exhibiting of the works) that created numbness and blurring. In an exhibition treating a decade on whose canvas the paint was not yet dry—whose young artists still had the rest of their lives ahead of them—it should have been easy to focus on the “now” in a manner not aspiring to be a summary or an attempt to “create history.” Precisely here, the curators could have improvised. The curatorship of the fourth and sixth decade exhibitions was characterized by a paradoxical relationship between the “now” of the exhibitions (which was faithful to the idea that history preserved and reconstructed the experiences of the past) and the adoption of curatorial practices that drew their meaning from theoretical approaches stressing the different nature of the relationship between time and memory, and which openly objected to the organization of the historical past. Sidestepping the issues created by the built-in link between art and state, these two exhibitions lacked relatedness or any focus on the individual. Spectators were thus left without place, story, or memory.

Outside Time The third decade exhibition, My Own Body: Art in Israel in the 1970s, stood distinct from the other exhibitions. As reflected in its title, the exhibition employed a timeevading strategy resting on a familiar and established model of art history: the cross section. Curated by Mordechai Omer, since 1995 the director and the chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and a leading figure in the world of Israeli art,46 the third decade exhibition served as a direct and explicit continuation of a large project curated by him a decade earlier, on the occasion of the state of Israel’s jubilee. This earlier exhibition, titled Perspectives on Israeli Art of the Seventies, had been divided into three parts: The Boundaries of Language (Tel Aviv Museum of Art) and Tikkun (at the University Art Gallery at Tel Aviv University), both curated by Omer; and The Eyes of the Nation (Tel Aviv Museum of Art), curated by Ellen Ginton. Returning to the decade of the 1970s, Omer opted to examine it from another angle, that of the body of the artist as the location of the happening. The third decade exhibition was divided into two parts that were mounted in separate areas of the museum, with no continuity between them. In a manner that can be interpreted symbolically,

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the section of the exhibition dealing with self-portraits (comprising the works of some thirty artists, among them Aviva Uri, Avigdor Arikha, Michael Gross, Uri Lifschitz, Ofer Lellouche, Yaacov Mishori, Michael Sgan-Cohen, Avshalom Okashi, and Lilian Klapisch) was located in the upper wing of the museum. The other part of the exhibition, which dealt with artists’ bodies (for example, Gideon Gechtman and Moshe Gershuni), expressions of activism and of protest against the establishment (for example, Itzhak Danziger, Avital Geva, Gabi Klazmer, and Sharon Keren), and the documentation of conceptual and performative activities (for example, Yocheved Weinfeld, Efrat Natan, and Motti Mizrachi) was mounted in the museum’s lowest level. Many of the pieces exhibited in the third decade exhibition had been shown a decade previously in another thematic context. Moreover, many of the topics broached in the exhibition, such as body art, performances and installations, and the place of photography and video art, had been covered in the earlier, comprehensive setting of the Perspectives exhibitions. In spite of the fact that the third decade exhibition afforded further exposure to a large selection of significant works in the history of local art, with most of the artists accorded the honor of being represented by more than one work, the event can hardly be viewed as providing a new interpretation. While ostensibly cooperating with the Six Decades project, Omer opted to deviate from the boundaries of the decade he was commissioned to curate by exhibiting pieces created in the 1980s (as late as 1988) and by not attaching a chronicle to the exhibition’s catalog. His strategy was to treat the third decade exhibition as a continuation of the Perspectives exhibition, and in this way revalidate his previous curatorial acts and interpretations. Thus, the exhibition served as a subversive act against the Six Decades project. Instead of relating to the issue of the (given) link between the state of Israel and art, Omer chose a different issue altogether: the curator’s loyalty and to whom it was pledged. Repetitiveness—represented in the exhibition as continuity—served to preserve Omer’s previous curatorial moves in the public’s consciousness, stressing his loyalty to a large group of artists whose creativity he appreciated, and to a decade marked by his own professional development. In the third decade exhibition, a distinction became apparent between relatedness and loyalty. “Relatedness” has been perceived in this essay as the spatial expression of time in its relationship to the curator, or as the way in which webs of relationships in time are spatially anchored in the individual. In contrast, “loyalty” is grounded in an ahistorical, traditional world order committed to a teleological notion of time and to a predetermined chronological memory. The Six Decades exhibitions were a challenging, well-funded, well-marketed opportunity to restart collective memory mechanisms. On the strength of their double institutional authority—that of the museums and that of the state—these exhibitions served as a call for action, placing curators at a mediating point between preserving memories of the past and orienting themselves both toward the future and, more particularly, in the “now.” Those who chose to rethink the traditional role of the curator, abandoning the stance of a super-narrator and embracing instead a sense of relatedness that included a unique, private, and personal dimension, were the most successful in avoiding the perception of “time” as historical summary—that is, a means of organizing the history and historiography of local art in accordance with some meta-principle. The replacement of a role without ascription with a curatorial

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role of personal relatedness prevented these curators from falling into the propagandist, ideological traps that exhibitions such Six Decades tend to conceal, allowing them to present an elastic perception of time that broadened the field of vision into and beyond the existing artistic discourse.

Notes This article was translated by Denise Levin. 1. Dialogue from the film Givat H . alfon einah ’onah, directed by Assi Dayan (1976). 2. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (N.Y.: 2006 [1954]). 3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: 1998 [1958]), 247. 4. The Six Decades project set out as a joint enterprise of the Ministry of Science, Culture, and Sport and of six museums, with the support of additional bodies, both governmental and private. In addition to funding from the government, the Six Decades exhibitions were funded by the Pais (national lottery) Council for Culture and Art, as well as by a number of private bodies. 5. The tradition of incorporating local art in the state’s independence celebrations had been institutionalized by 1958, when Israel marked its tenth anniversary. On the first decadal exhibition, see Gideon Ofrat, “Ta’arukhat he’asor,” in Gideon Ofrat and Galia Bar Or (eds.), He’asor harishon: hegemoniyah veribuy (Ein Harod: 2008), 235–244. On other exhibitions focusing on the summarization of decades, see, for instance, Sara Breitberg-Semel, Oman, h.evrah, oman (Tel Aviv: 1978); Galia Bar Or, ’Avodah ’ivrit: omanut yisreelit mishnot ha20 ’ad shenot ha90 (Ein Harod: 1998); and the catalogs of the three-part exhibition Perspectives on Israeli Art of the Seventies, held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Tel Aviv University Art Gallery in 1998: Gevulot hasafah, Tikun, and Ha’einayim shel hamedinah (Tel Aviv: 1998). 6. Moshe Zuckermann, H . aroshet hayisreeliyut: mitusim veideologiyah beh.evrah mesukhsekhet (Tel Aviv: 2001), 235. 7. Ibid, 48–49. 8. Yael Bergstein, “Likrat shenot hatish’im: sheelot rishonot leDoron Rabina,” Studio 171 (November–December 2007), 21. 9. Remarks by Doron Rabina at a symposium on the subject of the Six Decades exhibitions held at the joint initiative of the Beit Berl Academic College school of art and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, master’s degree program, December 28, 2008. 10. Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44, no. 1 (September 2005), 283. 11. Galia Bar Or, “Foreword,” in Bar Or and Ofrat, He’asor harishon, v (English section). 12. Szeemann (1933–2005) was curator of the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland from 1961 to 1969; upon his retirement, he became the first internationally recognized independent curator. For a discussion of Szeemann’s iconic status in contemporary curatorship, see, for example, Francesco Manacorda, “The Four Discourses of Curating,” Manifesta Journal 5 (Spring-Summer 2005), 118–128; Jens Hoffmann, “The Art of Curating and the Curating of Art,” ibid., 176–185. See also Tobia Bezzola and Roman Kurzmeyer (eds.), Harald Szeemann: with by through because towards despite: catalogue of all exhibitions (Zurich: 2007). 13. See, for example, Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollak, “From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur: Inventing a Singular Position,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London: 1996), 231–250. 14. Ory Dessau, “Flashback: ’al leidat ha’akhshav: shenot hashishim beomanut yisrael,” Studio 173 (May–June 2008), 61.

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15. Doron Rabina, “Time Killing,” in idem (ed.), He’asor hah.amishi: uvasof namut (Herzliya: 2008), 256–258 (English section). 16. Desau, “Flashback,” 64. 17. Yona Fischer, one of the founding fathers of Israeli curatorship, began his career in the early 1960s at the former Bezalel Museum. When the Israel Museum opened in 1965, he was appointed curator of Israeli and modern art, and in this prominent position was responsible for introducing the work of scores of artists, including Raffi Lavie and Moshe Kupferman. In addition, Fischer inaugurated art events such as ArtFocus and developed channels of communication between Israeli and European art in general, and between Israeli and French art in particular. In recent years, he has served as chief curator at the Ashdod Art Museum. In 1977, he won the Israel Prize in the category of design (there is still no curatorship category). In 2004, Kav-Hame’orer devoted a special issue to Fischer on the occasion of his 70th birthday, and the Bezalel Gallery in Tel Aviv held an exhibition dedicated to his life’s work. See Sarit Shapira and Sandra Weil (eds.), Po’alo shel Yona Fischer vesugiyot shel otzarut ’akhshavit (Tel Aviv: 2004–2005). 18. Yona Fischer and Tamar Manor-Friedman, “Conversations,” in He’asor hasheni: leidat ha’akhshav (Ashdod: 2008), 7* (English section). 19. The Ten Plus group was active from 1965 until 1970 under the leadership of the artist Raffi Lavie (1937–2007). During this period, the group held ten exhibitions, with a total of 75 artists being represented (Lavie was the only artist whose work appeared in all of the exhibitions). Among the other artists involved in the group’s activity were Buky Schwartz, Siona Shimshi, Joav BarEl, Henry Shlezniak, Batya Apollo, Yair Garbuz, Ran Shchori, Alima, Aviva Uri, and Yigal Tumarkin. See Benno Kalev, Kevutzat 10+: mitos umetziyut (Tel Aviv: 2008). 20. Fischer and Manor-Friedman, “Conversations,” 10*. 21. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 45. 22. Rabina, quoted in Bergstein, “Likrat shenot hatish’im,” 22. 23. Conversation with Yona Fischer (November 26, 2008). 24. See n. 19. 25. In the course of her career as a curator, Galia Bar Or has curated a number of exhibitions featuring artists left out of the canon. According to the Museum of Art, Ein Harod website: “A central line of thought in the museum’s activity is to deal with aspects not covered by the official history of Israeli art. With this in mind, we have held solo exhibitions of first-rate artists who created an exciting body of work over the years, yet were not included in the mainstream of Israeli art” (www.museumeinharod.org.il/hebrew/index.html) (accessed March 1, 2011). See also Galia Bar Or, H . ayenu meh.ayavim omanut (Beersheba: 2010). Another book by Bar Or, Eugene Kolb: binyan tarbut beeretz yisrael (Tel Aviv: 2003) deals with one of those relegated to the margins—Kolb, an art critic, theoretician, and curator, who served as director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from 1952 to 1959. Gideon Ofrat has written numerous books, among them the canonical Sipurah shel omanut yisrael: mimei “Bezalel” be1906 ve’ad yameinu (1980), which he co-authored with Dorit LeVité; simultaneously, he has been working on an “anti-canonic” mapping of Israeli art, most recently Hashivah el hashtetl: hayahadut kedimuy beomanut yisreelit (Jerusalem: 2011). A selection of other works by Ofrat is cited in the following note. 26. Other exhibitions held at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod in which they collaborated dealt with landscape paintings in Safed from the 1920s until the 1950s (1987); a look ahead to the 1990s (1990); and the artist Shalom Sebba (1994). Ofrat also served as guest curator for a number of additional exhibitions mounted in Ein Harod. 27. The New Horizons group was founded in 1948, following a split within the Israeli Artists Association. It was headed by Yossef Zaritsky and Marcel Janco, who sought to cut themselves off from the kind of exhibitions held by the latter, and to employ a more international, progressive, modernistic artistic language in their creations. The first exhibition mounted by the New Horizons group was held on November 9, 1948, with the participation of Zaritsky, Janco, Pinchas Abramowitch, Robert Baser, Aharon Giladi, Jean David, Yaacov Wexler, Aharon Kahana, Avigdor Luisada, Zvi Meirovich, Avraham Natanson (Naton), Yohanan Simon, Avshalom Okashi, Dov Feigin, Moshe Castel, Kosso Eloul, and Yehezkel Streichman. The

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group never formulated a manifesto; as Ofrat notes, the 11 exhibitions it mounted lacked conceptual and syntactical consistency. See Ofrat, “Hadialektikot shel shenot ha50,” in Ofrat and Bar Or, He’asor harishon, 18–21. See also, Gila Ballas, New Horizons (Tel Aviv: 1980). 28. Arendt: Between Past and Future, 91–141. It should be noted that, for Arendt, “tradition” refers to the tradition of western political thinking, whose beginning she identifies with Plato and Aristotle and whose ending she identifies with Karl Marx. Similarly, “authority” refers to a specific form of authority expressed throughout the centuries in the western world. On the connection between tradition, authority, and religion, see also idem, The Promise of Politics (New York: 2005), 40–62. 29. Arendt defines authority by way of negation, as being the opposite both of coercion by means of force and of persuasion by means of argument. 30. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 92, 95. Arendt puts forward a complex argument concerning the connection between, on the one hand, the loss of tradition and authority, and, on the other, the loss of the world as a place belonging to us in common. In other words, she argues that the loss of tradition and authority is connected to the break created between man and the world he lives in. A connection can also be made between this argument and that concerning the loss of the ancient Greek concept of history, which depended on man’s ability to define himself in contrast to nature. 31. Ibid., 93–94. 32. For a development of the idea regarding the connection between common sense and tradition, and their identification as ideas that developed in the Roman era, see Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 42–43, and idem, The Human Condition, 208–209. 33. According to Arendt, history is distinguished from tradition in that it has many beginnings and many endings, which in turn lead to new beginnings. The modern awareness of history as a process extends and stretches it infinitely in both directions, into both the past and the future. Consequently, history cannot guarantee the same stability as that offered by a tradition that is inherently “one”—that is, possessed of a single beginning and a single end. 34. In this context, see also the discussion by Y.H. Yerushalmi, who distinguishes between historic memory and collective (Jewish) memory on the issue of their attitude toward the past (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory [Philadelphia: 1982], 93–95). 35. For a broader discussion of the web of relationships as the intermediary creating and stabilizing our world, see, for example, Arendt, The Human Condition, 181–184. 36. Arendt’s “space of appearance” is connected with action: “It comes into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action” (The Human Condition, 199). Adi Ophir, who translated this passage in a Hebrew version of Arendt’s book, refers to it in an article discussing Arendt’s distinction between government and politics. “Activity,” he notes, “entails self-disclosure and needs its own space in which it will disclose itself and enable others to disclose themselves. The discussion of the space of disclosure is nothing other than an explanation of the visual and spatial dimension of political activity.” See Adi Ophir, “Reshut rabim vesheelat hashilton: ’al hamah.shavah hapolitit shel Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: h.atzi meah shel pulmus, ed. Idith Zertal and Moshe Zuckermann (Tel Aviv: 2005), 178. 37. Ofrat notes that, in this monumental painting, “Zaritsky aspired to combine personal artistic power with the power of the Zionist project: geometrical color units translated the landscapes of Yehiam, a young kibbutz in the Galilee, into an autonomous structural arrangement into which were inserted abstract symbols of a man and an animal” (Hegemoniyah veribuy, 27). On David Ben-Gurion’s reaction to the painting, and Zaritsky’s response, see Ruth Direktor’s essay in this volume, “Six Exhibitions, Six Decades: Toward the Recanonization of Contemporary Israeli Art,” 173–175. 38. See citation at n. 19. 39. As noted, Arendt divides “active life” (vita activa) into three levels of human activity: labor, work, and action. Labor is the activity corresponding to the biological process of the human body, “bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process of labour” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 7).

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40. Ory Dessau, “Seviv hashemonim: Ory Dessau besih.ah ’im Ilana Tenenbaum,” Studio 174 (August–September 2008), 11. 41. Theodor W. Adorno, “Valery Proust Museum,” in idem, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: 1967), 175. 42. Ilana Tenenbaum, He’asor harevi’i: Check-post (Haifa: 2008), 30. 43. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989), 13; online at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/201/artic les/89NoraLieuxIntroRepresentations.pdf (accessed March 6, 2011). 44. Dessau, “Seviv hashemonim,” 4. “Individual stalking” is a reference to Hitganvut yeh.idim, a novel by Yehoshua Kenaz, whose translated title is Infiltration. 45. Amitai Mendelsohn, “The End of Days and New Beginnings: Reflections on Art in Israel, 1988–2007,” in Real Time: Art in Israel, 1998–2008 (catalog) (Jerusalem: 2008), 18. 46. Omer, who died in June 2011, was a professor in the department of art history at Tel Aviv University. In 1977, he initiated the Tel Aviv University Art Gallery; in 1985, he established the Israel’s first certificate program in museology. Many of today’s leading figures in Israeli museums received their professional training in this program (at Tel Aviv University), under his tutelage.

A Matrix of Matrilineal Memory in the Museum: Charlotte Salomon and Chantal Akerman in Berlin Lisa Saltzman (BRYN MAWR COLLEGE)

In the summer of 2007, the Jewish Museum Berlin mounted two exhibitions, conceived and installed in purposeful relation to each other. One featured Charlotte Salomon’s 1940–1943 book project, Life? or Theater?, the other, Chantal Akerman’s 2004 video installation, To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge. These juxtaposed exhibitions offered an unprecedented opportunity to explore the acknowledged and unacknowledged affinities between the two artists and their work. Staged in Daniel Libeskind’s highly symbolic architecture of absence and rupture, the companion exhibitions evoked a set of uncanny historical revelations. In the midst of the divide separating the two artists, the two exhibitions, and indeed the two halves of the 20th century, there emerged a shared set of constitutive cultural and philosophical concerns—identity and inheritance, word and image, autobiography and fiction, exile and emigration, history and memory. It is in pursuit of these sites of congruence and connection that I embark on the essay that follows.

Berlin Childhood When I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth. . . . In this situation . . . I deliberately called to mind those images which, in exile, are most apt to waken homesickness: images of childhood. . . . I have made an effort to get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated in the child of the middle class. . . . The images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience. I hope they will at least suggest how thoroughly the person spoken of here would later dispense with the security allotted his childhood.1

These words, written while abroad in a small town on the Mediterranean and offered as an antidote to the anxiety provoked by an anticipated future in exile, introduce a remarkable autobiographical book project dedicated to the remembrance of a

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childhood in Berlin. Unpublished during the author’s lifetime, which was tragically cut short by the rise of fascism in Europe, the book stands as a monument to an irretrievably lost past: the quotidian experiences of an upper-middle-class, acculturated German Jew living in Berlin’s West End. Much as these words might be those of a visual artist grappling with the formidable task of transforming inchoate memory into pictorial form, the above reflections on “images” of childhood do not, for all of their author’s interest in montage, introduce a project in still or cinematic pictures. Instead, they serve as the introduction to a series of meditative prose vignettes by a writer engaged in an ongoing critical project dedicated to the formulation of a theory and philosophy of history. That said, I invoke them to introduce the work of another Berliner, a visual artist whose imaginative, proto-cinematic, autobiographical book project was similarly intended to “get hold of the images . . . of a metropolitan childhood” and to transform the remembrance of familial life in prewar Berlin into narrative form. Indeed, it is remarkable to note the degree to which the exilic words and interrupted life of one Berlin Jew, Walter Benjamin, resonate in the work and life of another, the artist Charlotte Salomon. While there is no documented relation between these two historical figures, no exchange of letters, say, as there was between Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, we might nevertheless imagine a period of almost intimate encounter, conjuring forth the scene of an adolescent Salomon, perched in her Charlottenburg living room, listening with rapt attention to Benjamin’s radio broadcasts between 1929–1932.2 Nor do we need to turn to the realm of the imagination in order to trace their very real historical connection. Although a generation apart (Benjamin’s Berlin childhood dates to the turn of the 20th century, Salomon’s to the 1920s and 1930s), both came to experience the erosion and eventual evisceration of the opportunities and freedoms once experienced and assumed by upper-middleclass, acculturated German Jewry. Both left Germany to live in exile. Both perished under Nazism, Benjamin by his own hand on the Spanish-French border, Salomon on the day of her arrival in Auschwitz. Finally, both left behind unpublished works dedicated to the memory of their Berlin childhoods—projects that were catalyzed by their increasingly precarious historical situations. Unlike Walter Benjamin, whose intellectual and cultural presence was already established by the time of his untimely death, the fact that we are at all aware of the work, or indeed, the life of the young artist Charlotte Salomon is almost entirely due to the felicitous survival of her one major work, an evocation of her own Berlin childhood, the manuscript Leben? oder Theater? Ein Singespiel.3 Salomon’s Life? or Theater? not only puts pressure on the distinction between life and art, memoir and fiction, but also challenges any modernist notion of a strict medium-specificity that demarcates and isolates visual, narrative, and musical traditions. First entrusted to the doctor who had treated Salomon’s maternal grandmother, and safeguarded until after the war in a sealed box in the home of Ottilie Moore, an American émigré who had sheltered Salomon and her grandparents in the south of France, Life? or Theater? comprises roughly 800 pages of text and images.4 The images are rendered in gouache, some with text painted directly onto their surfaces, others overlaid with sheets of inscribed tracing paper of equivalent dimension to form palimpsests. The text tells the story of a young woman, “Charlotte Kann,” born into

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an acculturated German Jewish family in Berlin. Immersed in music and culture and afforded all of the social privilege typical of a family with a highly placed Berlin professional—in this case, a doctor and medical professor—as its patriarch, her family is not only increasingly constrained and threatened by the rise of Hitler, but also deeply burdened by a matrilineal legacy of suicide. This was a legacy that became known to Salomon only when her grandmother, living in exile, gave in to the despair that had already taken, among others, Salomon’s mother (when Salomon was not yet nine years old), and her aunt (and namesake) four years before Salomon’s birth in 1917. Salomon’s surviving book raises questions both cultural and historical. As an object, Life? or Theater? is already a challenging work for the ways in which it disturbs aesthetic categories. Just how do we classify this mixture of text and images, this silent operetta rendered as a proto-cinematic storyboard that imaginatively narrates, depicts, and reconfigures the life story of an artistic, cultured, and somewhat troubled Jewish girl in prewar Berlin? And if Salomon’s work defies easy aesthetic categorization because of its mixing of generic conventions, it also fundamentally resists classification for its peculiar relation to history. By this I do not mean the ways in which Life? or Theater? can be said to anticipate genres yet to come, as, for example, the graphic novel as a mode of historical or autobiographical inquiry.5 Nor am I referring to the ways in which, in its projection of the historical into the intimate, it evinces and echoes the techniques and tendencies of Salomon’s compatriot, Walter Benjamin (and perhaps also those of another writer and theorist of memory, Marcel Proust) as it articulates its own wholly idiosyncratic strategy of “getting hold of the images” of a childhood past. Rather, I wish to draw attention to the peculiar way in which its afterlife inflects its historical identity. There is an affective dimension that accrues to this complex work of remembrance, imagination, word, and image simply by virtue of its continued existence. It is as if, in surviving a history that its author did not survive, the book stands witness to a larger history its author neither experienced nor depicted. The problem of historical time and place—the book’s movement between the anticipatory moment that is before Auschwitz and the memorial moment that is after Auschwitz—suspends Life? or Theater? in a sort of historical limbo. Is it, like Benjamin’s autobiographical collection of vignettes, a work of history and historical imagination, a project through which we might begin to approach a kind of historical representation of acculturated Jewish life in prewar Berlin? Is it, in its assorted techniques of capturing the images of the past, a work of art that offers, as does Benjamin’s, something like a theory of history? Or is it, rather, closer to an artistic equivalent of Anne Frank’s autobiographical endeavor, offering its readers a glimpse of a life lived in the shadow of death, a life that we know will end in the death camps?6 Finally, if these are the most apposite possibilities, need they be mutually exclusive or, instead, mutually illuminating?

Diary, Document, Drama Just what is depicted in Salomon’s work of remembrance that is also a work of historical imagination? If, in viewing Life? or Theater? we follow the largely chronological progression of the book (whose narrative development is interrupted only by

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what could be called almost cinematic flashbacks to situations before Salomon’s birth), we bear belated witness to a life that is defined largely by a domestic—but also, necessarily, a historical—context. We glimpse the pleasures of a privileged, acculturated, urban, modern childhood that is replete with tennis, opera, and trips to the sea and that is structured by educational experiences at both a gymnasium and an art school. We also register the sadness and confusion of a child forced to contend with a very difficult set of familial experiences, precipitated most explicitly by the death of her mother (which was explained at the time not as a suicide but as a case of influenza) but also catalyzed by the subsequent remarriage of her father to an opera singer, whose teacher became an object of great fascination (both intellectual and libidinal) for the adolescent Salomon and whose aesthetic theories are considered a significant influence on Salomon’s later work. As the book progresses through the events that structure the lives of Salomon’s alter ego and her characters, we also see the horrors of the rise of fascism, from the marches, rallies, and edicts of 1933 to the rampage of destruction that occurred on the night of November 9, 1938. We see Salomon’s father forced to perform manual labor during his brief internment at Sachsenhausen. And shortly thereafter, we see Salomon, almost 21, perched on the edge of her bed with books and a tennis racket laid before an open suitcase, preparing to leave Berlin for what is deliberately staged to look like a vacation in the south of France. Once Salomon is in France, we see depictions of the sequence of events that are understood to have catalyzed the creation of the book. Not long after her arrival in France, Salomon is confronted by her grandmother’s attempted suicide and her grandfather’s revelation of all of the other suicides that form her matrilineal history, a weighty legacy to which her grandmother subsequently succumbs. As if this revelation and loss were not enough to bear, the historical situation further presses on Salomon. In May 1940, war is declared and Salomon and her grandfather are deported from their home in exile. During this period of displacement, they are made to share a bed, forcing an intimacy that is even more troubling to Salomon, as she depicts it, than their transport in a railway car packed with thousands of refugees. In fact, we learn little about their experience of deportation and displacement, the visual images appearing to be more like scenes from a vacation than a period of imprisonment, almost as if the necessary fiction that surrounded her flight from Berlin now serves as a visual strategy, at least in this instance, of dissimulating historical trauma. What we have come to know, but what is not shown in Life? or Theater?, is that Salomon and her grandfather were deported to an internment camp in Gurs, where they were held for a month before being released in consideration of her grandfather’s advanced age. It is in the immediate aftermath of their liberation, back in Nice, that Salomon conceives her attempt at “getting hold of the images” of her childhood. As Salomon struggles both with her increasingly desperate situation of exile and with the full knowledge of her matrilineal legacy of suicide, the book project emerges as a means of coming to terms with her past as she anticipates her increasingly bleak future. In the final image of the book, Salomon depicts herself seated on the beach, gazing toward the horizon, her back inscribed with the very title of the work she is about to pen, holding a blank page that will become the first page of the monumental work

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that we, the readers, have just concluded. It is an image situated in the liminal moment between conception and realization, between the body of the artist and the body of the text, between the shore and the sea, between the present and the future, between the present and the past, between history and its representation, between witness and its narration, between life and art. What, then, do we do with this project? How do we understand its place in history and its relation to historical time? Certainly, I am not alone in wanting to see Salomon’s project as a vivid aesthetic representation of an era, something of a document of the texture of everyday life in prewar Berlin. Although some Salomon scholars focus on Life? or Theater? as a work of autobiography,7 for others, it achieves its historical significance through its distillation of the experiences of Jews in prewar Germany, whether as a “drama of assimilation” that, as Astrid Schmetterling argues, takes place in the “hybrid space,” Homi Bhabha’s “third space,” “the space between Jewishness and Germanness,”8 or else as a window into the “rich if ultimately the tragic complexities of German Jewish life during and after Weimar but before Auschwitz.”9 Of course, Life? or Theater? may best be understood as neither diary nor document, neither autobiography nor cultural history, but instead, as Griselda Pollock has argued, as “a singularly modernist form of history painting” whose narrative preoccupations and progression are structured by a familial drama of thwarted female desire and a familial trauma of matrilineal suicide, even as historical trauma remains its “structuring absence.” As Pollock writes: This terrible experience, albeit brief, of a concentration camp on French soil was, I would argue, the precipitating horror out of which Life? or Theater? was conceived. . . . Charlotte Salomon painted no image of the camp at Gurs, this unimaginable and horrific space which, we might deduce, functions precisely by that aporia, as the structuring absence of the project: the site of the most profound trauma that defied representation yet incited a surplus of images. Could it be the intimation of a voiding of humanity that is at the heart of the work whose origins she can no longer recall?10

In an essay that explicitly claims Benjamin as an absent interlocutor for this young dramatist of the psychic geographies of memory (“For me,” writes Pollock, “Benjamin stands as an alter ego to Charlotte Salomon, who used art to question this most painful of responses, suicide, to the betrayal of humanity by the nation so many Jewish people had adopted as the guardian of civilization”),11 Pollock comes to position Salomon as both a Eurydicean and an Orphic figure of creation, her Life? or Theater? a means of encountering and countering death and trauma, both familial and historical.12 In the end, however, it is the words of Michael Steinberg that perhaps best capture the power and paradox of the project for the postwar present. He writes: “Indeed, I want to make a case for this work as the most adequate history of modern secular German Jewish culture that I know, and to argue that its adequacy is produced through its ongoing recognition and reproduction of German Jewish modernity on the assumption of its multiplicity, its claims and its contradictions.”13 And yet, even as he strives to make the case for its historical function, Steinberg concludes his essay with the following dialectical and disabling imperative: In relation to Salomon’s life and to Jewish life, Auschwitz must be understood to be at once alien and inalienable; both absolutely relevant and absolutely irrelevant. I hope that

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I can state clearly the force of this ironic, necessary contradiction. It is, I would argue, the contradiction that needs to inform the placement of the Holocaust within a trajectory of Jewish history.14

With these concluding words, we are confronted again with the irreducible fact, the pressure of the Holocaust on this artistic project, a project that survives that history because it does not follow its author into its maw.

An Afterlife in Exile Introduced with the titular question “life or theater?” Salomon’s emphatically autobiographical work of aesthetic imagination questions the very nature of its existence from the outset. Neither diary nor memoir, it is nevertheless something very close to each. Bordering as it may on the genre of fiction, Salomon’s project always remains firmly grounded in a life, her life. That we know this life as historically lived experience is indebted not so much, or not only, to the artistic project itself as it is to the painstaking research that went into Mary Lowenthal Felstiner’s 1994 biography, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era. And it is only since then that Salomon’s life, as interpolated in her work, has become known to a wider audience, largely through the mechanism of the museum exhibition. The most comprehensive of these exhibitions was organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1998. The exhibition occasioned the publication of the most thorough catalog to date, an 831-page monograph containing reproductions of 769 gouaches, 13 painted pages of text, and one transparency, and it traveled to three North American venues: the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Jewish Museum in New York, ending its tour in 2002 at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. There the manuscript, a gift in 1972 from Salomon’s father and stepmother, Albert and Paula Salomon, is housed. Some portion of it is generally displayed—unless, as is frequently the case, pieces of the work are out on loan.15 Created from a site and situation of exile, Salomon’s Life? or Theater? has spent much of its life (or afterlife) in transit, charting a course through the cities of Western Europe, Scandinavia, Israel, North America, and Japan. It returned “home” to Berlin in its first German tour in the mid-1960s, when it was displayed both in West and East Berlin (at the Haus am Lutzowplatz and the Haus des Rundfunks), and it returned to Berlin again in 1986, for an exhibition at the Akademie der Kunste. In 2007, portions of the project made their way yet again to Berlin, this time for an exhibition at the Jewish Museum. It was there, in the space of that specific venue, that something very powerful came into being. To begin with, there may be no place more appropriate for the exhibition of Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? than the Jewish Museum Berlin. As conceived by the architect Daniel Libeskind, the museum at once poses and proposes an answer to the question of how to give form to the absence of Berlin’s Jews—how to embody and express the void at the very center of Berlin history and civic culture.16 Built as an extension to the Baroque building housing the Berlin Museum and standing as an autonomous yet connected entity, if only by way of an underground corridor, the “invisible,” “irrational matrix” of its structure maps Berlin’s cultural Jewish topography,

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compressing and distorting the emblematic yellow star, whereas its fractured mazes of broken lines, interpenetrating spaces, and self-enclosed wedges instantiate all that cleaves (in both senses of the word) the history of the German nation. In the Jewish Museum, the historical and affective dimensions of Salomon’s piece were accentuated by the symbolism of the architectural surround and were further amplified by what was outside and inside the museum walls. Outside was the reunified city of Berlin, evoking a simultaneous sense of continuity with, and radical rupture from, Salomon’s childhood home. And inside were the museum’s permanent exhibits, arranged in the recessed vitrines of its interpenetrating corridors: carefully curated diaries and documents, objects and photographs, the remainders and reminders of lost Jewish lives.17 And yet, for all the heightened symbolism and historical resonance of the Jewish Museum Berlin as the place to encounter Charlotte Salomon’s extraordinary work, it was not merely the temporary “homecoming” that shifted the terms of Life? or Theater’s reception and interpretation in the summer of 2007. Rather, it was an act of remarkable curatorial insight: the pairing of Salomon’s work with that of another artist, Chantal Akerman.18 Two works placed in “counterpoint,” in the words of the curator, Cilly Kugelmann, produced nothing less than illumination, a means of helping us understand finally, if not fully, something of what is at stake in Salomon’s project.19

Akerman Moves East Chantal Akerman, a Belgian-born filmmaker, first came to renown in both filmic and feminist circles with her 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a cinematic portrait of petit bourgeois domesticity that was as indebted to the experimental films of Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, and Jonas Mekas as it was to the auteurs of the French New Wave. Since 1995, the itinerant Akerman has been recognized as well for her work in video installation, particularly her inaugural piece, D’Est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction).20 A multichannel video-and-film installation that focuses on the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the installation is constructed from Akerman’s 1993 feature film, D’Est, an “ethnographic experimental documentary”21 composed of long shots, both fixed and tracking, that follow a seasonal cycle from summer to winter and that document a journey from the former East Germany, through Poland, to Russia. D’Est: Au bord de la fiction is typically displayed in three rooms. The first is a darkened cinema space that continuously screens the film, D’Est. The second is a gallery filled with 24 video monitors, mounted on pedestals and arranged in eight “triptychs,” on which 24 sequences from the film are shown simultaneously, the image loops accompanied, as was the film itself, with varying degrees of synchronous sound. The third and final room is a darkened space with a single monitor pairing the flickering image of a Moscow street at night with words and music, Akerman’s voice both intoning the biblical injunction against idolatry (in Hebrew) and musing on the impossibility of representing traumatic history. The text is recited by Akerman in French, English, or Spanish, depending on the exhibition context, though in the case of the German exhibition of D’Est, she arranged for a colleague to read in her

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place. In that third and final room, the words and images are set against a rising musical backdrop of the mournful Kol Nidre melody.22 Delivered by Akerman in deep and resonant tones, a recitation that is at once litany and liturgy, the words are, to cite Akerman’s own description of her use of language, a kind of “psalmody.”23 Taken as a whole, the piece offers a visual and acoustic encounter with the landscape and denizens of the former Soviet Union that is at once painstakingly objective and hauntingly subjective. If D’Est marks Akerman’s move into the medium of video and installation, it remains fundamentally consistent with her cinematic vision, not only in its strict adherence to structuralist principles, but also in its sometimes oblique, yet persistent, preoccupation with the question of Jewish identity and a history of extermination, exile, and emigration.24 As such, Akerman forthrightly reiterates the abiding aesthetic and ethical concerns of her cinematic practice, as exemplified, for example, in her 1978 film, Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna, while at the same time establishing the terms of her forthcoming installation pieces. Like D’Est, subsequent installation pieces offer meditative encounters with questions of place and the experience of displacement, and also confront, with increasing directness, the burdens of history and its inheritance. There is Sud (South) (1999), set in the American South in the aftermath of the abduction and murder of James Byrd, Jr. and traversing not only the terrain of his death but also a rural landscape haunted by the crimes of the past. There is De L’Autre Côté (From the Other Side) (2002), set on the U.S.-Mexican border and offering a portrait of the divided and desperate lives of migrants and their families. There is Là-Bas (Down There) (2006), set in Tel Aviv, but shot almost entirely from the windows of an apartment in which Akerman secludes herself as she grapples with depression, offering less a portrait of the city and its inhabitants—though we do see the daily rhythms of her neighbors’ lives—than a glimpse into Akerman’s psyche and the postwar emigration history of her family.25 (It should be noted that even as Akerman explicitly identifies “là-bas” as the term used by French Jews to refer to Israel, the country to which some of her relatives emigrated after the war and to which her own parents might well have gone had they not eventually opted for Belgium, it is also the term used elsewhere by Akerman to conjure, or to name without naming, the camps, Poland, and all that is bound up in her ruptured familial past in the East.) Finally, there is Marcher à côté de ces lacets dans un Frigidaire vide (To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge), an expressly autobiographical endeavor, a work of familial encounter and remembrance, documenting the first time that her mother, then 79 years old, talks to Akerman, then aged 54, about her experiences in the war. It was this piece that was installed in 2007 at the Jewish Museum Berlin, next door to Salomon’s Life? or Theater? The piece, created in 2004 and exhibited, prior to its installation in Berlin, at the Marian Goodman Gallery both in Paris and New York (in 2004 and 2005, respectively) and at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2006, takes shape around an object, a diary written by Akerman’s maternal grandmother, Sidonie Ehrenberg, when she was an adolescent in Poland in the 1920s. In the darkened first room of the installation, a spiraling scrim of diaphanous white fabric is illuminated by the projection of words. An intermingling of phrases from both the grandmother’s diary and Akerman’s writing on cinema, the spectral words hover somewhere between visibility

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and invisibility, legibility and illegibility. The second room features a more traditional cinematic screen, albeit cut from the same transparent fabric as the spiraling structure. Projected onto this screen are pages from the grandmother’s diary: on the left, the original entries in Polish; in the center, an inscription added to the diary in French by Akerman’s mother after the war; on the right, inscriptions added by Akerman and her sister when they found the diary as children, words that create a loving dialogue between the generations in the absence of an actual conversation. The images of the static pages are animated by the slow and searching movement of the deliberately subjective camera as it passes over them, the rhythm of the shot approximating something like reading—or, indeed, not reading—what, for Akerman, is a literally illegible, indecipherable foreign script. And yet, it is toward that end, namely, reading, that the final component of the piece is dedicated. A solid back wall of the gallery serves as the screen for the projection of the split-screen image of Akerman talking with her mother. They sit in her mother’s kitchen and discuss topics ranging from her mother’s memories of the grandmother, who died in Auschwitz, to her mother’s memories of her own experience of the camps (both of Akerman’s parents are Polish Jewish survivors who emigrated to Belgium after the war), to the life that the family made in Brussels, where Akerman was born in 1950. The split-screen projection shows Akerman and her mother, alone and together, distinct and blurred into one image, examining the diary and attempting to read Sidonie Ehrenberg’s faded entries, written in a Polish that Akerman’s own mother must struggle to remember. Marcher à côté des ses lacets dans un Frigidaire vide. Despite its striking mixture of deformed clichés, the title of Akerman’s piece has been translated, quite literally, as Neben seinem Schnürsenkeln in einem leeren Kühlschrank laufen in German and as To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge in English. The title shrouds the subject of the piece in a vaguely surrealist, largely inaccessible symbolism. The first part of the title, “Marcher à côté des ses lacets,” puts forth a highly idiosyncratic version of the expression “Être à côté des ses pompes” (to be “next to one’s shoes”— “pompes” being a slang term for shoes), which means being out of it, clueless, not knowing what is going on. “Dans un Frigidaire vide,” locates this behavior in, or perhaps going into, an empty refrigerator. Might this title summon something of the disorienting experience of encountering the diary of a grandmother she never knew, in the company of her mother, in the domestic space of the kitchen—a location that has informed Akerman’s cinema since her very first short film, Saute Ma Ville (Blow up My Town) of 1968? Or might it express something of the inevitable collapse of language, indeed, of meaning, in the face of the traumatic undoing of family? Might the “empty fridge,” an object that has come to function as a recurrent prop, if not trope, in Akerman’s cinematic oeuvre, exceed the seeming limits of its metaphors of domesticity (even if only as a marker of barrenness and want) and open onto the historical? For despite its domestication within the home, despite its domiciliation within Akerman’s cinematic vocabulary, might that cold chamber not also conjure the scene of cold storage, the morgue, if not also, in a surrealist inversion, the chambre de gaz, the gas chamber, and with that, the scene of her grandmother’s own perhaps unknowing end?26

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Even more than Salomon’s work of imaginative memoir, Akerman’s grandmother’s diary derives its greatest force from the very fact of its survival, in counterpoint to the fate of its author. A gift from mother to daughter that was bestowed in 1984, nearly forty years after the end of the war and well into Akerman’s adulthood and cinematic career—“She gave it to me,” writes Akerman, “instead of speaking”27—the diary is an obdurately mute object that extends even as it counters a maternal history of reticence and elision. That historical and familial lacuna is further redressed two decades later in a set of related works, first and foremost in the 2004 video installation, Marcher à côté. . ., in which mother and daughter together read and reminiscence. While the video installation puts forth the most sustained cinematic scenario of encounter with the diary and, in turn, with a matrilineal historical inheritance, it is not the only site or situation of such engagement. There is also Akerman’s antic yet melancholy feature film, Demain on démenage (Tomorrow We Move), also of 2004, in which that scenario of encounter—mother, daughter, and diary in the domestic space of the kitchen—is repeated even as it is stripped of any historical or personal specificity.28 And there is also its recurrent presence and most expansive treatment in Autoportrait en cinéaste, an explicitly diaristic, avowedly autobiographical booklength catalog essay, published in conjunction with the 2004 Akerman retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in which the determinedly elusive and nomadic Akerman reflects not only on her life in cinema, but also on the complex yet constitutive role of her familial history and her Jewish identity for her cinematic and artistic practice, and indeed, her life. If, as we learn from Akerman’s writing, the grandmother’s diary is, for her, “une sorte de sepulture sans shevah,”29 a kind of tomb absent the rituals of Jewish mourning, both video installation and feature film enact something of that work of ritualized remembrance, if only in the form of a conversation between mother and daughter, a conversation that may then be witnessed in the secular-turned-sacral space that is the gallery or the cinema. Performed in two cinematic registers, documentary and narrative, one bordering on fiction as the other approaches the autobiographical, Akerman doubles and divides that scene of encounter in two modalities of representation, life and theater. Or, as Charlotte Salomon would have it, Leben oder Theater.

Rendez-vous in Berlin It all started off with the journal, my grandmother’s journal. The only thing we have left, my mother always says. Often I mull it over in my mind and I work with the notion of lack, of nothingness as my mother also says. Here I worked with what we had left. Not much, yet an entire world. If one passes through the nearly transparent labyrinth, one will undoubtedly find the words exchanged between mother and daughter, the words of the journal and the secret connection, which runs from one projection to the next.30

So wrote Akerman at the time of her work’s creation. Read again in the context of the 2007 installation at the Jewish Museum Berlin, the “secret connection” (Akerman’s phrase an uncanny echo of what Benjamin would term, in his Arcades Project,

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“a world of secret affinities”)31 may be seen to run not just from “one projection to the next,” but from one project to the next. Moving from Akerman’s installation to Salomon’s, or from Salomon’s to Akerman’s, we are suspended between a simultaneously expanded and imploded set of matrilineal histories, histories that come together precisely where those lineages come apart—in the camps, in Poland, with the death of two women, Charlotte Salomon and Sidonie Ehrenberg.32 In the matrix of matrilineal memory that emerges in the juxtaposition of these two pieces in a museum dedicated, in form and mission, to instantiating the irredeemable void at the center of German culture, there is a moment of belated encounter. Across the chasm of familial and historical trauma, despite the distance and displacements of diaspora, there remain not one but two diaries, two stories of Jewish childhoods in prewar Europe, two testaments of youth, of lives interrupted and futures forever foreclosed. Thanks to a remarkably prescient and productive curatorial insight, the juxtaposition of Salomon’s work with Akerman’s created a set of synchronies and asynchronies, symmetries and asymmetries, resonances and relations across time and place, with tales of grandmothers, mothers and daughters, daughters, mothers and grandmothers, spiraling around a set of autobiographical projects, anchored by two works of remembrance. And, in so doing, the paired exhibitions recursively yet assym-topically approached a historical center that remains an irredeemable absence. It is an absence that is doubled and depicted in the personal losses at the heart of two families. It is an absence that is symbolized in the architectural chasm that centers and de-centers Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin. And, finally, it is an absence that is lived and experienced as an ongoing situation of historical aftermath in the city and nation that becomes the site and situation of impossible yet imperative encounter.

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood around 1900—Final Version” in Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass: 2006), 37–38. 2. Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago: 1993). 3. Singespiel is translated variously as “An Operetta,” “A Play with Music,” or “A Songplay.” The last term is perhaps the closest in meaning to the late-18th-century Songspiel, a form of German musical theater that was a predecessor to the operetta. 4. Ottilie Moore’s lover, Alexander Nagler, later became Salomon’s lover and the father of her unborn child. The two were married in September 1943 and were arrested and deported a few weeks later. 5. Think, for example, of such genre-defining graphic memoirs as Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: 1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: 1991); Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: Story of a Childhood (New York: 2003) and Persepolis: Story of a Return (New York: 2004); or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Boston: 2006). 6. It should be noted that comparative distinctions between Salomon’s project and Anne Frank’s diary have been rendered more complex in the aftermath of Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (New York: 2009). Prose establishes Anne Frank’s self-consciousness as a writer and the degree of revision to which her “diary” was subjected, to the extent that it became more akin to a memoir.

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7. See, for example, Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (New York: 1994). 8. See Astrid Schmetterling, “Inscriptions of Difference in Charlotte Salomon’s Work,” in Reading Charlotte Salomon, ed. Michael P. Steinberg and Monica Bohm-Duchen (Ithaca: 2006), 141–147. 9. See Monica Bohm-Duchen, “A Life before Auschwitz,” in ibid., 21. 10. See Griselda Pollock, “Theater of Memory: Trauma and Cure in Charlotte Salomon’s Modernist Fairytale,” in ibid., 44–45. 11. Ibid., 55. 12. As such, Pollock’s account works against the comparison to the Diary of Anne Frank and asserts Salomon’s work, in its negotiation of the historical and the hysterical, as a form of “Lacanian sinthôme” operating in a “matrixial borderspace of shared trauma,” the latter claim informed by the work of the psychoanalyst and artist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. See ibid., 64–72; for an earlier, illuminating account of Salomon’s project, see Gertrud Koch, “Charlotte Salomons Erinnerungsarbeit ‘Leben? oder Theater?’ als Familienroman,” in idem, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung. Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums (Frankfurt: 1992), 189–209. 13. Michael P. Steinberg, “Reading Charlotte Salomon: History, Memory, Modernism,” in Steinberg and Bohm-Duchen (eds.), Reading Charlotte Salomon, 3. 14. Ibid., 20. 15. Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theater? trans. Leila Vennewitz (Zwolle [Netherlands]: 1998). 16. See James Young, “Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture,” in idem, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: 2000), 152–183; Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Berlin, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton: 1997). 17. In addition to 277 sheets from Salomon’s Life? or Theater?, the exhibition of Salomon’s work, which was held from August 17–October 28, 2007, included photographs and documents gathered from Berlin archives, private collections, and the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. 18. Cilly Kugelmann, “‘Heb es gut auf’—Chantal Akerman und Charlotte Salomon in Jüdisches Museum Berlin,” Chantal Akerman. Neben seinen Schnürsenkeln in einem leeren Kühlschrank (catalog produced by the Jewish Museum Berlin) (Berlin: 2007), 4. 19. To date, the Jewish Museum Berlin is the only museum to have brought together the work of Charlotte Salomon and Chantal Akerman. That said, several scholars have juxtaposed the two artists, though none have done so in relation to this particular piece by Akerman (but rather, to D’Est). Those who do forge the connection are often committed to regarding Salomon’s project as an intimation and protean form of post-Holocaust art, relating it to the works of Christian Boltanski, Shimon Attie, or Art Spiegelman. That anticipatory, even prophetic relation is brought out most fully by Shelly Hornstein in her essay “Ornament, Boundaries and Mourning after Auschwitz,” in Steinberg and Bohm-Duchen (eds.), Reading Charlotte Salomon 126–139, who mobilizes Salomon’s work to frame an account of Akerman’s 1995 video installation, Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est, positioning it as a work of mourning, a prayer for the departed, Kaddish in secular and aesthetic form. A more subtle connection is forged by Christine Conley. In an essay that is deeply indebted to Benjamin and that makes much of the historical and theoretical relation between his life and work and that of Salomon, Conley finds in Chantal Akerman’s cinematic project a postwar echo of Salomon’s non-synchronous, allegorical work of history. See her essay, “Memory and Trauerspiel: Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theater? and the Angel of History,” in ibid., 88–104. 20. For the most extensive and rigorous scholarly accounts of Akerman’s cinematic work, see Ivone Margolies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham: 1996); and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (ed.), Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman (Wiltshire: 1999). 21. Margolies, Nothing Happens, 194. 22. For discussions of D’Est, see the materials and essays gathered in Kathy Halbreich and Bruce Jenkins, Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est (Minneapolis: 1995). 23. Quoted in Margolies, Nothing Happens, 193.

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24. See Alisa Lebow, “Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est,” Camera Obscura 52 (vol. 18, no. 1) (2003), 35–83. See also Margaret Olin, “Graven Images on Video? The Second Commandment and Contemporary Jewish Identity,” in idem, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: 2001), 179–203. 25. For more on each of these video pieces, see the essays and entries in Terrie Sultan (ed.) Chantal Akerman: Moving through Time and Space (Houston: 2008). 26. I am grateful to a colleague in the French Department at Bryn Mawr, Brigitte Mahuzier, not only for help with this not-quite idiomatic expression, but also for what goes beyond the call of translation and enters into the realm of interpretation. 27. “Elle me l’a donné à la place de parler.” Chantal Akerman, Autoportrait en cinéaste (Paris: 2004), 65. 28. In a brief scene in the film that alludes only obliquely to the family’s Jewish identity and to the mother’s time in the camps, a widowed mother residing temporarily with her daughter, a writer, joins her in the kitchen to study the grandmother’s diary, which was found among the mother’s possessions by a prospective new tenant. No mention is made of its historical significance. 29. Akerman, Autoportrait, 67. 30. Press release, Marian Goodman Gallery (New York), July 8–August 26, 2005. 31. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiermann (Cambridge, Mass.: 1999), 540. 32. A painter whose own self-portrait, in watercolor, animates the pages of her diary, Sidonie Ehrenberg comes all too briefly and belatedly to life in Akerman’s work and words as a woman whose aspirations defied her historical and cultural situation—a woman who was married to a cantor but who would paint and go to the cinema on the Sabbath. The self-portrait is reproduced, in color, in Autoportrait en cineaste. The biographical details emerge in an article structured in part by an interview with Akerman that took place on the occasion of the Tel Aviv exhibition; see Dana Gilerman, “In Exile: Here, There and Everywhere,” Haaretz (July 11, 2006), online at www.haaretz.com/culture/arts-leisure/in-exile-here-there-and-everywhere-1.192751.

Between Two Worlds: Ghost Stories under Glass in Vienna and Chicago Abigail Glogower (UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER) Margaret Olin (YALE UNIVERSITY)

Museums, and especially their depots, often have the feel of a memorial. Indeed, the very idea of a museum depot can have gloomy connotations. There is a sense that, if something is in the depot, it is not worthy of exhibit—it is of “historical interest only,” with the stress on only. To be sure, curators say that they cannot display everything. That is what college rejection letters say, too: “We had so many worthy applications, and we had only a limited number of places.” The works of artists who were once widely admired languish along with other “rejected” objects on tomb-like shelves or in drawers, gathering dust. European and American museums have increasingly sought to dispel these negative connotations by means of “open depot” displays, also called “visible storage.” Such exhibits originated in 1976 at the Museum of Anthropology in British Columbia, whose visible storage display is called the Multiversity Galleries.1 They emphasize the sense of excitement connected with an invitation into a restricted place where once only museum professionals could go. There are always gems waiting to be discovered in the depot; they are busy places, with curators and scholars occupied in studying the objects. This type of display is used in many museums in Europe, such as those of Dresden, Erfurt, Zurich, and Lucerne, and in the United States in places such as the Luce Centers.2 Often they have a cheerful character; their inauguration is an opportunity to celebrate the treasures of the archive. For instance, the website of the “Schaudepot” of the Museum Rietberg, Zurich (which also boasts a new glass façade) proclaims: “The museum no longer has hidden depot spaces. The storage is brightly lit . . . and lay people can now study the nearly 4,000 objects in the museum that used to lie in darkness.”3 Such language suggests the reevaluation, for the contemporary world, of objects formerly relegated to the gloom of hidden storage: now they are literally brought to light. Indeed, “light” is a popular “leitmotiv” for many open depots, though others 217

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remain sepulchral—in some cases, intentionally. The design consultant for several of these installations, writing on the topic in the newsletter of the American Association of Museums, alternates in tone between enthusiastic endorsement of the “Wow Factor” that will ensure visitors “big and pleasant surprises” and an admonition that, although “one might be tempted to make the space bright and cheery,” the storage light should be kept low not only for purposes of conservation, but also to keep the ambience “dark and a bit mysterious. . . . Visitors should feel as though they are entering an ancient Egyptian tomb, not a brightly lit department store.”4 However, many open depots that take a well-lit approach nevertheless evoke a feeling of gloom. At the bright and spacious Luce Center in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum, wide aisles divide lightly populated cases whose contents are easy to contemplate; banks of computers invite the viewer to look up any object using its accession number; and many pieces already have identifying labels that supply basic information. Yet when Beth Livensperger produced a series of paintings based on this luminous space (titled Visible Storage), a critic commented on its “unexpected melancholy,”5 and Livensperger noted both the excitement inspired by the depot (“It’s like the museum is closed and you snuck in”) and the sadness it conveyed.6 The sense of disquiet that on occasion is conveyed by visible storage sites in North American museums is accentuated in the open depots of Jewish museums in Europe. Such museums of necessity evoke the question: What is a Jewish space? In general, the objects on display were made by Jews, made for Jews, or made to be used against Jews. They relate to Jewish concerns or contain Jewish subject matter, or else focus in some way on interpretations of Jewish life. In certain locales, most of the people looking at the objects, or looking after them, may themselves be Jewish. Do these criteria make such a museum a “Jewish” space? Even outside museums, the question, “what is a Jewish space?” has been answered in many ways. Jewish space can be a tiny, disputed place in the Middle East or the sacred scroll of the Torah, a conceptual space disputed in rabbinical commentaries. Or, less globally, Jewish spaces can be those where Jews celebrate their rituals, in synagogues and at home. A dining table can be a quintessentially Jewish space where candles are lit and ritual meals are commemorated, a space to which, even without candles and rituals, a certain sense of Jewish sociability is often thought to attach. Jewish museums, too, enter a discourse of Jewish identity, but less straightforwardly. They rarely house the performance of Jewish rituals. The objects they contain refer to other Jewish spaces and discourses: an exhibition devoted to Israel, for example, or display cases filled with items of Judaica that were once used in a synagogue or in a Jewish home. Often they seek to bring the moment of eating into the discourse of Jewish space—a table set for the Sabbath meal or Passover seder may grace a gallery or the entrance hall, and objects that go on such tables are always on view (Fig. 10.1). Special exhibits examine individual foodstuffs, and sometimes their origin or their manufacture.7 Unlike Jewish museums in North America (and this is perhaps a source of their particular disquiet), European Jewish museums must confront the fact that, on European ground, the question “what is a Jewish space?” has often been answered by posing the opposite question: “From which spaces are Jews excluded?” Many of the items in their collections may have been confiscated from Jews during the Nazi

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Figure 10.1. Table set for a Passover seder, Austrian Jewish Museum, Eisenstadt (photo: Margaret Olin).

regime. The depots in such museums, with their unavoidable associations with the hoards of Jewish possessions amassed in this way, run the danger of defining “Jewish space” as a tomb. Do the open depot displays in such museums differ from those in countries in which a thriving Jewish community exists to support its own museum? The present essay addresses this question in two accounts that blend theoretical concerns and personal narrative. The first concerns a depot in a museum in Vienna (Margaret Olin) and the second, a depot in a museum in Chicago (Abigail Glogower). While their audiences are very different, their personnel overlap, and both installations speak to one another evocatively about Jewish space.

Ghosts in Vienna (Margaret Olin) My first thoughts about Jewish space began not in a depot, or with a question about a Jewish place, but rather with the displacement of an individual Jew—myself. It was 1980, during the year of my dissertation research in Vienna, a year marked by the gregarious loneliness of the American student abroad, whose companions were not other Americans (few of whom frequented the lecture halls of the university or the

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more obscure museums), but rather East Europeans. In the evenings we would gather between gleaming escalators below the 19th-century Ringstrasse buildings, or else aboveground on the pedestrian street of the Kärntner Strasse near the ornate opera, where palaces alternated with facades from the 1960s. Everywhere, plucky efforts at modernity stumbled against the stony evidence of an imperial past. The two eras collided head-on in the baroque Palais Liechtenstein, which housed the newly opened Museum of Modern Art. Once the palace was home to a baroque art collection, amassed by princes. In the 19th century, professors gathered their students there to examine the paintings; I studied pages of notes for such visits in the archives of the university’s Art Historical Institute.8 Now, tucked under rococo nymphs and satyrs on ceilings that were painted by the likes of Antonio Bellucci and Andrea Pozzo and surrounded by plaster-cookie walls, works by the Chicago Imagists, typified by the whimsical paintings of a group formerly known as the “Hairy Who,” took up an entire room (Fig. 10.2). Chicago was my hometown, and I was surprised to see how “at home” some of these works seemed to be below these ornate ceilings, with the equally baroque Austrian fantastic artists nearby.9 It was in the museum’s café on the otherwise deserted first floor that I saw the George Segal figures (Fig. 10.3). They were scattered here and there at the tables.

Figure 10.2. Philip Hanson, Chambers of Venus (1974); oil on canvas, courtesy MUMOK, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien.

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Seated alone, they seemed to invite company, and indeed a few patrons sat next to them, munching on apple strudel or knödel. I did not at first understand why they appealed to me, but I recognized them as hailing from the United States. Of course, they were Americans in quite a literal sense—Segal, who cast these plaster statues from real people, used American acquaintances as models. Later I realized that, for me, an American in Europe, they signified not the presence, but the absence of Americans. These homogenized white creatures seated amid the pomp of the absent Viennese nobility marked the empty spaces where I might have expected to see at least a few Americans, as though they had been erased, or had entered as ghosts. I spent a moment among them, sipping coffee with these absent compatriots. Years later, I encountered Segal’s figures again. They were different figures, but unmistakably his style. These figures were in San Francisco. I saw them unexpectedly while viewing the Golden Gate Straits from above the terrace of the San Francisco Arts Center (Fig. 10.4). Here they spoke of an environment just as alien to the coast of California as the figures at the café in the Museum of Modern Art had been to Vienna. The piled, or rather artfully draped, postures of the nude figures identified them as Holocaust victims. A lone upright “survivor” overlooked the Pacific Ocean from behind his scrap of European barbed wire.10 The sun-whitened bodies of the fallen seemed too tall, too straight, too healthy, too beautiful. This was the Holocaust viewed from America, Europe’s tragedy acted out by figures who, when I visited them in the Viennese palace, had seemed to be negative spaces from my home country. They were no more “in place” in California than they had been in Europe.

Figure 10.3. View of the café in the former Museum Moderner Kunst in Palais Liechtenstein, Vienna, 1979 (photo: Margaret Olin).

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They were out of place literally, with their view of the ocean; their commemoration of Jewish victimhood was figuratively out of place in a country where such genocides happened, but only to others. As noted by Rabbi Arnold Wolf in reference to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.: “The Native Americans must feel bewildered to see our European Shoah commemorated and their local murder ignored.”11 Perhaps my words about Segal’s displaced figures seem yet more bewilderingly displaced in the context of a discussion of the depots of Jewish museums in Europe and the United States. Yet I hope that they can be made to speak to the search for a Jewish space. I spent two very different years in Vienna. The first, as an aspiring photographer in 1970, gave me the linguistic tools I needed for the second, as an aspiring academic in 1979–1980. The dissertation I researched in 1980, when I saw the Segal figures, culminated in my first book.12 It also provided the inspiration that would lead to later research on concepts of Jewish art.13 This was a time marked by the beginning of German and Austrian attempts to grapple with the legacy of the Holocaust, a development that, in its form in West Germany, is sometimes attributed to the impact in Europe of the 1978 American television series Holocaust.14 Thus, when I arrived in Vienna in 1979, matters relating to Jews were far more visible than

Figure 10.4. George Segal, The Holocaust (1984), Lincoln Park, San Francisco; art ©The George and Helen Segal Foundation/licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. (photo: James E. Young).

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they had been ten years earlier. On my earlier visit I had noticed that, in bookstores, works of “Judaistik” (Judaica) tended to occupy a small shelf in an out-of-the-way corner, in company with books on “Freimauerei” (Freemasonry) and Esoterik. Now the same bookstores were likely to devote an entire wall to the subject of Jews. German translations of works by such writers as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, which had previously been mixed in with the general population of novels, were now collected from all corners of the bookstore along with the works of Bergson, Freud, Sontag, Wittgenstein, and others, and given their own “Jewish space” as examples of Jewish literature, philosophy, and psychology. With regard to some, one could argue that the only criterion that defined them as “Jewish authors” was Jewish ancestry.15 Yet such bookshelves are themselves case studies of Jewish spaces.16 It was not until 1996 that a proper Jewish museum opened its doors in the Palais Eskeles, an elegant central location near museums, expensive shops, and tourist attractions such as the Spanish Riding School. When it did, the Jewish Museum Vienna, as it is known in English, focused less on the food or the books than on the ghosts. The entry floor of the museum houses a permanent exhibit consisting of the collection of Judaica amassed by Max Berger, curated by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, the museum’s chief curator (Fig. 10.5). A gold-lettered dedication wrapping around

Figure 10.5. Max Berger Collection, Jewish Museum Vienna. Installation of Remembrance, by Nancy Spero, is visible on the wall in the background (photo: Margaret Olin).

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Figure 10.6. Max Berger Collection, Jewish Museum Vienna; detail: collection of ritual Torah accessories, with an excerpt from Deuteronomy 5:30, 11–14 (photo: Margaret Olin).

a corner of the wall lists the names of Berger’s relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust, to whose memory he dedicated his collection.17 In the long and brightly lit display case, uncaptioned individual objects, the pride of the Berger collection, are arranged in bays according to various Jewish holidays, life stages, or rituals. Objects used in Jewish rituals sit on shelves behind glass; the glass itself is engraved with excerpts (in German) from prayers pertaining to the corresponding rituals (Fig. 10.6). Thus, one literally reads the objects for Shabbat, for example, through the text from the Torah commanding one to observe the Sabbath. The terse explanatory material that accompanies some of these objects is insufficient to dispel the mysteries that surround them. An audio tour provides access to others, and viewers willing to do a bit of sleuthing may discover information in a brochure and a book located near them. Nonetheless, most of the objects remain resistant to interpretation. Heimann-Jelinek, writing about the Berger collection in the guidebook, discourages viewers from asking after “the individual object,” urging them instead to consider the “evanescent object that ultimately is the materialization—more or less arbitrarily—of a fundamental idea.”18 She sees the layers of writing over the objects as suggestive of the priority of the text over the material object in the Jewish religion.19

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Figure 10.7. Nancy Spero, Installation of Remembrance (1995–1996), Jewish Museum Vienna; detail: menorah from the Max Berger Collection (photo: Margaret Olin).

Yet their evanescence suggests more than the textual meanings of ritual. Ideas of Holocaust and loss hang over them not only in the dedication, but also because an installation by the American artist Nancy Spero, located high on the wall, makes it appear as if the objects themselves have begun to escape and are floating up to the ceiling (visible in Fig. 10.7). Spero’s installation, which can be seen in the interior courtyard throughout the museum, deepens the impression of ephemerality and directs it toward the Holocaust: the objects seem to flutter from floor to floor along with museumgoers as they ascend the staircases.20 Two floors higher, the sense of disappearance and loss becomes more explicit (Fig. 10.8). A display of holograms, also curated by Heimann-Jelinek, represents objects that form part of the museum’s collection, alongside objects too large and immobile to fit in any museum. Examples of these ungainly objects are the Church of St. Charles Borromeus (a Jew was forced to contribute to its upkeep in the 17th century in order to retain residency privileges in Vienna) and the “Riesenrad,” the giant Ferris wheel located in Vienna’s playground, the Prater (also sponsored by a Jew). Transparent photographs and documents, hovering furniture, and floating textiles deliver a history of the Jews of Vienna in holograms, still a relatively innovative art medium in the 1990s. The narrative, however, is traditional. Some holograms (for instance, bolts of material from the Nazi period that are stamped with yellow stars and intended to be sewn on clothes) reference material traces of antisemitism; others show Jewish contributions to literature; whereas others

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Figure 10.8. The Permanent Collection on Austrian Jewish History, Jewish Museum Vienna, Holograms, 1992 (destroyed); detail: Anti-Semitism and Loyalty and Patriotism (photo: Margaret Olin).

tie the socially motivated furniture and interior design of Friedl Dicker (a former student of the Weimar Bauhaus, murdered in the Holocaust) to Austria’s socialist reforms of the 1970s under the chancellorship of Bruno Kreisky, who always downplayed his Jewish identity.21 A chronological gap of more than sixty years separates Dicker’s “Children’s Chair” and the next entry, the “Mother and Child’s Passport” of 1995, although the program under which these passports were distributed began in 1974, during Kreisky’s years in office. The title of this section, “From the Zedaka to the Welfare State,” makes the welfare state appear to be a manifestation of Jewish ethics and elides Jews with socialists, an association that has disquieting historical overtones. The ghostly feel, however, extends to the exhibit as a whole by virtue of its holographic medium, which makes all the objects appear to be both present and absent; and also by the Spiro installation, which elicits the idea that the objects that escaped up the wall might have evaporated into holograms. The first time I visited the museum, shortly after it opened, I saw only the hologram exhibit, and I briefly speculated that it represented objects that had disappeared or perhaps could not be acquired by the museum. Holograms seemed an appropriate means of curating absence, of displaying lost objects and a history of Vienna that no longer existed. A series of exhibitions that preceded and led up to the opening of the museum seemed to suggest this. These included the fascinating, multivenue Beschlagnahmt (confiscated), which narrated the fate of the objects of Vienna’s earlier Jewish Museum, established in 1896 as the

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Figure 10.9. Schaudepot (viewable storage area), Jewish Museum Vienna, before 2011, courtesy Jewish Museum Vienna.

first of its kind worldwide and closed by the Nazis in 1938.22 The story told by the ghost-objects in the later holographic display was accordingly a familiar one. Jews contributed as makers or patrons to much that was typically Viennese: architecture, design, literature. In return, they were driven away or exterminated, and their ritual objects were confiscated. Labels could not threaten to solidify these individual objects: holograms made their evanescence explicit. When I finally visited the Schaudepot, or “open depot” (also called “visible storage”) in 2004, a chill ran down my spine, The open depot, curated by Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz, is on the highest floor, the “attic,” a rather dark, constricted, and not very large room. There, a glass storage unit, not very high, contains shelves upon which the objects sit (Fig. 10.9). Entering the room felt like coming upon a body. Many of the hard and motionless objects corresponded to the floating holograms below, as though I had reached the tombs and seen the corpses of everything of which I had earlier heard tell. Like the Berger collection, the depot, according to an inscription on a wall plaque, is “also a memorial.” The plaque explains that most of the objects were expropriated during the Holocaust from synagogues and from individuals who fled or who were deported. Some objects had been taken from the former Jewish Museum; other objects were charred survivors of synagogues that had been attacked and burned during the Kristallnacht pogrom. On a table next to the plaque

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sit heavy black-bound books that contain the catalog of the collection in English and German and suggest memorial volumes, intensifying the tomb-like impression and giving the objects the aura of mysterious relics from a vanished culture. The three floors of the Jewish Museum suggest three kinds of memory: überschrieben (written over: the glass with the etched German words for Hebrew prayers); Verflüchtigt (vanished: the fleeting holograms), and finally Aufbewahrt, in cold storage. These three ways of seeing Judaica all suggest a memorial. The Jews who used these items are gone. The items are orphaned. Some, it seems, have been orphaned more than once—as with “Lilly’s Box,” a collection of memorabilia brought for safekeeping to the local Jewish community organization (Die Israelitische Kultusgemeinde) by a Viennese couple shortly before their deportation and intended for their daughter, whom they had managed to send to England.23 Indeed, the depot itself, with its rows of unused artifacts, acts as a reminder of such projects as the “Jewish Central Museum,” a “Museum einer untergegangenen Rasse” (Museum of an Extinct Race) established by the Nazis in Prague and administered during the war by Czech Jews.24 Perhaps in a Jewish depot in a country where few Jews live, and where the Holocaust shadows the ones who do, it is proper to emphasize commemoration. The objects themselves are neither works of art—no one item is singled out as a treasure— nor extraordinary in their own right. Rather, each is a trace of loss. With most of them stolen from people who were murdered, this approach might be appropriate even if Austria still contained a large community of Jews. It seems especially so when approximately 10,000 Jews live in Austria, a small number compared to the nearly 200,000 who populated the country before 1938. Indeed, the depot’s gloomy display seems to answer the reservations cited by Berhard Purin in 1993 in the face of attempts by well-meaning supporters of the Jewish Museum at Hohenems, in western Austria, to fill in the gaps of their collections by acquiring Judaica on the market. Displays amassed in this way can gloss over the questionable pasts of the objects, in particular, their status as stolen goods. Furthermore, by combining objects of varied provenance into a single collection, instead of concentrating on objects made or used locally, these museums threaten to perpetuate the stereotype of a uniform “world Jewry.”25 I would now like to return to George Segal’s placeholders in the Viennese café. By the time I first wrote about them in 2000, I considered them through the lens of an evolving Holocaust memorial culture: they no longer seemed to be absent Americans, but rather absent Jews.26 These Jews, whose forefathers were once a sizable proportion of Vienna’s public for contemporary art, would now be having their coffee and resting their feet between philosophy in neon and photographs streaked with graphite. And yet they had never been born, since their parents had disappeared from Vienna. Now even these placeholders are gone. They had been a mere temporary exhibit, and by the late 1990s even the memory of the exhibit had vanished.27 And yet the traces of these non-existent Austrian Jews remain in the Schaudepot, in the “attic” of the Jewish Museum in Vienna, in the shape of the tagged items their would-be ancestors left behind. To be sure, Viennese viewers in 1980 would have been unlikely to regard the Segal figures as Jews. For them, Jewish life mostly came to a halt beginning in 1938; the question of how Jewish life might have been different by the year 1980 had the

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Jewish community remained intact was not a topic of discussion; even the actual community that had existed in the 1930s and 1940s was little understood. The average Viennese museumgoer could scarcely envision the Segal figures as would-be descendants of those bygone Jews, wearing sweaters and sipping lattes in modern cafes. According to Purin, the concentration on ceremonial objects in European Jewish museums would also discourage such an impression.28 Loss is in the present, not in the past. That is to say, it pertains not only to the quaint old Jews of the 1930s, some of whom were far from quaint even then, but rather to those who would have replaced them by now; not only to those who owned the Judaica in the depot, but rather those for whom the Segal figures stand in—who would have inherited those pieces and who might even have donated them to a Jewish museum. How would the continued presence of these families have made the depot different? The challenge is to see those Segal figures as Jews, to see the loss of Jewish life in Vienna as existing in the present, and not only in the past. These are the concerns that come to mind in face of the memorial culture of the Jewish Museum, where objects are condemned to haunt the present only as ghosts of the past. Certainly, a contextual display of Judaica can disentangle some of these issues. Even without their captions, the objects in the open depot are organized in a deadeningly traditional typological display, with rows of Torah covers in one display case, rows of rimonim in another. A contextual display, however, would run the risk of looking like one of the perfectly unified historical rooms so numerous in European museums. It would risk an essentialized fixing of the Jew as “Other” that the museum wished to avoid.29 In addition, it would be unlikely to include the unexpected juxtapositions often afforded by a confrontation with the truly ordinary, where secular items are routinely used for ritual purposes and placed in secular surroundings that seem to have little to do with religion (Fig. 10.10). Only such juxtapositions, as with the Segal figures or the Chicago Imagists nestled under the 18th-century frescoes and plaster ornamentation, would free a Jewish space from the ghostly and even horrific aura that often threatens to turn Jews in Europe, and not only their artifacts, into living representations of the Holocaust. For now, however, the community in Vienna, including the Jewish community, needs its opportunity to mourn. The open depot affords this opportunity; my words at best offer the eccentric viewpoint of a stranger.

Dybbuks in Chicago (Abigail Glogower) In November of 2007, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies moved one door north on South Michigan Avenue’s grand “Cultural Mile” to take up residence in a stunning new building. This ten-story, glass-facaded work of Chicago architects Ron Kruek and Mark Sexton could not have been farther either from the site of the Jewish Museum Vienna in the Palais Eskeles (tucked into a narrow street) or from the guarded, understated international style of Spertus’ former home.30 For Spertus employees like myself who straddled the transition between old and new, it was a time of great excitement and challenge. The result of a massive building campaign, the new structure provided a metonymic framework for a re-envisioned Spertus: a

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Figure 10.10. Anna Shteynshleyger, Candlesticks, pigment print, 2004–2009.

model of open, welcoming transparency, beckoning, with the light of learning, not just Jews of Chicago, but the intellectual community at large. The question posed by Margaret Olin—how different might the open depot in the Vienna Jewish museum have been if the Jewish community of Vienna had survived to see it, and if their descendents had donated Judaica to fill it—can perhaps be answered in this new building. The museum of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies is situated in a thriving, ghost-free Jewish community numbering some 270,000 individuals.31 No one calls upon its members to act as living representatives of the Holocaust. Surely nothing could prevent an open depot in the Jewish museum in Chicago from presenting to the visitor a warm, inviting countenance. It is amazing, therefore, that the Vienna depot’s discomfiting uncanniness seems to have reproduced itself in Chicago, where the Spertus Museum’s depot engages in a manner of haunting different, but nonetheless related, to that of its Viennese counterpart. It is not the murdered ghosts of the community, but rather ghosts of a more intellectual nature—its own methodological approach—that stalk the open depot at the Spertus Institute. This secondary haunting arises from changes at the level of theory with respect to how objects should inhabit a display space and consequently convey information. Among the casualties in this shift of thinking is the belief that relics of material culture are able—and should be permitted—to narrate history in an authoritative manner.

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Spertus’ moment of expansion and rebirth afforded the museum an opportunity to move in new directions, tugging at the traditionally assumed aims and audiences of a Midwestern Jewish museum. The museum had been established in 1968 when the artist (and native Chicagoan) Maurice Spertus (1903–1986) donated his large collection of Judaica to his family-endowed training ground for Jewish scholars and educators, the Spertus College.32 Over time, it came to comprise an interactive children’s archeological dig in the basement, the Zell Holocaust Center’s permanent exhibition of educational texts, photographs, and artifacts on the second floor, and a main floor exhibition space dedicated to rotating themed exhibitions and a permanent installation of Judaica from the collection. As gateways to learning about Jewish religion, history, and culture—intended mainly for the local Jewish community and for visitors from surrounding, smaller Jewish communities—the temporary shows and permanent displays tended to be straightforward in their presentation and content. Shows mounted before the move included the (now dormant) biennial Spertus Judaica prize competition,33 a show about Midwestern Jewish vacation spots, and an exhibit on hidden children of the Holocaust. The permanent exhibition of Judaica presented one or two examples of each type of Jewish ritual object from the museum collection (a shofar, two prayer shawls) accompanied by explanations of the object’s history and function, along with an occasional photograph of the item in use. As conceived by Rhoda Rosen, who directed the museum between 2002 and 2010, the one and a half floors allotted to the new museum consist of a top floor for inhouse and traveling exhibits (most of them concentrated on contemporary Jewish art) and a smaller gallery on the ninth floor for the permanent collection. Adjacent to a large open multipurpose space, the exhibition nook on this floor is split between a new, site-specific multimedia work by artist Ranbir Kaleka, Consider (2007), commissioned as a Holocaust memorial by the Zell Center (whose former didactic exhibit was retired to storage in the move) and the Open Depot Collection Display of art and Judaica from the permanent collection. With high art, most of it contemporary, dominating the top floor, the Open Depot is now the only dedicated space in the museum for displaying items, about 1,500 in all, culled from its 15,000-item collection of Jewish ritual objects, art, and material culture. Impressed by the Vienna depot, Rosen invited Heimann-Jelinek to design a similar display for Spertus. Perhaps she was also curious to see what effect the format would have when transposed from Europe to the very different conditions in Chicago. While the disquieting power of the Jewish Museum Vienna emanates from the dead-end nature of its contents (its objects, both inside and outside of the Open Depot, rendered, through tragedy, into cul-de-sacs of meaning), little of the Spertus Museum’s collection came to the museum as “orphaned” Judaica, and none of it is as poignant as “Lilly’s Box.” Existing for many years without a formal accession policy, the Spertus Museum evolved into a repository of both international and local Jewish material culture. It was never conceived as a memorial, despite the fact that some of its holdings were acquired via the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR), an organization set up after the Second World War to retrieve Jewish-owned artwork from Nazi storehouses.34 In most instances, inherited or acquired objects of Judaica were gifted by native Chicagoans and by émigrés residing in the area. These gifted items did not enter the depot as lost or unidentified, burnt or pilfered, and they do

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not exist as monuments to a loss of meaning, but rather the opposite: the close ties between objects and provenances function as a testament to the community’s enduring ability to transmit personal and cultural knowledge. The problem posed to the Chicago museum’s depot, therefore, is the extent to which the format can serve viewers who are not entering the space preparing to mourn what they cannot know, but rather to celebrate what they can know. Yet, as with the open depot in Vienna, the objects are left unlabeled and for the most part unexplained. It is possible that, by treating Judaica and Jewish material culture both as relics of actual lived experience and as nameless vessels open to endless interpretation, the depot performs an erasure of its contents. Detached from their place in everyday usage and from the narratives to which they naturally belonged, the objects in the depot hover between two worlds.35 Formally, the Spertus depot bears some resemblance to the Vienna depot, though it is not housed in a small room, nor are its objects crowded together in a vast, low cube. It is much more expansive: for those familiar with the Jewish Museum Vienna, the overall look brings to mind a wedding of the Schaudepot with a colossal version of the Max Berger collection. Welcoming visitors with the posture of an open embrace or an unfurled scroll, the Open Depot at Spertus is an awesome semi-circle of twelve glass-shelved bays extending from floor to sixteen-foot ceiling (Fig. 10.11).36 Populated with an assortment of materials that can seem almost motley at first, the cases somewhat plaintively represent the vastness of the collection, the mere

Figure 10.11. Open Depot, with temporary exhibit, Slippages, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago. Image used with permission of Spertus Institute (photo: Margaret Olin).

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beginnings of organization, and an effect akin to chancing upon a stash of forgotten relics in an old attic, with each viewer granted both the delight and the responsibility of being a discoverer. In sum, the Open Depot is in every way a radical departure from the Judaica exhibit at the old Spertus, and audiences have had a great deal of difficulty making the transition. Whereas the old display favored fewer objects with greater contextual framing, the Open Depot emphasizes breadth and variety of objects with little or no explication. Objects are grouped together by type, sometimes in staggering numbers, but what purposes they serve, where they come from, or even the name of the type is not divulged (Fig. 10.12). At its premier, a brief introductory text to the entire installation accompanied it, but there were no individual item labels or more general labels to explain the thematic organization of each bay. In the traditional display of the former Spertus Museum, objects sat front and center at a comfortable viewing level; in the new depot, the far more numerous objects are often perched at inaccessible heights of maddening inscrutability. Working at the front lines of patron services at Spertus, I absorbed the litany of depot-related complaints and critiques that poured in following the opening. Although the museum provided six iPods programmed with very brief thematic audio tours, many patrons found them difficult to operate and were unsatisfied by the explanations they offered.

Figure 10.12. Open Depot, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago; detail: ritual Torah assessories. Image used with permission of Spertus Institute (photo: Margaret Olin).

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The Spertus staff was instructed to explain to visitors that their problems were due not to mistakes on the part of the exhibit’s planners but rather to conscious curatorial decisions. In order to convey this effectively, I decided to offer further intervention in the form of guided tours, assuming the role of exhibition facilitator and providing walk-in tours to visitors several times a day. My time spent as intermediary between visitors and the depot display afforded me the opportunity to appraise the depot’s methodology and ultimate efficacy. During the process I found that, almost without exception, visitors responded to the depot more positively with the benefit of a guided tour. The irony in this is that I became a walking label, channeling, like a medium, a depot whose aim was to speak for itself without mediation. In fact, the depot profoundly disrupts the familiar museum-going script, according to which visitors assume that a curatorial team composed of trained and knowledgeable professionals is charged with performing extensive research on a collection of objects and with presenting those findings through the medium of an exhibition. Learning typically flows uni-directionally: from expert to novice.37 The depot reverses this flow of information by refusing to deliver a series of incontestable facts on labels, privileging instead whatever preexisting knowledge (in the form of memories, hypotheses, and associations) viewers bring to the exhibit. The wall text of the exhibit informs the viewer that the aim is to “facilitate an aesthetic and associative” encounter with the objects, imparting an open-ended wonder and curiosity not permitted to fluoresce wherever knowledge is simply spoon-fed. According to the depot’s logic, those learning props and aids on which museumgoers have come to rely are potential deterrents to their experiences in the space. Not only do they reduce the manifold (theoretically infinite) aspects and meanings of an object to an incomplete blurb, but they can also be the work of trained experts who sometimes make mistakes. Indeed, one of the problems plaguing museum collections is the fact that objects are not always what they at first seem to be, necessitating much reclassification and re-presentation. The impetus behind such a radical reorganization of audience experience is the desire to push viewers into a realm of meta-cognition in which they can appreciate the objects on display in the context of larger questions about the very nature of collecting. Why should the display resemble a storage unit? Because carefully curated exhibits mask the often convoluted and chaotic reality behind the scenes of museum collections, where research is still being performed and “facts” are up for grabs. Is there knowledge that can be gleaned from a sustained inquiry into the factor that unites all the depot’s disparate contents under the banner of “Jewish Museum”? And as for those out-of-reach items, high above the viewers’ heads, many of them pertain to various realms of privacy: personal grooming effects, funerary shrouds, and tools used in ritual circumcision. Before your curiosity and sense of viewer entitlement run amok, the depot seems to be saying, keep in mind that such objects were never intended for public display. These are all fascinating issues, worth pursuing in an exhibition environment. Unless carefully presented, however, they are introduced at a hefty price. The sadness Beth Livensperger expressed with regard to the Luce Center is palpable at Spertus as well. Seeing the veiled machinations of the museum laid bare can be like entering the kitchen of one’s favorite restaurant: there is excitement, to be sure, but

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also discomfort. Like so much meat awaiting preparation, the objects in the depot cannot help but sit, to some extent, “at market”; on one memorable occasion I overheard a disoriented visitor ask her companion if the items there were for sale. In a report on visitor experience that took note of comments ranging from misguided to bilious, I lamented the depot’s “lost opportunity,” which I attributed to a critical imbalance between theory and affect.38 Audiences deprived of familiar learning tools, I argued, were called upon to make phenomenally difficult intellectual leaps. As a result, many visitors reacted defensively, feeling that their simple questions about the facts of the objects were somehow perceived as being intellectually inferior to the loftier methodological and conceptual questions explored by the depot. Again and again, I observed how visitors who had been provided with background information and a sustained conversation about the validity of questioning the museum script began to relax their barriers and accept, and even applaud, the exhibit. Yet whenever visitors were left to their own devices with no tour guide, no labels, and little or no literature, the depot failed consistently to come alive for them. It seemed that, in the end, the evocation of memories and conjectures was not enough to satisfy visitors’ hunger for knowledge. Without a spoonful of sugar in the form of actual narrative, the medicine would not go down. Only later did I come to appreciate how complex those problems of affect are. To be fair, some visitors in the depot did not appear to welcome any challenge to think beyond their comfort zones. Others, however, eager to engage, sensed keenly that they were in a haunted space. As noted, the Spertus Museum is also the site of a permanent video installation by Ranbir Kaleka. The video’s soundtrack, consisting in part of oral testimony by Holocaust survivors, is audible in the depot, and whenever it is running, the sense of being haunted is easy to trace. The Holocaust becomes the default soundtrack of the depot as well. Yet the uncanny presence of ghosts may actually be most palpable in the tenth bay of the depot, which is devoted to American Jewish cultural expression in the once popular form of Yiddish theater, with an emphasis on its Chicago legacy (Fig. 10.13). Towards the top of the bay hangs a poster for a theatrical performance in Warsaw of the classic work of Yiddish literature, S. Ansky’s 1914 play, The Dybbuk.39 Featuring a young couple in front of a field of tombstones, it advertises one of the most chilling ghost stories of its time. The Dybbuk is the tale of a deceased young man who invades, in spirit form, the body of Leah, his earthly betrothed.40 Wronged by a broken promise between fathers, the ghost of the jilted bridegroom, Channan, is characterized by a purgatorial transience: without peace he cannot retire to the world beyond and thus assumes temporary residence in a living being. He is a corporeal squatter, a wandering spirit, a man of no place. Attempting to exorcise the dybbuk, the local rabbi beseeches the spirit to return to his proper place. Alas, no happy ending resolves the story. Channan refuses to leave, preferring to haunt. Polish filmmaker Michał Waszyn´ski’s 1937 interpretation of The Dybbuk exquisitely voiced the anxieties of Polish Jewry two years before the outbreak of the Second World War. As with the photographs of Roman Vishniac, the movie visually evoked an already long-lost past in which Jewish life circled mythically around shtetl and yeshiva.41 After the demise of Polish Jewry, it was impossible to view the film without an element of “backshadowing.”42 In the cast, appearing in her only celluloid role, was a famous native star of the Yiddish stage, Dina Halpern. Her matronly

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Figure 10.13. Open Depot, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago; detail: Yiddish Theater. Image used with permission of Spertus Institute (photo: Margaret Olin).

character, Frade, is Leah’s governess, and regards herself as steward of the young bride’s spiritual purity. When Leah wishes to steal away to visit her dead lover’s grave before she is wed to another man, Frade, overcome with pity, permits her to go. On parting, she resolves that, should anything happen to the young girl, “the sin will be mine.” In the real world, Halpern soon found herself in need of her own protective spirit as the political climate in Poland rapidly deteriorated. Fortunately, she was on tour in the United States when the war broke out, and she was able to find refuge.43 In 1948, she married Danny Newman, founder of the Lyric Opera in Chicago, and settled in the Midwest. Newman managed her continuing career as a touring Yiddish actress, and together they founded the Chicago Yiddish Theater Association in 1960.44 Upon Halpern’s death in 1989, her husband donated her large collection of costumes, playbills, sheet music, and other personal ephemera to the Spertus Museum. These effects comprise a significant portion of the tenth bay and lend a powerfully haptic, personal point of entry into the now virtually extinct art form of Yiddish theater. Halpern’s portrait hangs at the top of the bay next to the Dybbuk poster, signaling that this is her haunt.45 At the bottom of the bay, level with the viewer, rests her massive stage trunk, its battered condition testifying to her extensive travel (Fig. 10.14). The trunk stands on one end, ajar, inviting viewers into its interior of half-opened

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Figure 10.14. Open Depot, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago; detail: Dina Halpern’s theater trunk. Image used with permission of Spertus Institute (photo: Margaret Olin).

drawers, their contents arranged in a careful chaos of disclosure. Draped bejeweled sashes and embroidered silks suggest that the deceased starlet has only just recently rifled through them. One drawer reveals an unsorted pile of important looking papers, not unlike the mounds of miscellany stacked on so many of our own desks at home. Before Halpern’s death, Newman already described himself as her curator: Certainly, she was a special cultural treasure of my people—the perfect personification of the thousand-year-old, Yiddish-speaking civilization that the Germans had so cruelly and ruthlessly extirpated along with millions of innocent victims in the 20th century’s renewed manifestation of the millennial anti-Semitic war of religious and ethnic hatred. . . . I felt that heaven had placed her in my keeping, and I strove to be worthy of the responsibility that accompanied that joy.46

Let us consider Halpern and her reputation, then, as items of Judaica preserved from the Holocaust that eventually came to the museum at Spertus, where the depot now removes her from her own possessions. She was a person of note, a minor celebrity performing in a western democracy, whose biography, far from lost to the palimpsest of history, is subject to ample documentation and interrogation. Her belongings did not trace a winding route to the museum but rather came at the behest of her widower, who was anxious to mythologize her in death. By withholding these

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stories from the viewer, preferring to present them as “anyone’s trunk,” Halpern is left to haunt her own possessions. Severed from their stories, the objects in the Spertus depot become monuments to the same intransigence plaguing Channan in The Dybbuk. Except that here, unlike in The Dybbuk, the permanent-temporary residents are not the souls of people but rather those of objects, the meanings of material culture. Their homes lost, destroyed, or altered (often by forces as unglamorous as the mere passage of time) they, like the grieved young Channan, persist in a purgatory both stubborn and tragic. Dwelling, as the name “depot” implies, in a holding area, a clearing house, or a changing station, these lost or obsolete remnants of ritual, faith, and banal everyday life await an impossible reconciliation: reinstatement of their former relevance. For just as the dybbuk stalks the divide between living and dead, the contents of the depot hover at the borders of meaning and meaninglessness, function and irrelevance, fiction and fact. In its self-conscious institutional critique, the depot at Spertus implies that this haunting is endemic to museums, occurring whenever material culture leaves the realm of intimate use to enter the vacuum of the vitrine. For if all objects are destined to “die a little bit,” to become detached from the significance of their station in history and personal immediacy, then why not come clean about the institution’s murderous methods? To condense every aspect of an item’s complete narrative—the hands that touched it, the lips that kissed it, the ink that spilled on it, its transition from owner to owner—into a curt, smug identification label is worse than hubris; it is an insult to both artifact and viewer. Might it not be more honest, more transparent, to provide the holdings a place to exist openly in their disembodiment instead of being propped up with the vain rehabilitative efforts of extensive text and context? In adopting this strategy, the Spertus depot is taking a gamble, encouraging a different sort of experience that prompts and embraces an imprecise metaphysical knowledge transmittable through feelings, memories, and associations rather than the certitude of “research” that validates the museum’s authority. This, however, amounts to withholding whatever actual information is known about any given object, telling a visitor that the particular history of an object is less important than his or her own tangential connection to it. To open an object to too much interpretation is also to deprive that thing of its full status as a vessel of history in all the particularities of its existence. In The Dybbuk, Channan, a pious young seminary student, is also a conjurer. His downfall comes when metaphysical dabbling gives way to the unchecked fervor of sorcery. Convinced that he can employ unmanageable powers in the service of ultimate truth, he eventually draws his formidable strength from satanic forces. In the form of a dybbuk, he manages to stand his ground between two worlds, defying the collective will of the community. But never again will he have things as they once were. Vanquished by the struggle waged by Channan in her body, Leah, his beloved bride, expires at the story’s end. The Spertus depot’s method similarly forces the object to straddle two worlds, in one a story of things that happened, and in the other (potentially) everything else. While visitors are free to imagine the meanings of objects in the Spertus depot, they are also free to imagine incompletely, erroneously, or not at all. By emphasizing the

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unknowable over the knowable, the depot prizes and preserves the haunted status of its contents, consigning them there, intellectually, forever. Their only salvation lies in the very modest information the Open Depot initially banished from its midst: the stories that visitors so desperately long to know. Indeed, bowing to pressure from visitors, the museum staff retroactively outfitted the depot with informational handouts on featured “objects of the month” (including Dina Halpern’s trunk) and paper copies of a revised audio tour script. Preserving and imparting these important stories, such tools help reinstate the museum’s authority and expertise. In another response to the criticisms surrounding the depot, students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago recently mounted an exhibition that explicitly addressed issues concerning juxtaposition and authority and applied them to specific objects in the collection. For a brief moment, the student curators united the twin responsibility of stewardship and mediator (see the display tables visible in Fig. 10.11).47 The Open Depot of the Spertus Museum in Chicago, possessed by its dybbuk, suggests a Jewish culture no more alive and vibrant in the center of American Midwest than in what is known as “Mittleeuropa,” where the demise of its Jewish culture condemned the surviving Judaica to serve as a memorial. For what loss does the Jewish community in Chicago mourn? At the time of this writing, perhaps a great deal. The Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies and its museum are in transition once more. A restructuring of college, museum, and library departments is underway, and it is not clear what will happen to the Open Depot and its contents. Will the dybbuk be exorcized, freeing the depot to celebrate the enduring Chicago Jewish community and, with contemporary art and critical thinking as partners, take on the task of communicating Jewish identity in the present? Or will “Judaica,” once the promised bride of the Jewish museum, share the fate of her betrothed?48

Notes For their time and expertise, the authors are grateful to Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Hannah Landsmann, and Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz of the Jewish Museum Vienna; and to Rhoda Rosen and to Arielle Weininger, formerly of the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies in Chicago. Margaret Olin is grateful for stimulating interchanges with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Matti Bunzl, and to members of an audience at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, in January 2010, for their responses to an earlier version of this paper. 1. See the untitled review by Sally Yerkovich, The Public Historian 24 (2002), 127–131. 2. There are three Luce Centers in New York: the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, at the New York Historical Society; and the Luce Center for American Art, at the Brooklyn Museum. A fourth center, the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, is located at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. 3. “Das Museum hat keine verborgenen Depoträume mehr! Das Magazin ist hell erleuchtet und als Schaudepot konzipiert, das dem Publikum einen Blick hinter die Kulissen ermöglicht. Fachleute und Laien können nun die annähernd 4’000 Objekte in Musse studieren, die vorher im Dunkeln ruhten.” The website is found at www.stadt-zuerich.ch/kultur/de/index/institutionen/ museum_rietberg/sammlung.html#das_schaudepot (accessed March 2010).

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4. John D. Hilberry, “Behind the Scenes: Strategies for Visible Storage,” Museum News (July–August 2002), 37–38. 5. Zachary Woolfe, “Sneaking into the Stockrooms at City Museums,” Capital (August 6, 2010), online at www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2010/08/284235/ sneakingstockrooms-city-museums (accessed March 9, 2011). 6. Ibid. 7. See, for example, Domagoj Akrap, Almut Jaschke, Christa Krajnc, and Johannes Reiss, Nicht ganz koscher? (Eisenstadt: 2000), catalog of an exhibit of the same name; another exhibit, Der Wein erfreut des Menschen Herz, took place in 1999 at the Jewish Museum in Eisenstadt, Austria. 8. These notes are found in the Nachlass of Alois Riegl, which is housed in the art history department of the University of Vienna. 9. In the catalog for the exhibition, E.M. Triska describes Philip Hanson’s Chambers of Venus as though it were the work of a Viennese “Fantastic Artist,” where “the mood of a baroque grotesque merges with that of a modern gambling den.” See “The Chicago School,” in Museum Moderner Kunst, Kunst der letzten 30 Jahre, ed. Hermann Fillitz (Vienna: 1979), n.p. 10. For a sympathetic interpretation of the monument, its models, and its siting, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: 1993), 309–319. He identifies the survivor as an Israeli survivor of the camps. The dead bodies were modeled after Americans. 11. Arnold Jacob Wolf, Unfinished Rabbi: Selected Writings of Arnold Jacob Wolf, ed. Jonathan S. Wolf (Chicago: 1998), 195. 12. Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: 1992). 13. See the preface to Margaret Olin, Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on “Jewish Art” (Nebraska: 2001), xv-xxvii. 14. See Andreas Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification: ‘Holocaust’ and West German Drama,” New German Critique 19 (1980), 117–136. 15. The transformation from invisibility to progressive forms of incorporation and conceptualization of the Jewish population is traced expertly (for the period before and after the Waldheim affair) by Matti Bunzl in his Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in LateTwentieth-Century Vienna (Berkeley: 2004); this work also offers an analysis of Vienna’s Jewish museum, 160–172. 16. So, for that matter, are some individual publications—in a two-volume anthology of 1939 that was published in memory of the art historian A. Kingsley Porter, for instance, the honoree’s Jewish friends (along with opponents of the Nazis) were crowded into vol. 2, whereas two German Nazi sympathizers (along with one American literary medievalist) honored him in vol. 1. See Wilhelm R. W. Koehler (eds.), Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass: 1939). 17. Michaela Feurstein-Prasser (ed.), Jewish Museum Vienna from A to Z, trans. James Roderick O’Donovan (Munich: 2006), 7. 18. Ibid., 21. 19. Interview with Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Vienna, November 2009. 20. Feurstein-Prasser, Jewish Museum Vienna from A to Z, 21. On this installation, and on the other permanent exhibits in the museum, see also Reesa Greenberg, “The Jewish Museum, Vienna: A Holographic Paradigm for History and the Holocaust,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: 2003), 235–250. 21. Information about the exhibit, including the list of items in each section, can be found in Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Hannes Sulzenbacher (ed.), Jewish Museum Vienna (Vienna: 1996). 22. Bernhard Purin (ed.), Beschlagnahmt: Die Sammlung des Wiener Jüdischen Museums nach 1938 (Vienna: 1995). 23. On the box, see Feuerstein-Prasser, Jewish Museum Vienna from A to Z, 78–79.

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24. On this museum, see Dirk Rupnow, Täter, Gedächtnis, Opfer. Das “Jüdische Zentralmuseum” in Prag, 1942–1945 (Vienna: 2000); Jan Björn Potthast, Das jüdische Zentralmuseum der SS in Prag. Gegnerforschung und Völkermord im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: 2002). I owe this association to Daniel Eisenberg. 25. Bernhard Purin, “Dinge ohne Erinnerung: Anmerkungen zum schwierigen Umgang mit jüdischen Kult-und Ritualobjekten zwischen Markt und Museum,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 47 (1993), 161. 26. Margaret Olin, “On Not Introducing George Segal,” Judaism 49 (2000), 462–469. 27. In preparation for my essay on the figures, I sent my slides to the (then) director, who had no record of the exhibit. 28. Purin, “Dinge ohne Erinnerung,” 163–165. On the concentration on Judaica in Jewish museums, see Annabel Jane Wharton, “Jewish Art, Jewish Art,” Images 1 (2007), 29–45. 29. This point is splendidly elucidated in Matti Bunzl, “Of Holograms and Storage Areas: Modernity and Postmodernity at Vienna’s Jewish Museum,” Cultural Anthropology 18 (2003), 435–468. 30. Blair Kamin, “Blades of Glass: New Spertus Institute’s Gemlike Wall of Glass a Welcome Counterpoint on South Michigan,” Chicago Tribune (November 25, 2007). 31. This figure (for the year 2000) is cited in David Singer and Lawrence Grossman (eds.), American Jewish Yearbook 108 (New York: 2008), 190. 32. Elliot B. Lefkowitz, A Passion for Life: The Story of Herman and Maurice Spertus (Chicago: 1994). 33. The biennial Philip and Sylvia Spertus Judaica Prize competition began in 1994 and ran through 2004, hosting 5 exhibitions comprised of juried submissions around a different Jewish ritual object each time. Artists and designers offered interpretations from the traditional to the highly conceptual, and each exhibition was accompanied by a catalog with scholarly essays, including one written by Margaret Olin for the 2002 Mezuzah competition. It is unclear when or whether the Spertus Prize will return. See Jung Mee Jamie Kim, Rena Lipman, and Rhoda Rosen (eds.), Eternal Light: The 2004 Philip and Sylvia Spertus Judaica Prize Competition (Chicago: 2004); Lauren Apter and Amanda Barnett (eds.), Mezuzah: The 2002 Philip and Sylvia Spertus Judaica Prize (Chicago: 2002), 7–9. 34. Following the war, abandoned and confiscated Judaica items were rounded up into giant storehouses and then dispersed via the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. to various Jewish cultural institutions around the world. Spertus inherited some 50 objects in this manner. (Interview with Spertus Museum Collections Manager, Arielle Weininger, February 2, 2010.) 35. As will be seen, the phrase “between two worlds” is a conscious reference to The Dybbuk. 36. Heimann-Jelinek initially envisioned the installation as a full circle, a project that proved impossible to carry out in the space (interview with Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek [Vienna], November 2009). 37. Kate Emily Flinner, “Learning in a Culturally Specific Postmodern Museum: The Depot at the ‘New’ Spertus Museum” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 2008). 38. Abigail Glogower, “Affect Precedes Theory: A Report on Visitor Experience in the Spertus Open Depot” (unpublished paper, June 2008). 39. The production was staged at the Kaminsky Theater in Warsaw, c. 1970. 40. S. Ansky, The Dybbuk and Other Writings, ed. David G. Roskies, trans. Golda Werman (New York: 1996). 41. On Vishniac’s deliberate characterization of Polish Jewry as vestiges of the past, see Carol Zemel, “Z’chor! Roman Vishniac’s Photo-Eulogy of East European Jews,” in Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust, ed. Julia Epstein and Lori Hope Lefkowitz (Urbana: 2001), 75–86. 42. The term “backshadowing” is from Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: 1994). 43. Details of Dina Halpern’s life are found in a pamphlet by the museum titled “Dina Halpern’s Theater Trunk.” The trunk was the open depot’s featured object in January 2009. 44. Leo Melamed with Bob Tamarkin, Escape to the Futures (New York: 1996), 67.

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45. The poster, which belonged to Dina Halpern, advertises a performance in the Ester Rachel Kaminska and Ida Kaminska Jewish Theater in Warsaw, founded and for decades managed by Halpern’s great-aunt, the famous Yiddish actress Ester Rachel Kaminska (née Halpern) and her daughter, Ida Kaminska. 46. Danny Newman, quoted in an obituary in the Chicago Jewish News (December 7, 2007). 47. “Slippages: The Unexpected Dynamics of Knowing and Not Knowing,” Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies, November 16, 2009–January 17, 2010. The exhibition was a project of Rhoda Rosen’s course, “Curatorial Practice,” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 48. Before this essay went to press, the authors learned of events providing an unfortunate and uncanny epilogue to the piece. The hologram exhibit in the Jewish Museum Vienna discussed by Margaret Olin was demolished in February 2011, in the course of renovations to the museum. The pictures of the empty room littered with broken glass shields were upsetting to many and provoked controversy among museum officials in Vienna and abroad. While time constraints do not allow for an analysis of this situation in our text, one of the most troubling factors at play is surely the unsettling degree to which the very method of de-installation tragically mirrors the violent acts of destruction and erasure chronicled by the exhibit and implied in its form.

Thoughts on the Role of a European Jewish Museum in the 21st Century Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek

What role can a Jewish museum claim for itself in Europe of the 21st century? What should be its goals? Should it attempt to educate people about antisemitism, and especially its culmination in the Holocaust? Should it celebrate Jewish history and culture, or memorialize what no longer exists? Or perhaps it should be a place in which visitors are invited to reflect upon present-day issues and realities that are provocative or even discomforting? In the past 25 years or so, the history of Jewish museums and collections in preSecond World War Europe has been the subject of extensive research.1 Much has also been published on the fate of Jewish museums during the Nazi period.2 Finally, the history of Jewish museums in areas formerly under Nazi rule has grown in importance.3 In contrast to historical studies, this essay joins other discussions that focus on how best to present Jewish history and culture in postwar Jewish museums.4 Its main emphasis, as indicated in the title, is on Europe, although many of its findings hold true for Jewish museums elsewhere.

New Directions within Jewish Museology While in the early years of Jewish museums (prior to the Second World War and even for some years after) the common emphasis was on showing the so-called “core” of traditional Jewish life, mainly by means of Jewish artifacts relating to different rituals, holidays, and ceremonies, there lately has been a discernable shift away from particularistic Jewish perspectives. This shift is most apparent in the choice of topics for temporary exhibitions; several are especially noteworthy for the ways in which they reconfigure the relationship between particularistic and universalistic concerns. One pioneering, U.S.-based exhibit, Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, curated by Norman Kleeblatt at the Jewish Museum of New York in 2002, was almost painful in what it presented: the works of 13 artists, all of them born after 1945, who took imagery from the Nazi period and transferred it into their contemporary artistic language. The show challenged visitors to forget—or at least distance themselves from—typical imagery of the Shoah as regularly shown in museums and exhibitions worldwide. Instead, viewers were provoked into pondering the nature of evil in 243

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today’s society and the ways in which they related to it. One of the most haunting objects in the exhibition was Zbigniew Libera’s Lego Concentration Camp, comprising a seven-box set, each box containing a different segment of a concentration camp, including the crematorium. The most unsettling aspect about this work was not its taboo-breaking character per se, but its implied message that the “Lego concentration camp,” rather than being a unique piece of art, was a commercial product designed for mass consumption. Another striking work was a video by Boaz Arad, titled Hebrew Lesson, that was based on digitalized historical film clips of Adolf Hitler talking to his “Volk.” Arad singled out various acoustic units of Hitler’s speeches and recombined them in a manner that had Hitler saying “Shalom, Jerusalem, I apologize” (“shalom yerushalayim, ani mitnatzel”). A more recent U.S.-based exhibit, Imaginary Coordinates (2008), curated by Rhoda Rosen at the Spertus Museum in Chicago, embarked on a no less ambitious project. Making use of the museum’s collection of maps from the Holy Land, the exhibition juxtaposed the maps with contemporary works of art that reflected on the question of what defines national boundaries. One of the works, by Mona Hatoum, was placed alongside a collection of pre-1948 postcards depicting the daily life of Arabs. In stark contrast to these pastoral images was Hatoum’s video, featuring a woman in Jerusalem who is asking local passersby for directions to Ramallah, a West Bank town located less than 10 miles away. No one really knows the proper answer, because Ramallah is so far from their own daily reality; everyone assumes that it is much farther away. Imaginary Coordinates attempted to raise awareness of the one-sidedness of the definition of demarcation lines and to encourage a fresh look at these accepted notions. However, because it dealt specifically with demarcation lines within Israel, and thus seemed to be questioning the legitimacy of the Zionist project, it provoked an emotional (and to some extent, political) outcry on the part of the Jewish community. As a result, the museum abruptly terminated the exhibition. In Europe, meanwhile, several thematic shows pursued connections and associations that were, on the face of it, surprising for a Jewish museum. Such was the case with 10 + 5 = God: The Power of Numbers and Signs,5 organized by the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2004, which traced the most basic symbols in religion, science, and everyday life without losing sight of German Jewish history. Included in the exhibition were a number of objects specifically related to the Jewish experience during the Shoah: for instance, part of a V-2 rocket, whose production was facilitated in part by prisoners in the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. However, the main thrust of the exhibition related more broadly to numbers in the context of western culture. Its centerpiece was a 9-meter-long interactive table covered with numbers. Whenever a given number was touched, a text or image popped up—visitors could learn, for instance, that 613 represented the total of affirmative and negative commandments in the Bible, according to a list compiled by Maimonides in the 12th century. Another exhibition, typical! Clichés of Jews and Others (2008),6 examined stereotypical ways of perceiving and compartmentalizing images and objects relating to specific groups of people, without limiting itself to antisemitic stereotypes (Figs. 11.1a and 11.1b). While acknowledging the necessity of characterizations and classifications as a means of orienting oneself in the world, the exhibition sensitively showed how such characterizations also serve as a breeding ground for racist

Figures 11.1a and 11.1b. Posters from the typisch! Klischees von Juden und Anderen (typical! clichés of Jews and others) exhibition, Berlin 2008, courtesy aroma GbR, Berlin.

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ideologies. Developed by the Jewish museums of Berlin and Vienna, the exhibition questioned the very notion of perception—whether what we see is what there actually is, or more what we want to see. Based on a collection of so-called “antisemitica” that was donated to the Jewish Museum Vienna shortly after its establishment in 1990, the exhibition objects had originally been given brief labels and integrated into the holdings of the museum. On closer inspection, however, the curators came to the conclusion that much of the collection was not antisemitic or even stereotypically Jewish. Previous identifications were seen to be problematic: for instance, a porcelain figurine depicting a merchant selling clothes was inventoried as a “Jewish merchant of clothes,” whereas an identical figurine appears in other museum and private collections as a “merchant from Holland.” To emphasize the point, the exhibition included a small porcelain figurine of a woman in a blue dress. A sign near the figurine asked viewers whether the object should be considered part of the antisemitic collection and offered several possible arguments in favor of an affirmative answer, ranging from “because of her nose” to “because she wears a wig.” In fact, the figurine in question had nothing specifically Jewish about it. Here and elsewhere, the exhibition called into question the process of labeling objects by means of pointing to the highly subjective nature of labeling. In so doing, it challenged the authority of museums, collection registrars, and curators, as well as their standard methods of identifying their holdings. Beyond this, by integrating stereotypes of Jews with those of “others” (the latter included Japanese women, Native Americans, and “wild” aborigines), the exhibition challenged the perspective in which the Jew is regarded as the classic victim of stereotyping. In conceptualizing the issue in this manner, the museums displayed their willingness to go beyond their traditional mandate; many groups of non-Jews as well as Jews could relate to the topic being presented. Of all Places, Germany! Jewish-Russian Immigration to the Federal Republic,7 mounted at the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt in 2010, dealt with the immigration of some 220,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union to the Federal Republic of Germany between 1989 and 2005. This mass immigration had provoked wide discussion in Jewish circles, but until this exhibition had rarely been treated in any broader public forum.8 Migration issues were also explored by the Munich Jewish Museum in an exhibition titled Places of Exile 01—Station 1: Istanbul. Tales of Lives between Munich and Istanbul (2009), which addressed the topic of Jews escaping to Turkey during the Nazi era and their subsequent remigration to Munich.9 The issue of migration was taken up in a more far-reaching manner by the Jewish Museum Vienna in an exhibition of 2010 titled The Turks in Vienna: History of a Jewish Community,10 which explored the history of relations between Austria and Turkey and between Jews in the East and West, along with the history of migration (mainly Jewish) to Europe. The historical starting point was the fateful year of 1492, marked by the final Reconquista (ending 800 years of Arab-Muslim rule in Spain), the Jews’ expulsion from Spain, and Christopher Columbus’ journey from Spain to the New World. The exhibition traced the routes of Jewish migration from Spain to North Africa, several Italian cities and, in particular, the Ottoman Empire (it depicted as well the migration of Jews expelled from Portugal, who eventually settled in the Netherlands and in northern Germany). It illustrated the evolution of culturally and

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economically prosperous Balkan Jewish communities in the wake of Ottoman conquests and the ways in which their rich culture, characterized by Spanish and Turkish influences, continues to be reflected in distinctive religious, linguistic, literary, musical, and culinary forms of expression. In addition, it presented the story of Sephardic Jews in Vienna. These Jews utilized the opportunity afforded by the peace treaties between the Habsburg Empire and the Sublime Porte in the first half of the 18th century, which introduced a new era in the relationship between Europe and Turkey. As Turkish citizens in the Habsburg Empire, the Sephardic Jews of Vienna enjoyed freedom of movement and religious observance. The Turks in Vienna examined as well the mediating role of the Sephardic Turkish communities between Orient and Occident and between Asia and Europe. It focused on traders and merchants and their innovative networks, and also on scholars, rabbis, writers, and musicians who shared their cultural heritage with the world. The destruction of these communities and their absence from the historical memory of Vienna and Austria was also portrayed. By shedding light on a minority within a minority, namely, the Turkish Sephardic community in Vienna, the exhibition raised broader questions of exclusion and inclusion. Although sharing ostensibly the same cultural basis and historical experience, the Turkish Jews were never integrated into the canon of Austrian Jewish consciousness: why was the memory of this community’s destruction neglected after 1945, even by Jews, and why has so little attention been given to this topic in the academic world? In addition to asking these questions, The Turks in Vienna made a conscious attempt to reach out to Austria’s non-Jewish Turkish community, stressing the fact that the Muslim world had welcomed Jews while the Christian world treated them dismally. Young Turkish visitors to the exhibition could thus identify themselves as the humane figures in this saga. Finally, although it highlighted the diverse nature of the Turkish Jewish community, the exhibition also depicted the multi-connectedness of its members. Turkish Jews had previously lived in multiple regional, linguistic, and national contexts. Among the objects making this point was a silver Hanukah menorah designed for travel, made in the form of a Bosnian Turkish belt buckle and shaped like the top of a palm tree (Figs. 11.2a and 11.2b). A hinge allowed the two parts of the buckle to open: on the bottom was a stand for eight small oil cans; on the top, decorated with filigree, were two tablets of the Law, flanked by a lion on each side and topped by a Habsburg crown. This beautiful object, an amalgamation of two worlds, demonstrated how Jews were able to integrate into Austrian society while preserving their specific cultural identity, from which there emerged a unique and fascinating Sephardic-Turkish-Viennese culture. The broader horizons of these and other exhibitions are indicative of a desire on the part of Jewish museums to attract wider public attendance and academic interest. Indeed, the more Jewish museums are willing to serve as platforms from which to address current sociopolitical concerns, the more impact they will have on cultural and social developments. Illuminating the patterns of Jewish experience may serve to enhance the understanding of conditions under which minority groups live; evoking patterns of relations between Jews and non-Jews may help to orient people in an everchanging, multifaceted society. Thus, one of the main visions of a Jewish museum

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today may be its engagement in the sociopolitical issues of an increasingly globalized European society.

Facing up to Europe’s Past in Contemporary Jewish Museums European Jewish museums face an internal dilemma relating both to their past and to the provenance of their holdings. Many of the objects in Jewish museums were torn from their owners during the Nazi era and placed in storage following the war, eventually falling into different hands. To the extent that Jewish museums (as do other museums, private collectors, and dealers) possess looted objects from the Nazi period, should provenance research be a major concern? Several significant attempts have been made during the last generation to give prominence to this issue. As early as 1995, the Jewish Museum Vienna organized an exhibition, curated by Bernhard Purin, that dealt with the fate of the prewar Jewish museum. Titled Looted: The Collection of the Jewish Museum Vienna after 1938, the show traced the confiscation of the collection and its dispersal among different institutions.11 Two years later, the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam examined the “orphaning” of the European Jewish cultural heritage during the Nazi era.12 In 2006, it again took up the topic with Looted, But from Whom?, an investigation of art objects that were either acquired by forced sale or else stolen outright from their Jewish owners. After the war, the intention both of postwar governments and of Jewish organizations was to identify as many prewar owners as possible and to return properties to their rightful claimants. For a great number of objects, however, this goal had not been achieved. Thus the show, organized by the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam in cooperation with the Origins Unknown Agency, which sought to draw public attention to the matter and in this way further the effort to discover legal heirs.13 An exhibition mounted in 2007 at the Jewish Museum Vienna went beyond the question of the fate of art and Judaica objects. Titled There Has to be Order: The Archive of the Jewish Community Vienna, the exhibition traced the archival heritage of the Austrian Jewish community as well as its dispersal.14 Looting and Restitution: Jewish-Owned Cultural Artifacts from 1933 to the Present, a joint exhibition of the Jewish museums of Berlin and Frankfurt (2008), focused on the fate of both the objects and their owners.15 Also in 2008, the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (Paris) mounted an exhibition on looted art objects that focused on the search for provenance.16 Apart from these exhibitions, extensive provenance research has been carried out by the Jewish museums of Prague and Amsterdam. As indicated by these exhibitions, European Jewish museums are aware of the need both to revise their inventories and to reconsider how best to present their collections. In the process of making these revisions, they are experiencing a more fundamental

‹ Figures 11.2a and 11.2b. Silver Hanukah menorah designed for travel, displayed at Die Türken in Wien: Geschichte einer jüdischen Gemeinde (The Turks in Vienna: history of a Jewish community) exhibition, Jewish Museum Vienna, 2010, courtesy Jewish Museum Vienna.

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shift in the way they perceive their mission to the broader public. Traditionally, museums, like theaters or concert halls, have been regarded as refuges of high culture— embodied, in the case of museums, in collections of material objects. Yet they are not merely carriers of culture. Rather, museums present their collections of cultural assets in the context of knowledge-and goal-oriented frameworks of interpretation, and in this way serve as mediators of culture. Furthermore, their exhibitions are intended for a public that is expected not only to become aware of its cultural assets, but also to appropriate such assets for itself, in the sense of identifying objects in the core collection of a museum—even those taken from another country—as part of their own national heritage. Put somewhat differently, museums are sites of identity creation and representation. They are places in which societies build and hand down their images and understanding of history; where social and cultural practices are both affirmed and made more concrete. The exhibition is the main vehicle by which the museum represents a society, or creates (or reinterprets) a specific identity. In a cultural-historical museum such as a Jewish museum, historical images are constructed by way of curated exhibitions consisting of purposeful ensembles of objects, artworks photographs, archival items, and texts. In the context of such exhibitions, the social and cultural practices of society are elucidated, usually affirmatively, and handed down to subsequent generations. This brief outline points to the museum’s power not only to define what a given culture is, but also to determine which of its aspects are emphasized as opposed to being understated or even ignored. Which cultural or historical assets are worth keeping? To some extent, a museum curator is the arbiter: if he or she declares an object to be unimportant, then it is unimportant, in the sense that it will either not be acquired or, if already owned, will be neither researched nor exhibited. Alternatively, if the curator declares an object to be of particular importance, it will be acquired even at an exorbitant price; it will be thoroughly researched; and it will be presented to the public, in more or less dramatic fashion, as an item of significance. The same holds true for topics: if a curator (or museum director, or financial backer) deems a given topic insignificant, it will never be presented for public discussion, as opposed to other topics that are continually explored. Finally, museum collections as a whole are meant to generate a sense of participation in one or more cultures, whether by means of perceived links to a given cultural heritage, or through claims of being that culture’s legitimate heir. To be sure, the holdings of numerous museums are not necessarily their legitimate cultural property: suffice to mention the Egyptian and Oriental collections found in the Louvre or the British Museum, or the southwest Asian collection held by the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Such holdings are the material expressions of French, British, and German colonialism or imperialism, and thus a manipulation of cultural and political self-image. While it is fair to say that, since the French Revolution, museums and the culture they present are meant to contribute to the improvement of (middle-class) individuals and society as a whole, it is beyond question that such “improvement” can translate, among other things, into enhanced nationalism and patriotism—and sometimes even blind loyalty to the state.17

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In sum, museums are public spaces of culture and history acquisition. Yet whereas “culture” and “history”—together forming the identity of a society—are frequently the outcome of historic events and processes that have been completed and therefore are hardly reversible, the same does not hold for all objects on display at a museum. Not all of them “belong,” at least not in the sense that the society to which they are attributed can automatically lay claim to them. Especially in the case of objects that have in some way been expropriated, it is necessary to give an account both of their representation and the means by which they came to be acquired. For Jewish museums in Europe, this raises a set of problems that can succinctly be reduced to one key question: “To whom do Jewish cultural assets in Europe belong?” This question is particularly urgent with regard to ceremonial religious items that were confiscated or looted from synagogues or private homes during the Nazi era. As demonstrated in the various exhibitions mounted by European Jewish museums in recent years, such objects cannot be exhibited simply as museum pieces, and the museum’s goal cannot be merely to provide information about the objects’ aesthetic, historical, ethnographic or historic classification. Adequate representation of such objects requires, as a first step, investigation of their provenance. In general, it is necessary to question the provenance of any ceremonial Jewish object of European origin that was acquired after 1945. In the period following the Second World War, a large number of items defined as “ownerless assets” were distributed by the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR), mainly to American and Israeli institutions. The “lack of owners and heirs” determination was made in a very short time span, and (from today’s perspective) with virtually no publicity or media coverage. Numerous assets that were not registered by the JCR came into private or commercial possession; over the years, they were traded on the free market at everincreasing prices. Other material evidence of Jewish life reached international trade after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What all such objects had in common was their origin in family homes or communities that were destroyed between 1933 and 1945, and that only in the rarest of cases had been traced back to their original owners. The collection holdings of the Jewish Museum Vienna can serve as an example of the complex issues connected with provenance. At first glance, the choice of this particular institution may seem surprising, as the museum was founded only in 1990 and does not have any JCR holdings. One might have expected it to have no questionable collections in need of research. This assumption turns out to be wrong. The Jewish Museum Vienna possesses two main collections, the so-called Berger collection, which was acquired by the city of Vienna in 1988 on behalf of the museum about to be established, and the collection of the Jewish Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien [IKG])—less a collection than a gathering together of remnants of Jewish Vienna after 1945—which was placed on permanent loan in the museum in 1992. Motivated by passion and a love of Judaica, Max Berger began his collection in the 1960s and continued adding to it until his death in 1988. Unlike most collectors, he inquired after the origin and history of the objects offered to him—this, at a time when the issue of “provenance” had not yet entered public awareness. Berger’s main motivation was the preservation of Jewish cultural assets and their (re)introduction to

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the wider public. At the same time, he was concerned that certain objects, if not acquired by him, might well be offered to overseas buyers and thus be lost to Austria. His collection, therefore, contains a number of items of unidentified provenance, among them some objects from the holdings of the old Jewish Museum Vienna and others from Eastern Europe. In addition, there are a number of items from the IKG that had come into circulation a number of years after 1945, without the latter’s knowledge—a fact that sheds light on the ambivalent relationship of the post-Holocaust Viennese Jewish community to its own cultural heritage. Since most of the holdings of the old Jewish Museum Vienna, confiscated in 1938, were later restored to the IKG, their provenance can be easily ascertained, as is the case with most items originating in the prewar community holdings. In other instances, however, researching the origin and history of specific objects is extremely difficult and time-consuming, as important clues (seller; route to Vienna; community of origin; legal owner) are generally missing. While in many cases there are names on the objects that offer a hint about its donor or sponsor,18 there is usually no information regarding the benefiting institution or private association, or whether the object was given on loan or else donated outright. In other instances, private names found on objects are clearly meant to designate a private owner rather than a donor or sponsor; these generally require even more extensive research. To show the range of possible provenance in the collection holdings, let us consider an inquiry directed to the museum with regard to one of the items in the Berger collection, a Torah crown made in the Polish town of Os'wie˛cim (Auschwitz) that had once been in a synagogue in Krzezowice, near Cracow. In 2003, a relative of the object’s sponsor learned that it was in the possession of the museum; knowing that he was not in a position to make a legally indisputable claim, he nonetheless inquired into its status. As it happened, a dedication inscription on the crown showed the family name of the restitution claimant, but the relative was unable to provide evidence as to whether the object had remained under the ownership of the sponsor, or else had become the legal property of the synagogue and its congregation. The museum, for its part, preferred to avoid restitution proceedings even though such proceedings would most likely have been resolved in its favor. Instead, it suggested that the crown be given the status of an item on permanent loan, with the name of the claimant listed as its sponsor. This offer was accepted. Had it not been, the crown’s presentation in the museum would have been rendered exceedingly problematic. For once there is knowledge regarding what might be called the “living context” of an object, such knowledge cannot be overlooked or denied, even when the object itself is of particular public interest or significance (as in this case, because of the crown’s site of manufacture). Similar issues come up with regard to the IKG collection at the Jewish Museum Vienna, which contains the holdings of Viennese synagogues and prayer houses that were still in existence following the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. These holdings were poorly supervised in the postwar period, with the result that many items were stolen and put on the market. At the same time, the IKG came into possession of numerous objects that did not, strictly speaking, belong to it. Following the war, the IKG was defined as the de facto (and later, the de jure) successor to all prewar Austrian Jewish institutions; as such, it was given all existing “Jewish objects.” At the time, no one in the IKG thought to distinguish between communal and private

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property. Nor did it occur to the Austrian authorities to make inquiries into who owned what. Happy to have an effortless means of getting rid of previously confiscated and “Aryanized” Jewish cultural assets, they restituted anything that was remotely “Jewish” to the IKG. In this way, the Viennese Jewish community acquired objects that, in certain instances, belonged to someone else. Difficult as it may have been in the late 1940s and early 1950s to determine the actual owners, the situation today is even more complicated. As with the Berger collection, many of the objects in the IKG collection bear names that carry information about the object’s donor or sponsor, without identifying the benefiting institution or private association and without clarifying the precise legal status of the object (whether loaned or donated). And again, as in the Berger collection, there are objects that have inscriptions, including names, that are clearly meant to designate private owners. One such object is a Hanukah menorah (JMW, IKG Col. Inv. No. 1001) that was deposited with the IKG sometime after the winter of 1939–1940 (Figs. 11.3a and 11.3b). Manufactured from various materials, the menorah bears the inscription “Nisko am San 1939–1940 Chanukah 5700/Josef Berger/Hans Berger/aus Wien”; it was most likely transferred to the IKH by one (or both) of a pair of brothers named Berger who were deported to Nisko (Poland), then back to Vienna, and eventually to the east. An entire historical episode is packed into this brief inscription. Between fall 1939 and spring 1940, plans were made for the deportation of Jews from the Germanoccupied territories to the Lublin area. This “resettlement” of Jews in Poland was Adolf Eichmann’s idea, approved by Reinhard Heydrich. At the time, this plan still fit in with Hitler’s concept of a “racial” restructuring of Eastern Europe. A transfer camp for the deported was to be established in a small site near Nisko on the San River; Jews from Ostrava, Katowice, and Vienna were brought to Nisko in order to drain the nearby marshland and build a town of barracks. The project was brought to a halt in April 1940. The Nisko camp inmates were either driven to the Lublin district—the center of deportations and killings in Poland—or else deported back to Vienna or the Protectorate. Whoever deposited the candelabrum at the IKG never returned to reclaim it. The twisted problem of unknown provenance concerns most Jewish museums, whether in Europe, in the United States, or in Israel. They all are confronted with the question whether, based on the insights we have today, it might not be appropriate from both a moral and a legal perspective to systematically examine the provenance of “ownerless” objects. Such a project requires time, money, and trained personnel. I would contend, however, that it is a necessary first procedure in the ethical handling of objects forcibly torn from their owners. In the second stage, an attempt should be made to investigate each object’s path of decontextualization—that is, how and why it came under the aegis of a given museum. After all, objects do not end up in museums “by chance.” Their transferal into the museum space has an underlying purpose: in the best case, to attempt to save them from oblivion; in the worst case, to usurp the history of their origin and carriers. In tracing any object’s path to a museum, one must also determine who was interested (and had the necessary authority) to acquire it, and to what extent it was defined as being “museumworthy”—whether in the minimal sense of being placed into safekeeping, or else deemed worthy of display to the public at large, either as part of a permanent collection or in the

Figures 11.3a and 11.3b. Nisko Hanukah menorah, 1939–1940 (IKG collection, inv. no. 1001), courtesy Jewish Museum Vienna.

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context of a temporary exhibition. Finally, all such findings regarding an object’s path to a particular museum should be recorded in the museum inventory. Such details are as much a self-evident part of the object’s history as is its place of manufacture or use. In cases in which investigations into an object’s provenance result in solid clues about former owners, the museum must make strenuous attempts to locate beneficiaries, and to be prepared to restitute the object to any legal heirs that are discovered. Alternatively, in instances in which the ownership of an object remains undetermined but the object itself goes on display, the museum has a duty to present it in its fullest historical context. It seems entirely inappropriate to use ceremonial objects as illustrations of cultural history without disclosing how the museum came to acquire them. The history of an object does not stop at the entrance to the museum. A further necessity with regard to objects of unknown or ambiguous provenance may seem at first to be counterintuitive: rather than “restoring” such objects, it is important to preserve them, as much as possible, in the state in which they were acquired. If an object arrived with a note of ownership or certificate of confiscation, such documents should be kept or displayed alongside it; if the object is dented, torn, burned, or otherwise damaged, it should not be repaired. Restorations in the sense of “healing” or enhancing the aesthetic appeal of an object are to be avoided in order to preserve its historical integrity. Precisely because historical and cultural-historical museum exhibitions are acts of appropriation and recontextualization, those concerned with the ethical handling of ceremonial objects must consider not only the best ways in which to present these objects’ material distinctiveness or former functional context, but also their origin and the history of their decontextualization. Visitors to the museum should be encouraged to perceive “culture” beyond fixed museum discourses and to query the contexts in which objects are being displayed; to question seemingly normative museum practices (for instance, the tendency to present as “complete” a narrative that in fact is fragmentary); and, more generally, to view historical narratives more critically. With regard to the specific case at hand—items of unknown or ambiguous provenance—the museum should also acknowledge the interplay between objects and those who view them, seeking ways to make it clear that possession of a property is not necessarily synonymous with ownership. To be sure, expectations about the “correct” presentation of collections will always diverge, especially with regard to European collections that are in some way related to Jewish culture and contemporary history. On the one hand, the Shoah cannot be ignored: many collections would not even exist were it not for the fact that so many Jewish communities were destroyed between 1933 and 1945, and in certain instances a museum itself was initially established as a result of sociopolitical pressure to make some form of amends. At the same time, most European Jewish museums were not designed to focus solely on the Shoah but rather to portray the history and culture of a specific country’s Jewish community. Yet visitors expecting a traditional presentation of Jewish religion and history are often disappointed by the refusal of most European Jewish museums to present a linear historical narrative or an “educational” account of Judaism. For those of us who participated in long museological discussions on the representability of history, this refusal makes logical sense. Historical or ceremonial religious objects cannot be used naively or quasi-“innocently” in representations of European Jewish life. Such use would go beyond being an act of deliberate illusion—it would be sheer

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cynicism, given the fact that so many of these material objects are in museum collections only because they were violently wrested from their original owners. Beyond this are further qualms with regard to presenting objects of “Judaica” as stand-ins for an authentic, living Jewish culture. An Austrian Hanukah candelabrum on display is not the same as one currently in use, or one that had been used in the past in a specific family or community. Even in instances where the provenance of an object is known, it remains divorced from a living context; a mere historical remnant. With only a bit of exaggeration, one could argue that museums are a “dumping ground” of material decontextualizations. The error made by many who work in museums is to believe that, by assembling a large collection of individual objects, a museum is able to present a more or less “complete” picture in context. In fact, the gap between a Jewish ceremonial object that has its specific place in life—an “object in action,” as opposed to a frozen item surrounded by those who put it on display or those who consume it as spectators—cannot be bridged, cannot be reversed by any means, and most importantly, cannot be sugarcoated by even the most artful staging. This is true, of course, for all objects in a museum, not only those in Jewish museums; though the example of Judaica, especially in post-Second World War Europe, is particularly poignant. Hence the decision made by many European Jewish museums to offer deconstructed and abstract forms of presentation, which encourage visitors to ponder the possibilities and impossibilities of presenting history and culture. Because of the specific circumstances surrounding their establishment and the acquisition of many of their objects and collections, European Jewish museums have had an easier time than other museums in avoiding “the narrative fetishism” connected with objects of beauty, in which the focus is entirely on aesthetics of the past, with no attempt at engaging the past in dialogue with the present.19 In line with this view, I believe that the role of today’s European Jewish museum is not to silence the questions of those coming to view its exhibits, not to offer aesthetic experiences in which polished and gleaming objects are highlighted by strategically placed spotlights, and not to promote “would-be narratives.”20 Instead, it should attempt to show, in the simplest and most laconic manner possible, just what has remained in the wake of one of the most monstrous and sustained outbursts of violence in the history of so-called civilization. Not only a place of “estate management” that administers Jewish history and culture, today’s Jewish museum is, or should be, a memorial space that, through its holdings, both preserves and activates memory; an institution that educates by means of stimulating or even disconcerting its viewers; and a witness for the prosecution in the ongoing dispute between past and future.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Georg Heuberger (eds.), Was übrig blieb. Das Museum Jüdischer Altertümer in Frankfurt 1922–1938, (Frankfurt: 1988); Ilona Benoschofsky and Alexander Scheiber (eds.), Das Jüdische Museum in Budapest (Budapest: 1989); Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Vom Kultus Zur Kultur: Jüdisches auf Weltausstellungen,” in Wiener Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte, Kultur und Museumswesen, vol. 1, ed. Bernhard Purin, (Vienna: 1994), 11–37; Daniel M. Swetschinski, Julie-Marthe Cohen, and Stephen Hartog, Orphan Objects: Facets of the Textiles Collection of the Joods Historisch Museum (Amsterdam: 1997); Magda Veselská, “Jewish and Related Museums in Czechoslovakia in the

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First Republic,” in Judaica Bohemiae 40 (2004), 78–92; Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek and Wiebke Krohn (eds.), Das Erste—Das erste jüdische Museum (Vienna: 2006). 2. See, for instance, Bernhard Purin (ed.), Beschlagnahmt. Die Sammlung des Wiener Jüdischen Museums nach 1938. Eine Ausstellung des Jüdischen Museums der Stadt Wien an fünf Schauplätzen (Vienna: 1995); Dirk Rupnow, Täter, Gedächtnis, Opfer. Das “Jüdische Zentralmuseum” in Prag 1942–1945 (Vienna: 2000); and the following essays in Neglected Witnesses: The Fate of Jewish Ceremonial Objects during the Second World War and After, ed. Julie-Marthe Cohen with Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek (Cricadarn: 2001): Julie-Marthe Cohen, “Theft and Restitution of Judaica in the Netherlands during and after the Second World War,” 199–252; Magda Veselská, “Jewish Museums in the Former Czechoslovakia,” 103–128; and Katharaina Rauschenberger, “The Judaica Collection of Frankfurt’s Museum Jüdischer Altertümer and Its Worldwide Dispersion,” 81–102. 3. See, for instance, the following two essays in Wiener Jahrbuch für Geschichte, Kultur und Museumswesen, vol. 2, ed. Bernhard Purin (Vienna: 1995–1996): Cilly Kugelmann, “Das Jüdische Museum als Exponat der Zeitgeschichte. Das Beispiel Frankfurt. Ein Lagebricht und Versuch einer Einordnung,” 43–56, and Eva Grabherr, “‘Erinnerung ist Erinnerung an etwas Vergessenes’. Die Wiederentdeckung der jüdischen Geschichte in einer Kleinstadt der österreichischen Provinz,” 57–77. Also see Elke Dorner and Daniel Libeskind, Jüdisches Museum Berlin (Berlin: 1999); Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: 2002); Grace Cohen Grossman, Jewish Museums of the World (Southport: 2003). 4. See, for example, Sabine Offe, Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen. Jüdische Museen in Deutschland und Österreich (Berlin: 2000); Gottfried Fliedl and Sabine Offe, “Die Dauerausstellung des Jüdischen Museums der Stadt Wien,” in Wiener Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte, Kultur & Museumswesen, vol. 6, ed. Hannah Landsmann (Vienna: 2004), 19–26. 5. Daniel Tyradellis (ed.), 10 + 5 = Gott. Die Macht der Zeichen (Cologne: 2004). 6. Jüdisches Museum Berlin/Jüdisches Museum Wien (eds.), “typical!” Clichés of Jews and Others (Berlin: 2008). 7. Dmitrij Belkin and Raphael Gross (eds.), Ausgerechnet Deutschland! Jüdisch-russische Einwanderung in die Bundesrepublik (Berlin: 2010). 8. For a brief discussion of this exhibit, see Robin Ostow, “From Wandering Jew to Immigrant Ethnic: Musealizing Jewish Immigration,” in this volume, esp. 152. 9. Jutta Fleckenstein (ed.), Places of Exile 01: Münih ve Istanbul (Munich: 2008). 10. Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Gerhard Milchram, and Gabriele Kohlbauer-Fritz (eds.), Die Türken in Wien. Geschichte einer jüdischen Gemeinde (Vienna: 2010). The exhibition traveled as well to the Jewish Museum Hohenems. 11. See Purin, Beschlagnahmt. 12. Swetschinski, Cohen, and Hartog (eds.), Orphan Objects. 13. More information on the exhibit Looted, But from Whom? can be found online at www. geroofdmaarvanwie.nl/en/index.html. 14. Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, Lothar Hölbling, and Ingo Zechner (eds.), Ordnung muss sein—Das Archiv der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien (Vienna: 2007). 15. Inka Bertz and Michael Dorrmann (eds.), Raub und Restitution. Kulturgut aus jüdischem Besitz von 1933 bis heute (Berlin: 2008). 16. Isabelle le Masne de Chermont and Laurence Sigal-Klagsbald (eds.), À qui appartenaient ces tableaux? (Paris: 2008). 17. Krzysztof Pomian, Der Ursprung des Museums:Vom Sammeln (Berlin: 1988); Gottfried Fliedl (ed.), Die Erfindung des Museums. Anfänge der bürgerlichen Museumsidee in der Französischen Revolution (Vienna: 1996). 18. The distinction made here between a donor and a sponsor is based on the known legal status of a given object. If it is known to have legally shifted owners (say, from a private individual to a synagogue congregation), it is defined as having been donated. In many instances, however, the exact legal status of an object is not known—it is sometimes the case that a “given away” object is later reclaimed (as happens, for example, when the object’s sponsor moves to a different community). The term “donor” is used only in cases in which it has been ascertained that the object has in fact acquired a new legal owner. 19. Offe, Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen, 224. 20. Ibid.

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Essay

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“The Forces of Darkness”: Leonard Woolf, Isaiah Berlin, and English Antisemitism Elliott Horowitz (BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY) In memory of Lloyd Gartner (New York, 1927—Jerusalem, 2011)

Late in 1934, Isaiah Berlin (known to most of his friends and family as “Shaya”) wrote a long letter from All Souls College, of which he was famously the first Jewish fellow, to his friends Marion and Felix Frankfurter, who were back in Boston after a sabbatical year in Oxford. The 25-year-old Berlin interrupted his animated account of his first visit to Palestine and the Middle East in order to share with his American friends the “splendid” news that their coreligionist, Eduard Fraenkel, who had sought refuge in England after being forced by the Nazis to resign his professorship at Freiburg, had just been appointed to Oxford’s Corpus Christi Professorship of Latin. “This is really splendid,” wrote Berlin. “All the forces of darkness are, momentarily at least, defeated.”1 Those “forces of darkness,” which had also cast a shadow upon Frankfurter’s distinguished career,2 bore some relation to the ones that had earlier kept the Oxford-educated but Polish-born historian Lewis Namier (né Bernstein-Namierowski) out of the university’s exclusive All Souls College. One member of the committee that had rejected him had confided to his parents that “the best man by far in sheer intellect [among the candidates in history] was a Balliol man of Polish-Jewish origin and I did my best for him, but the Warden and majority of Fellows shied at his race.”3 Namier, whom Berlin first met shortly after his own election (in 1932) to All Souls, first came to the latter’s attention through his 1927 article on “Zionism,” which appeared in the New Statesman while Berlin was an Oxford undergraduate. “It was the best and most arresting piece on that subject that I or, I suspect, anyone had ever read,” the philosopher later recalled.4 Not long after its appearance, Virginia Woolf reported to her sister, Vanessa Bell, that she and her husband, Leonard, had been invited to tea by the London journalist Raymond Mortimer in order to meet “a Jew called Namier.”5 The former Virginia Stephen had been married since 1912 to a Jew called Woolf, but this had stopped neither her nor her sister from referring

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to Jews, whether individually or collectively, in ways that were less than complimentary. A year after the couple’s marriage, for instance, Vanessa had written to her new brother-in-law (to whom she evidently owed a letter), expressing mock fear of “getting into trouble if I don’t pay what I owe to the Jews.”6 Late in the 1920s, shortly after the Woolfs were invited to meet Namier, Virginia attended a luncheon at which she was seated between Sir Philip Sassoon and Harold Nicolson. Both were graduates of posh public schools as well as prestigious Oxford colleges—Christ Church and Balliol, respectively. Nicolson, who had just retired after 20 years in the Foreign Office, had recently become Raymond Mortimer’s lover. Virginia, who had recently ended an affair with Nicolson’s wife, Vita Sackville-West (upon whom she had based the figure of Orlando in her eponymous novel),7 was evidently comfortable enough sitting next to her ex-lover’s husband. Sassoon, however, she characterized as “an underbred Whitechapel Jew.”8 Even before their marriage, Leonard and Virginia’s lives were intertwined with many of the same exceptional people. Leonard had been a friend and classmate at Trinity of her older brother Thoby Stephen, who died before their marriage. Both men had overlapped at Cambridge with the slightly younger John Maynard Keynes, whom Woolf had been instrumental in bringing into the elite “conversation society” known as the Apostles.9 Leonard himself had been introduced into the society largely through the efforts of his Trinity classmate Lytton Strachey, who shared with Keynes a predilection for what both called the “Higher Sodomy,”10 which both continued to cultivate in London’s Bloomsbury. This did not prevent Strachey from proposing marriage to Virginia (before Leonard did),11 or Keynes from marrying a Russian dancer. Attitudes toward both sexuality and Jews were full of contradictions in the world of Bloomsbury, as may be seen in particular from the letters of Virginia Woolf. Her ambivalence toward Jews, apparent already in her youth, was further complicated not only by her nearly three-decade marriage to Leonard, but also by her frequent contact over most of those years with her husband’s mother, described by one of her biographers as “a caricaturable Jewish mother-in-law.”12 Writing in 1930 to her close friend Ethel Smyth, Virginia described a recent visit to Leonard’s octogenarian mother (“the most exhausting expedition I know: all facts, all personalities, all compliments, all personal relations, and family news”), adding with characteristic candor: “How I hated marrying a Jew—how I hated their nasal voices, and their oriental jewellery, and their noses and their wattles—what a snob I was.” This sentence is often partially quoted to Virginia Woolf’s detriment; in fact, she goes on to explain why she had been wrong about the Jews: “for they have immense vitality, and I think I like that quality best.”13 This seems to have been one of the qualities she liked in (the much younger) Isaiah Berlin, whom she described, after their first meeting, as a “fire eater.”14 Berlin, like her husband, was a graduate of London’s venerable St. Paul’s School, which Leonard was one of the first Jewish boys to attend. Although Berlin was the first Jew elected to Oxford’s All Souls, Woolf had three decades earlier been the first member of his race (as he himself called it) invited to join the Apostles, which was arguably no less an accomplishment.15 In addition, aside from their St. Paul’s and Oxbridge backgrounds, both men shared a fascination with the woman who, more than two decades after she became Woolf’s wife, was described by (the much younger) Berlin, upon their first encounter, as “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”16

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This essay, which takes as its primary subjects Leonard Woolf and Isaiah Berlin, draws some of its inspiration from the publication of three equally engaging volumes: Victoria Glendinning’s Leonard Woolf: A Life (2006), and two meticulously edited volumes of Isaiah Berlin’s letters from the years 1928–1960, one that preceded Glendinning’s biography and one that followed it.17 My aim is to put the Woolf biography and Berlin letters into “conversation” by examining the ways in which the lives of these two individuals—each of them very English but also very Jewish— intersected with English antisemitism, a subject that has recently received considerable attention.18 This “conversation,” like many Jewish conversations (especially when antisemitism is on the table), will sometimes take off in slightly unexpected directions, and will sometimes veer from its primary subjects to a variety of figures who were central to their respective worlds. In her biography of Leonard Woolf, Glendinning has drawn attention to “the persecution of Jewish boys at St. Paul’s” as described by Woolf’s classmate, the future novelist Compton Mackenzie. Both had entered the venerable school during the final years of the 19th century, when Jewish immigration to England from Eastern Europe was reaching record levels. “It was my delight,” Mackenzie later confessed, “to put drawing pins with the sharp end up on the seats of Semitic school-desks. It was my delight to stick the lids of those desks with gelatine lozenges and watch the way the lid would come up . . . and strike a Semitic chin.” He also enjoyed joining some of his “exuberant young Nordic companions lined up on either side of a corridor . . . and when some timid, book-laden young Jew passed along . . . to push him from side to side all the length of those grinning rows of boys until his books were scattered on the floor.” Mackenzie’s explanation, later in life, for “that silly anti-Semitism manifested with all the crudity of a savage boyhood” was that it was rooted in “resentment at the way our Jewish schoolfellows used to sacrifice everything to reaching the top of the class.” To her credit, Glendinning questions this explanation, asserting that “in all social classes in England, some degree of unthinking anti-Semitism was as normal as class-consciousness, acquired by osmosis from parental attitudes and values.”19 Yet Glendinning does not sufficiently appreciate the degree to which “unthinking anti-Semitism” was combined with a strong streak of anti-alienism during the very same years in which Woolf and Mackenzie were schoolboys. The 1890s, as Lloyd Gartner and other scholars have shown, witnessed a peak in the flow of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, with perhaps 8,000 immigrants a year remaining in England—most of them congregating in and around eastern London, whose Jewish population probably exceeded 100,000 by the end of the century.20 These developments led to the efforts of Arnold White, founder of the Association for Preventing the Immigration of Destitute Aliens (1891), and Major Evans-Gordon, a Liberal member of Parliament and founder of the Big Brothers’ League, to limit immigration to England in order to protect both its English character and the livelihoods of English workingmen. White, a believing Christian and son of the chairman of the Congregational Union, was particularly struck by the Jews’ alleged “aloofness from the nations among whom they dwell,” and thus their unsuitability for mass immigration to England. (In this regard, he may have sounded more like a Jewish nationalist than a classic antisemite when he wrote that “members of this community for successive generations

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decline to intermarry with non-Jews, maintain a different Sabbath, consume a different food, and are tied to alien communities of their own race and faith in other lands by closer bonds than any that unite them to the country of their adoption.”)21 The writings and efforts of both White and Evans-Gordon, together with those of their parliamentary supporters (including the Jewish MP Benjamin Cohen), led to the Aliens Bill of 1904, which was soon followed by the infamous Aliens Act. In 1905, the year in which the Aliens Act was passed, the teenaged Virginia Stephen, then on her way to Spain by sea, reported to a friend that “there are a great many Portuguese Jews on board, and other repulsive objects, but we keep clear of them.”22 In contradistinction to Glendinning’s view that the “unthinking antiSemitism” of Leonard Woolf’s schoolmates was simply “acquired by osmosis,” I do not believe that his future wife’s sense of foreign Jews as “repulsive objects” was acquired from her late father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a former Apostle at Cambridge, or from her older brother Thoby, who had been Leonard’s classmate there. Whether or not she read Arnold White, whose writings Gartner has described as “anti-alien at their outset, but shift to anti-Semitism,”23 both pernicious trends were sufficiently present in popular discourse to influence the mind of an inquisitive London teenager. By contrast was the more benign disdain for Jews, even those who were wealthy and cultured, to be found in the diary of Virginia’s nearly exact contemporary, Violet Asquith, the daughter of Herbert Henry Asquith, who served as prime minister from 1908–1916. This more genteel antisemitism would seem to reflect the sort of osmosis described by Glendinning. In 1904, the teenaged Violet was invited by Lady Aline Sassoon (née Rothschild), mother of the aforementioned Sir Philip, to join her extended family at Château de Laversine. “I daresay it will be an amusing experience,” Violet confided to her diary, “passing 2 nights at a French Chateau in a nest of Rothschilds.” The attractive Lady Aline, who was soon to be painted by John Singer Sargent, had been a friend of King Edward since his days as Prince of Wales. Violet, however, rather than commenting on this or on Lady Aline’s (by then fading) beauty, preferred to note the “pronounced kink” on Lady Aline’s sister’s nose; later that weekend, she found the arrival of H.J. O’Beirne, a secretary at the British embassy in Paris, an “immense relief among all these French Jews.”24 Six years later, after she had accompanied her father, by then prime minister, to a Guildhall dinner that was “dreadfully long,” Violet complained to her diary not only about the dinner’s length, but of having been seated next to Herbert Samuel, whom she described as “the most smug and sapless type of Jew.”25 Although Samuel, one of the two Jewish cabinet ministers in her father’s government (the other being his cousin, Edwin Montagu), was, like Asquith himself, a graduate of Oxford’s Balliol College, he apparently did not possess “the tranquil consciousness of an effortless superiority” that the latter had reportedly deemed characteristic of Balliol men.26

“Both Proud and Ashamed of Being Jews” In the first volume of his 1961 autobiography, Leonard Woolf reflected on the various allegiances he had accrued over eight decades. His strongest feelings of loyalty, he noted, were to “my family; ‘race’ (Jews); my country, England in particular, and the

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British Empire generally,” and also “places to which I have been connected.” Among those places he stressed his “loyalty to Trinity and Cambridge,” which was “more intimate, profound, and unalloyed” than any of his other loyalties—linked, among other things, to “a profoundly civilised life; friendship, and the Society.” The last, of course, was the (nominally secret) society known as the Apostles, whose secretary at the time of Leonard’s election was his Trinity classmate Lytton Strachey. Unlike his Cambridge loyalties, which were “unalloyed,” Woolf’s allegiance to his Jewishness had always been more complicated. “Most people are both proud and ashamed of their families,” he wrote, “and nearly all Jews are both proud and ashamed of being Jews. There is therefore always a bitterness and ambivalence in these loyalties.”27 Although it is not entirely surprising that an avowed anti-Zionist who had been married to a Gentile was not altogether comfortable with his Jewish identity,28 Isaiah Berlin’s published letters show that he, too—despite his fervent Zionism—often had complicated feelings about his Jewishness. This is particularly evident in his letter of 1934 to the Frankfurters, where he had the following to say about his (and their) coreligionists in Palestine: As for the Jews they are most odd & fascinating, & I felt equally uneasy with them & away from them, like relations one hasn’t seen for 30 years or something, to whom one knows one is, even feels, related, but whom one doesn’t really know, & is afraid of, & has to treat on an oddly familiar footing, tho’ knowing nothing about them, & is even afraid of them.29

His ambivalence is even more striking in a letter written to his parents from Jerusalem’s King David Hotel some months earlier, in which he described his recent visits to Tel Aviv and Haifa. “Tel-Aviv is dreadful. . . . noisy, dirty streets too narrow because of dearth of room—Jews have no taste. Same applies to Hadar Hacarmel. And yet,” he added, “the atmosphere, though hectic is beautiful: Jews. Everywhere Jews.”30 Three years later Berlin was a guest at Ashton Wold, one of the Rothschild estates. Writing—as “Shaya”—to his friend Mary Fisher, the daughter of Virginia Woolf’s cousin, the Oxford historian H.A.L. Fisher (at whose behest Berlin had begun his long-delayed monograph on Karl Marx), the young philosopher snootily observed that the house was “not nearly so moneyed & vulgar as Waddesdon,” the Buckinghamshire home of James de Rothschild. With regard to Rothschild, Berlin observed that he had “no taste in anything, except a certain general style,” and he went on to further enlighten his Gentile friend on Jewish limitations in matters of visual art: “Even their taste in pictures, when right, is generally a function of its commercial advantage.”31 As Berlin may have known, this claim had recently been expressed in quite similar terms by the pseudonymous H.S. Ashton in a book titled The Jew at Bay (1933). “In view of their own inability to produce work of enduring artistic nature,” Ashton wrote, “it might almost be said that Jewish interest in fine art is almost purely commercial.”32 Berlin was even more likely to have been familiar with E.F. Benson’s more popular (and less overtly antisemitic) As We Are (1932)—a sequel to Benson’s As We Were (1930), which included a rather uncomplimentary thumbnail sketch of the late Sir Ernest Cassel, the German-born and nominally Catholic financier who had been widely

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regarded as King Edward’s “greatest friend” but who nonetheless suffered from antisemitism both during his lifetime and after.33 Benson, a novelist and biographer whom Virginia Woolf regarded as a “tubby ruddy fleshy little Clubman,”34 asserted that Cassel had “bought splendid pictures, the finest examples of great masters . . . but he did not care for pictures” and that his “collections of Italian bronzes and particularly of Dresden china were remarkable, but he did not really know a bronze from a piece of porcelain.” In short, the Jewish-born financier “bought anything that was sufficiently expensive and of testified excellence, but all such were only the trappings suitable for a very wealthy man.”35 This sounds a bit like Isaiah Berlin on James Rothschild some five years later, though the former extended his observations to Jews in general. The philosopher’s penchant for generalization is also evident in the final lines of his 1937 letter to Mary Fisher, in which he added the important news that a motorcar had “just disgorged some more very fairhaired women & an enormous Rothschild tough with a moustache.” This prompted him to wonder “why Jews love enormous bullying men. . . .”36 Ironically, Berlin himself had once been described by Virginia Woolf as a “violent Jew.” The two had first met in 1933, at a dinner in Woolf’s honor at Oxford’s New College, where H.A.L. Fisher served as warden. Writing shortly afterward to her nephew Quentin Bell (one of her future biographers), Virginia reported meeting “the great Isaiah Berlin”—then all of 24 years old—“a Portuguese Jew by the look of him, Oxford’s leading light, a communist, I think, a fire eater.”37 Less than two years later, Virginia described to her sister Vanessa another dinner party at which the two had met, where she had “argued with Isaiah, who is very clever, much too clever, like Maynard [Keynes] in his youth, [a] don.”38 It was in that letter that she described Berlin as a “violent Jew.” Between these two encounters, it may be noted, Berlin had been to Palestine and had rubbed shoulders with its “odd & fascinating” Jewish denizens, some of whom, he later confided to the Frankfurters, “look & behave like Sicilian bandits”—which he did not necessarily think was a bad thing.39 One wonders whether the eminent novelist had correctly identified a more belligerent tone that had crept into Berlin’s famous conversational style after that visit to the land of his fathers. In a letter written to his mother in March 1934, Berlin reported on yet another occasion on which he had dined in the company of “Virginia Woolf, who was charming to me; very beautiful very cold very nice.” In addition, he had “also met T. S. Eliot the poet, who was also v[ery] kind.”40 That same year, Eliot (a friend and frequent houseguest of the Woolfs) had published After Strange Gods, in which the Anglo-American poet had referred to the undesirability, for “reasons of race and religion,” of a Christian society including within it “any number of free-thinking Jews.” It is unclear whether Berlin had read the just-published book; in any event, it is unlikely that he would have provoked the poet by proudly proclaiming himself a “free-thinking Jew.” Some time later, at an Oxford event in June 1935, Berlin was formally introduced to the poet by Geoffrey Faber, Eliot’s publisher. On that occasion Berlin found Eliot “very nice,” but he also confided to Stephen Spender (who was half-Jewish) his fear that he had “talked to him with too much freedom . . . too fast and too gesticulously if you see what I mean.”41

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Spender, who had been a friend of Berlin’s since their undergraduate days at Oxford, had rather complicated feelings about his own (half-) Jewishness. As he noted in an autobiography written in 1951, “although I myself was never anti-semitic, I despised some of these qualities in myself which I thought of as Jewish, and my feelings for the English was at times like being in love with an alien race.”42 At Oxford, Spender (though not Berlin) developed a long-lasting friendship with the slightly older W.H. Auden, who subsequently migrated to the United States. During the summer of 1940, Berlin, who found himself in New York in the wartime service of Britain’s Foreign Office, reported to his friend Marion Frankfurter that he had received a “sudden unexpected” visit from Auden. The visit was unexpected, he explained, since the poet “never really knew or liked me much.”43 Although Berlin did not indicate that Auden’s previously cold attitude may have been related to Berlin’s Jewishness, the poet himself provides reason to suspect that this may have been the case. His Christmas 1941 letter to his American Jewish lover, Chester Kallman, opened by addressing the irony that “it is in you, a Jew, that I, a Gentile inheriting an O-so genteel anti-Semitism, have found my happiness.”44 Auden’s comment to his lover dovetails with the observation made at the very end of the Second World War by George Orwell. “Anti-Semitism as a fully thought out racial or religious doctrine has never flourished in England,” wrote Orwell, carefully distinguishing between “existed” and “flourished.” Orwell acknowledged, however, that “thirty years ago [circa 1915] it was accepted as more or less a law of nature that a Jew was a figure of fun and—though superior in intelligence—slightly deficient in ‘character.’”45 This, I think, is about as good a description of genteel English antisemitism as there is to be found.

The Asquiths and Their “Assyrian” Friend During the second decade of the 20th century, Edwin Montagu, formerly the parliamentary secretary to Herbert Asquith, found himself competing with the (married) Asquith for the affections of Venetia Stanley, a close friend of Asquith’s daughter, Violet. In the summer of 1912, Montagu had joined Asquith, his daughter, and Venetia on a holiday trip to Sicily; feeling indisposed, Asquith’s wife, Margot, had remained behind. In the course of that sultry summer holiday, both the prime minister and his younger (but notoriously ugly) cabinet colleague fell in love with Venetia, to whom Montagu first proposed marriage in early August—around the time that Leonard and Virginia Woolf were married at London’s St. Pancras Registry Office.46 Although it is possible that Montagu knew of his friend’s engagement to Virginia Stephen before he first asked Venetia for her hand, it is more likely that the recent death of his (Orthodox) father played a greater role in allowing him to think that such a mixed marriage might be possible. As we shall see, however, the shadow of his father played a significant role in the final outcome of Montagu’s proposal. The complicated triangle that emerged from the summer holiday to Sicily (which has recently resurfaced in Ben Brown’s play of 2010, The Promise) is known to us primarily from Asquith’s published letters to Venetia, written both before and after her 1915 marriage to Montagu.47 In August 1912, shortly after Montagu’s proposal,

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Asquith wrote to Venetia from his country home in Oxfordshire: “It is an age since I heard from you or of you. . . . It is time you made some sign.” He then asked rhetorically (since he knew of Montagu’s proposal) whether she had been “cultivating new acquaintances, or (what would be much worse) playing fast & loose with old ones.” Asquith, of course, knew the answer: “I know (for he spent Monday night here) that the Assyrian has been coming down among you like a wolf on the fold. Did the ‘sheen of his spear’ dazzle your vision? and what happened? Tell me about it.”48 This was the first of many occasions on which the prime minister would refer to his fellow suitor by means of the orientalizing sobriquet “Assyrian,”49 drawn from the opening line of Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” which had first appeared in his Hebrew Melodies (1815).50 As has been noted, Asquith’s ready recollection of Byron’s poem had less to do with his Balliol education than with the fact that it had been famously parodied by Punch in 1878.51 Venetia may have been too young to know about Punch’s parody of Byron’s poem, but she was probably not too naïve to recognize Asquith’s rather coarse allusion to her Semitic suitor’s circumcised “spear.” Asquith’s strategy of orientalizing his younger suitor in order to stress his foreignness echoed the manner in which, several decades earlier, members of his Liberal party who had opposed Benjamin Disraeli’s pro-Ottoman orientation during the heated debates on the “Eastern Question” (favoring instead an alliance with Russia) had linked Disraeli’s views with his Semitic origins. As Asquith may well have recalled, his Liberal colleague Edward A. Freeman, who was later Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History, had written in 1877: “No one wishes to place the Jew, whether by birth or religion, under any disability as compared with the European Christian, but it will not do to have the policy of England, the welfare of Europe, sacrificed to Hebrew sentiment.”52 Asquith, the true Englishman, may have seen himself competing with the “Assyrian” Montagu for Venetia Stanley’s heart much in the same way as Gladstone had competed with the “Hebrew” Disraeli for the hearts and minds of the English people. In a poem he sent Venetia in April 1913, Asquith described her as a “Christian child” who had been “too easily beguiled” by the “silken tents of Shem.” Indeed, “the Silken Tent” was a name they both used occasionally when referring to Montagu’s lavish London home at 24 Queen Anne’s Gate. On one occasion, Asquith’s daughter-in-law, Cynthia, described Montagu to her diary, using a somewhat different racial field of reference, as “a real Caliban.” This was after Venetia Stanley finally acceded, in May 1915, to Montagu’s unremitting requests for her hand, leaving “the poor P.M.” as Cynthia wrote, “absolutely broken-hearted.”53 Perhaps even more disturbed by the news of their engagement was Asquith’s daughter, Violet, to whom Montagu had brought the news himself. “I am bound to confess,” she wrote in her diary, “that the thought of it—much as I love him—& clearly recognize his points—filled me with horror.” She then enumerated the reasons for her horror, among them Montagu’s “physical repulsiveness,” which was such, in Violet’s opinion, that “the thought of any erotic amenities with him is enough to freeze one’s blood.”54 Moreover, Montagu was “not only very unlike an Englishman—or indeed a European—but also extraordinarily unlike a man,” lacking, she claimed, “robustness, virility, courage, physical competency” and “devoured by hypochondria.” At the same

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time, she acknowledged that he had “imagination, ambition” and (reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s later description of Isaiah Berlin) “fire in his stomach”—her “favourite quality”—together with “real generosity & powers of devotion.” In short, he was “a better friend than lover.”55 Although Montagu had declared in a letter to his father in 1898 that he was “by race . . . an Englishman,”56 this was hardly the opinion of his fiancée’s close friend. In describing Montagu as “extraordinarily unlike a man” it is clear that Violet, consciously or unconsciously, drew upon a long European tradition of feminizing the Jew, which began with medieval claims regarding Jewish male menstruation and continued with the assertion of (the Jewish-born) Otto Weininger, in his Sex and Character (published in English in 1906) that “the homology of Jew and woman becomes closer the further examination goes.” As John Hoberman has noted, “by the time Weininger absorbed it, this intuitive sense of the Jew’s deficient masculinity had been germinating for centuries, dating from the Middle Ages.”57 Although Montagu may have been lacking in “robustness, virility, courage, [and] physical competency,” one thing he did have was wealth, in the form of an annual trust in the amount of £10,000 from the estate of his recently deceased father, the Liverpool-born banker Samuel Montagu (the first Baron Swaythling)—most of which would be forfeited if he married a Gentile. The obvious solution, of course, was for Venetia to convert. The possibility of this occurring, however, shocked her friend Violet “to the marrow.” After hearing from Montagu that this was indeed their plan, she wrote in her diary: “To renounce England & Xtianity—even if one has never held it—at the dead bidding of foul old [Baron] Swaythling & to secure his filthy 10,000 [pounds] a year—for that to renounce one’s religion & take a new one—become a Jew—seems to me the most impossibly squalidly cynical antic.”58 Shortly afterward, Violet had a conversation with the person she now came to refer to (in her diary) as “Wu.” In reference to “Venetia’s embracing of the Jewish faith,” Montagu dismissed the matter of the trust, “saying that it was not that he minded losing, but estrangement from his people.” Violet added dryly: “It is the first time he has shown anything but abhorrence of them to me,”59 which seems quite plausible. Whatever his true motivation, Edwin was married to Venetia at the (Reform) West London Synagogue on July 26, 1915 (the corresponding Hebrew date was 15 Av, traditionally a popular date for Jewish weddings). Venetia had converted, presumably in a Reform ceremony, and his “filthy” £10,000 annual trust remained secure. In contrast to the established forms of antisemitic discourse (whether feminizing or orientalizing) that Herbert and Violet Asquith used in reference to Montagu, the Bloomsbury intellectuals made use of more ambiguous terminology; their “faint contempt for Jews” has been downplayed by Noel Annan, himself a former Apostle, as “characteristic of their class.” Lord Annan was recently taken to task by Anthony Julius in his highly polemical Trials of the Diaspora (2010), which purports to be “a history of anti-Semitism in England.” According to Julius, Annan’s comment “does not quite capture the experience of recoil and suffocation” to be found in a 1909 notebook entry composed by the 21-year-old Virginia Stephen. The passage in question is a sketch for a story centering on a “fat Jewess” given the name Mrs. Loeb.60 Whether or not an “experience of recoil and suffocation” from the full-figured Mrs. Loeb is indeed expressed in that sketch, it can hardly be adduced as evidence of its

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author’s long-term attitude toward Jews, both before and after her marriage to Leonard Woolf. And precisely because of her marriage to a Jew, Virginia’s attitudes are less representative of Bloomsbury than those, say, of her sister Vanessa (unmentioned in Julius’ book), whose aforementioned comment to Leonard, expressing mock fear of “getting into trouble if I don’t pay what I owe to the Jews” does reflect quite accurately the Bloomsbury circle’s “faint contempt for Jews.” Julius might well have compared the 1909 notebook entry with a letter written by Virginia in the same year to Lytton Strachey, in which she reported that, during “the whirl of the London season,” she had found herself “penetrating into the most mysterious places.” These mysteries included encountering a certain “Jewess who spends 50 guineas on a hat, and wishes to meet me, not that we may exchange views on the subject, I imagine.” It is unclear whether the tone of this remark should be characterized as “faint contempt.” Virginia and her family had met the unnamed “Jewess” at the opera, where, Virginia noted, “she displays a wonderful arm upon the ledge of her box.” It was there, too, that her family had encountered “the great Mr Loeb, who has the greatest collection of operatic photographs and autographs in Europe.”61 The question is whether Virginia’s comments to Strachey (concerning the expensivelyhatted woman with a “wonderful arm”) were substantially different from those concerning the American collector, James Loeb. I think not. Both observations related to wealthy Jews and the mysteries of how they chose to spend their money, questions of natural interest to a bright young woman who had not been permitted—as had her late older brother—to attend university, and thus to meet Jews on her own. Virginia did, of course, have ample opportunity to do so after her marriage to Strachey’s friend and former classmate, and one senses in the letters written during the early years of the Woolfs’ marriage an increasing familiarity with matters Jewish, though not quite what might be called philo-Semitism. In April 1918, for instance, she wrote to the painter Roger Fry, mentioning a recent review of a French novel by the Jewish socialist writer Jean-Richard Bloch. Virginia, who had read Bloch’s book, wrote that the reviewer had missed some of its important aspects, and then added the following (somewhat ambivalent) generalization about Jewish writers: “The truth is these Jews have such terrifically clear insight, and never know what to leave out and ram it all with such emphasis. . . . still, he’s far better than any one we have.” In the next paragraph, she referred to one of the “one[s] we have”: James Joyce, whose Ulysses had been offered to the Hogarth Press, the publishing house run by the Woolfs. According to Virginia, Joyce “leaves out the narrative and tries to give the thoughts, but I don’t know that he’s got anything very interesting to say.”62 How many other British critics at the time preferred Bloch over Joyce? Moreover, in February 1919, Virginia, apparently without her husband, attended a concert and tea party in South Kensington among such “decorous & fur bearing” members of her class (as she later reported to her diary) as Lady Katie, the second wife of the late Lord Cromer (Sir Evelyn Baring), and the Times journalist Sir Valentine Chirrol. Both had expressed concern over the present and immediate dangers allegedly posed by “Russian Jews.” The next day Virginia reported to her sister that Lady Katie, who had been described by one of her late husband’s diplomatic colleagues as “rather narrow-minded, very obstinate, and extraordinarily tactless on occasion,”63 had remarked fatalistically: “we may be shot at any moment.” To Virginia’s

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query, “but why,” Lady Cromer had replied: “O the Jews—the Russian Jews.” Sir Valentine explained that “yes . . . after 4 years of war the people are not the same as they were . . . they’re unreasonable—they want higher wages—and as Lady Cromer says, there are the Jews, the Russian Jews. There are Jews in every town—colonies of them. They will supply the motive power. . . .” Although Virginia did not openly confront her titled interlocutors, she wrote to Vanessa that “I almost proclaimed myself a Russian Jew, but I’m keeping this for the next concert.”64 On the following day, writing in her diary, Virginia struggled with the “gigantic task of giving an account” of the tea party at which “Sir Val and Katie . . . seemed to picture themselves meeting death nobly . . . at the hands of the Russian Jews,” whom they saw as people of “enormous energy and unscrupulousity.” Whatever ambivalence Virginia herself felt toward Jews was certainly equaled by her acute sense of distance from what she called, in that same diary entry, “South Kensington dowager respectability.”65

Keynes in Love At around the same time that Virginia Woolf was contending with Lady Katie, Sir Val, and their fears of being shot by unscrupulous Russian Jews, her Bloomsbury colleague John Maynard Keynes was representing Britain at the Versailles Peace Conference. At the conference, he, too, found himself forced to reconsider his attitudes toward both Jews and their detractors. As a schoolboy in 1900, Keynes had described the Jewish presence in Europe as a “living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs.”66 Shortly after writing those words, however, he had gone from Eton to Cambridge, where he had encountered such educated and cultivated Jews as Edwin Montagu and Leonard Woolf, both of whom continued to play a role in his later life. At Versailles, Keynes came into frequent contact with two prominent Jews: the French finance minister, Louis-Lucien Klotz, and Carl Melchior, a banker and member of the German delegation. The two aroused radically different reactions. Whereas Klotz was described by Keynes as “a short, plump, heavy-moustached Jew . . . well kept, but with an unsteady roving eye, and his shoulders a little bent with instinctive deprecation,”67 Melchior sparked admiration, as is evident in the title Keynes gave to his trenchant but often moving account of his experiences at Versailles, “Dr Melchior: A Defeated Enemy.” Although published many years later in Two Memoirs (1949), Keynes’ tribute was originally read shortly after its composition before a 1921 meeting of Bloomsbury’s Memoir Club. In this essay, Keynes described how he was immediately impressed by Melchior, who spoke in “moving, persuasive, almost perfect English . . . always deliberately, but without pause, in a way which gave one an extraordinary impression that he was truthful.” He spoke, Keynes added, “with the passionate pessimism of a Jew”—a sort of pessimism he may have first encountered among Montagu and Woolf. The economist, who had not initially recognized Melchior as a Jew, stressed that it was “he only” among the members of his delegation who “upheld the dignity of defeat.” He also acknowledged, with characteristic candor, that he had been “in a sort of way . . . in love” with the German Jewish banker, whom he “longed to see . . . again” after the

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Paris Conference.68 Virginia Woolf, who was present at the reading, quoted Keynes in her diary as having said “I was rather in love with him,” and then added: “I think he meant it seriously, though we laughed.”69 Keynes may later have changed the “rather in love” heard by Virginia to the milder “sort of . . . in love,” but either way, his open acknowledgment of such close feelings for Melchior, first before his Bloomsbury friends and later in the published version of his memoir, says a great deal about how far he had come from his crude schoolboy antisemitism. To be sure, Keynes was unsparing in his description of the other Jew at Versailles, (the unfortunately named) Klotz. Although one scholar has pointed to the “fine equilibrium” that was achieved in Keynes’ depictions of these two Jews,”70 it should be stressed that, according to Keynes’ account, the antisemitic antipathy of the British delegation toward “that poor man” had been fanned by its senior representative, David Lloyd George, “who had always hated [Klotz] and despised him; and now saw in a twinkling that he could kill him.” Keynes depicted himself, with great honesty, as having been swept off his feet by Melchior’s dignified bearing and “passionate pessimism,” while also acknowledging that antisemitism, generally “not far below the surface” in such assemblages, was in the French Jew’s case “up in the heart of everyone”—himself included.71 In October 1919, Keynes managed to see Melchior again in Amsterdam, by which time the banker “had resigned from his position sooner than be a party to the Peace Treaty” (of which Keynes himself also disapproved). Though it was unclear what purpose their meeting might serve, “all the same I wanted to see him immensely,” Keynes later wrote in his memoir. The two men shared a profound disappointment at what had occurred at Versailles—“the breach of promise, the breach of discipline, the decay of honourable behaviour.” In addition, Keynes, at their second meeting, came to understand “better than before” the degree to which Melchior was “a strict and upright moralist, a worshipper of the Tablets of the Law, a Rabbi.”72 In calling him “a Rabbi,” Keynes may have been saying something to his Bloomsbury audience not only about Melchior himself, but about the nature of their relationship. Glendinning notes that Leonard Woolf had been part of a “fivesome” of Trinity undergraduates that had included Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Thoby Stephen, who was nicknamed “the Goth” on account of his physical dimensions. Leonard had been known as “the Rabbi” (a name that presumably came to the attention of Virginia), and was many years later referred to as such by Keynes himself.73 He was in attendance when Keynes read his essay to the Memoir Club; others in the audience may well have included his brother-in-law, Bell. To all of these, Keynes seems to have been suggesting that he now had his rabbi—a Jew with whom he had experienced true intimate friendship, one of the supreme values in the Apostolic world from which he and others present had sprung. Nonetheless, Keynes, like others of the Bloomsbury circle, retained a sense of ambivalence with regard to Jews. In August 1925, he married the Russian-born ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova. During their long engagement, the two would correspond frequently when Keynes was in Cambridge and Lydia was in London. In October 1923, while he was occupied with arranging a dinner at Kings College for Melchior, Keynes appended to one of his letters, for Lydia’s amusement, two clever “quotations”—that is, humorous definitions. The first was “‘Jew: a man who kills 2 birds with 1 stone

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and then wants the stone back,’” the second, “‘Women: Sphinxes without secrets.’”74 Keynes, as has been noted, was no less ambivalent about Jews than he was about women. Both of these ambivalences converged in a letter to Lydia, written the following month, in which Keynes offered some curious comments about their mutual friend, Vera Bowen (née Polianov), the daughter of a wealthy Ukrainian landowner who was married to the even wealthier Orientalist Harold Bowen. “Oh what a Jew Vera is with her tirelessness!” he wrote. “I see why you and she get on together.” Keynes then explained: “You are so very uncircumcised, and the two of you make a good average and are equal when you are added up to two Christians.”75 Unpacking this last sentence would require a separate article, but it is clear that Mrs. Bowen, like Mr. Klotz, was the sort of Jew who brought out Keynes’ antisemitic side. Edwin Montagu, in contrast, was the subject, like Melchior, of Keynes’ highest regard. Upon hearing of Montagu’s premature death, in November 1924, Keynes wrote to Lydia (with characteristic openness): “For more than 20 years I had reason to be grateful to him, and there was a certain affectionate relation between us.” That “affectionate relation,” reminiscent of his having been “in a sort of way in love” with (the better looking) Melchior, seems to have been rooted in Keynes’ recognition of certain attributes he shared with Montagu, whom he described in the same letter as being “one of the Jews of divided nature—half artist and lover, and half consumed with extravagant ambitions.”76 Later that month Keynes composed a full-fledged eulogistic essay on Montagu in which he empathetically described the latter’s “violent fluctuations of mood, quickly passing from reckless courage and self-assertion to abject panic and dejection.” Although his letter to Lydia had referred explicitly to Montagu’s Jewishness, Keynes prudently avoided the J word in his essay, which was intended for a wider audience, opting rather for the more euphemistic O word: “That he was Oriental,” wrote Keynes, “equipped, nevertheless, with the intellectual technique and atmosphere of the West, drew him naturally to the political problems of India, and allowed an instinctive, mutual sympathy between him and its peoples.”77 Like various members of the Asquith family, Keynes linked his late friend with the Orient, but less in a manner that mocked his difference than one that celebrated it—imputing to it an ability to develop “mutual sympathy” with other peoples, the importance of which Keynes himself had recently learned at Versailles. Violet Asquith, who had written so disparagingly in her diary first of Herbert Samuel and then of Montagu, also experienced a change of heart with regard to Jews, not as a consequence of Versailles but of Hitler’s rise to power. In late 1933, as Lady Bonham Carter, she became active on behalf of “Child victims of the new Germany”—the title of a pamphlet she published in 1934. The pamphlet was based on a speech delivered at a women’s luncheon at the Savoy Hotel in which she expressed her “profound conviction that this is not a matter which concerns the Jewish community alone,” but rather “concerns all who believe in justice and in our common humanity.”78 Within a decade, she had lost her son-in-law, Jasper Ridley, to the fight against Nazism. A decade after Ridley’s death, Isaiah Berlin, who had been his friend at Oxford, dedicated The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (1953) to his memory.

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During the final years of the Second World War, Berlin had been based in the British embassy in Washington, occasionally escaping the city’s summer heat by going to places such as Tanglewood, where in August 1944 he heard, as he reported to his parents, “4 wonderful Mozart concerts under Sergey Koussevitzky—a pseudo aristocrat who looks & is a 120 percent Russian zhidok surrounded by such other Russian nobility as the composer [Arthur] Lourié M. Paul Gunzbourg, & his secretary Mme [Henrietta] Hirschmann. . . .”79 Henry Hardy, Berlin’s editor, notes that the word zhidok means “little Jew” and explains that it is used here in “a pejorative and/or ironically affectionate sense.” The same, of course, could be said of such epithets as “Assyrian” and “our Oriental friend” by which Herbert Asquith had referred to Montagu some three decades earlier. In 1955, Berlin was back in the United States in order to serve briefly as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, a city for which he did not particularly care. As he wrote to his widowed mother in November of that year: “I could not live here; plenty of Yiddish is to be heard: ‘Mogen Dovid’ wine is boldly advertised in the elevated railway stations: & still & yet it is a frightful culture: provincial, gross, terribly ‘prost’—everything I cannot bear.”80 In his next letter, written four days later, “Isaiah”—as he was now signing off—expressed similar feelings about his coreligionists at the University (including apparently his fellow philosopher, Leo Strauss),81 whom he described as “too smart & ‘prost’ for me.” He also referred dismissively to some “potential Bundists, if you know what I mean: Jews with colossal noses, who hate Zionism, make jolly Jewish jokes, but ultimately are ashamed and aggressive.”82 Four years earlier, Berlin had published “Jewish Slavery and Emancipation,” a spirited, two-part exposition of his own views regarding Zionism, written in response to a recent interview with Arthur Koestler in London’s Jewish Chronicle. In that essay Berlin provided a list, as he later acknowledged in a somewhat cloying letter to T.S. Eliot, “of annoying characteristics which the Jews have . . . been thought to possess, and which indeed some of them may in fact have.”83 Although Berlin actually named Eliot—alongside Koestler himself—among those who sought to place the Jews, on account of those characteristics, “beyond the borders of the city,” he was at pains to note that he “did not wish to imply” that the great poet himself “had ever so spoken of them.”84 Indeed, Berlin prudently excised Eliot’s name from the essay’s second version, which appeared soon afterward in the (now defunct) Hebrew University Garland. Clearly Lord Annan was exaggerating slightly when he stated, at a memorial service for Berlin, that he “never forgave those who forgot to conceal their anti-Semitism.”85 Sir Isaiah himself (belatedly) recognized that this was not quite true. In a 1996 letter to his editor Henry Hardy, he acknowledged having been “excessively polite—almost obsequious—to Eliot,” and requested that the poet’s name be reinstated in the essay’s third and final publication.86 This may well have been in response to the publication of Anthony Julius’ well-received first book, T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1995). In May of 1996 Berlin was in the audience when James Fenton delivered a public lecture, in his capacity as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, on the subject of “Eliot v. Julius.”87 In his more recent Trials of the Diaspora, Julius devotes considerable attention to the controversial category of “Jewish anti-Semitism”—which, as he notes, is “a complex phenomenon, not to be captured in the summary phase, ‘Jewish self-hatred.’”88 However,

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he refrains from linking Isaiah Berlin, through his recently published letters, with that “complex phenomenon.” Nor does he note Leonard Woolf’s recollections, in 1967, of his first visit to Jerusalem a decade earlier, where on a “hot and dusty” day he had walked inadvertently into “a ramshackle suburb” (recognizable as Meah Shearim) “frequented by those unshaven, long-haired orthodox Jews, young men whose self-conscious, self-righteous hair and orthodoxy fill me with despair.”89 This equally self-righteous despair, however, seems to have been rooted in an ambivalent identification with those young Jerusalemites who were ostensibly so different from himself. As Woolf had written in the first volume of his autobiography, “nearly all Jews are both proud and ashamed of being Jews.” With the publication, in recent years, of Isaiah Berlin’s letters from the years 1928–1960, we see that Leonard Woolf was hardly the only Jewish graduate of St. Paul’s of whom this was true.

Notes 1. Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters, 1928–1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London: 2004), 108. On the Fraenkel appointment, see ibid., 112. On Berlin’s relationship with Felix Frankfurter, see his 1964 essay, “Felix Frankfurter at Oxford,” reprinted in idem, Personal Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: 1981), 83–90. In this essay Berlin erroneously recalls their first meeting as having taken place in the fall of 1934. In truth, it occurred a year earlier. 2. In 1918, after Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought Frankfurter home for lunch, his wife, Eleanor, wrote to her mother-in-law: “An interesting little man but very jew.” See Joseph P. Lash, “A Brahmin of the Law: A Biographical Essay,” in From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter, ed. Joseph P. Lash (New York: 1975), 24. 3. The letter, written by the historian Albert Frederick Pollard on November 5, 1911, is quoted by Julia Namier in Lewis Namier: A Biography (London: 1971), 101. On Namier’s failure to be elected to All Souls, see also Berlin, Personal Impressions, 64, and, more recently, M.G. Brock, “The Oxford of Raymond Asquith and Willie Elmhirst,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 7, Nineteenth Century Oxford, Part 2, ed. M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys (Oxford: 2000), 802; Thomas Weber, “Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism among the British and German Elites,” English Historical Review 118 (2003), 109–110. 4. In his 1966 essay on Namier, reprinted in Personal Impressions (63–82), Berlin notes that he is not sure whether the article appeared in the New Statesman or the Nation; he thought that he had read it in 1929. 5. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols. (New York: 1975–1980), 3:485. 6. Quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: 1996), 314. 7. The relationship is discussed in most biographies of the two women. See, for example, Lee, Virginia Woolf, 472–494; Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (London: 1983), 144–151. 8. See Peter Stansky, Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil (New Haven: 2003), 19, 160. By contrast, upon his arrival in the United Sates in November 1927, Sassoon was described somewhat more accurately by Time magazine as “a handsome, immaculate Jew [who] has had an astounding career for a man his age” (November 14, 1927). 9. On the Apostles more broadly and the group’s subsequent connection with Bloomsbury, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 1, Hopes Betrayed: 1883–1920 (New York: 1986) 115–121; Richard Deacon, The Cambridge Apostles: A History of Cambridge University’s Elite Intellectual Secret Society (New York: 1986); William C. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Public Life (Cambridge: 1999).

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10. See Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 2 vols. (New York: 1968), 1:212; Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 125–129; David Felix, Keynes: A Critical Life (Westport: 1999), 95–120. 11. On the proposal and her reaction, see Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, 430–433. 12. Lee, Virginia Woolf, 314. 13. Nicolson and Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 4:194–196. 14. Nicolson and Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 5:255. See also Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: 1988), 66. 15. On Leonard as “the first Jew to be elected to the Apostles,” see Mark Hussey, Virginia Woolf A to Z (New York: 1995), 370. 16. Berlin, Flourishing, 69. 17. Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf: A Life (New York: 2006). In addition to the 2004 volume cited above (n. 1) see Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters, 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (London: 2009). 18. On English antisemitism, see in particular the ostensively exhaustive, but deeply flawed, book by Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: 2010). 19. Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 32, 34–35. For an earlier discussion, apparently unknown to Glendinning, of Woolf’s Jewishness, see Freema Gottlieb, “Leonard Woolf’s Attitude to His Jewish Background and Judaism,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 25 (1977), 25–37. 20. Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England: 1870–1914 (Detroit: 1960); Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (London: 1972). 21. Arnold White, The Modern Jew (London: 1899), ix, xii. 22. Nicolson and Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1:184; quoted also by Nigel Nicolson, Virginia Woolf (New York: 2000), 49. 23. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 278 (n. 12); cf. Gainer, The Alien Invasion, 121. 24. See Mark Bonham Carter and Mark Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1904–1914 (London: 1996), 8–12. On Lady Aline Sassoon, see Chaim Bermant, The Cousinhood (New York: 1972), 227–228; Stansky, Sassoon, 19. 25. Carter and Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides, 223. 26. For one of many citations of Asquith’s famous remark, see “The Master’s Letter” in the Balliol College Annual Record (2008), online at http://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/alumni-andfriends/balliol-college-annual-record-2008#letter (accessed November 20, 2011). 27. Leonard Woolf, Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904 to 1911 (Oxford: 1961), 125–126. 28. For Woolf’s 1968 letter, in which he wrote (to an archbishop) that he had been “against Zionism” since “the first moment of the Balfour Declaration,” see Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 381–382. 29. Berlin, Flourishing, 107. 30. Ibid., 101. 31. Ibid., 245. 32. Quoted in Elliott Horowitz, “The People of the Image,” The New Republic (September 25, 2000), 41. 33. See Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (Oxford: 1992), 210, and the excellent entry on Cassel by Pat Thane in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 10:488–492. 34. Nicolson and Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 5:80. 35. In the fuller quote, Cassel “bought anything that was sufficiently expensive and of testified excellence, but all such were only the trappings suitable for a very wealthy man, and not the hard-won and intelligent acquisitions of the true collector who does not have his treasures driven to him, but stalks them himself.” Benson As We Are (London: 1932), 238–239. 36. Berlin, Flourishing, 246. 37. See n. 14. 38. Nicolson and Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 5:410–411.

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39. Berlin, Flourishing, 109–110. 40. Ibid., 85. 41. Ibid., 126–127. 42. Stephen Spender, World Within World (New York: 1994), 13. On the (perceived) problem of being “too Jewish,” see Elliott Horowitz, “Too Jewish? and other Jewish Questions,” Modern Judaism 19 (1999), 195–206. 43. Berlin, Flourishing, 342. 44. Dorothy J. Farnan, Auden in Love (New York: 1984), 65. 45. George Orwell, “Antisemitism in Britain,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 3, As I Please: 1943–1945 (New York: 1968), 337. The essay originally appeared in The Contemporary Jewish Record (April 6, 1945). 46. Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 138. 47. H.H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley, ed. Michael and Eleanor Brock (Oxford: 1982), 21, 28, 35, 40, 44, 51, 65, 67–68, 70, 99. See also Naomi B. Levine, Politics, Religion, and Love: The Story of H.H. Asquith, Venetia Stanley and Edwin Montagu, based on the Life and Letters of Edwin Samuel Montagu (New York: 1991). 48. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, 21–22; Levine, Politics, Religion, and Love, 176–177. 49. On other occasions, Asquith referred to Montagu as “our Oriental friend,” and sometimes as (the near-rhyming) “Mr. Wu”—a term favored as well by Asquith’s daughter-in-law, Cynthia. See Lady Cynthia Asquith, Diaries: 1915–1918, ed. E. M. Horsley (New York: 1969), 42, 73, 154, 157, 456; Levine, Politics, Religion, and Love, 194, 199, 390–391. 50. The allusion to Byron’s poem is noted in passing by Eugene Black, “Edwin Montagu,” Jewish Historical Studies 30 (1989), 209, and is developed further by Levine, Politics, Religion, and Love, 177. The opening lines of the poem are: “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, /And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold/And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea/When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.” 51. The Punch parody, following the victory of a touring Australian cricket team in England, opens with these lines: “The Australians came down like a wolf on the fold/The Marylebone cracks for a trifle were bowled.” See Harry S. Altham, A History of Cricket (London: 1914), 1:135. 52. Edward A. Freeman, The Ottoman Power in Europe (London: 1877), introduction. 53. Asquith, Diaries, 42, 154, 157; Levine, Politics, Religion, and Love, 177, 194, 199. 54. Mark Pottle (ed.) Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter 1914–1945 (London: 1998), 49–50. 55. Ibid., 50. 56. Quoted from Sigismund David Waley, Edwin Montagu: A Memoir and an Account of His Visits to India (New York: 1964) by Black, “Edwin Montagu,” 205. The quote continues: “and my interests are mainly in England, but I will never forget that I am a Jew, and the son of a Jew and will always be a good ‘Jew’ according to my lights, my definition of a good Jew differing from yours.” 57. John Hoberman, “Weininger and the Critique of Jewish Masculinity,” in Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, ed. Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams (Philadelphia: 1995), 143; Elliott Horowitz, “‘They Fought Because They Were Fighters and They Fought Because They Were Jews’: Violence and the Construction of Modern Jewish Identity,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 18, Jews and Violence: Images, Ideologies, Realities, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York: 2002), 23–24, 30; idem, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, 2nd. ed. (Princeton: 2008), ch. 7. 58. Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable, 50. For the terms and amount of Edwin’s annual allowance, see also Black, “Edwin Montagu,” 206. 59. Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable, 54. 60. Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, 360–361. 61. Nicolson and Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1: 398. James Loeb later established the Loeb Classical Library at Harvard University Press. 62. Ibid., 2:234.

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63. On Lady Katie, see Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: 2004), 317–320. 64. Nicolson and Trautmann (eds.), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 2:334–335. 65. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, vol. 1, 1915–1919 (New York: 1977), 244–245. 66. The schoolboy paper is quoted in part by Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 92; and more extensively by Anard Chandavarkar, “Was Keynes Anti-Semitic?” Economic and Political Weekly 35, no. 19 (May 6–12, 2000), 1619–1624. See also Nina Paulovicova, “The Immoral Moral Scientist: John Maynard Keynes,” Past Imperfect 13 (2007), 24–55. 67. Regarding “Jewish” shoulders, see also William Randolph Hearst’s spiteful description of Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times, quoted in Horowitz, “‘They Fought Because They Were Fighters,’” 30. 68. John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs (London: 1949), 32–33, 50, 68. For Keynes’ accounts of Melchior and Klotz at Versailles, see also Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 358– 360; Felix, Keynes, 229. 69. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: 1978), 89–90. 70. Felix, Keynes, 229. Felix has correctly stressed, however, that the economist’s antisemitism was “mixed with comparable magnitudes of philo-semitism” (ibid.), and that “the extremes in his attitude toward Jews proliferated endlessly.” 71. Keynes, Two Memoirs, 61. 72. Ibid., 69–70. 73. Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, 37–38. In 1933, upon meeting the future scientist (Baron) Victor Rothschild, who had also been an Apostle at Cambridge, Keynes described him to his wife, Lydia Lopokova, as “a very handsome Jew, full, dominating, and victorious. . . . sane and attractive too, but not at all a rabbi like Leonard. . . .” See Felix, Keynes, 231. 74. Lydia and Maynard: The Letters of Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes, ed. Polly Hill and Richard Keynes (New York: 1989), 115. Note the allusion to Oscar Wilde’s 1891 story “The Sphinx Without a Secret.” 75. Ibid., 131. 76. Ibid., 256. Part of the letter is also quoted in Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 297. 77. John Maynard Keynes, “Edwin Montagu,” in idem, Essays in Biography (London: 1933), 55–56. 78. Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable, 182–183. 79. Berlin, Flourishing, 495. The word zhidok appears there in Cyrillic letters. 80. Berlin, Enlightening, 506–509. 81. See Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 219. 82. Berlin, Enlightening, 508. 83. These alleged characteristics were: “To be over-sceptical or over-critical or insensitive or over-sensitive; to lack dignity, or practise vulgar ostentation; to be obsequiously or neurotically aggressive, or lack a sense of moral or aesthetic measure or certain forms of spiritual tact.” They are still included in the essay’s third and final publication, in Berlin’s posthumous The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: 2000), 183–184. 84. Berlin, Enlightening, 279. 85. Henry Hardy (ed.), The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (Suffolk: 2009), 12. 86. Berlin, Power of Ideas, xii; idem, Enlightening, 278–279. 87. See Ian Parker, “Eliot vs. Julius,” New Yorker (May 20, 1996). Parker noted that “Sir Isaiah . . . sat near the front of the hall.” 88. Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, 31. 89. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way (London: 1968), 43. Had Woolf gone to Cambridge and to his beloved Trinity College in 1967, he presumably would have encountered no shortage of unshaven young men with “self-conscious, self-righteous hair”—yet this sight might not have troubled him in the least.

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It’s Not All Religious Fundamentalism

Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009. x + 328 pp. Motti Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple? Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. viii + 211 pp.

During the last two decades of the previous century, there was a great deal of discussion about the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism, largely as a result of the apparent growth of the religious right in the United States, the success of the Iranian revolution, and the spread of Islamic terrorism. In Israel, not only terrorist acts but almost all Jewish settlement activity was explained within the context of religious fundamentalism. However, because there is no simple or even consistent definition of religious fundamentalism, the term is frequently used in a problematic manner. Instead of a precise and concise definition, contemporary scholars of religious fundamentalism attempt to delineate its basic features. They suggest that fundamentalists are “militant and highly focused antagonists of secularization” who live within a geographic and/or psychological enclave, either renouncing the outside world or else aspiring to conquer or transform it.1 While the delineation of features is helpful, many scholars of religio-political conflict confront a much broader problem— namely, how to determine whether radical political acts are in fact driven by a comprehensive religious ideology, as opposed to a political ideology that is presented in a religious guise. Two recent works centered on radical right-wing activity in Israel starkly manifest this problem. Motti Inbari’s Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount deals with a site that is holy both to Jews and to Muslims. To Jews, the place is known as har habayit, the Temple Mount; to Muslims, it is al-haram al-qudsı- ash-sharı-f, the Noble Sanctuary, from which Muhammad ascended to heaven. A focal point for violence between the two groups (most notably, the second intifada—which is also known as the “Al-Aqsa intifada” in reference to the violence that erupted in the wake of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000), the area has been astutely described by journalist Gershom Gorenberg as “the most contested piece of real estate on earth.”2 Inbari’s book is an in-depth account of the major Jewish religious fundamentalist groups that seek to rebuild the Temple on its ancient site. Identifying them as extremist groups, Inbari notes that, while they appear to “represent a small minority of Zionist Orthodoxy,” their “moral influence extends far beyond its inner circles” (p. 16). Inbari’s account begins with Israel (Yisrael) Ariel, a graduate of a religious Zionist hesder yeshiva, whose students combine religious studies with active army service. 

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Serving in the paratroop division in June 1967, Ariel was among the first soldiers to reach the Western Wall when it was captured by Israel in the Six-Day War. The following evening, he was assigned to guard the entrance to the Dome of the Rock, which he reckoned to be the site of the Temple’s inner sanctum (kodesh hakodashim); this experience had a deep impact upon him. Later, serving as the rabbi of the Sinai town of Yamit, Ariel was among those most vehemently opposed to the town’s evacuation in 1982 in accordance with the terms of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Ariel also held the second spot on the Kach list for the Knesset elections in 1981 (the party, headed by Meir Kahane, won one seat). In 1984, operating from his new home base in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, he founded the Temple Institute for the propagation of Temple awareness. Convinced that the Temple will be built not by miraculous means but rather by human initiative—Ariel has referred on occasion to a “heavenly voice” (bat kol) that informed him that the Messiah would arrive only after the Temple was built—he aims, through the Temple Institute, to prepare the people for its rebuilding. Thus the Institute produces a series of prayer books featuring colorful illustrations and extensive discussions of the Temple and its service, along with wooden models, pictures, articles, and audio-visual material. It also operates a museum that is increasingly frequented by students as well as tourists, and it has developed extensive ties with the Christian evangelical community. Declaring its objectives to be study, research, writing, and teaching about the Temple, the Temple Institute has achieved significant support within religious Zionist circles. A second figure, Yehuda Etzion, rose to notoriety as one of the founders of the mid-1980s “Jewish underground,” which carried out a number of terrorist acts against Palestinians that resulted in fatalities and injuries and also plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock as a first step in the rebuilding of the Temple. Etzion spent several years in prison for his part in the underground and, upon his release, attempted to form a broad movement to further his ideas. Together with two other radical activists, he established the Chai Vekayam movement, which explicitly rejects the laws of the state and engages in confrontational activities. Etzion continues to live in Ofra, a settlement he helped to found, and his writings are published in reputable nationalist religious publications. Within the religious Zionist sector, his radicalism is especially attractive to some among the young who admire what they perceive to be his “authenticity.” The oldest and perhaps best-known of the Jewish activist groups connected with the Temple Mount is the Temple Mount Faithful (neemanei har habayit), founded and led by Gershon Salomon. Although the movement is motivated by nationalist rather than religious goals and Salomon himself is not Orthodox, Inbari shows Salomon to be an apocalyptic messianist who seeks to remove the mosques from the Mount and to build in their stead a “universal” Temple. His ideology is rooted in Scripture; not surprisingly, he has garnered support among Christian fundamentalists. Inbari, however, suggests that Salomon’s movement is on the decline, in part because its apocalypticism and universalism do not particularly appeal to radically nationalist Jews. Yosef Elboim, a Belz hasid who founded and continues to head the Movement for the Establishment of the Temple (hatenu’ah lekinun hamikdash), is an anomaly among Temple Mount activists. Despite the fact that haredi rabbis are virtually unanimous in

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their belief that the Temple Mount is off-limits to Jews (for reasons having to do with ritual impurity), Elboim regularly organizes groups to ascend the Mount. He does this because he believes that praying on the Mount is essential for the complete “return” of the Jewish people—to God as well as to the land of Israel—such action being a prerequisite for complete messianic redemption. Inbari points to similarities between Elboim’s views and those of one of the forerunners of Zionism, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, and notes that Elboim characterizes himself as a true Zionist. In addition, he emphatically distinguishes himself from Salomon’s group, avoiding confrontation and coordinating with the police before leading any groups to the Temple Mount. Not surprisingly, his activities have been strongly condemned by the haredi community, to the extent that large posters (pashkevilin) announcing his excommunication have appeared in haredi neighborhoods. At the same time, Elboim has succeeded in winning the favor of an impressive group of religious Zionist rabbis and some non-haredi rabbis; in December 2008, he led a group of them to the Temple Mount.3 Perhaps the most radical and (and potentially dangerous) of Inbari’s gallery of ideologues is American-born Yitzhak Ginzburg, the president and former head of the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, who became religiously observant as a teenager, studying mathematics and philosophy before making aliyah in 1965. In Israel, he immersed himself in yeshiva studies and hasidic (Chabad) philosophy; over the years, he has become a popular and influential lecturer on a wide range of topics, including Hasidism, Jewish views on marriage, physiology and health, the interpretation of dreams, education, and Israeli politics. In 1994, Ginzburg was the only Orthodox rabbi of stature who praised Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 Palestinian Arabs in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. He believes that Jews are inherently superior to non-Jews and that the commandment not to murder does not apply to the killing of Gentiles, who are effectively considered to be subhuman (p. 134). He also sanctions, at least theoretically, the seizing and killing of a non-Jew to order to acquire organs necessary to save a Jew, and he and his students have developed an elaborate theory that encourages zealotry even when this challenges the halakhic framework. Among Ginzburg’s followers are the growing number of militantly anarchistic “hilltop youth” (no’ar hageva’ot) who reside in a chain of tiny, unauthorized settlements throughout the West Bank. Many supporters, especially among those in the diaspora who contribute to the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva (once situated in Joseph’s Tomb in Shechem, and now operating in the nearby settlement of Yizhar), are unaware of the full extent of Ginzburg’s extremist approach, which “seeks to undermine the institutions of the Israeli regime, and expresses sympathy for zealous actions that are contrary to religious law and could be considered to constitute terror” (p. 159).4 Inbari’s systematic analysis of Ginzburg’s extremism is convincing. Less so is the attempt to link Ginzburg with Temple Mount radicalism. Although students from the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva were involved with the “Temple Guard” and a monthly “March around the Gates” of the Old City, there is nothing inherently sinister in either of these activities.5 These actions alone are hardly justification for including Ginzburg among the Temple Mount extremists. The strongest aspect of Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount is Inbari’s examination of publications put out by representatives and leaders of the various

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extremist groups and his close attention to what group members say among themselves. Most of the individual chapters comprise a fine study of the different groups. What is missing is a comparative analysis of the potential impact of such groups— and their leaders—on the larger religious Zionist and haredi sectors of Israeli society. For example, are Ariel and Ginzburg equally dangerous? I suspect not, but Inbari gives us no means to judge. Moreover, he is unconvincing in his repeated assertion that the growing tendency of religious Zionist rabbis to permit and even encourage going up to the Temple Mount is an indication of the influence of extremist groups. Such an assertion fails to take note of the fact that only parts of the Temple Mount are inherently out of bounds because of ritual impurity. For generations, religious Jews did not ascend the Mount because the precise location of various sections of the Temple (including the inner sanctum) was unknown, but this situation has changed in the wake of archeological discoveries and scientific mapping of the area. Many religious Zionist rabbis have been convinced by the abundance of evidence and now permit, under certain conditions, the ascent to specific areas of the Mount. In May 2010, for instance, a group of 43 rabbis ascended the Temple Mount.6 This was the third such collective rabbinic venture to the area, and it was organized specifically to counter the perception that those who wish to ascend are an insignificant minority of provocateurs. In fact, the desire to go up to the Temple Mount has both religious and national-historical roots. Most Jews who ascend the Mount do not sanction the removal of any of the mosques and have no intention of actively attempting to build the Third Temple. To be sure, there is often an element of protest in their act; despite Israeli control of the Mount, Jews are explicitly forbidden to pray there, and this has caused much resentment among religious and nationalist Jews. Yet it is a mistake to characterize all those who ascend the Mount as extremist in their views. For many who feel religio-ethnic ties to the Temple Mount, Israeli policy rather than religious extremism serves as the catalyst for their visiting there, as can be seen in the tours offered by such non-extremist groups as the Israel Center of the Orthodox Union. At the same time, it cannot be denied that, to some extent, ideas promoted by the small groups analyzed by Inbari are entering the religious nationalist mainstream. As a result, such groups are increasingly less likely to be viewed as deviant, and their ability to raise funds and to gain adherents is on the rise. This, in turn, intensifies an ever-incendiary situation. Inbari’s book succeeds in drawing attention to the danger of fundamentalist religious activities on the Temple Mount, but fails to provide a clear and nuanced distinction between extremist and more moderate forms of religious fundamentalism or between fundamentalism and nationalist activism. Confusion with regard to religious fundamentalism is even more apparent in Michael Feige’s recent book. Ostensibly a study of Gush Emunim and the reasons it failed to capture the hearts of the majority of Israeli Jews, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories ultimately confuses rather than clarifies, for a number of reasons. For one thing, the book is billed as a contemporary ethnography and Gush Emunim is portrayed as an enduring, dominant force in settlement activity in the administered/occupied territories (Judea and Samaria). Actually, it has long since ceased to exist, and not all of its leaders were political messianists or religious fundamentalists, as Feige seems to believe, although some were staunch

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nationalists. The overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews currently residing in the territories never was part of Gush Emunim, and these people live where they do for religio-communal or socioeconomic reasons rather than being motivated by strong nationalist or “religious fundamentalist” ideology. Indeed, the two largest Jewish “settlements” are the cities of Modi’in Illit and Betar Illit, populated almost exclusively by haredi Jews who left the larger cities in search of affordable housing.7 Two other cities, Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel,8 contain a mix of secular, traditional, religious-nationalist, and haredi Jews, and in this sense are virtually indistinguishable from cities such as Modi’in and Shoham that are located within “the green line,” as Israel’s internationally recognized boundaries are popularly known. Feige makes good use of his anthropological skills to show how the settlers use biblical references to reconstruct locations within Judea and Samaria as parts of the national homeland (in another section, he recounts disagreements between religious settlers and the national committee in charge of giving names to new settlements; in some cases, settlers wished to give a biblical name to sites whose actual location had not been verified). He views such behavior as being very different from the approach of classical Zionism which, he claims, had a broader definition of homeland in addition to its never focusing on areas populated by Arabs. The second part of his assertion is debatable; the first is rooted in a basic difference between secular and religious Zionism, the latter almost always more firmly rooted in biblical origins. Moreover, classical Zionism has always been much more politically and culturally heterogeneous than Feige suggests, and no less skilled than Gush Emunim at reconstructing history.9 As Feige cogently demonstrates in his ethnographic portraits of several settlements, Jewish tradition surely affects its adherents’ notions of time, space, and history. However, such influence is not unique to any particular religion, nor is it confined to fundamentalists. Many of the people that Feige interviewed, among them Rabbi Avi Gisser and the journalist Israel Harel (both of Ofra) manifest strong Jewish nationalism based on religious tradition but cannot be defined as fundamentalist by any accepted definition of the term. Rather, they are active in the public life of Israeli society and culture and very much a part of the broader Zionist enterprise. In the final analysis, although religious fundamentalism was a factor among some who identified with Gush Emunim, it did not characterize Gush Emunim as a whole, nor does it characterize today’s settler movement—and it most certainly does not characterize the overwhelming majority of settlers. The settler movement is a nationalist rather than a religious fundamentalist movement. It has failed to capture the hearts of those who identify with the secular left, which believes that domination over millions of Palestinians is detrimental to Israeli society; it has failed to capture the hearts of those religious Zionists who believe that, from a religious perspective, social issues should take precedence over settling. It has also failed to convince much of Israel’s center that no land concessions in Judea and Samaria should ever be considered. Notwithstanding, it is firmly situated within the Zionist movement. Almost all of its settlement activity was initially sanctioned by the Israeli government, and when push came to shove—sometimes literally—the settlers overwhelmingly conceded to the national majority, whether in the case of Yamit or the more recent withdrawal from the Gush Katif settlements. Moreover, despite predictions of large-scale

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defection from Zionism or state-sponsored enterprises, the settlers (as well as the nationalist religious population as a whole, and including almost all of those evacuated during the Gush Katif/Gaza disengagement), continue to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces and to serve in leadership capacities within both the IDF and the larger Israeli society.10 There are probably several reasons why Gush Emunim and Temple Mount activists are labeled “religious fundamentalists.” As indicated, the subject of fundamentalism was au courant in the social sciences during the last decades of the 20th century. Framing a study within the context of fundamentalism gave it “relevance.” It is also, at least implicitly, a way of demonizing the activists and defining them as both deviant and dangerous, given that, in the public arena, fundamentalism is often associated with terrorism. In the final analysis, the mislabeling of nationalism as fundamentalism weakens the arguments of both of the books under review. Much more importantly, it draws attention away from what is really at play—namely, different conceptions of Zionism as well as varieties of religious beliefs and national agendas. Ignoring these complexities inhibits understanding and exacerbates social conflict. CHAIM I. WAXMAN Rutgers University

Notes 1. Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago: 2003). 2. Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (New York: 2000). 3. A picture of this group is included in a booklet containing writings by two of Elboim’s followers, which has been widely distributed in synagogues in Jerusalem and, presumably, elsewhere. 4. In November 2011, the Ministry of Education announced a cut-off of funding to Od Yosef Chai—and the closing of a high school affiliated with the yeshiva—on the basis of reports it had received from the Israeli security services, according to which numerous students had been involved in provocative and violent acts both against Palestinians and the Israeli army. See Haaretz (November 2, 2011), online at www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacydefense/israel-closes-down-yizhar-yeshiva-due-to-violent-acts-against-palestinians-1.393210 (accessed November 9, 2011). 5. Inbari describes the Temple Guard as a “quasi-military, uniformed unit” that “has no legal authority” (p. 157). Actually, there have been several groups calling themselves the Temple Guard; typically, these consisted of one or two individuals standing at the entrance to the Temple Mount in order to discourage those who were ritually impure from entering the complex. 6. David Brukner, “Bein ‘sheheh.eyanu’ le‘dayan haemet,’” Makor Rishon (May 28, 2010), Shabbat supplement, 22. According to some of the participants, despite their prior coordination with Israeli authorities, they encountered police hostility and disrespect. 7. In 2009, Modi’in Illit (popularly known as Kiryat Sefer), had a population of more than 46,000. Betar Ilit had a population of about 35,000 (State of Israel, Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel 2010 [Jerusalem: 2010], Table 2.15). 8. In 2009, the population of Ma’ale Adumim was about 34,300; Ariel had about 17,600 inhabitants (ibid.).

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9. On classical Zionism, see, example, Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York: 1981); Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea (Philadelphia: 1959); Rafael Medoff and Chaim I. Waxman, Historical Dictionary of Zionism, 2nd ed. (Lanham: 2008). On historical reconstruction, see, for example, Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: 1995); and Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State (Berkeley: 1983). 10. For an early indication that there would not be large-scale defections from Zionism and disengagement from the state, see Zehavit Gross, “Walking a Tightrope: The Attitude of Religious Zionist Adolescents to the State of Israel after the Disengagement,” in Religious Zionism Post Disengagement: Future Directions, ed. Chaim I. Waxman (New York: 2008), 159–188; see also Gidon Maron and Oded Shalom, “Anah.nu hayeladim shel kayitz 2005,” Yedioth Ahronoth (July 16, 2010), Shabbat supplement, 10–13.

One Step before the Abyss: Recent Scholarship on the Jews in Occupied Soviet Territories during the Second World War

Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The Final Solution in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. xi + 517 pp. Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, trans. Ora Cummings. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem/Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. xvi + 700 pp. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (eds.), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. ix + 378 pp. Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xiv + 351 pp. Anton Weiss-Wendt, Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009. xv + 476 pp.

Holocaust research dealing with the occupied Soviet territories has been flourishing in the past two decades as a consequence of the opening of previously inaccessible Soviet archives. Ground-breaking studies have been written by researchers from Germany,1 Israel,2 the former Soviet Union,3 and other countries.4 The five books analyzed here were carefully selected among a host of recent publications on the topic, and I believe them to be representative of current trends in Holocaust scholarship. Apart from making a trove of documents accessible, the dismantlement of the Soviet Union resulted in a gradual shift of focus in Holocaust research from the study of the entire Soviet Union to regional research. This development reflects not only the difficulty in covering Holocaust-related issues in a country as large as the Soviet Union but also the reality that a number of new states now occupy its space, and these are in search of their own history and identity. To be sure, historians are not bound by the parochial concerns of any given country, yet such concerns invariably leave their mark on research, whether that of local scholars or of scholars based farther away. Among the authors of the books analyzed below, two (Arad and Weiss-Wendt) were born in the region under study; Yitzhak Arad, originally from Lithuania, is also a Holocaust survivor and former Soviet partisan. In Brandon and Lower’s volume, 10 out of 12 contributors (including the editors) live outside the region of their scholarly interest. Overall, there seems to be a predominance of German and U.S.-trained scholars currently working in this particular field.

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Only one of the books under review (Arad) deals with the Holocaust in the entire Soviet Union, whereas three others address local aspects at the level of region/republic (Weiss-Wendt) or town (Epstein; Angrick and Klein). Brandon and Lower’s volume is somewhere in the middle: while also handling a regional topic, it covers a very large region (Ukraine). Alongside their relatively narrow geographical perspectives, most of these works focus on specific themes rather than attempting a more sweeping analysis. The exception, again, is the volume by Arad, which tackles all aspects of the Holocaust. The other authors limit themselves significantly. Anton Weiss-Wendt writes solely about the role of Estonians. The Shoah in Ukraine, edited by Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, spans the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods, but omits many aspects of the Holocaust in Ukraine (conspicuously absent, for example, is any discussion of issues pertaining to Jewish and Soviet perspectives). Barbara Epstein’s volume confines itself to the study of joint Jewish/non-Jewish resistance. Finally, the seemingly “all-inclusive” title of Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein’s book is somewhat misleading, as the authors do not look into a number of important questions pertaining, for example, to the relationships between Jews and Latvians during the Holocaust. Overall, the geographic and thematic narrowing of research in these books results in a deeper level of analysis: within each work’s specific focus, there is an attempt to present a picture of what occurred during the war from numerous angles, which necessitates, among other things, their relying on sources and evidence written in many different languages—among them Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, Estonian, and German. Accordingly, as is generally the case with the current stage of Holocaust scholarship, their authors are either proficient in multiple languages or else (as is especially the case with the volume edited by Brandon and Lower) have relied on the language skills of others. One of the less explored aspects of existing Holocaust scholarship is the prelude to mass destruction. In order to comprehend why various local populations collaborated in the murder of Jews as opposed to hindering Nazi efforts, it is important to understand the relationships between Jews and non-Jews in the years preceding the onslaught. With regard to the areas controlled by the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941, the issue is often linked to the extent to which Jews were perceived as siding with the Soviet regime or even being actively involved—as members of the Bolshevik party—in repressive Soviet policies. Local resentment against the Jews was cleverly exploited by the Nazis after they invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941,5 and it also plays a role in postwar nationalist historiography of the Nazi era in countries such as Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania.6 In the remainder of this review, the main focus will be on how each of the five books deals with the period preceding the mass destruction of the Jews and, in particular, what were the relationships between Jews and non-Jews during this period. Barbara Epstein’s account of the Minsk ghetto draws our attention to the important issue of Soviet internationalism but limits itself to an examination of the Jewish and non-Jewish resistance networks in and around the ghetto. In addition, Epstein confines her historical account to the period of 1941–1943. She does note the “relatively good relations between Jews and Byelorussians” (p. 43) before the war and the fact that “Minsk had been under Soviet rule for two decades before the war. Soviet-promoted

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Jewish assimilation had strengthened ties between Jews and Byelorussians, and these became bases for aid and mutual resistance during the war” (p. 42). Beyond this, however, Epstein provides only a bare-bones summary of previous history: “Byelorussia stood apart from the rest of the region: nationalism did not take hold there until the turn of the twentieth century. . . . The two charges that right-wing nationalist movements made against Jews elsewhere—that they were not legitimate members of the nation and that they were Communists or pro-Communist—lacked traction in Byelorussia” (p. 44). These claims go unproved, as Epstein overlooks existing scholarship on the complex relationship between Jews and non-Jews in prewar Soviet Byelorussia.7 Thus, although the main thesis of her book (stressing the continuing connections between Byelorussian Jews and non-Jews despite the Holocaust) is interesting and thoroughly explored, her work suffers from being confined to an overly narrow chronological and conceptual niche. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower’s edited volume on the Holocaust in Ukraine contains several essays highlighting the prewar dynamics of relationships between Jews and non-Jews as a possible clue to explaining the murder of Jews in these regions. In a contribution titled “The Life and Death of Western Volhynian Jewry, 1921–1945,” Timothy Snyder provides a good background to the events of 1939–1941 by pointing to a general problem confronting Jews in new national states that had emerged on the debris of what had once been the European imperial order— namely, a new and more virulent form of antagonism on the part of the new regimes. Over the course of centuries, Jews had been subject to discriminatory practices but had also learned to accommodate themselves to the regimes under which they lived. However, the new national states built in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the First World War not only discarded the alliances skillfully forged by the Jews but also, with few exceptions, came to regard the Jews as an alien element in the national body. Snyder notes that “Volhynian Jews were indifferent, or sometimes hostile, to the Polish state established in 1918. Their Slavic language was Russian rather than Polish” (p. 79). This dichotomy would persist throughout the interwar period. Jewish dissatisfaction with their stance in the Polish state found its expressions, inter alia, in their visible involvement in the Communist movement, a tool in the hands of Poland’s bitter enemy, the Soviet Union.8 With regard to the Soviet takeover in September 1939, Synder takes a cautious line. The Red Army, he writes, “was welcomed everywhere, which is not to say that it was welcome to everyone” (p. 85). Moreover, whereas “Communists of Jewish origin had played an important role in local militias in late 1939 . . . by 1940, they had been replaced by men from the east” (p. 88). (He does not say whether local people took notice of this change, which is crucial to understanding their attitudes toward Jews.) Finally, Snyder notes that, with the implantation of harsh Soviet policies, even those Jewish elements most enthusiastic about the Communist rule prior to 1939 “had second thoughts in 1940. . . . This made Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles mistrustful of each other” (p. 89). Although fragmentation of the interethnic fabric of Volhynian society is doubtless an important factor in understanding the situation in this region on the eve of the German invasion, Snyder does not make clear why the pogroms of summer 1941 were directed only against Jews. In a more recent book published in 2010, Snyder explains that the outrage of local people toward Jews was

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a function of their “pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes.”9 In an essay on interethnic relations in Galicia, Frank Golczewski similarly looks at the critical period from September 1939 to June 1941, observing that “Jews did sometimes benefit from the official Soviet policy of non-discrimination among nationalities. As a result, some Jews did become more visible as they assumed posts in the new Soviet institutions and municipal administrations” (p. 128). Golczewski furthers our understanding of how this social advancement was grasped by the local people, and what was the consequence: “For the Jewish minority to hold positions of political power . . . was something novel. Thus, the general public and the nationalist intelligentsia were inclined to see their stereotype of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ once again reinforced” (ibid.). In an article dealing with Romanian policies in Transnistria, Dennis Deletant provides a sketchy explanation of Romanian behavior toward Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. He cites Romanian leader Ion Antonescu’s public response to a Romanian Jewish leader, as published in the Romanian press on October 19, 1941: “we are paying generously and in blood . . . for the hatred [with which] your coreligionists in Bessarabia treated us during the withdrawal from Bessarabia [in June 1940]” (p. 160). Here it is important to note that the Romanians’ conduct in Transnistria was different from that of the local populations in Volhynia and Galicia: in Transnistria, violence against Jews was the deliberate policy of Romanian authorities rather than a spontaneous outburst. Yet in order to properly understand Romanian behavior toward the Jews at this stage, it is not enough to quote Antonescu. To be sure, he was both an antisemite and Hitler’s ally, but the incidents in which young Jews disarmed and beat retreating Romanians in June 1940 did happen,10 and it is imperative to elucidate how widespread such actions were and what stood behind them. Although prewar relations between Jews and non-Jews is not the main focus of The Final Solution in Riga, Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein nonetheless provide us with some useful insights. They mention that the arrival of Soviet troops was met with enthusiasm by some young Jews. Still, according to their study, initially warm sentiments soon gave way to more sober attitudes, with Jews being grateful to the Soviets only because “all racist discrimination was banned and prosecuted” (p. 26). Angrick and Klein do not content themselves with describing Jewish responses but also note (albeit in somewhat perfunctory manner) the reaction of the local population to Jews in this critical period: “Latvian nationalists had long cultivated an intent [to unleash pogroms] on their own, which amounted to nothing more than putting their traditional anti-Semitism into practice” (p. 65). No evidence, however, is brought to support this important claim. Similarly, the only mention of alleged Jewish collaboration with the invading Soviet forces is a quote attributed to a Baltic German who made his way to Latvia with the invading German forces: “During the occupation of Latvia by the Russians in 1940–1941, the Jewish share of the population in particular sided with the Russians and supported the Russians in the deportation and shooting of members of the Latvian people” (ibid). Unfortunately, this accusation against Jews in various places, leveled both by the Nazis and by their local allies, has yet to be accorded its fair share of scholarly attention.11

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In this context, Anton Weiss-Wendt makes a considerable contribution in his exploration of the sensitive issue of alleged Jewish overrepresentation in the Soviet apparatus in Estonia and the way this was viewed by the local population. One of the strengths of Murder without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust is its comparative perspective—the author often compares the situation in Estonia with what occurred in other areas, in particular Latvia and Lithuania. He notes, for instance, that “unlike in Latvia and Lithuania, only a few Jewish names were directly associated with the Soviet terror in Estonia” (p. 53). Weiss-Wendt has done meticulous work in scrutinizing the composition of the Estonian Communist Party and the Soviet apparatus: “as of January 1, 1941, Jews constituted at most 2 percent among Estonian Communist Party members. . . . The proportion of Estonian Jews in the Soviet apparatus fluctuated between 1 and 4 percent, regardless of which statistics one takes as a basis” (ibid.). This analysis of prewar conditions is an important cornerstone of Weiss-Wendt’s conviction that there was no foundation, whether real or imagined, for Estonian hatred of the Jews. His conclusion is that Estonian collaboration with the Nazi genocide was rather based on their nationalism and hence constituted “murder without hatred.” Weiss-Wendt documents the claim that “[t]here is no evidence . . . that the Nazis ever attempted to incite the Estonian population against the Jews either before or during the war” (p. 55). Less convincing is his assertion that “Estonians fought Communism relentlessly, so that no additional references to Judeo-Bolshevism were needed. There were simply not enough Jewish Communists in Estonia to sustain the Judeo-Bolshevik myth” (p. 56). I believe this conclusion needs further corroboration, in part because anti-Jewish attitudes evolved long before the Soviet rule. Nonetheless, I am inclined to agree with Weiss-Wendt with regard to the relatively minor role of antisemitism in Estonia as compared with the rest of Nazi-dominated Europe. Finally, we have the monumental work by Yitzhak Arad that deals with the Holocaust in the Soviet Union as a whole. Contrary to what might be expected of a work of such scope, the author devotes less than two pages to “anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union” (with a focus on the country in its prewar borders; he writes slightly more on the Jews of the annexed territories in 1939–1941). Concerning the relationship between Jews and non-Jews by the time of the war, he has only this to say: “AntiSemitism, inherent in large segments of west Ukraine, had grown in strength under the hated Soviet regime” (p. 89). In my opinion, such cursory treatment cannot be justified in a book whose length exceeds 700 pages, especially as Arad provides five full chapters on the subject of prewar conditions of Soviet Jews in the Hebrew edition of his book.12 One is left wondering what led the author or the publisher to make such a significant cut in the English edition. On the basis of these five books, current scholarship dealing with the prelude to the Holocaust appears to accept the thesis that local populations perceived the Jews to be a privileged group under Soviet rule, whether during the entire interwar period or during the years 1939–1941. This perception (with all its disastrous consequences) is noted in the books focusing on Latvia and Ukraine and also seems to be accepted by Arad in his volume on the Soviet Union as a whole; Estonia deviates from this pattern only because of its relatively small Jewish population. While inclined to agree

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that such a perception existed, I would argue that it does not entirely explain the scope of anti-Jewish feeling in Soviet-controlled regions. Given the centuries-long religious bias against Jews on the part of East Europeans and the protracted economic competition between the two groups, Nazi agitation against the Jews probably would have succeeded even without reference to a Bolshevik/Jewish link. Beyond this, it is necessary to explore both the accuracy of this perceived link (as done, for example, by Weiss-Wendt) and, to the extent that it is accurate, the factors accounting for Jewish sympathy for the Soviet regime. In fact, the perception of Jewish identification with the Bolshevik regime was highly distorted—by the late 1930s, in a first wave of purges, the Soviet regime had already drastically reduced the number of Jews in its apparatus, including the NKVD.13 The sad irony is that, had the Soviets occupied Latvia, Lithuania, and other areas several years earlier, the allegations about Jews being overrepresented in the dreaded Soviet security agency may have been more credible. Apart from the case of Estonia, there was another significant exception to the pattern whereby the events of 1939–1941 led to an exacerbation of hostility toward Jews. In an essay not included in the work under review, Arad notes that attitudes toward Jews were relatively better in the core region of the Soviet Union, as contrasted with the recently annexed territories.14 Epstein’s work on Minsk points to two explanatory factors. First, the tragic experience suffered by the people in the newly annexed Soviet territories evolved with kaleidoscopic speed during a short period stretching from September 1939 to June 1941. Yet in core areas of the Soviet Union, the local population had been under Soviet rule for more than two decades. Within this period, they had witnessed the numbers of Jews rising to power and more generally benefiting from Soviet liberalization and “indigenization” (affirmative action policies) of the 1920s—and then the way in which the Jews suffered as a result of the Soviet political and economic oppression in the 1930s. Overall, the Jewish experience was not dissimilar to that of the population as a whole; this arguably contributed to Jews being perceived as “sitting in the same boat.” Second, Eastern and Central Byelorussia, including Minsk, were subjected to protracted and unrelenting Soviet propaganda stressing the “brotherhood of people,” and as Epstein’s account indicates, many non-Jewish dwellers of Minsk came to internalize these values. This is the historical context in which her account of Holocaust-era collaboration between Jews and non-Jews in Minsk should have been placed. Epstein’s study, despite its narrow focus, provides new insights with regard to the alliance between Jews and Communism. To be sure, other scholars have noted that, overall, Jewish involvement in the Communist movement led to “the exacerbation of hostility among broad strata of the population toward . . . the Jewish people,” with ensuing catastrophic effects.15 Occasionally, however, Soviet internationalist propaganda may have led to a positive result: a certain immunity to Nazi antisemitic propaganda among significant portions of the Soviet population. This was one of the major achievements of the Soviet totalitarian regime, to which many Jews owed their survival during the Holocaust. KIRIL FEFERMAN Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center

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Notes 1. See, for example, Dieter Pohl, Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: Deutsche Militärbesatzung und einhemische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Munich: 2008), 243–282; Klaus Joschen Arnold, Die Wehrmacht und die Besatzungspolitik in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion (Berlin: 2005), 486–530; Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: 2003). 2. See, for example, Yitzhak Arad, In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War against Nazi Germany (Jerusalem: 2010); idem, Toledot hashoah: brit hamoetzot vehashetah.im hamesupah.im, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: 2004). 3. See, for example, Ilya Altman (ed.), Entsyklopedia Kholokosta na territorii SSSR (Moscow: 2011); Pavel Polyan, Mezhdu Aushvitsem i Bab’im Yarom: Zapiski i issledovaniya (Moscow: 2010); Ilya Altman, Zhertvy nenavisti: Kholokost v SSSR, 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow: 2002). See also Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman (eds.), The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington: 2008). 4. See, for example, Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: 2005). 5. Jonathan Frankel, “The ‘Non-Jewish Jews’ Revisited: Solzhenitsyn and the Issue of National Guilt,” in Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry, ed. Richard I. Cohen, Jonathan Frankel, and Stefani Hoffman (Oxford: 2010), 171–172. 6. See, for instance, Joanna Michlic, “The Soviet Occupation of Poland, 1939–1941, and the Stereotype of Anti-Polish and Pro-Soviet Jew,” Jewish Social Studies 13, no. 3 (Spring-Summer 2007), 135–176; Wilfried Wilge, “Competing Victimhood—Post-Soviet Ukrainian Narratives on World War 2,” in Shared History—Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, ed. Elazar Barkan, Elisabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve (Leipzig: 2007), 103–131; Šaru- nas Liekis, 1939: The Year that Changed Everything in Lithuania’s History (Amsterdam: 2010). 7. On this subject, see, for instance, Arkady Zeltser, “Inter-war Ethnic Relations and Soviet Policy: The .Case of Eastern Belorussia,” Yad Vashem Studies 34. (2006), 87–124; Andrej Krotau, “Obraz Zyda w folklorze Białoruskim,” Kwartalnik Historii Zydów 217 (2006), 68–71. 8. Jaff Schatz, “Jewish and the Communist Movement in Interwar Poland,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 20, Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Dan Diner (guest symposium ed.) (New York: 2004), 13–37. 9. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: 2010), 196. 10. See, for instance, Tsvi Kerem, Evrei, neevrei i t.d. (Tel Aviv: 1987). 11. On this subject, see, for example, Daina Bleire, “Nachalnyi period sovetizatsii Latvii (jun’ 1940–jul’ 1941 goda): rol’ evreev,” - in Evrei Latvii i sovetskaya vlast’, 1928–1953, ed. Leo Dribins (Riga: 2010), 140–184; Eriks Žagars, “Uchastie evreev Latvii v sovetskikh silovykh strukturakh v 1940–1941 godakah,” in ibid. 185–216. 12. Arad, Toledot hashoah (see n. 2). 13. Frankel, “The ‘Non-Jewish Jew’ Revisited,” 179; Arkadii Zeltser, “Jews in the Upper Ranks of the NKVD, 1934–1941,” Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 52 (2004), 72–72, 78, 82, 90. 14. Yitzhak Arad, “The Local Population in the German-occupied Territories of the Soviet Union and Its Attitude toward the Murder of the Jews,” in Nazi Europe and the Final Solution, ed. David Bankier and Israel Gutman (Jerusalem: 2003), 233–248. 15. Dan Diner and Jonathan Frankel, “Introduction—Jews and Communism: The Utopian Temptation,” in Frankel and Diner (eds.), Dark Times, Dire Decisions, 4. 

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Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

Suzanne Bardgett, David Cesarani, Jessica Reinisch, and Johannes-Dieter Steinert (eds.), Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Europe after the Second World War: Landscapes after Battle. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010. xii + 236 pp.

In recent years, the aftermath of the Second World War has evolved as a separate field of study. Scholars of various disciplines have begun to research the immediate consequences and continuing effects of warfare, displacement, persecution, genocide, and the redrawing of the geopolitical map on European societies; all of these subjects had previously been overlooked by those whose studies concluded with Germany’s unconditional surrender. The current volume, the first in a planned multivolume series featuring the work of senior scholars, recent Ph.D.s, and doctoral candidates from across Europe and North America, is a fitting example of this international, interdisciplinary and rapidly developing new field of “aftermath studies.” Twelve essays explore the ambiguities of wartime victimization and postwar rehabilitation and analyze the lasting impressions of war, persecution, and mass murder on notions of citizenship, social structures, gender roles, family ties, identity formation, and everyday life among Jews and non-Jews in Eastern and Western Europe. As indicated by its title, this book considers the wartime and postwar experiences of various categories of victims of Nazi persecution, rather than focusing on the Holocaust of European Jews in particular. According to the editors’ rationale, previous research had provided detailed knowledge of the major postwar policies of military governments and relief organizations, yet questions of how those policies were implemented and experienced by individuals on the ground still require exploration. Thus their decision to focus primarily on individual stories as a prism reflecting on the larger problems that shaped the European “landscapes after battle.” As David Cesarani explains in his introduction: “It is only by sifting through the joys and agonies of individuals amongst the myriad, and looking at how grand strategy or high politics had an impact on ordinary men and women, that it is possible to appreciate the ramifications of decisions taken by generals and statesmen” (p. 2). The first of the book’s three parts, “Identifying the Survivors,” considers issues of survivors’ national identification and image in the eyes of relief workers in Alliedoccupied Germany. On the basis of letters, diaries, and memoirs, Johannes-Dieter Steinert reconstructs how members of British relief agencies who followed the British army in liberating concentration camps in northern Germany perceived survivors of Nazi terror, displaced persons (DPs), and the local German population. Their negative perception of survivors and DPs, in contrast with their sympathy toward Germans 297

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who regarded themselves as victims, illustrate relief workers’ inadequate psychological training in dealing with traumatized individuals and their lack of knowledge of the daunting realities of recent terror and genocide. Steinert, who pays particular attention to the voices of female relief workers (a topic that has previously gone unexplored), complicates idealized images of the encounter of survivors, liberators, relief workers, and Germans while also demonstrating that German victim narratives began immediately after the war, if not before. Lynne Taylor explores the problems faced by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which formally began to care for the survivor population in Germany after the war, in determining DPs’ eligibility for assistance. Although UNRRA officials had assumed that allocating care was merely a matter of distinguishing between enemy and non-enemy civilians, by the end of 1946 they had to differentiate between 88 categories of nationality in the course of administering a growing population of Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Ukrainians refusing to be forcibly repatriated as “Soviet citizens.” Taylor convincingly shows that old debates over whether nationality was to be understood in terms of citizenship or of ethnicity received new impetus in the immediate postwar years, against the backdrop of the shift of national borders and mounting Cold War tensions. In his analysis of photographs distributed by UNRRA’s public information division to news agencies, Stefan Schröder highlights the discrepancy between the positive public image that the relief agency sought to create and the photos themselves (taken by various photojournalists, soldiers, relief workers, and amateur photographers), which told a different story. Neglected and forgotten for decades, those collections only entered historians’ consciousness in the mid-1990s; most are still in private hands. Schröder urges historians to move beyond using these photos as illustrations by treating them as historical sources in their own right. However, the evidence provided in his article casts some doubt as to whether the vital background information on the images, the objects they show, and those who photographed them can be retrieved from oblivion so many years later. The second part of the volume, “Receptions and Resentments,” moves to issues of ethnic violence and the quest of groups and individuals for the recognition of their victim status after the war. Michael Fleming provides a challenging new reading of the role of ethnic violence in cementing Communist rule in Poland. Looking at atrocities perpetrated by ethnic Poles against Jews, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and Germans in context—rather than separately, as is commonly the case—he argues that the Polish Workers’ Party deliberately used this violence in order to gain a broad following among a population that largely opposed communism and Soviet dominance. The population could be won, however, by directing its social unrest against minorities (rather than Polish Communists and their Soviet allies) and by fulfilling longstanding nationalist aspirations of creating an ethnically homogeneous Polish nation state. In what is one of the densest and most provocative contributions to this volume, Fleming demonstrates that even the Catholic church (which would become victimized once the Communist regime was in place) lent its support to the nationalist project, thus assisting in the political transformation of Poland. On the basis of archival records and interviews with contemporaries, Raphaël Spina turns to the largely forgotten history of the 600,000 forced laborers whom the

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Vichy government had sent to work in the Reich under its Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) (forced labor) program in compliance with German demands for labor, in addition to 200,000 men and women who went as volunteers. Some 35,000 of those Frenchmen died in Germany, mainly in consequence of Allied bombings, while 50,000 returned to France with illnesses and disabilities. Spina argues that although the representative body of the returning workers emphasized that they, too, had made sacrifices for France and deserved equal status with those deported for political and racial reasons, the protests of camp survivors and resistance fighters removed the STO members both from public memory and from narratives of wartime suffering. Aleksandra Loewenau explores the history of a mutual-aid organization of former Polish political prisoners of German concentration camps who rebuilt their postwar lives in the United Kingdom—some arriving with resettlement programs (through which the British government paid tribute to Poles who served in the British armed forces in Italy toward the end of the war) and others coming to fulfill Britain’s needs for labor. Loewenau discusses the difficulties faced by these ex-prisoners in finding employment and in overcoming marginalization and prejudice in Britain, and also highlights their struggle for compensation from the Federal Republic of Germany, which rejected their claims mainly on the grounds that they resided outside their original country. Kurt Düwell traces the life stories of two German architects and urban planners of Jewish descent, Stephan Prager and Philipp Rappaport, who made successful careers before 1933. Despite their conversion to Christianity, their military service with distinction in the First World War, and their marriage to non-Jews, they were not spared from forced labor and internment by the Nazi regime. Their deep commitment to Germany resulted in their returning to the country after the war; both then resumed their careers while at the same time winning recognition as victims of Nazi persecution and being publicly honored for their roles in rebuilding German cities. While these are remarkable individual cases, further contextualization with the fate of Jews in other professions whose prewar and postwar careers were equally prominent might have been useful. The volume’s third section, “The Postwar Worlds of Women and Children,” discusses victimhood and postwar rehabilitation through the lens of gender and age. Alois Nussbaumer explores the stories of Austrian women from the Salzburg area who suffered incarceration in prisons and camps for their relationships with foreign forced laborers and POWs. Nussbaumer aptly demonstrates the social context of these cases of “race defilation,” which could not have been efficiently criminalized, prosecuted, and sentenced without the help of a network of informers and denunciators acting out of a variety of motivations. After the war, Austrian authorities rejected requests for compensation, arguing that these women had not contributed to turning Austria into a democracy since their offenses had not been politically motivated. Looking at matrimony and childbirth among Ukrainian and other DPs in Germany, Silvia Salvatici problematizes celebratory accounts of family reconstruction in the wake of war and displacement. She addresses the pragmatic approaches that the DPs took to marriage and emphasizes the conflicting approaches of UNRRA, the military governments, and the German magistrates in legalizing DP marriages. Salvatici also shows the decisive role of gender in determining how the DPs experienced and coped

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with the bureaucratic hurdles they encountered when seeking to build families and acquire new homelands. The last three essays of the volume turn to issues relating to Jewish children and youth in Western Europe and the Soviet Union. Discussing the cases of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, David Weinberg analyzes how educators and relief workers debated and implemented the rehabilitation of Jewish children and youth in the first years after the war. Most of these children had been orphaned and found themselves in Christian foster families and children’s homes. Weinberg shows that, in order to return these children to the Jewish community and to provide them with the religious and secular education they had missed because of persecution and war, relief workers and communal activists introduced American-style Jewish community centers. Although these centers were not as successful as in the United States (where they functioned as markers of ethnic identity for secular Jews), they nevertheless were crucial tools in the rehabilitation of Jewish youngsters, paving the way for their integration into their surrounding societies. Svetlana Shklarov uses oral histories of nine child survivors in the Soviet Union to demonstrate how government-sponsored narratives of the “Great Patriotic War” against fascism, along with fears of falling victim to the terror apparatus of the Soviet regime, silenced distinct narratives of Jewish suffering for four decades. She argues that, in confining their stories to their own families, Jews nevertheless developed an internal memory culture. Shklarov clearly states that she does not seek to provide a historical analysis, and indeed, this interesting contribution suffers from a number of historical inaccuracies and from generalizations that are not backed up by evidence. Anika Walke presents a more nuanced historical picture of the multiple reasons why non-Jews in the Soviet Union refused to recognize the specific suffering of Jews—whether because the narrative of historical defeat of fascism left no room for civilian suffering, or because it was felt that Nazi collaboration by locals should not become a topic of public discourse, or because of the regime’s general policy both of suppressing Jewish (and other ethnic or religious) distinctiveness and curbing adherence to Zionism. On the basis of 41 interviews of Jewish women and men from Byelorussia aged 11–23 at the war’s end, she highlights the complex processes by which survivors were silenced by their surroundings or chose to conceal their Jewish identity in order not to further complicate their postwar lives. As is often the case with volumes that harvest the fruits of conferences (in this case the second “Beyond Camps and Forced Labor” conference at the Imperial War Museum in London in January 2009), a thread of common themes, questions, and arguments linking the independent contributions to one another seems to be missing, despite David Cesarani’s excellent introduction. Also, further elaboration of the reasons why the editors chose to dwell upon some subjects while leaving others out (which might be dealt with in future volumes) would have been welcome. Nevertheless, this volume is clearly a very valuable addition to the existing scholarship. It adds further nuance to notions of “victims” and “survivors” by showing how arbitrary and politicized those categories were at the time; and also that, irrespective of what they meant for the individuals themselves, such categories had varying and sometimes contradictory social, political, juridical, and material implications. It correctly demonstrates that factors such as age, gender, religion, political affiliation,

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nationality, ethnicity, and geography—which had decisively conditioned wartime victimization and survival—also had a powerful afterlife in the wake of the war. Further, this book makes an important contribution by considering the experiences of different persecuted groups in context, bringing together both individuals and collectives, while attesting to the ways in which the victims and survivors saw and expressed themselves as well as how they were perceived by military personnel, relief workers, and surrounding populations who did not share their experiences. Finally, it benefits greatly from its wide geographic scope, which does justice to the European dimension of the aftermath history of Nazi persecution, as well as from the use of a broad variety of historical sources, many of them hitherto unexplored. LAURA JOCKUSCH The Hebrew University Ben-Gurion University

Israel Gutman, Sugiyot beh.eker hashoah: bikoret uterumah (Issues in Holocaust scholarship: research and reassessment). Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History and Yad Vashem, 2008. 347 pp.

Few historians have made more of a contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust than Israel Gutman. Himself a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and of Nazi camps, Gutman has spent decades amassing an important and impressive corpus of original research on ghettos, the Judenräte, Jewish leadership, problems of resistance, and the impact of the Holocaust on the state of Israel and on Jewish history. In addition to his studies of the Holocaust he has also written on the history of Polish Jewry, especially the Jews of Warsaw, and has played a major role at Yad Vashem and at the Hebrew University. As Dan Michman has pointed out, Gutman and Yehuda Bauer were instrumental in the founding of an “Israel School” of Holocaust research. This “school” approached the subject from the Zionist historiographical viewpoint pioneered by Ben Zion Dinur, Yitzhak Baer, and Shmuel Ettinger. Indeed it was Ettinger who supervised Gutman’s groundbreaking dissertation on the Warsaw ghetto that was published in Hebrew in 1975. Gutman followed in the footsteps of the Jerusalem historians in many key ways. In his conception, the Jews were a distinct people, a collective that even in the diaspora maintained its own political and social characteristics. This dogged clinging to a national identity continued in the face of Nazi persecution. Resistance in the widest sense, known in Hebrew as ’amidah, transcended a narrow focus on armed combat and encompassed a vast effort at self-help, education, and smuggling—anything to thwart Nazi schemes to starve, humiliate, and dehumanize Jews. In turn, this story of ’amidah, and indeed the entire internal story of the Jews, was not merely a part of Holocaust history but also formed a critical segment of the history of the Jewish people as a whole. Indeed, one of the salient articles in this book, on the Jewish displaced persons (sheerit hapeleitah), examines how these individuals, far from being a mass of

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traumatized, helpless survivors, were driven by intense national energy to play an important role in the events leading to the birth of the state of Israel. To cite Michman again, the approach of this “Israel School” of Holocaust historiography was certainly more applicable to the experience of the Polish Jews in the Holocaust than it was to Jews in Belgium or Holland, in part because the Polish Jews were largely confined in ghettos, and also because they had a more developed political and organizational life before the Second World War. This historiography, as Amos Goldberg has remarked, focused on the Jewish collective rather than the experiences of the Jewish individual. But these caveats in no way invalidate the immense contribution of historians such as Gutman who integrated the history of the Holocaust into the wider context of East European Jewish history. This is especially true because most Polish Jews lived in ghettos that were not just antechambers to death but were also entities that allowed for some social space shaped by the experiences and memories of the prewar communities. Gutman’s research trajectory has certainly reflected a difference in emphasis between Holocaust research in Israel and in other countries such as the United States and Germany. In the 1970s and 1980s, Holocaust scholarship in Germany and, to a lesser degree, the United States concentrated on the perpetrators and on meticulous archival research in order to elucidate the various stages of the decision-making process that led to the Endlösung. Typical of this approach was Raul Hilberg’s emphasis on the salient importance of original documents. It stood to reason that the Nazi bureaucracy left many more documents than did its Jewish victims. Skepticism about the reliability of survivor testimony, combined with linguistic hurdles, ensured that, for a long time, most scholars outside of Israel tended to neglect the experiences of the Jewish victims in order to concentrate on the German bureaucracy and on the attitudes of “bystanders.” This privileging of non-Jewish over Jewish sources led to some very controversial conclusions, such as Hilberg’s judgment regarding Jewish “passivity” during the Holocaust or Hannah Arendt’s generalizations about the role of the Judenräte. These judgments hit an especially sensitive nerve in Israel, particularly at a time when Gutman was beginning his scholarly career. Gutman’s magisterial study of the Warsaw ghetto, published in 1977, marked a milestone in Holocaust research. It integrated German policy and the attitudes of the Poles into a wide-ranging synthesis that focused on Warsaw Jewish society under the Nazi occupation. Gutman brought together social, economic, and cultural history as he analyzed the variety of Jewish responses and stressed the importance of going beyond rigid categories such as “collaboration,” “resistance,” or “passivity” in order to understand the realities of the Jews’ position at various stages of the occupation. Gutman’s pioneering monograph on Warsaw was the first of a number of ghetto monographs that have emerged as a hallmark of Israeli Holocaust scholarship, including those authored by Sara Bender (Bialystok), Yael Peled (Cracow), Tikva Fatal-Knaani (Grodno), and Michal Ungar (Lodz). This research underscored the importance of careful local studies of Jewish life in Eastern Europe under the Nazis. Conditions in various ghettos varied so widely that such studies had to be seen as a vital precondition for any meaningful scholarly syntheses or conclusions. These

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studies used German and Polish sources but developed a conceptual framework that put Jewish sources and the Jewish experience front and center. It is this deep and nuanced understanding of the historiographical issues posed by the Holocaust that form the common denominator of these essays, which were originally published at different stages of Gutman’s scholarly career. The essays are divided into four parts, prefaced by Zeev Mankowitz’s very helpful introduction. Part 1, “Historiographical Reflections,” includes “The Holocaust and Its Impact on the Writing of Jewish History,” “Problems in the Investigation of the Holocaust,” and “The Shearit Hapleitah: Problems and Reflections.” Part 2, “Varieties of Jewish Organization,” includes “The Judenrat as a Form of Leadership,” “Adam Czerniakow: The Man and the Diary,” “The Uniqueness of the Lodz Ghetto,” “Youth Movements as a Form of Alternative Leadership in Eastern Europe,” and “Reflections on Jewish Resistance under the Nazi German Occupation.” Part 3, “People,” includes “Is There Really a Banality of Evil? Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem,” “Nolte and Revisionism,” and “Daniel Goldhagen’s Book: A Contribution and Some Criticism.” Part 4, “Polish Jewry in the Holocaust,” includes “The Minority Problem at the End of the First World War and the Preparation of the Minorities Treaty,” “Jews in the Anders Army in the Soviet Union,” and “The Jews of Poland between Liberation and Emigration, 1944–1948.” Some of the strongest essays in this collection deal with the internal responses of Polish Jewry to the Holocaust. Essays on the Judenräte, on Adam Czerniakow, on the unique features of the Lodz ghetto, on the role of the youth movements, and on the problematics of Jewish resistance all reflect a deep historical sensibility that carefully analyzes the position of the Jews, their reactions, the options facing their leadership, the problems and limitations of armed uprisings, and the various efforts made by Jews to maintain their dignity and to resist German policies as much as was possible. What stands out in these essays is the importance of detail and local conditions. Why did the Warsaw ghetto fighters manage to attract a degree of mass support that eluded the fighters in the Vilna and the Bialystok ghettos? In what ways did the Lodz ghetto differ from other large ghettos? How does one evaluate a Chaim Rumkowski? Before the war the youth movements were largely concerned with their own affairs or, in a few cases, served as obedient auxiliaries of adult parties. Why did the war transform them into centers of leadership, inspiration, and resistance? In an impassioned and sharply critical discussion of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gutman lambasts the political theorist for giving short shrift to fact, context, and the historical method. Anxious to prove her theories about the interplay of totalitarianism, modernity, and genocide, Arendt made unsubstantiated allegations and hypotheses about Eichmann, the “banality of evil,” and the behavior of the Judenräte. In his careful assessments of Czerniakow and Rumkowski as well as in his study of the real scope of Jewish resistance, Gutman underscores how flimsy were these generalizations when not backed up by solid and careful research in Jewish sources. In contrast to his critique of Arendt is Gutman’s qualified defense of Daniel Goldhagen, who was accused by most historian reviewers of slipshod methodology and lack of attention to historical detail. While acknowledging that Goldhagen’s book indeed has some glaring weaknesses, Gutman praises him for reminding scholars

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that antisemitism played a central role in the Holocaust. Many scholars had somehow made the mass murder seem like a byproduct of impersonal bureaucratic processes; the consequence of rational, albeit immoral, calculations concerning how the elimination of Jews could save food or streamline long-term economic development in Eastern Europe; or else a vague radicalization fueled by war that turned perfectly normal and decent Germans into perpetrators who murdered Jews but who did not really hate them. According to Gutman, Goldhagen’s book has the merit of steering the discussion back toward the key issue of antisemitism and ideology as a salient motive. One of the most interesting essays is Gutman’s treatment of the Jews in General Władysław Anders’ army in the Soviet Union. Gutman supplements the paper trail of documentary evidence with interview records of Jewish veterans of the army to produce a very valuable contribution to our understanding of Polish-Jewish relations in the Second World War. The Shazar Center and Yad Vashem are to be commended for publishing this most important collection of essays. SAMUEL KASSOW Trinity College

Andrei Ois¸teanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, trans. Mirela Ada˘sca˘lit¸ei. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009. xii + 468 pp.

The author of this major work, which presents the wide spectrum of Jewish stereotypes in Romanian culture (and, to a much lesser extent, those of other Central European cultures), does not need to be “invented” as a Jew. As noted in the preface written by Moshe Idel, Andrei Ois¸teanu is known as an “active Jewish intellectual in Romania.” Indeed, as documented in this book, being a liberal, an active and involved intellectual, and a promoter of values of civil society, is tantamount to being a Jew—or even better, a Jew with some communists in the family. Perhaps contrary to the initial expectations of a historian such as myself, this book does not primarily offer a “history” of the stereotypes or a systematic inquiry into the patterns of continuity and/or change throughout the various periods leading up to the post-Communist era. Instead, as outlined in the theoretical and analytical framework presented in the introduction, Ois¸teanu approaches his subject matter by means of comparison: over time (which includes how clichés and legends regarding the Jews evolved) and in various places, along with cultural and ethnic comparisons. The book’s five chapters provide “portraits” of the various sets of stereotypes. Among the subsections of Chapter 1 (titled “The Physical Portrait”) are “Filthy, Stinking Jew” and “Beautiful, Elegant Jewess.” The occupational portrait of the second chapter includes “The Jew as Farmer and as Shepherd”; in the following chapter, dealing with the moral and intellectual portrait of the Jew, we have, among other images, the

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“Blind, Deaf and Dumb Jew.” The mythical and magical portrait of Chapter 4 deals with matters such as “Why Jews Do Not Eat Pork” (in one popular Russian saying that posits an inverse case, “if the Jew knew that the sow had swallowed half a kopeck, he would eat it” [p. 346]). The final chapter presents the religious portrait, and deals with such matters as deicide and ritual infanticide. As these examples make evident, the dichotomy in the image of the Jew, which is characteristic of both traditional and modern antisemitism, is well documented in the book. The dirty, evil-smelling Jew is also the prosperous, successful one. The ugly Jew is also the beautiful Jewess, usually without the crooked nose, but with elegant silken dress and jewels. The inferior being is superior to others in intelligence, and in fact is a target of envy. Ois¸teanu has an excellent mastery of Romanian and other foreign sources. He presents a large canvas of Romanian attitudes and stereotypes as culled from a variety of sources, ranging from popular ballads and jokes to texts of the notorious “golden generation” of Romanian intellectuals in the interwar period, among them Mircea Eliade, Nichifor Crainic, and Emil Cioran. (Pioneering research on this topic was done by Leon Volovici.) In a well-placed quotation from Cioran’s The Transfiguration of Romania (“The Jew is not our fellow man, and no matter how intimate we are with him, a precipice separates us under any circumstances. . . . It is as if they descended from a different species of monkeys than we did” [p. 437]), Ois¸teanu provides an insight into the (sick) mindset of philosophers who embraced the extremist, racist ideology of the 20th century, keeping alive the traditional image of the Jew as the ultimate Other. Thus, when they see the Jew as descending from a different species of monkey, they are echoing their forefathers, even if the latter did not yet embrace Darwinian terminology. The focus in this book is on Romania. Both the preface by Moshe Idel and Ois¸teanu’s very penetrating introductory chapter clearly explain why Romania is an interesting case study—not only because of the intensity of its antisemitism, as reflected in popular culture and during the dark chapter of the Holocaust, but also because, until about two decades ago, research on Romania was scarce. Since then, serious works have emerged from both a historical and a social science perspective by scholars such as Volovici, Maria Bucur, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Michael Shafir, and Ois¸teanu (in a number of previous studies). The present volume is an essential addition to the growing scholarship on Romanian extremism and antisemitism, including that of the Holocaust. This, in addition to its being an excellent tool for the understanding of post-Communist antisemitic motifs in Romania, where many of the stereotypes and images of the Jews have been resurrected after 1989, or perhaps never really disappeared under communism. At the same time, Ois¸teanu’s book raises certain expectations that it does not meet. While billed as an analysis of stereotypes in Romania and in “other Central European cultures,” there is no real comparative analysis of countries other than Romania. To be sure, there are references to mutual influences and to similar examples of stereotypes in countries bordering Romania—which may raise the issue of where or what “Romania” was in different periods. In addition, although Ois¸teanu brings examples from Russian and other Slavic sources, he does not explain if Russian antisemitism belongs to a “Central European” genre rather than being a more specific “East European”

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phenomenon or else is merely “Russian” in nature. Certainly, Russian culture is not part of what can be defined as “Central European,” though there are indeed mutual influences between the image of the Jew from the Russian Empire and the Romanian lands, with Bessarabia serving as the connecting axis. Similarly, the author correctly points to links between stereotypes of the Jew in the Habsburg Empire and in the Romanian lands, where Transylvania was the meeting ground between the various cultures. A comparative study of the mutual influences between different cultures in the wider region is a very challenging topic. Perhaps the present excellent work will be continued and expanded by Ois¸teanu into a wider comparative study. RAPHAEL VAGO Tel Aviv University

Cultural Studies and Education

Walter Ackerman, “Jewish Education—For What?” and Other Essays, ed. Ari Ackerman, Hanan Alexander, Brenda Bacon, and David Golinkin. Jerusalem: The Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, 2008. 432 pp.

“Jewish Education—For What?” and Other Essays is a collection of essays written between 1969 and 1999 by Walter Ackerman, who died in 2003. Together with five introductory articles by students and colleagues, it forms a memorial volume for an individual who combined active engagement as an educator with the academic study of Jewish education, principally from a historical and sociological perspective. The book reflects the variety of this activity as well as the range of settings in which it was conducted, from Ackerman’s native Boston to California and, from 1973, his pioneering engagement with the department of education at Ben-Gurion University. The essays are arranged in four sections dealing, respectively, with the sociology and history of American Jewish education, the curricula of Jewish education, and Israeli education. As Ari Ackerman notes in his useful and informative introductory article, Ackerman brought depth to his study of American Jewish education by virtue of his method of looking at developments in the Jewish community within the broader context of trends in American society and education. An unmistakable theme in many of the essays is the extent to which patterns of American Jewish education mirror (albeit often with some delay) trends in general education. Examples of this mirroring are the ways in which Samson Benderly (1876–1944), the pioneer of professionalization in American Jewish education, was preoccupied by the issue of efficient educational practice, which was in vogue in general education in his day. In the 1930s, we find the influence on American Jewish education of progressive education inspired by John Dewey and his disciples at Teachers College. In the early 1970s, we see the impact on Jewish education of the fashion for child-centered and experiential education. In an essay first published in 1977, Ackerman relates how the justification for Jewish education had shifted to the idea that to be Jewish is to be different and that to be different is desirable. He shows how, for the most part, Jewish education had served as much as a conduit for Americanization as for cultivating Jewish distinctiveness. Yet once America began to respect and celebrate cultural and ethnic difference, “being different” became itself a better way to be American. Ackerman’s historical learning prevents him from reducing concrete realities to general theories and claims. Until the last quarter of the 20th century, when day schools came to be regarded as the most effective form of Jewish education, most 307

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American Jews championed the virtues of the public school system, with Jewish education relegated to supplementary afternoon schools. It comes as a countercultural surprise to learn how radical Yiddishist educators in the early part of the century regarded the day school as a form of cultural resistance. The Yiddishist ideologue Chaim Zhitlowsky is quoted: “The drive for Americanization is a veiled form of slavery, but slavery nonetheless” (p. 186). The radical perspective of these socialist Yiddishists made it possible for them to stand apart from the primary mood of the Jewish community, which favored integration by means of public schooling. Another example of Jewish education running counter to the general trend is the establishment in Boston (during the 1930s and 1940s) of five-day-a-week afternoon schools, alongside a high-school program (Prozdor) at Hebrew Teachers College. While the general verdict on the academic achievement of supplementary schools is fairly damning, the Boston network of schools is regarded as having set high standards of Hebrew and Jewish learning. Ackerman himself, a proud graduate of Boston Latin School and Harvard University as well as Hebrew Teachers College, who went on to dedicate his life and career to Jewish education, is a prime example of the possibilities of such a system. “Jewish Education—For What?” also contains important material for those concerned with Zionist education (or Israel education, as it is more delicately called nowadays). The emphasis on Hebrew language in supplementary schools in the first half of the 20th century, recently skewered in the Coen brothers film, “A Serious Man,” was made possible by teachers who were themselves graduates of the Heder Metukan and Tarbut schools in Europe. They reflected the influence of Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism, which envisaged the land of Israel as a spiritual center providing cultural and moral nourishment for Jews everywhere. Ackerman cites a Jewish history textbook that describes the American Jewish community as “the greatest Jewish community in history.” Why, Ackerman asks, would such a community have a need for a “spiritual center” elsewhere? The textbooks on Israel surveyed by Ackerman (the latest of which was published in 1985) are described as resting on the assumption that “Israel is really a place for other Jews” (p. 344). As the mythic power of the h.alutzim diminishes and the idea of a Jewish state as a haven for the dispossessed and displaced loses its urgency for young Jews, he argues, educators need to find new ways to think about the teaching of Israel. A short review does not allow for a consideration of Ackerman’s analysis of Israeli education, its reform, and its Jewish component; or for his discussions of Jewish camping, curriculum, and education within the Conservative movement. While Ackerman writes with clarity and insight on all these matters, some of his essays have the character of contemporary reports aimed at describing the state of Jewish education at a given moment. These pieces have documentary importance but lack the intellectual depth of essays such as “Some Uses of Justification in Jewish Education.” Similarly, a number of pieces consist of analyses of curriculum materials and textbooks as a means of understanding trends in Jewish education. While such analyses have validity in their own right, they are limited by the fact that any given curriculum or textbook is less significant than the ways in which it is interpreted or implemented by teachers, schools, and students.

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Overall, however, this collection of essays is a fine example of a historical and qualitative approach to the study of Jewish education. As such, it should become a valuable resource for researchers in the field apart from its importance for general readers interested in the history, sociology, and pedagogy of Jewish education. MICHAEL GILLIS The Hebrew University

Simon J. Bronner (ed.), Jews at Home: The Domestication of Identity (Jewish Cultural Studies, vol. 2). Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010. x + 337 pp.

The “Jewish home” is among the core issues dealt with by Jewish scholarship in the modern era. For the most part, however, its epistemic scope has been aligned to the national sphere, that is, to the search for and establishment of the Jewish home in Eretz Israel or to the difficulty of feeling at home in the diaspora. The second volume of the new Jewish Cultural Studies series puts the spotlight on a dimension that has received far less scholarly attention: the private Jewish home. The volume’s editor, Simon Bronner, approaches the private Jewish home as a crucial site of identity construction, which, in contrast to the synagogue, is primarily shaped by women. In his introduction, Bronner lays out a conceptual approach that integrates the physical (material) dimension of the home with both its metaphysical (or emotional) and performative dimensions; the essays that follow present a variety of case studies and central issues pertaining to its construction and maintenance. The articles are grouped in four sections. In the first section, the Jewish home is situated in its larger local contexts. Jennifer Cousineau explores the changing Shabbat practices of Orthodox Jews following the establishment of the much debated ’eruv in northwest London in 2003. She shows that the extension from the private home to the 6.5 square miles enclosed by the ’eruv had a particularly marked effect on young mothers who, because of the prohibition against carrying objects (or human beings) from one domain to another, had previously been confined to the house with their little children, and thus had experienced Shabbat not as a time of rest, but rather as a day of heightened stress. Joellyn Wallen Zollman takes us back to the gift shops established by sisterhoods after the Second World War as an integral part of most American Conservative and Reform synagogues. With subtle irony and a keen eye for the larger socio-cultural dynamics of the time, Zollman describes the sisterhoods’ comprehensive efforts to strengthen home observance of Jewish practices through an abundance of “home objects of Jewish content” and through kosher food available at the shops, as well as by workshops or decoration contests held before major Jewish holidays. The second section, devoted to the “sacred, secular and profane in the home,” starts with a contemporary reading of the rabbinic discourse on the sukkah by Marjorie Lehman. Focusing on one rabbi and two female figures involved in controversies over the proper construction and usage of the sukkah, Lehman elaborates

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on its rabbinic definition as an ideal ritual (and immanently masculine) space, resisting and controlling the female domain of the home it is attached to. Shalom Sabar traces the evolution of the h.amsa, or hand of Fatima, from a sacred symbol in the Muslim world and the Sephardic diaspora to an omnipresent lucky charm in today’s Israel. Its immense attraction as a symbol of protection and hospitality for Israelis in general—whether religious or secular, Sephardic or Ashkenazic, Jewish or Muslim—originates, as Sabar argues, from its being embedded in regional culture and a cross-religious tradition. The h.amsa thus represents a rare common reference point for an otherwise highly fragmented society. A third essay, by Gabrielle Berlinger, is a fascinating account of how the gothic-style brick building at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which originally housed a secular medical clinic, became the central sacred site of the Lubavitch community. The Lubavitch’s charismatic leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, resided in the building from 1951 until his death in 1994; convinced that 770 Eastern Parkway was a predetermined holy site, he supported this claim with prophecies he found in the Mishna and in kabbalistic encodings of the street number. Berlinger further shows how the address assumed even higher spiritual importance after Schneerson’s death (which left the community without a leader), at which time replicas of his home began to be built in various places around the world as part of the Lubavitch outreach program. Giovanna Del Negro’s article offers a glimpse into the careers and comedic styles of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott, three Jewish stand-up comedians who rose to fame in the 1950s. Their X-rated repertoires were mostly transmitted by means of best-selling “party-records” that were frequently played at cocktail parties and informal gatherings in suburban Jewish homes. (The predominant focus on the three protagonists comes, however, at the expense of a more detailed discussion of the records’ impact on the Jewish home.) The narration of home constitutes the common framework for the articles of the third section. Rosana Kohl Bines’ contribution on the Brazilian Jewish writer Samuel Rawet (1929–1984) and Mónica Szurmuk’s discussion of the Argentinean Jewish writer Alberto Gerchunoff (1883–1950) make for a fruitful comparative reading: both writers, who immigrated as children from Eastern Europe, made the exploration of their new surroundings and the Jewish search for a viable home(land) a central theme of their respective oeuvre. The literary outcomes, however, were vastly different. In Rawet’s writings, the figure of the eternally wandering Jew and the impossibility of joining together “here” and “there”—Brazilianess and Jewishness— both dominate and imply a pervasive sense of disintegration, an impression that might also be informed by Rawet’s unstable mental disposition and Bines’ efforts to interpret him as a displaced post-Holocaust diasporic writer (even though his family had left Eastern Europe for economic reasons several years before the Holocaust). In contrast, Gerchunoff’s popular collection, Los gauchos judíos (first published in 1910), presents the ultimate success story of Jewish integration into Argentinean society. Szurmuk’s convincing analysis of the book’s upbeat theme is clearly argued and thoroughly contextualized, covering the development of the Argentinean Jewish

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community and the enthusiastic response to the book on the part of the country’s cultural establishment. In the last essay in this section, Andrea Lieber turns to female Orthodox Jewish bloggers in the United States. Apart from portraying the different ways in which these women use their blogs as sites of communication and selfreflection, in the process blurring the boundaries between private and public space, Lieber provides a helpful introduction to the blog as a genre, and also alerts us to the far-reaching changes wrought by new media on closed or strictly controlled societies and milieus. In the concluding forum (which is envisaged as a permanent feature of the Jewish Cultural Studies series), Jenna Weissman Joselit scrutinizes newly invented Jewish rituals. At the present time, she notes, rather than asking if American Jews are at home in America, the real question might be whether they are still at home with Jewish culture. The diverse and pronounced responses to her (somewhat normative) critique by David Kraemer, Joachim Schlör, Suzanne Rutland, and Michael Kramer demonstrate the successful realization of editorial intentions to stir up debate on current issues of Jewish culture. In summary, Jews at Home represents a valuable contribution to the scholarship concerned with modern Jewish culture and Jewish everyday life. Its well-written articles (some with more analytical depth than others) point to new research trajectories as well as lending themselves to fruitful reading material for the classroom. Nevertheless, some aspects of the topic deserve further elaboration. First, considering the high and steadily increasing number both of alternative families and religiously and ethnically mixed families who maintain Jewish homes, it is important to explore how the Jewish “home story” evolves in instances in which it is not based on the implicit model of a nuclear, heterosexual family with two Jewish parents conforming to traditional gender roles. Second, while Jews have reflected for more than two millennia on the search for a viable home, this quest—as a result of rapid globalization—has lately emerged as an issue of universal concern. Scholars of migration and minority issues are among those who have produced a wealth of pertinent theoretical and empirical scholarship in recent years, and there is no doubt that all sides would benefit from a strengthened cross-disciplinary dialogue. Last but not least, the Jewish Cultural Studies series is to be applauded for making the acknowledgement of the diversity of Jewish cultures “around the globe” a central task of its editorial mission (see the editorial statement at www. littman.co.uk/jcs/). The overall composition of the current volume, however, generally gives much greater attention to Jewish culture in Israel and in the United States. Notwithstanding the central position of both communities in today’s Jewish world, our analytical understanding of this world’s diversity and its interconnections would certainly be advanced by a wider and more balanced scope. For the future, one can wish this series all the best in further pushing boundaries—for now, this is a very promising beginning. ANNA LIPPHARDT University of Freiburg

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Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009. xi + 206 pp.

In The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture, Warren Hoffman trains a closely focused lens on a series of Jewish American texts—or, perhaps more precisely, textual performances, since all of his texts (whether written narratives or dramatic presentations) perform rather than debate or analyze or even construct American Jewish identity. In one way or another, these textual performances deal with passing over into American culture and/or passing as American. Hoffman’s reasons for using the word passing rather than, say, assimilation, are not in the least disguised: the assimilationist tensions and anxieties that concern him are those that are accompanied by questions of sexual preference and gender definition. Hoffman’s aim is to examine how American Jewish identity is performed specifically in and through its entanglement with performances of another sort, which are also involved with passing; that is, being identified as a member of the white, heterosexual, mainstream American culture. Sexual and gender performances that aim at passing enact a complex relation to what society perceives of as “normative,” in this case heterosexuality and binary definitions of sexual preference and gender definition. Thus, Hoffman wisely chooses the term queer in order to engage the subversive strategies of his texts’ performances. He is not concerned with homosexuality or lesbianism or even androgyny as such. Nor is his concern with homosexual or lesbian or androgynous texts that also happen to have Jewish characters and might therefore be understood to be concerned with Jewish identity as well. He is not interested in mainstream American Jewish writings dealing with problems of immigration and religious conflict. Rather, he is interested in how sexual and gender differences play out in the particular “game” of performing one’s American and Jewish identity, where neither the term American nor the term Jewish are any more essentialized than the differing sexual and gender orientations that the book considers. In the process, however, despite the restrictions on his focus, or perhaps because of them, Hoffman succeeds in interrogating and illuminating larger issues of “American,” “Jewish,” and “gay” identity, none of which, we come to realize, can be understood in essentialist terms. “Identity” for Hoffman is always an enactment. It always needs to be bracketed, put in quotation marks, as idiosyncratic, unique, and personal, even where identity performances overlap and inform each other, as they do in the texts that Hoffman examines. The textual performances that concern Hoffman stretch from the early part of the 20th century to the present time. They are eclectic in terms of language, genre, author’s nation of origin, and canonicity. They include Sholem Asch’s play Got fun nekome (God of vengeance); Abraham Cahan’s The Rise and Fall of David Levinsky; multiple stage performances by Molly Picon; an early lesbian novel by Jo Sinclair, titled Wasteland; Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint; a series of late short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer; and the dramatic monologue of a contemporary lesbian Jewish American comedian, Sara Felder. This set of texts constitutes a somewhat slender canon; moreover, not all of the texts are well known either to the average Jewish American reader or, for that matter, to the writers or performers of the other texts.

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Consequently, Hoffman’s claim that his book, like these texts, “queers” Jewish American culture seems somewhat overstated. Nonetheless, his readings open up literary and cultural subtexts that most of us have not considered, except, perhaps, in relation to the more visible lesbian agendas of Sinclair and Felder. Since the Sholem Asch play, the Sinclair novel, and the Singer stories are also relatively unknown (except for “Yentl,” which achieves notoriety but also, as Hoffman points out, suffers severe distortion in the Barbra Streisand movie), Hoffman’s book also serves to introduce into the Jewish American canon, if not the American canon itself, works worthy of our consideration. Hoffman’s readings are for the most part perceptive and intelligible, though he does have a tendency to repeat himself (this is especially apparent in the chapter on Sholem Asch) and sometimes, as noted, to overstate a claim. In the reading of Sinclair’s Wasteland, for example, Hoffman suggests that, because Sinclair was a lesbian, she succeeded in “rescuing and recuperating” queer identity as “an integral part of Jewish American life” (p. 92). That isn’t quite right, since I do not think it can be argued that queer identity was or is “integral” to Jewish American self-definition or performance as such. More precise and nuanced is his statement a few sentences later that “in Wasteland Jewish and queer identities comment on and influence each other in metonymic proximity through shared language that positions both subjectivities as ‘closeted’ secrets that need to be brought to light and revealed” (p. 93). Hoffman is more persuasive when he exercises such caution, as when he is careful not to claim in relation to Asch, for example, that his Yiddish-speaking audience would have responded to the lesbianism of the drama in contemporary terms, or that Molly Picon’s cross-dressing is identical with other forms of cross-dressing. As Hoffman presents it, the complexity of such performances resides in their histories and contextualization, as well it should. That Hoffman can add something significant to our readings of these textual performances (even in relation to a well-known text such as Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint) and to our understanding of Jewish American identity formation generally makes this book well worth reading. It is well-researched, wellwritten, sensitive, and intelligent. EMILY BUDICK The Hebrew University

Amy Horowitz, Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. xvii + 251 pp.; 1 sound disc.

One of the most stirring cultural upheavals in Israeli history commenced in the post1967 era, when “Mizrahi music” (muzikah mizrah.it) began to move from the periphery toward the mainstream of Israeli popular culture.1 Although a handful of musicians such as Jo Amar and Aris San had earlier broken through the cultural barriers that had effectively silenced Arab Jewish music, the most significant landmarks in the evolution of musikah mizrah.it occurred in the period beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the late 1990s. Amy Horowitz’s book, the first comprehensive

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study of the genre she terms “Mediterranean Israeli music,” focuses on this period and deals with most of the processes that brought about the emergence of Zionism’s “others,” who eventually conquered the consensus at the cost of being consumed by globalization. The issue of how to define Mediterranean music (or Mediterraneanism) can be confusing for both outsiders and insiders, as the term applied originally to art music.2 As to “Mizrahi music,” some practitioners insist on regarding it as part of “Israeli” or “Hebrew” music, denouncing the label “Mizrahi” (which today verges on political incorrectness). At the same time, postcolonial readings have refined concepts such as mizrah.im, sepharadim, or Oriental Jews (themselves the product of hegemonic nationalist agendas) in tandem with the shifting and blending of ethnic positionings in Israel. Here, following Yehouda Shenhav, I refer to members of these subcultures as Arab Jews.3 The archeology of labels, however, merely scratches the surface of musikah mizrah.it. The underlying story has to do with the migration of musical idioms from liturgical and paraliturgical Jewish musical traditions to western popular music genres. For instance, harmony in its western sense is foreign to the monophonic (single-voiced) Jewish music traditions, whose colors and harmonic properties are lost once they are filtered through western scales and chords; all that is left are some exotic musical images, serving as frills. Ironically, in making use of standard western forms of popular music with their symmetries of phrases, refrains and interludes, musikah mizrah.it attests to its practitioners’ adaptation of a Eurocentric outlook. Still, whether termed mizrah.it, Mediterranean, or Arab Jewish, this music has destabilized hegemonic constructions such as “Hebrew music” or “Hebrew song” and has signaled a more inclusive definition of Israeliness after 1967. Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic opens with a credo that is both autobiographical and methodological. Horowitz locates herself as straddling the ground between insider and outsider: an American Ashkenazic Jew and a political activist who has been involved in academic research on Mediterranean Israeli music for nearly three decades. As such, she is sensitive to the indeterminate positioning of Arab Jewish popular music: “music seeps across checkpoints through which people cannot pass and makes the cultural destinations themselves disputed territories” (p. 6). Methodologically, Horowitz attempts to think through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory with regard to “rhizomatic spaces.” In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, tree-like and genealogical models are replaced by non-hierarchic stratifications, in this way “deterritorializing” hegemonic cultural, historical, and political constructions.4 Although deterritorialization is occasionally given a political nuance in the author’s adaptation, its main function is to aid in the critical decipherment of Arab Jewish popular music through “reformulated cultural identities as a result of new ethnic proximities” (p. 30). Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the consolidation of Arab Jewish pan-ethnicity (the result of Arab Jews’ ghettoization in Israel) against the backdrop of “political asymmetries that privileged European-ness,” thus driving a wedge in “the Zionist ideal of unified Jewish-Israeli identity” (p. 35). Following a brief summary of the important social upheavals attesting to Arab Jews’ disillusionment with Israeli hegemony,

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Horowitz illustrates the network of live neighborhood performances and the ensuing “cassette culture” as sidestepping “the state controlled radio programs and other mainstream music industry channels” (p. 50). Although Horowitz is aware of the “‘muddle’ of cultural recombinations” in Mizrahi music (p. 63), she uncritically adopts composer and singer Avihu Medina’s “Mediterranean categories” comprising “real roots,” “music with a Mediterranean coloring,” “music with original Mediterranean coloring,” and “traditional religious music with Mediterranean coloring” (pp. 59–62). Yet Medina’s categories might easily lead a reader to erroneously assume that these categories refer to different genres of music—in fact, they all describe hybrids of paraliturgical Jewish musics and western popular music templates. The inclusion of these categories, therefore, is unclear, especially since Horowitz rarely refers to them past the third chapter. Moreover, whereas she aptly notes that “the politics of authenticity acts as a corrective to the Euro-American influences while promulgating a mentality antithetical to the colonial” (p. 78), she leaves the reader guessing as to how Medina actually “translates” his ideas into sounds, given the fact that he neither reads nor writes music and thus literally “plays it by ear.” Interviewed by the author, Medina reveals that composer and conductor Noam Sheriff had advised him against studying composition. Sheriff must have anticipated the potential clashes between Medina’s practice of Yemenite oral (monophonic) musical tradition and western musical literacy, which could overtly westernize Medina’s musical vocabulary—or worse, paralyze his compositional abilities. Horowitz, for her part, accepts Medina’s remarks at face value without considering the implications of his compositional constraints. In the following two chapters, the focus shifts to Zohar Argov (1955–1987), at once the antihero and mythic figure of the genre. Horowitz unfolds a fascinating biography that includes an analysis of Argov’s milieu, including some demystifying information concerning his sexual felonies (conveniently omitted from former narratives in favor of his glorified rehabilitation). Horowitz eloquently argues that “[Argov’s] innovation was in the juxtaposition and resolution of unlikely music genres” (p. 95), and adds: “Argov’s ‘authenticity’ was rooted in his voicing a discomforting musical moment. The cultural and artistic conflict itself was authentic and expressed the interference between Eastern vocalization and Western and Mediterranean music accompaniment” (p. 97). In contrast to redemptive Zionist narratives, Argov’s biography evinces his failed acculturation. Yet because he made the Arab Jewish experience more audible, he has been valorized in posthumous redemptive accounts. Memorial concerts and cinematic adaptations of his life have recast the problematic details of his biography in more poetic form; in the theater, Shmuel Hasfari’s play, Hamelekh, portrayed Argov as the victim of social inequality. In the penultimate chapter of her book, Horowitz discusses the music of Zehava Ben, which she considers to be a “stratification” of Argov’s precedents. Ben, who grew up in an overcrowded, Arabic-speaking neighborhood in Beersheba, “made no attempt to sound European” (p. 140) but rather emphasized her Arabness by recording cover versions of Umm Kultumm’s songs. Analyzing Ben’s evolving style in the context of the Oslo accords, Horowitz notes that “Ashkenazi audiences who had rejected both mizrahi attempts to emulate hashir haeretz yisraeli [song of the land of Israel] as too Arab-sounding and the emerging pan-ethnic genre of Mediterranean

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Israeli music as too hybrid and confusing, embraced Ben’s performances of unquestionably ‘authentic’ Arab music” (p. 143). Ben’s music, therefore, did not merely “challenge geopolitical maps of disputed territories” (p. 147) during tectonic political shifts. Rather, her appropriation of Arabic music manifests a tragic irony of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, “the sense that a part of their own being is the enemy” (p. 154). Horowitz’s rhizomatic mapping comes full circle in the concluding chapter of her book. By the 1990s, she shows, pan-ethnic mizrah.i music had become part of the consensus even as political and social affirmative actions lagged behind. The music, Horowitz concludes, “was both unabsorbable and accommodative” (p. 157): outside of mainstream channels yet catering to the dominant culture, thus acting “like a lightning rod that attracted the conflicting social currents rumbling in the air” (p. 159). Musicians who do not think dichotomously, we are told, articulate their instable musical hybrids from the space where Arab, Jewish, and national memories converge. Although Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic contains many insightful comments and valuable formulations, it is flawed by a number of its own “asymmetries.” The complexities of given historical moments are almost never part of the musical analysis. Horowitz summarizes recent scholarly publications concerning the history and cultural history of Arab Jews in Chapter 2 but neglects to integrate their findings with the main topoi or songs under discussion. Methodologically, her adaptation of rhizomatic models to musicology relies more on metaphors than on musical semantics. Although Horowitz mentions the Oslo accords, she does not consider the impact of the collapse of peace negotiations on either Israelis or Israeli Palestinians. She also, somewhat surprisingly, refers to Samir Shukri as an “Israeli Arab” (p. 170)—an obsolete hyphenated Israeli identity imposed upon Israeli Palestinians in early statehood, and a term they have rejected since the 1970s.5 Members of this subculture underwent a transition from adaptive passivity to oppositional activity and have developed hybrid identities based on their identification as Palestinian by nationality, Arab by ethnicity, and Israeli by citizenship. Samir Shukri’s cassette packaging (shown on p. 170) indicates that he recorded a cover medley of Umm Kultumm’s songs. Having discussed the “dueling nativities” of Zehava Ben’s cover version of Umm Kultumm’s songs, it seems unfortunate that Shukri’s own “dueling nativities” have not merited a similar discussion. Ironically, despite her critique of “asymmetries” in Israeli society, Horowitz ignores Israeli Palestinians’ positioning between Mediterranean Israeli music and their Arabness. Shukri’s song “From Moses to Muhammed” presents this problem in nuce. Composed by two leading (Ashkenazic) practitioners of shirei eretz yisrael, Nurit Hirsch (music) and Yoram Teharlev (lyrics), the song displays asymmetrical borrowings that had been practiced in early statehood. Recorded in the synthesized era of the 1980s, it smacks of western imperialism. Moreover, the ludicrously utopian lyrics (symbolically bridging between Moses and Muhammed and hence between Jews and Arabs), sung against the background of an overtly exotic refrain, manifest the contrast between an artificial televised image of peace and a reality in which Israelis practice the exclusion of Israeli Palestinians. Instead of a multidirectional rhizomatic mapping, Horowitz reverts to traditional hegemonic perspectives in which “dueling nativities” are seen from the Jewish Israeli side.

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Finally, Horowitz’s book is saturated with metaphors that replace actual musical analysis. Applying Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking to music history requires the inclusion of musical language—the very embodiment of “seepage” and “deterritorialization.” And while I agree with Horowitz that cassettes have flooded the market with hybrid-style music while “contributing both to preserving and subverting traditional styles as well as to the proliferating of innovative new styles” (p. 25), her brilliant discussion of artists’ “straddling the contentious domains of politics and aesthetics” (p. 81), “seepages,” and the disruption of ethnic boundaries are portrayed mainly through images that are devoid of precise references to the migration of musical idioms. The thicket of postmodern adjectives could have been more intelligible (particularly for outsiders) had the author followed the migration of several melody types—for example, from paraliturgical Yemenite diwan, through the early cassette recordings, and to their dilution in the process of globalization; or had she demonstrated a case study of asymmetrical borrowing in addition to her discussion of “dueling nativities.” To what extent were exoticisms such as liturgical melodic-types and rhythmic patterns grafted onto the western musical infrastructure in the late 1970s? What are the musical results of “straddling” between paraliturgical importations and shirei eretz yisrael? And, given that technology forms another factor, what are the influences of synthesizers, drum machines, and the like on Israeli Mediterranean music? (This last matter is mentioned, but not at length.) One can theorize that musicians who do not know how to read or write music would develop greater dependency on sequencers and drum machines as they “translate” their soundscapes. But these questions and many others concerning the proximities among liturgical, paraliturgical, and popular musics should have been answered through the transcription of musical idioms and—to paraphrase the author—their “instable mutations.” ASSAF SHELLEG University of Virginia

Notes 1. On the prevailing culture of Israeli society in the period prior to the Six-Day War, which is characterized by Motti Regev and Edwin Seroussi as the era of “Hebrewism,” or Hebrew culture, see their book, Popular Music and National Culture in Israel (Berkeley: 2004). 2. Edwin Seroussi, “Yam Tikhoniyut: Transformations of Mediterraneanism in Israeli Music,” in Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds, ed. Goffredo Plastino (New York: 2003), 179–198. 3. Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford: 2006). 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: 1987), 3–28. 5. Itamar Rabinovich, Waging Peace: Israel and the Arabs 1948–2003 (Princeton: 2004), 251–254.

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Miryam Segal, A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 206 pp.

Modern Hebrew poetry emerged in Europe in the 1890s, as the “revival generation” of poets led by Hayim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky introduced a thematic, linguistic, and prosodic revolution in all aspects of the poetic text. Before long it witnessed a severe crisis as a result of developments in the pronunciation of Hebrew throughout its transformation into a spoken language. Whereas the poetry of the revival period had been based on Ashkenazic stress patterns, which are predominantly penultimate (for instance, shálom rav shúvekh tzipórah neh.médet), spoken Hebrew—which started to develop in Palestine from the 1880s on—has been anchored in the Sephardic stress system, which places the stress on the ultimate syllable in most grammatical categories. Though initially this shift was subject to some controversy, by the first decade of the 20th century the predominance of the Sephardic stress system in the budding vernacular among the Jews of Palestine was already apparent. Poets’ adaptation to the new linguistic reality was no easy task. Initially, only popular genres such as children’s songs and folksongs responded to the shift of pronunciation. Whereas lyrics in these genres began to exhibit experimentation with the Sephardic stress in the first quarter of the 20th century, canonical poetry continued to reflect the legacy of the Ashkenazic stress patterns of the revival generation. Even when the next generation of young poets (operating in Palestine in a Hebrew-speaking surrounding) started to emerge in the 1920s, they initially remained loyal to the Ashkenazic stress. Only toward the end of the 1920s did they begin to adopt the new pronunciation system in poetry writing, a move that is customarily attributed to the leadership of Avraham Shlonsky. The early 1930s witnessed the efforts of some poets of the revival generation to adapt to the shift and to replace their former habits with new stress patterns, and by the mid-1930s the predominance of the new pronunciation in Hebrew poetry was an established fact. Miryam Segal’s book contributes to the research on the shift of pronunciation in Hebrew poetry by dedicating attention to female poetry, which generally has been overlooked by scholars dealing with the topic. “[W]ith the exception of Bat-Miryam,” claims Segal, “the popular female poets of the 1920s were composing almost exclusively in the new accent,” whereas male poets “were still writing in Ashkenazic in the early part of the decade” (p. 12). Moreover, “[t]he women were also more likely to begin their Hebrew careers in the new accent,” whereas their male contemporaries “began in Ashkenazic and switched to the new accent in the mid-to late 1920s” (ibid.). Segal attributes this difference to “authenticity,” although this notion, even after lengthy discussion, remains somewhat obscure. A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry is divided into two parts. The first two chapters are historical in their orientation, aiming at a historical-cultural analysis of the formation of the new pronunciation system as part of the transformation of Hebrew into a spoken language. The rest of the book, consisting of two further chapters and an epilogue, is literary in nature and is centered on the analysis of specific poetic texts. These two distinct orientations seem to cater to a great extent to two target readerships.

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The historical chapters deal respectively with the role of the Hebrew schools in Palestine in the formation and dissemination of the new pronunciation, and with the ideological significance of competing suggestions vis-à-vis the desirable pronunciation to be adopted in speech. In contrast to the conventional focus on the differences between Ashkenazic and Sephardic reading traditions of Hebrew, Segal’s analysis is anchored in notions such as authenticity, unity, and modernism. She presents three variations of pronunciation discussed by prominent members of the revival generation. First is the so-called Galilean dialect created by Yitzhak Epstein and Simha Vilkomits, known mostly for its uniform pronunciation of the letter bet as [b] in all circumstances, which was based in turn on a local reading tradition of Hebrew that shared many features with other varieties of the Sephardic pronunciation. Segal’s claims about its being rejected by the school system despite its centrality in the “competition for the role of national language” (p. 72) is somewhat misleading, as Epstein and Vilkomits never intended to propose this dialect as a national pronunciation (hence its name). Segal acknowledges this fact, but only in the following chapter. Following her extensive discussion of the Galilean dialect, she focuses on the more mainstream views of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and David Yellin, which combined scientific, cultural, pragmatic and pedagogic considerations. In principle, both of these leading figures of the revival movement agreed on the preference for the Sephardic pronunciation over the Ashkenazic one; their views diverged on certain details regarding the realization of specific sounds within that system. It would have been useful for the book to have included a detailed discussion of the Ashkenazic and Sephardic pronunciation systems. In any case, Segal’s claim (p. 61) that the former has six vowel sounds and the latter four vowel sounds should be corrected, as they include seven and five vowel sounds respectively.1 The third chapter focuses on the rise of women’s poetry, which both coincided with the rise of new-accent poetry and contributed to it. Several women poets who were based in Palestine are mentioned: Rahel (Bluwstein), Yocheved Bat-Miryam, Elisheva Bihovski, and Ester Rab. (Malkah Shekhtman, writing under the nom de plume “Bat Hamah,” is also mentioned as part of this group, although she did not actually live in Palestine.) At the heart of the chapter is an attempt to explain Rahel’s negative attitude toward Bat-Miryam’s reliance on Ashkenazic prosody, as opposed to her acceptance of a similar practice on the part of her contemporary male poets. After analyzing some critical essays published in the 1920s as well as certain poems by Shlonsky and Rahel, Segal concludes that the use of Ashkenazic pronunciation among women poets ran counter to Rahel’s notions regarding the role of female poets and their connection to nation and language alike. Regrettably, the other women poets in this group are not discussed. The fourth chapter aims at explaining the common perception of Shlonsky as the leading figure in the shift to the new pronunciation in poetry, despite the fact that other poets preceded him in publishing new-accent poems. The discussion first focuses on Shlonsky’s early-1920s non-canonical works, namely folksongs, which enabled him to experiment with the new accent prior to its introduction into his canonical poetry. While this claim is certainly true as far as Shlonsky’s development as a poet is concerned, a further claim, namely that this facet of Shlonsky’s activity “‘prepared’ the Hebrew-speaking audience for lyric composition in the new accent”

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(p. 107), overrates Shlonsky’s contribution to the field of folksong, as the shift to the new pronunciation in this genre was already underway for quite a while, thanks to writers and composers such as Levin Kipnis, Avraham Zvi Idelsohn and Hanina Krachevsky. Segal goes on to analyze several poems included in Shlonsky’s 1927 book, “To Mama-Papa,” which signaled the switch to the new accent. The first poem he published in the new accent, “Train,” is discussed in detail, as well as a few other poems that may be interpreted as addressing his attitude toward the Ashkenazic diaspora environment. Segal concludes that the identification of Shlonsky with the transition to the new accent in poetry reflected his own poetic biography. The epilogue addresses a related topic, namely the position of Bialik as Hebrew national poet, despite the fact that his work is written according to Ashkenazic stress patterns rather than according to the new stress patterns used in speech. Bialik, the leading figure of the revival generation, was the first to introduce into Hebrew poetry the modern tonic-syllabic meter based on the alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables (see the above example of shálom rav shúvekh tzipórah neh.médet). This metrical system offered an alternative to the former reliance on prosodic practices originating in medieval Hebrew poetry, which were anchored in grammatical considerations and in the counting of the number of syllables rather than on the actual sound of texts when read aloud. Bialik’s first published poem, “El hatzipor” (“To the bird,” 1891), which opened up the revival period in Hebrew poetry, is rightly indicated by the author as the main relic in contemporary Israeli culture of the former domination of Ashkenazic stress patterns in Hebrew poetry. Interestingly, Bialik regarded the Ashkenazic pronunciation as corrupt, and preferred in principle the Sephardic pronunciation. He also feared the consequences of the stress shift in spoken Hebrew, believing that it would threaten the status of his poetry and undermine its ability to retain its relevance and centrality in modern Hebrew culture. Nevertheless he adhered to Ashkenazic stress patterns, and in contrast to many other poets of his generation, he never made a significant effort to adopt the new stress pattern. Apart from a very small number of children’s songs published toward the end of his life, his entire oeuvre is based on the Ashkenazic pronunciation. Segal seeks to “propose a way of understanding the apparent contradiction between Bialik’s role as the national poet and the history of his language” (p. 141) and tackles the problem by means of a detailed analysis of “El hatzipor.” Taking into consideration the thematic structure of the poem, she concludes that the “failure [to adopt the new accent] resonates with Bialik’s insistence on a poetic persona that preserves a memory of exile” (p. 148). An ahistorical connection is made between Bialik’s 1891 poem and the “Hebrew that the poets spoke in Palestine in the 1920s” (ibid.). By contrast, the historical background for Bialik’s becoming regarded as the national poet is not discussed. The introduction to the epilogue thus raises expectations for a broad historical-cultural discussion of the topic that are unfulfilled, as Segal offers only a literary analysis of a single well-known poem. The apparatus of bibliographic references deserves some attention. No uniform method is used: some references appear within brackets in the text whereas others are provided in the endnotes. In certain cases, items referred to either in the text or else in the endnotes do not appear in the bibliography, at least not in a consistent manner. One example is the mention of “Uzi Shavit 1982–1983” (p. 161, n. 37), which leaves

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the reader wondering whether it refers to Shavit’s work of 1983, or to a different item that was mistakenly omitted from the bibliography. A particularly conspicuous example is the repeated reference to “CD” in Chapter 2, although this abbreviation is not to be found in the bibliography. It probably stands for Collection of Documents, the English translation for Leket te’udot, one of the best-known sources on the topic of pronunciation (and on the process of the Hebrew revival in general), which appears in the bibliography under its Hebrew name. Confusion is likewise generated by references such as “Harshav 2000” (p. 164, n. 54), which may refer either to the book Omanut hashirah or to the book Shirat hateh.iya ha’ivrit, both published by Harshav in 2000 and included in the bibliography. Some of Segal’s assertions are regrettably not supported by bibliographic citations. Thus, for instance, without appropriate reference to studies of the complex linguistic situation in Palestine (and particularly in Jerusalem) in the late 19th century, the claim that “Hebrew speech was used in Jerusalem among Jews, especially among new immigrants who did not speak Arabic” (p. 38) may be misleading—“Hebrew speech” does not refer here to the results of the well-known process of speech revival, but to the much less known fact that Hebrew, even prior to its revival, served as the lingua franca for Jews of diverse language communities. In addition, certain unreferenced assertions are hard to interpret, for instance, that “the discourse of Hebrew language-planning in the early twentieth century invoked the central metaphors of the period: the three options for Hebrew pronunciation reflected the ideals of farming, manual labor, or industrial production” (p. 56), or that “Galilean Hebrew encapsulated the feminine role in the nationalist symbolic which was perceived as inherently authentic and as almost mystically connected to the ancient roots of Judaism” (p. 76). Here and elsewhere, the reader would benefit from more extensive references to extant research or more convincing arguments by the author. YAEL RESHEF The Hebrew University

Note 1. The nikud signs h.irik, h.olam and kubutz/shuruk are distinguished in both pronunciation systems, but the pairs kamatz-patah. and tzere-segol are distinguished only in the Ashkenazic pronunciation, whereas in the Sephardic stress system (and consequently in the Israeli pronunciation of Hebrew) each of these pairs is realized by a single sound.

Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff, Nächstes Jahr in Marienbad: Gegenwelten jüdischer Kulturen der Moderne. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007. 246 pp.

Nächstes Jahr in Marienbad, by Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff, outlines “a Jewish spa topography in Central and Eastern Europe at the Fin de siècle” (p. 14) that was focused around the western Bohemian springs at Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary), Marienbad (Mariánské Lázneˇ), and Franzensbad (Františkovy Lázneˇ). The mirroring of the

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land of Israel and Bohemia winds throughout the book, from the title (a pun on “next year in Jerusalem”) through the final chapter, which details how, for many, the pilgrimage to the Bohemian spas was replaced by a one-way ticket to Palestine in the 1930s, with Tiberias taking the place of Carlsbad. Triendl-Zadoff’s book is an important piece in the mosaic of general history and Jewish life in the Bohemian lands, as well as of modern European history prior to the Second World War. The Bohemian “world spas” mainly treated diabetes, often known as the “Jewish disease” and believed by many to be a nervous disease sparked by the traumas of Jewish history. In 1850, the Carlsbad spa began to treat the disease with a treatment based on the local “healing water,” although the discovery of insulin (for which a Nobel Prize was awarded in 1923) contributed to the decline of Carlsbad and other West Bohemian spas. (Ironically, Bohemia was also a major sugar producer, which perhaps augmented interest in diabetes and the various treatments for it.) Carlsbad was thus a place of life, illness, and sometimes death, with death hiding in the hospital at the outskirts of town. The life of many spa guests was ruled by strict diets, timetables, and procedures. A key medium in the European spa culture was the train, which carried passengers of various classes from population centers across the continent to the spas, and from spa to spa. London, Istanbul, Paris, and Warsaw were connected by direct trains to Carlsbad. As a result, this Bohemian spa town became an opulent mini-metropolis, reminiscent perhaps of historical Las Vegas. In this fantasy landscape of luxury and exoticism whose popularity peaked in the years prior to the First World War, visitors included the who’s who of fin-de-siècle European Jewish intelligentsia, from Heinrich Graetz to Sholem Aleichem, from Franz Kafka to Hayim Nahman Bialik, from Bertha Pappenheim to Sigmund Freud, and from Theodor Herzl to Martin Buber. The secret of success of the Bohemian spas was probably their geographical and cultural location, which created a shared West and East European space. Especially significant, in the Jewish context, was the encounter with secularization and civic religion. While West European Jews often experienced a much more Jewish environment than at home, East European visitors, especially those belonging to Hasidic courts, were exposed to a thoroughly modern experience. The overlapping of the Jewish spiritual and the temporal worlds could work either to create or to defuse intra-Jewish social and cultural tensions. The Christian-Jewish encounter in the Bohemian spas was another complex phenomenon. At times it seemed that Austro-Hungarian Carlsbad and Marienbad represented an alternative to nationalist Europe, a protected society in which Jews had a rightful place. At the spas, Jews and Christians often met on more equal grounds than was common in European circles. However, such encounters were both temporal and superficial, and the popular (self-)caricature of Jews and other stereotypical spa guests easily fed into political antisemitism. Carlsbad was the site of the 1921 and 1923 World Zionist Congresses. Like Basel, where the first (and most of the subsequent) congresses had been held, Carlsbad offered a quasi-neutral yet German-speaking arena for international Zionism. TriendlZadoff explains that, after 1923, no further World Zionist Congresses convened in Carlsbad, both because of conflicts surrounding Czech-German language policies and because of local antisemitic agitation (p. 195). This conclusion is not entirely convincing, given the fact that the 1933 congress was scheduled to take place in Carlsbad. At the last moment, the venue was switched to Prague—according to a

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Prague-based Czech nationalist newspaper, Polední list, the congress had been moved in the wake of the Nazi takeover in Germany, in order to coordinate it with the Prague trade fairs. (The Czechoslovak government was allegedly trying to promote its trade fairs among Jews as an alternative to the Leipzig trade fairs.) Similarly, the (liberal) German-language Prager Montagsblatt acknowledged rising Nazi influence in Carlsbad as one reason for moving the congress, but also pointed out that antisemitism in the area was (still) limited.1 Indeed, the Nazification of the Sudeten Germans would gain pace only in 1935 and even more so in 1938.2 Among the most fascinating sections of Nächstes Jahr in Marienbad are those dealing with Hasidic visitors of the interwar period and the Agudath Israel World Congress in Marienbad in 1937. Ultimately, rabbis and doctors, miracle-makers and the representatives of science were probably more similar than they would readily have admitted: the West Bohemian spa treatments, just as Jewish emancipation in modern Europe, were first and foremost pipe dreams. The book’s epilogue is a brief glimpse of a short Jewish revival in the Bohemian spas that took place after the Holocaust and before the regime changes to Communism in Eastern Europe, that is, in the years 1945–1948. This chronological jump leaves out the German annexation after the 1938 Munich agreement, the Holocaust, and the postwar ethnic cleansing of the area of its German-speakers. However, the Holocaust in particular can be seen as an alternative “ending” of the European Jewish spa culture. As a lethal perversion of a train trip to a spa, trains (mostly freight trains) took Jews to forced labor and death camps. Aharon Appelfeld, as TriendlZadoff points out, made a clear connection between spas and death camps in his Badenheim 1939 (1980). At the same time, European spa culture found expression in Nazi propaganda, which described the Theresienstadt ghetto, not far from Carlsbad, as a spa-like place. The practice continues to this day among Holocaust deniers who characterize Auschwitz as the “Auschwitz spa.” MARTIN J. WEIN Tel Aviv University

Notes 1. Polední list (July 8, 1933); Prager Montagsblatt (July 10, 1933). These and other newspaper clippings on the World Zionist Congress of 1933 can be found in the Foreign Ministry collection at the Czechoslovak Central State Archives, which is not sufficiently mined by Triendl-Zadoff. It must further be noted that the archival annotation and abbreviation in her book is often not entirely accurate or else indicates only a signature code and not a concrete document. 2. On interwar Czechoslovakia and the Sudentenland, see, for instance, Stephan Dolezal, “Grundzüge der Reichsdeutschen Tschechoslowakei-Politik 1933–1939—unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Sudetendeutschen,” in Das Scheitern der Verständigung—Tschechen, Deutsche und Slowaken in der Ersten Republik, ed. Jörg K. Hoensch and Dušan Kovácˇ (Essen: 1994); Antonín Klimek, Velké deˇjiny zemí Koruny cˇeské, vols. 13 and 14 (Prague: 2000, 2002); Jan Rataj, O autoritativní národní stát (Prague: 1997); Ronald M. Smelser, “Die Henleinpartei: Eine Deutung,” in Die Erste Tschechoslowakische Republik als Multinationaler Parteienstaat—Vorträge der Tagungen des Collegium Carolinum in Bad Wiessee vom 24.–27. November 1977 und vom 20.–23. April 1978, ed. Karl Bosl, (Munich: 1979), 187–202. These books are not cited by Triendl-Zadoff, and she also lists only three items in the Czech language, none of them a Czech historical work. Finally, her book lacks a subject index.

History and the Social Sciences

Ben Zion Dinur, Ketavim yeshanim vegam h.adashim (Posthumous and other writings), ed. Arielle Rein. Jerusalem: Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History and Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2009. 395 pp.

This volume presents the works of Ben Zion Dinur (Dinaburg, 1884–1973), one of the most influential historians and educators in the history of the Yishuv (the Jewish community of Palestine) and later the nascent state of Israel. A socialist Zionist, Dinur also served as Israel’s third minister of education (1951–1955). To date, most critical researchers have studied Dinur and his heritage in the field of historiography, with the clear goal of demonstrating the close relationship between ideology and Zionist historiography.1 For this reason, the publication of this volume is of considerable importance. Presenting well-known essays alongside previously unpublished works, it completes the picture Dinur aspired to create in his autobiographical books Be’olam sheshak’a (A vanished world) and Biymei milh.amah umahapekhah (Days of war and revolution), for which he planned additional, complementary volumes. Dinur integrated his autobiographical writing with the Zionist effort to lay the foundations for a collective Zionist consciousness; according to Arielle Rein, who has provided an introduction and copious notes to the texts, he “preceded the new [reflexive] awareness of the profession of history by three decades” (p. 14). I find this claim to be somewhat overstated, as one cannot ignore the strong ideological factor present in Dinur’s historiographic work.2 Yet this fact does not minimize Dinur’s vital scientific contribution to the study of Jewish history as it took shape in Eretz Israel from the 1920s to the 1960s. Selections from Dinur’s diary, published here for the first time in translation from the Yiddish original, are an important and surprising section of the book. The diary allows the reader to understand Dinur as a multifaceted individual rather than as a one-dimensional ideological figure. We discover that Dinur began his path as a doubting Zionist, a man with a deep sense of dedication to the Jewish people who viewed Zionism as only one of a number of possible solutions to the “Jewish problem.” His reservations about Zionism, combined with personal insecurities— including suicidal thoughts that plagued him when he was in his 20s—recall other members of the Jewish intelligentsia of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Theodor Herzl. As opposed to the accepted identification of Dinur as an energetic, idealistic figure who became a “national historian,” the diary allows us to view a man who was far from being a deeply devoted Zionist (pp. 56, 70, 94). In the early 1920s,

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he even faced the accusation that he was not dedicated enough to the Zionist effort, being considered instead as a “territorialist – socialist-Yiddishist” (p. 123). Born in Khorol (Poltava, Ukraine) to a Hassidic family, Dinur first studied at elite Lithuanian yeshivot. Later, having drawn close to the socialist movement, he received academic training at the Berlin Hochschule, Bern University, and Petrograd University. From the outset of his career in Palestine, he regarded history as a vital tool for the molding of national identity, and also as a positive source of lessons that were valuable for the Zionist project. Thus, he did not object to the creation of historical analogies, despite the methodological problems of utilizing them as a historian: “We often use analogies, sometimes going back to the time when Joshua conquered the land of Israel, but mainly to the era of the Return from Exile. [. . .] From this perspective, we have a special interest in the Crusades. The immigrants (’olim) may be different, but the opponents are the same, almost the same as those facing us today . . .” (p. 130).3 Hayim Nahman Bialik had a recognizable influence on Dinur’s historiography, particularly on the latter’s penchant for anthologies (see, for example, pp. 322–332). Dinur’s summarizing works on Jewish history were strongly influenced by the national cultural trend led by Bialik, Ahad Ha’am, and others. In relying on the historical continuity of Jewish culture, Dinur operated in the same vein as other national historians in Europe, as Arielle Rein shows in her research. Furthermore, unlike more radical Zionists, Dinur refused to reject the diaspora heritage. Dinur’s memoir ’Im ’am ’oleh (With a rising people) (pp. 106–191) completes biographical aspects of his life from 1921 to 1926. Upon beginning his work in Palestine, he quickly rose to a position of honor among the country’s cultural leaders. In the early 1920s, he served as a teacher at the Jerusalem Teachers Seminary, where he taught history, literature, and Bible studies. He utilized his impressive command of Jewish literature, from ancient classical texts to modern Hebrew works, to construct the Jewish past as a national past, while also implementing advanced teaching strategies such as combining Jewish history along with general history (pp. 149–151). The second half of this volume includes texts (most of them previously published) that reflect Dinur’s work as an activist educator and historian who viewed Zionist education as a lever to revitalize the nation. For example, beginning in the 1930s, Dinur formulated a curriculum for teaching Zionism in various educational frameworks, including the teachers council of the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet). The collection includes Dinur’s programmatic introductions to various projects he undertook: historical research, bibliographies, the setting up of archives, and anthologies. It also contains records of his activity as a historian after 1948, although for some reason his contributions to the Israeli school curriculum of the mid-1950s have not been included. In sum, the publication of these writings is welcome, and a debt of thanks is owed to Arielle Rein for her work on editing the texts. The copious footnotes aid the reader to achieve a deeper understanding of the texts, although the absence of an index is regrettable. YITZHAK CONFORTI Bar-Ilan University

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Notes 1. See, for example, Uri Ram, Hazeman shel ha“post”: leumiyut upolitikah shel hayed’a beyisrael (Tel Aviv: 2006), 19–70. On Dinur’s ideological stance, see David N. Myers, “History as Ideology: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur, Zionist Historian ‘Par Excellence’,” Modern Judaism 8 (May 1988), 167–193. Some researchers, such as Arielle Rein and Dani Marom, have focused their research on Dinur’s essential work in the fields of education and history. See Arielle Rein, “Historeyon bevinui umah: tzemih.ato shel Ben Zion Dinur umifalo bayishuv (1884–1948)” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 2000); Dani Marom, “Haguto ufoalo shel Ben Zion Dinur kemeh.anekh” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 2000). A comprehensive bibliography of studies on Dinur appears in the volume under review (pp. 11–12, notes 1–3). 2. This criticism of Dinur was raised by Jacob Katz as early as 1956. See Katz, Leumiyut yehudit: masot umeh.karim (Jerusalem: 1983), 230–238. 3. This attitude is interesting in relation to the role of the Crusader myth in Zionism. The topic has been researched extensively by David Ohana, in Lo kena’anim lo tzalbanim: mekorot hamitologiyah hayisreelit (Ramat Gan: 2008), although his book does not address this text by Dinur.

Haya Gavish, Unwitting Zionists: The Jewish Community of Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. xi + 439 pp.

The uprooting of Jewish communities that had existed in Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa for many centuries—sometimes for more than two thousand years—and the immigration of most of the Jews to Israel, is one of the most fascinating phenomena to have taken place in these regions during the 20th century. In historical perspective, the change happened virtually overnight: out of approximately one million Jews who had lived in these countries prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, fewer than 100,000 Jews remained there two decades later.1 Today they number no more than 40,000, most of them in Iran and Turkey. This aliyah, however, did not begin with the establishment of the state. The Jews’ exodus from these countries to Palestine dates back to the middle of the 19th century. This fact stands out with regard to emigrants from small Jewish communities located in remote areas that were far from the main transportation arteries, commercial cities, and government centers. Thanks to their isolation, such communities maintained their traditional lifestyles and ancient culture, and those who emigrated mainly chose Jerusalem as their destination. This was evident in the city’s pre-1948 population, which included Jews from Bukhara, Urfa, Yemen, and Kurdistan. The most conspicuous group was that of Yemenite Jews, who started making their way to Jerusalem in the 1880s. Approximately one-third of all Yemenite Jews were already living in Palestine when the state of Israel was established. A similar phenomenon, though less well known, marks the Jews from Zakho, a small town in northern Iraq (Kurdistan), near the Syrian and Turkish borders. The aliyah from Zakho began in the mid-19th century, when a few families left the town and traveled west until they reached Jerusalem. It continued for the next several decades, to the point that about half of all Zakho Jews lived in Israel in 1948. Two years later, when the large-scale aliyah from Iraq (Operation Ezra and Nehemiah) began, all of the remaining Zakho Jews emigrated to Israel

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en masse. This aliyah was part of the large wave of immigrants that flooded Israel in its early years. The aliyah from Zakho is the main topic of Haya Gavish’s book. In studying this phenomenon, Gavish examines the local context of the Jewish community of Zakho, its image, and its characteristics. More specifically, she looks at the community’s history in its last century. This proves to be no simple task; because Zakho was a small and remote locality, formal documentation of the town and its Jewish community is negligible. Even within the Jewish community, everyday matters were rarely recorded, possibly because such documentation was not considered important, and possibly, too, because of the community’s high rate of illiteracy. These circumstances presented Gavish with a challenge: how could she reconstruct the lifestyle of Zakho Jews, their mentality, and their relationships among themselves and with their Kurdish Muslim neighbors, with other Jewish communities in the region, and with the central government under Ottoman, then British, and then Iraqi rule? How could she describe the events and changes that Zakho Jews experienced, which eventually led to their pulling up roots and making aliyah? These questions are asked on the assumption that in order to describe and analyze the phenomenon of this particular aliyah, history needs to be written “bottom-up”—that is, by means of focusing on the lives of ordinary people who did not leave their fingerprints in the existing historical documentation. Gavish deals with this complex challenge by combining historical research based on oral and written documents with a study of popular literature. In the historical realm, she reconstructs the backdrop and the historical contexts by amassing an impressive collection of details scattered in various studies of the region’s history. She also relies on written sources of the period, including accounts by European tourists who recorded their impressions of the region in letters, newspaper articles, and memoirs. In addition, she draws on the reports of diplomats, charity collectors sent out from the land of Israel, and Zionist emissaries. However, the main source for her study is oral documentation, including dozens of in-depth interviews that she conducted with the immigrants and their descendants. These two types of documentation, external and internal, are integrated and cross-checked both to verify the historical reliability of the information and to analyze its significance. On the basis of these sources, readers are presented with social and cultural history at its best. The book presents the dynamics of relationships that existed in this traditional nonmodern society, in the context of family life and the status of women and children. It also describes life-cycle rituals, customs, beliefs, and other aspects of the Jewish community, including its relations with its Muslim neighbors. Beyond this, Gavish’s study sheds light on the Jewish self-identity of the Zakho community. Despite the great distance between their community and others, which leads Gavish to describe Zakho Jews as “living in a bubble,” they manifested strong solidarity with other Jewish communities. This was especially noteworthy during the Second World War, when they learned of the holocaust of European Jewry by listening to the radio and by reading between the lines of the local press. From a religious point of view, their perception of Jewry as a diaspora, with the land of Israel as its center, was never in doubt.

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These descriptions and analysis are a welcome byproduct of the main focus of Gavish’s research, the aliyah of Zakho Jews. She shows how the process began with the emigration of a few families prior to the First World War, with the scale of emigration gradually expanding in the interwar period. Some received immigration certificates to Mandatory Palestine, but the majority went first to Syria and Lebanon and from there entered Palestine as tourists or pilgrims, staying on as illegal immigrants. Shortly after the establishment of Israel, almost all the Jews of Iraq, including those remaining in Zakho, made aliyah. The main issue addressed by this study is how that aliyah should be regarded. Was it motivated by religion or by more everyday push-and-pull factors? Or was it rather an ideological aliyah with Zionist motives? Did the mass immigration to the state of Israel represent a historical continuity, or was it something new? Gavish chooses not to analyze the matter; instead, she presents readers with the aliyah narrative of the Zakho Jews as it emerges from their own stories. This narrative combines religious, economic, and political motives, along with a concern for personal security. It even includes supernatural forces that erected obstacles in the immigrants’ paths, as well as miracles that led to their salvation. Some of the immigrants defined their religious attraction to Jerusalem as Zionist in nature and their immigration as a Zionist aliyah. Gavish, while not analyzing this attitude, adopts it and projects it onto the entire aliyah. Thus the name of her book and its main motto: Unwitting Zionists. It is impossible to ignore the problematic nature of this narrative. First, the stories of Zakho Jews include numerous details that do not point to Zionism. For instance, the exodus from Zakho began well before the appearance of political Zionism and stemmed from push factors that are typical of migration processes. Moreover, in the 1940s, when there was an active Zionist movement in Iraq, young Zakho Jews barely showed interest in it. Although a few of them helped to smuggle Jews across the borders, they themselves did not join the convoys. It is clear from the book that some had no interest in aliyah, whether because they were satisfied with their economic situation in Iraq, or else because they supported the Iraqi nationalist movement. The Zionist narrative offered by Zakho Jews is voiced in interviews conducted many years after their aliyah and is consistent with the official Israeli interpretation that ascribes Zionist motives to the aliyah from Muslim countries. Although Gavish does not deal with this issue, it seems clear that these stories, with their inconsistencies, reflect later issues of identity in a Zionist state rather than the situation as perceived by Zakho Jews at the time of their emigration. It also seems that their adoption of the Zionist interpretation is neither coincidental nor unwitting, because in Israel it was more prestigious to be a Zionist than a refugee or an immigrant. The story of the Jewish community of Zakho is also the main subject of a fascinating memoir, My Father’s Paradise, written by Ariel Sabar, the son of Yona Sabar, a scholar of Jewish Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Jewish folklore.2 My Father’s Paradise describes a multicultural paradise in which Jews lived peacefully for 2,700 years, much of the time in coexistence with Muslims. Sabar attributes emigration to Palestine to personal motives rather than being an outcome of nationalism or antisemitism, and describes the later mass immigration as an “uprooting,” one of the byproducts of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

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A comparison of the main themes of these books reveals contradicting narratives: one was written in Israel and reflects the Zionist attitude that, to a large extent, still prevails in Israel; whereas Sabar’s narrative was written by the son of a Zakho immigrant who left Israel for the United States. Both books reflect conceptions that were molded a few decades after the exodus from Zakho, yet the differences between the two narratives work to cast doubt on both the “paradise” of Sabar’s book and the “unwitting Zionism” in Gavish’s account. This disjunction demonstrates the lack of comprehensive research on the emigration/uprooting of Jewish communities from Islamic countries in the 20th century. Despite some flaws, Unwitting Zionists is an important book that offers a fascinating example of the interaction of the Jewish communities at the beginning of the modern era with the agents of modernity and nationalism. The book combines official and establishment history, “bottom-up” history, Zionist history, and Jewish history. It tells us not only about the Jews of Zakho and their aliyah, but also about the way in which they wish to etch their past on the Israeli collective memory. ESTHER MEIR-GLITZENSTEIN Ben-Gurion University

Notes 1. See Haim Saadoun (ed.), Begaluy uvaseter: ha’aliyot hagedolot mearatzot haislam (1948–1967) (Jerusalem: 1999), 13. 2. Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Chapel Hill: 2008).

Esther Hertzog, Orit Abuhav, Harvey E. Goldberg, and Emanuel Marx (eds.), Perspectives on Israeli Anthropology. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. 732 pp.

Perspectives on Israeli Anthropology begins with an extended introduction that outlines the origins of Israeli anthropology, tracing its development and major intellectual currents and achievements until the present day. To a very limited degree the book follows that history, yet even from the first selections of Part 1—“A Country of Immigrants”—it is clear that the idyllic scenes of 1960s village anthropology, which in the case of Israel were presented mainly in studies focusing on kibbutzim, moshavim, or Arab rural communities, were largely misleading. Such communities were often profoundly affected by the discontinuities brought about through emigration, relocation, and dislocation; in later years, these communities grappled with overwhelming cultural, economic, and political forces of the wider society. In the case of the kibbutz, the struggle happened a little later and had to do with the political and economic changes within Israel proper and of globalization more generally, which wreaked havoc with local economies based on small-scale agriculture and manufacturing.

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New states such as Israel face a particularly challenging task in legitimating themselves, and the inventedness of their public cultures is more transparent than that of states of longer duration. National holidays (both celebratory and commemorative), flags, historical patrimony, national museums, language academies, and living treasures such as writers, artists, and scholars—all serve to buttress the legitimacy of the state, sometimes by means of the appropriation of indigenous minority cultures, and certainly through the evocation (no matter how grudging) of the traditional culture(s) of the majority, albeit resurrected in largely symbolic form. Not all such evocations are a result of state intervention. The first essay of this volume is a segment of Shlomo Deshen’s study of immigrants from the Djerba community of Tunisia. Deshen demonstrates that the decrease in traditional religious practice may be accompanied by what would appear at face value to be evidence of heightened religiosity—an increase in the publication and purchase of traditional texts. Such books, he shows, unlike the context in which they were generated prior to immigration, are today largely beyond the intellectual reach of those producing and purchasing them; their value is largely talismanic, constituting what Deshen defines as a “ritualization of literacy.” Harvey Goldberg’s essay on the introduction of the dance known as the twist into the celebratory culture of the Tripolitanian moshav during the 1960s reveals the mechanisms through which young people adopt, albeit hesitantly, new cultural forms—a particularly striking phenomenon in a small community that takes pride in its cultural tenacity, and whose political affiliation at the national level would steer the community toward increased traditionalism. Interestingly, the reverse is true in regard to agricultural technology, where the ready acceptance of innovation is the source of its prosperity. Yael Katzir, considering the place of Yemeni women in Israeli rural society, shows how their social networks (stemming from small-scale retail trade outside the moshav) have given them the means to manipulate the male-dominated public sphere within the settlement. And Arnold Lewis’ essay on “Oriental Jews” demonstrates the ways in which the putative cultural category “Oriental” masks the socioeconomic inequalities within Israeli society, the cultural “deficiency” of Near Eastern and North African Jews vis-à-vis the Ashkenazic elite being the explanatory model through which social facts are organized by outsiders, always at the expense of a model of institutional discrimination. The second part of the book, “Pervasive Bureaucracy,” contains five essays constituting an ethnography of the state, among them Lea Shamgar-Handelman and Don Handelman’s influential essay on kindergarten birthday parties. Part 3, “Negotiating Society,” emphasizes Israeli public culture and includes Tamar Katriel’s essay on “fire inscriptions” at youth movement ceremonies and Hagar Salamon’s piece on Israel’s ubiquitous and assertively political and/or religious bumper stickers. As many of the essays make clear, Israel’s public culture (even its language) is clearly invented (although, as in the case of language and Jerusalem place names, to name just two items, attempts to extirpate the past are not always successful). At the same time, traces of what preceded this culture are evident everywhere, albeit often displaced (as in the case of a significant part of the Arab population); such traces are well represented in this collection, which is perhaps not so surprising given the increasing impetus within Israeli academia to come to terms with the country’s Arab minority.

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An astute editorial hand is apparent in the selection of the concluding essay in Part 3, Tamar El-Or and Gideon Aran’s “Giving Birth to a Settlement,” which constitutes a bridge to the next section, titled “Accommodating Palestinians.” This part of the volume consists of seven essays, including Eyal Ben-Ari’s thoughtful piece on army reserve duty in Hebron (if I am not mistaken, the collection’s only example of reflexive anthropology); Dan Rabinowitz’s moving account of an Israeli Arab coach of a Jewish Israeli basketball team; and Susan Slyomovics study (the only essay by someone who is not Israeli, whether native-born or immigrant) of the post-1948 reconstruction of the Arab town of Ein Houd not far from its former location (the original town is now a Jewish artist colony) and its ongoing quest for official recognition as a township. The history of relocations that Slyomovics details may be shocking to those unfamiliar with the subject. The section ends with a fine account of Bedouin childbirth practices by Aref Abu-Rabia, followed by a study of Arab women textile workers and their Arab managers. The final essay is Emanuel Marx’s informative piece on landownership among the Bedouin of the Negev. Part 5, “Israeli Jewishness,” comes full circle to Part 1, “A Country of Immigrants.” This section includes Henry Abramovitch’s meticulous ethnography of the Hevra Kadisha burial society (a nice counterpoint to Abu-Rabia’s piece on Bedouin childbirth) and Yoram Bilu and Yehuda Goodman’s fascinating work, “What Does the Soul Say,” which introduces readers to the place of peripheral mysticism via facilitated communication within haredi communities—that is, “communication” by individuals incapable of normal speech (as, for instance, someone suffering from severe autism), which is facilitated by others and interpreted in mystical fashion. (One source for the value placed on such communication is the talmudic dictum that, since the destruction of the Temple, prophesy is now the domain of children and fools.) Also included in this section are André Levy’s thick description of card games among Jews and Muslims on a beach in Casablanca, Alex Weingrod’s provocative essay on representation of the past in two different Israeli communities, and Rahel Wasserfall’s reading of the relationship between laws relating to ritual impurity (nidah) and Moroccan women’s identity. Although fewer than a third of the 30 essays in Perspectives on Israeli Anthropology are new, the editors have done an invaluable service in assembling this material—most of it compelling reading even for a reviewer—and making it readily accessible for teaching purposes. This volume is also useful for those contemplating fieldwork in Israel who might wish to get a sense of the work already done and the underlying issues fueling it. Moreover, anyone not familiar with the anthropological community in Israel may be surprised to learn how numerous are its subjects; how varied are its methodologies (reflecting an array of intellectual traditions within anthropology, including English, French, American, and home-grown Israeli); and perhaps most important, how politically diverse it is. And if Israeli anthropology is in any sense provincial, this may be all for the good: as the editors point out, the field is distinguished by its commitment to the peoples who reside within Israel’s borders. Like any collection, there are some apparent deficiencies within the volume, more in the sense of what does not appear rather than what does, which the editors might have addressed, at least by way of outlining a possible program for recommended research. The most egregious omissions are those dealing with urban issues. There is

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nothing in this collection on Tel Aviv, whose culture is distinctly “non-tribal” Israeli—nothing on the city’s jet-setters (to use a term that now sounds a bit anachronistic) who feel just as much at home in New York, Paris, or London; its gay community; or its art scene. Also missing is any consideration of Haifa as an ethnically mixed city, or of Jerusalem’s increasingly fragile secular community. There is no discussion of planning issues—what might be termed the “imperial” idiom of Jerusalem’s mega-building projects; how the city of Modi’in was conceived and developed. Similarly, the recent French migration and its impact on Israel’s central cities goes unmentioned. I suppose that little of this work has been done, and that, as in anthropology elsewhere, the city and the lifestyles it fosters rarely figure as subjects in their own right. Also absent is any analysis of the expatriate communities of Israelis in the United States and elsewhere, and the temporary communities of young Israelis in the Far East and South America. Regrettably, there is also nothing in the volume on music—an inclusion that would have given the collection a stronger representation of expressive culture. Israel studies is an important new area within Jewish and Middle East studies, and one can only hope that its expansion will open the way for the inclusion of more anthropologists in these fields. This collection makes clear just how developed is the anthropological study of Israel, and how much it deserves to be represented within Jewish and Middle East studies and within anthropology more generally. JACK KUGELMASS University of Florida

Jack Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009. xii + 185 pp.

There has been renewed interest over the past decade in the history of the Jewish socialist party known as the Bund (Algemeyner yidisher arbeter bund in lite, poyln un rusland—the General Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), especially with regard to its activities in interwar Poland. This is a welcome development since, unlike the more extensive historiography that has been devoted to the Bund in Russia in the pre-revolutionary period, comparatively little has been written on the course of the movement’s fortunes in independent Poland. Several recent studies have contributed to this new trend, in which new attention has been paid to the social and cultural aspects of Bundism. Jack Jacobs’ book belongs to this select group. However, his approach, in which a political organization is presented as the framework for a different kind of “culture” serving as a counterweight to that of the capitalist environment, raises more than a few difficulties. Jacobs’ suggestion, in brief, is that Bundist “counterculture” constitutes evidence of the party’s commitment to achieving its long-stated goal of shaping a Jewish national-cultural autonomy. In his introduction, Jacobs offers a revisionist interpretation of the Bund’s impressive electoral successes during the second half of the 1930s, when it sponsored candidates both for local Jewish community boards and for city councils. Past research

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has posited several different explanations for this phenomenon, which boosted an erstwhile sectoral workingman’s party with relatively little voice into the role of a major political representative of Polish Jewry. Thus, it has been variously suggested that the Bund’s political gains reflected the general political changes that swept over Europe at the time, the crisis besetting the Zionist camp on the eve of the Second World War, the liquidation of the Communist party in Poland in 1938, certain ideological changes undertaken by the Bund, and the altered socioeconomic situation of the Jewish working class. As Jacobs sees it, none of these explanatory schemes adequately accounts for the dimensions of new political support given to the Bund. The underlying cause, he feels, must be sought in the special counterculture promoted by Bundist activities in the social and cultural spheres, which addressed the needs of children and youth as well as promoting sporting activities, educational work, and women’s activism. In contrast to the sense among other scholars that the Bund’s prominence in the late 1930s did not augur long-term shifts in the Bund’s ideological popularity but was instead largely a function of immediate factors in the political life of those years, Jacobs argues that the steady increase in the Bund’s social networks and educational activities denoted a more fundamental increase in the Jewish public’s support for the party. That groundswell was abruptly cut short by the outbreak of war in 1939. The book consists of five separate essays (a few of which have been published separately), tied loosely to each other. Each essay deals, respectively, with one particular instance of institutions or organizations founded (or revived) by the Bund in interwar Poland: the youth group known as Tsukunft, the children’s movement SKIF (Sotsyalistisher kinder farband), the athletics and sports group Morgenshtern, the Medem Sanatorium (a unique medical and educational facility that catered specifically to hundreds of tubercular children), and the women’s organization YAF (Yidishe arbeter-froyen organizatsye). Jacobs devotes about half of each chapter to a description of the particular group or institution and its history, offering membership data or information on its local branches, as well as short biographical sketches of its main leaders. Throughout, Jacobs relies almost entirely on internal movement reports, without attempting to verify the data via cross-tabulation with other sources. For example, he might have turned to reports of the Polish police, whose accounts from the 1930s contain summaries of its surveillance of Jewish and other political organizations suspected of “subversive” leanings. Similarly, he does not look at material from other political movements (Jewish or otherwise, including the Polish Socialist Party, the PPS), which reveal much information on the Bund and its activities. Such material would have provided corroborating evidence or, in some cases, the opportunity for a more critical reading of the Bund’s own self-reporting. The importance that Jacobs ascribes to the internal organization of party affiliates, which he sees as supplying the evidence he seeks of large-scale Jewish support, ought perhaps to have prompted him to invest greater research in this regard. I find the main problem in the book, however, not in the handling of source material— nor, indeed, in the fact that some of Jacobs’ conclusions appear to lack any valid documentation, or else rely on material not directly relevant to the point he is making. Rather, the main problem, as I see it, is that while Jacobs attributes to the Polish Bund

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a unique party “culture,” he does not actually provide a historical definition of that culture. His conclusions, therefore, are not always persuasive, given that the individual organizations and institutions (each with its own character and purpose) do not appear to add up to an internally consistent, collective counterculture: the cornerstone of Jacobs’ theory. Thus, in the chapter devoted to Tsukunft, Jacobs describes a series of articles by Sophia Dubnow-Erlich that was published in the early 1930s in the organization’s periodical, Yugnt-veker. The author of these pieces was married to the Bundist leader Henryk Erlich and was the daughter of Simon Dubnow, the seminal Jewish historian. During those years, Dubnow-Erlich displayed a growing interest in psychological and pedagogical theories regarding sex education for adolescents, and she was persuaded that these subjects needed airing among teenagers, given their sensitivity to and complex grappling with their own developmental processes. Jacobs asserts that many Tsukunft members read these articles, took them up in discussion circles with their group leaders, and in the process helped to make Tsukunft an attractive venue for numerous adolescents looking for a modern, open, and engaging environment in which to weigh sensitive issues. This, we are told, became an important educational objective for Tsukunft and indeed part of its overall outlook, which aimed at creating a “new man” (naye mentsh)—a personality capable of upholding values at odds with those of the rest of society. In turn, the recruitment of so many young people to the movement’s youth wing in the 1930s had a quantitative influence on the growth of the party. Although this is an interesting point, Jacobs’ conclusions are based solely on Dubnow-Erlich’s memoirs (in which she wrote that she was called upon to lecture on the subject before quite a number of movement groups) along with those of one or two other movement members who recalled that they, too, had occasion to touch on sex education in one forum or another. This is not to belittle the efforts made by Tsukunft to broach topics for the sake of its members’ enlightenment, bearing in mind that most of the members came from working-class families and many had to leave the school system at a relatively early juncture in their lives. For instance, Abrasha Blum, an engineer and a leading figure in the Warsaw branch of Tsukunft as well as its leader during the ghetto period during the Second World War, wrote a series of articles in Yugnt-veker dealing with technological inventions and scientific innovations and their impact on modern life. At the same time, Tsukunft was first and foremost a party organization whose aim was to groom a cadre of youthful, politically aware, class-conscious activists. The movement stressed ideological indoctrination based on firm political beliefs that were anchored in the party’s political mythology. One of the key mythic figures in party lore was the revolutionary hero Hirsh Lekert. Thousands of young Bundists grew up on the story of his martyrdom—but his name does not appear even once in Jacobs’ book. (Lekert was a young Bundist executed in 1902 after a May Day demonstration in Vilna.) It would not be amiss to remark that many more Tsukunft members would have been more familiar with Lekert than with Dubnow-Erlich’s pieces on sexuality or Blum’s articles on modern technological advances. We might look, as well, at the chapter that deals with the Medem Sanatorium. This was one of the crowning achievements of the medical and educational system developed by Jews in interwar Poland, both known and highly regarded even beyond

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Poland’s borders. Its remarkable methods of medical treatment for children with tuberculosis, integrated with new, open approaches to schooling, turned it into an impressive success story; at the same time, it was continually plagued by financial problems, to the extent that its continued existence was threatened during the latter half of the 1930s. The sanatorium was affiliated with the Yiddishist school system, Tsisho (Tsentrale yidishe shul organizatsiye), which was supported by the Bund as well as by the radical left-wing Zionist party Poale Zion-Left and a number of smaller groups. Tsisho, too, was in chronic financial trouble, among other reasons because of steadily decreasing enrollment. Ezra Mendelsohn has correctly concluded that the school system’s ideological and budgetary problems posed basic questions about its long-term durability and the potential (had it not been for the war) of maintaining the Yiddishist movement within Polish Jewry. Indeed, the late Chone Shmeruk, one of the great scholars of Yiddish culture in our day, once posited that during the 1930s there was a noticeable drift toward the Polish language in Jewish society, with Polish becoming the main vehicle for communication and schooling. That trend, undoubtedly, would have continued apace had it not been cut short in 1939. Jacobs, however, wants us to believe otherwise. He claims that Tsisho’s circumstances did not directly reflect upon the sanatorium’s situation. Despite the decline in overall Tsisho school enrollments, there was a waiting list of children hoping to enter the sanatorium. These children were not just the sons and daughters of Bund members, though most were from the working class. Some were from other social backgrounds, and there were even a few Polish (that is, non-Jewish) children. Here, Jacobs’ argument falls short: these children were not sent by their parents to the sanatorium to receive a Yiddishist education in an open-school environment with socialistic leanings, thus prompting their families to become political supporters of the Bund in Warsaw’s city council elections, but rather to save their lives. For all that tuberculosis was a disease that flourished in conditions of chronic poverty, crowded living quarters, and lack of adequate public hygiene and sanitation, the attempt to discover a political link between the undoubted success of the Medem Sanatorium and the rising political fortunes of the Bund in those years is contrived, to say the least. In conclusion, one may read Jacobs’ volume as a synthesis of cultural history and Jewish political history—not without a certain tendentious quality—that demonstrates the importance of organizations that were affiliated with the Bund in interwar Poland. It is based on documentation from within Bundist records and should certainly be read by students of Polish Jewish history in the 20th century. But one cannot credit Jacobs with successfully challenging the view, already generally accepted, that the Bund’s political ascent in the late 1930s was essentially a function of immediate causes that reflected the harsh political realities of Jewish life in Poland at that time. What we really need in terms of a renewed historiography on the Bund is a proper cultural history of the movement. For example, how was May Day celebrated by Tsukunft?1 What literature did young Bundists read; what films or plays did they see; what were their preferred cultural pursuits? What was written in the newspapers and periodicals they published in reference to their homes and families? What songs and stories did they write and disseminate? What sort of social activities took place in their clubs? What was courtship like among young Bundist adolescents? What

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happened at the sports events in which they competed against teams from other movements? Jacobs occasionally gives us a glimpse or hint of such topics (in his discussion of Morgenshtern and the place of football and boxing in Bundist circles), but in these sections generally relies on other scholars’ work. His book does not provide a solid cultural history of this impressive political movement, which the Bund surely deserves. DANIEL BLATMAN The Hebrew University

Note 1. On Bundist May Day celebrations, see Daniel Mahla, “Between Socialism and Jewish Tradition: Bundist Holiday Culture in Interwar Poland,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 24, The Protestant-Jewish Conundrum, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 2010), esp. 178–181.

Carole S. Kessner, Marie Syrkin: Values beyond the Self. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2008. xii + 479 pp.

Carole Kessner has written a rich and engaging biography of Marie Syrkin (1899– 1989), whose vigilant and vibrant life—full of devotion to, and defense of the Jewish people in turbulent times—spanned almost the entire 20th century. Kessner presents her subject as a heroine. Syrkin, a polemical journalist, poet, socialist Zionist, and self-styled feminist, was arguably the most eminent and influential person among what Kessner, in an earlier book, called “the other New York Jewish intellectuals”— leaders in the Jewish community who were actively engaged in Jewish life, as distinct from such figures as Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt, Nathan Glazer, and Alfred Kazin, who, while never distancing themselves fully from Jewishness, did not make it the center of their identities. Marie Syrkin was born in Bern, Switzerland, the daughter of Nachman Syrkin, a pre-eminent labor Zionist, and Bassya Nachman, an activist in her own right. By her ninth birthday, Marie had also lived in Germany, France, and Russia. Her “Papa,” who exerted tremendous influence over Marie, “was always getting exiled,” Syrkin quipped much later, “so we traveled a lot” (p. 49). In 1908, she arrived in the United States with her family. Already a gifted and precocious child, Marie’s intellectual growth, political sophistication, and literary ambition were encouraged by both the household environment and her father’s coterie of associates, which included Mordecai Kaplan, Sholom Aleichem, and Sholom Asch. Her mother died when Marie was only 16, and her father became an even more dominant and controlling figure in her life. The politics she learned at home held an abiding interest for Marie, but she seemed to be equally interested in literature, and she first came to public attention as a poet and deft translator of Yiddish. The details of her personal life are difficult to pack into a review, and at times Kessner meanders

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too much to lay them out coherently in her book. Suffice it here to say that by the time she was 25, Marie had suffered through two failed marriages (a third marriage, to the poet Charles Reznikoff, lasted for decades but was marked by emotional turmoil), the loss of a child, the birth of another, and the death of her father. Kessner grapples with the question of why at this point Syrkin turned her full attention to politics and journalism, but she does not give a direct or clear enough answer; perhaps with her formidable father gone, Marie felt she could do more of what he had done without interference. In 1933, Syrkin, in Palestine for the first time, was overwhelmed by the spirit and dedication of the h.alutzim in the Yishuv and in the kibbutzim. She believed she was witnessing a rare if not unique example of an “idea” come to full fruition. By 1939, however, her joy was tempered by the plight of millions of European Jews, trapped between Hitler and Stalin and their brutal efforts to impose ideologically conflicting “utopias” throughout Eastern Europe. In response, Syrkin became an advocate of “aliyah bet”—illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. Her articles on this subject and other Jewish concerns appeared in many magazines, including the Jewish Frontier, which she helped establish in 1934. In her role as editor of this magazine, Syrkin helped shape an American Zionism in the late 1930s, a peak period of antisemitism both in the United States and in “the bloodlands” of Europe.1 Following the war, when the enormity of the Holocaust had become clearer, Syrkin wrote Blessed is the Match as a counterpoint to the widespread and demeaning image of Jews as sheep led unresistingly to slaughter. In 1946, attending the 22nd Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland after having moved among “the gaunt figures with hollow eyes” in the DP camps, she passionately promoted the establishment of a Jewish state in a portion of Palestine. Two decades later, following the Six-Day War in 1967, she argued against the construction of settlements beyond the prewar borders. Neatly described by Kessner as a “rational romantic,” Syrkin was never a blinkered ideologue; she recognized Israel’s mistakes, but never wavered in her commitment either to Zionism or to tolerance and justice for the Arab population. Moreover, even at her most polemical, Syrkin displayed an irrepressible wit. In a 1969 essay on Palestinian nationalism, she responded to an Arab call for a reversal of the Balfour Declaration on the grounds that Muslim, Christian, and Jew could all inhabit the same land. “Obviously,” she noted, “Israel is unlikely to accede to a formula for its extinction no matter how graciously phrased” (p. 424). At the same time, she wrote that even if Palestinian nationalism “did spring belatedly out of the head of Arab nationalism as a hostile response to Israel,” that point was no longer relevant because the “lad is alive and kicking and calling him bastard will not exorcise him.”2 Shortly before her death twenty years later, Syrkin looked back on her decades of support for Israel and wondered what had been accomplished. In the end, the establishment of a Jewish state had not eradicated the world’s most enduring hatred; nor was Zionism’s dream of normalcy realized, given that its legitimacy was still questioned. Nonetheless, Syrkin did not think Zionists had engaged in a useless labor— only that the dream had to be adapted to reality. That, she warned, was “the price of survival” (p. 269). ḥ

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Kessner’s close friendship with Marie Syrkin allowed her to conduct many indepth interviews over a period of years, and enabled her to bring us details we would otherwise have missed. This material is sewn carefully into what Kessner was able to garner from disparate collections of correspondence, and the synthesis makes for a special and empathic book. However, while not overlooking many instances of political confusion, ambiguity, and idiosyncrasy on Syrkin’s part, or the fact that the great woman was often insensitive and rude, Kessner (often relying on psychoanalytical terminology) goes to great lengths to explain away her subject’s failings and foibles. This lack of critical distance adds an unfortunate layer of sentimentality to an otherwise valuable biography of a woman who was a model of courageous, responsible, and progressive idealism. GERALD SORIN State University of New York at New Paltz

Notes 1. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: 2010). 2. Marie Syrkin, “Who are the Palestinians,” in People and Politics in the Middle East, ed. Michael Curtis (New Brunswick: 1971), 93–99.

Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880–1920: From Caste to Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xxiii + 224 pp.

In the last decade, economic history has emerged as one of the most fertile fields in Jewish studies. More than a generation ago, the subject inspired pioneering works, but only recently have contemporary scholars reengaged seriously with the dynamics of Jewish economic behavior. Eli Lederhendler’s new book is a welcome and thought-provoking addition to the literature in this burgeoning field. Lederhendler’s purpose is to reassert class as a chief interpretive framework for understanding immigrant Jewish behavior in America. He challenges recent scholarship that places primary emphasis on ethnicity and culture as explanatory paradigms, arguing that those analytic categories are essentialist and motivated largely by the contemporary preoccupation with identity politics. Confronting the prevailing wisdom that accounts for Jewish mobility by invoking the European background of immigrants and the culture that they brought with them upon arrival, Lederhendler essentially turns that historical model on its head. He insists instead that it was the nation’s fluid and dynamic capitalist system that made possible Jewish integration into America’s economy, spurring Jewish cultural development. In making his case for the primacy of class, Lederhendler persuasively refutes the common assertions that Jews’ higher rates of literacy, familiarity with urban culture, and work experience in Eastern Europe predisposed them for rapid success as immigrants in America. Rather, he claims, Jews had been impoverished and systematically isolated in Eastern Europe; few possessed modern industrial skills or understood how

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to operate in a western capitalist society. They may have been literate in their own languages, but there is little evidence to suggest that this helped them secure work in manufacturing or commerce in the United States. In sum, their pre-migration experience did not prepare them to succeed in America’s urban economy—whatever skills they developed “were not carried over on the boat, but were acquired over time spent working in American industry” (p. 47). Lederhendler argues further that conditions in Eastern Europe deprived Jews of social capital, a term he defines as “the ability to successfully assert and deploy one’s personality and self-regard in the context of relationships with others” (p. xix). Only in the United States did Jews acquire class status, no matter how meager their work and paychecks might be, and with it, the social capital to begin to integrate and move forward in American society. Making use of this idea of social capital as well as the concept of honor, Lederhendler goes on to present a nuanced interpretation of how class operates as a social force. More than merely a hierarchy of wealth or prestige, class emerges in this study as a category that enables social relations and opportunity, sets the stage for work conditions, and also helps to frame community and culture. Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism does not wholly discount the power of ethnic culture. In fact, one of the book’s most insightful discussions highlights the role played by Central European Jews, who had arrived earlier in the 19th century, in helping East European immigrants gain a foothold in American industry. Lederhendler argues that new immigrants benefited from the presence of an established Jewish middle class that predominated in manufacturing. Social networks, word-ofmouth, and a sense of social responsibility on the part of Jewish employers did, in fact, create an ethnic niche for Jews within American industry, though Lederhendler stresses that this niche did not constitute an ethnic economy and that class considerations, not ethnicity, became the driving force in guiding the occupational development of immigrants. In this discussion, Lederhendler also contributes effectively to revising the portrait of the often strained relationship between “German” and East European Jews, emphasizing both the valuable services provided by Central European Jews to their co-religionists and the ways in which they served as role models for immigrants eager to embrace American norms for success. Lederhendler appreciates the dynamics of ethnic community and its sources of support, all the while arguing that the existence of an established Jewish community in the United States was far more vital in shaping immigrant behavior than any prior work experience or ethnic ties the immigrants had brought from Europe. Despite its primary concern with class and economic history, Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism utilizes a diverse array of sources and firmly grounds its arguments in the realms of social and cultural history. Lederhendler presents a vast amount of statistical and demographic data, but also relies heavily on memoir literature, which he uses to give voice to the ways that Jews perceived and made sense of their economic lives. His book provides a wealth of information about lived religion as well as family and gender dynamics, lending it depth and richness. It is clearly the product of a historian who commands knowledge of both East European and American Jewish history, which enables him to challenge existing paradigms and put forward new perspectives with erudition.

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This slim volume is, in many respects, a polemic. Since Lederhendler wants to throw down the gauntlet for future historians and prompt a thoroughgoing reconsideration of fundamental interpretive frameworks, he often paints with a broad brush. He sometimes simplifies the assertions put forward in previous works and overstates the extent to which other scholars have ignored class. His book might have given greater consideration to the class stratifications among East European Jews and how these played out in the American environment. Lederhendler’s work also begs some crucial questions: in particular, if we accept that prior economic and ethnic experiences had little impact on East European Jews’ mobility in the United States, and that the only ethnic advantage they possessed was the existence of an established Jewish community already in place, is this enough to explain their rapid mobility as compared with other immigrant groups who arrived at the same time and encountered the same conditions? Although Lederhendler has left many salient issues still to be addressed, his provocative and challenging book has indeed shifted the landscape in American Jewish history in ways that future historians will not be able to ignore. BETH S. WENGER University of Pennsylvania

Natan M. Meir, Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History 1859–1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 403 pp.

Communal history is one of the most traditional, old-fashioned genres of Jewish historiography. Is there a single major or not-so-major Jewish urban center, at least in the Ashkenazic world, without its monograph or monographs? These studies are sometimes written by professional historians, but probably more often by amateur enthusiasts eager to put their communities on the map. They tend to be exercises in Jewish piety, bent on displaying the community in question in the most positive light possible. In Israel such well-known series as the Entziklopediyah shel galuyot (The encyclopedia of diasporas) and ’Arim veimahot beyisrael (Jewish cities) are examples of such work. We also have the remarkable outpouring of memorial books (sifrei yizkor), which hope to fix forever in the Jewish memory those Jewish communities, large and small, that were decimated by the Holocaust. Valuable though they sometimes are, most of these studies are hardly serious contributions to Jewish history. It is therefore quite surprising that some of the best, most innovative work in recent Jewish history writing has been done in this genre. Just as modern realist artists have breathed new life into an old and apparently moribund artistic form, so some notable contemporary Jewish historians have made something new and exciting of communal history. This is the case with Steven Zipperstein’s work on Odessa, with Benjamin Nathan’s study of St. Petersburg, and with Eli Lederhendler’s work on New York. Now we have another example—Natan Meir’s book on Kiev.

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All cities are unique, no doubt, but Kiev is especially so. It was both the first center of Russian (or, according to another point of view, Ukrainian) statehood, and the cradle of East European Orthodox Christianity. It later became a Polish city, “reunited” with Russia only in the 17th century. In modern times it was an important Russian imperial metropolis, the center of emerging Ukrainian nationalism, and home to a large and influential Jewish community. It was a cosmopolitan town, multiethnic and multi-religious, whose Jewish history was much influenced by this special context. The Jewish community also had an unusual history. There were Jews in Kiev in ancient times, but their modern story in the city begins quite late. Kiev lay within the Pale of Settlement, though Jewish residence there was restricted and remained precarious throughout the tsarist period. It was only in 1859, during the time of Alexander II’s reforms, that certain categories of Jews were allowed to settle there, but during the years 1859–1914, Jewish residence continued to be restricted, and police raids and expulsions of “illegals” were common. In Kiev, partly as a result of government policy, there emerged special Jewish quarters, really ghettos, the most famous being Podol, a “second Berditchev” (p. 49). Nonetheless, the promise of economic growth meant that Kiev became a magnet for Jewish immigration. It was a new Jewish town, far removed from traditional seats of Russian Jewish learning and piety, a place where dreams of a better life could be pursued without abandoning the Russian Empire for the New World or Western Europe. In this sense it was comparable to Odessa, and even to St. Petersburg. Natan Meir, who has mastered a wide array of sources in several languages, tells us all we need to know about Jewish demography, settlement patterns, social structure, economic activities, religious and cultural life, communal organization, and politics; he also has much to say, naturally, about relations between Jews and Gentiles in this volatile and tension-ridden city. Particularly fascinating is his account of the politics of Jewish philanthropy, a key activity that often determined the leadership of the Jewish community. We can be grateful for all of this information, which is presented clearly and in a most interesting manner (upon occasion thanks to the use of literary material), but in this review I wish to emphasize those aspects of Meir’s analysis that make his study representative of the new historiography of Jewish Eastern Europe. Meir tells us in his introduction that he is interested in Alltagsgeschichte, and that “this book seeks to bring to life the everyday struggles and triumphs of Kiev’s Jews . . .” (p. 6). He succeeds admirably in this aim; we learn here about how the poor lived, and about how ordinary Jews went about earning a living (not always, we might add, in an edifying manner). Issues of gender, as might be expected, are not neglected. Note that the author wishes to record not only “struggles” but “triumphs.” We are not used to thinking of the modern history of East European Jewry as “triumphant,” at least not in the way that Meir uses the term. He argues that Kiev’s Jews from 1859 onwards underwent a relatively successful process of integration into the Russian imperial system—many of them came to regard themselves as patriotic citizens of the Russian Empire, and the official ideology of their leaders, such as the oligarchic Brodsky family, was integrationist (but not assimilationist). Kiev’s Jews were involved in a process of acculturation, many speaking Russian as well as Yiddish

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(although not Ukrainian, the language of another local ethnic minority). We have a most welcome emphasis here on the several identities available to Kiev’s Jews: they could identify with the Russian Empire and its high culture while at the same time remaining loyal to their Jewishness, which was defined in various ways. For many of them, life in Kiev was in fact a success story, a kind of triumph: a substantial Jewish middle class developed, Jews attended Russian schools and the local Russian university, and some became professionals, successful businesspeople, and pioneering industrialists. They created institutions that would have done any Jewish community proud—a hospital famous for its modern facilities, a beautiful “progressive” synagogue in which sermons were given in Russian, self-help societies, and charitable foundations. Not all was wine and roses, of course—Kiev has achieved notoriety as a city of pogroms. But anti-Jewish violence, though discussed and thoroughly analyzed in this volume, is not given the same prominence as it enjoys in more traditional studies. The pogrom of 1881 was frightening, but did not change in any essential way the Jews’ basically positive attitude toward their city, and from 1881 to 1905 the fear of violence was minimal. Meir is excellent on the ways in which the Russian government’s attitude toward the Jews hardened in the post-1905 period, and on the growth of both government-inspired and popular antisemitism, but he can write, nonetheless, that “Kiev’s ethnic and religious groups got along better than might have been expected, in the period before 1905 and even to some extent in the years after” (p. 208). Proto-Zionist sentiment emerged after 1881, but as things went back to normal its influence waned, and it was only after 1905 that the “new Jewish politics,” including Zionism, really hit its stride. Kiev was never a Jewish religious center, and although we are used to thinking of Russia as a bastion of Jewish Orthodoxy, this was not the case in the capital of the Ukraine, where attitudes toward religion were relatively relaxed. It is interesting that the author has nothing to say about emigration from Kiev to the New World (was there any?). The Jewish population of the city, it seemed, was here to stay, and was entranced neither by dreams of Palestine nor of America. Most Jews, after all, had come to Kiev from other parts of the Empire, seeking a better life. And despite the persistence of poverty and antisemitism, Meir tells us that many found it. Jewish history in Kiev, according to Meir, is largely the story of Jewish efforts to lead normal lives, to make an economic success for themselves and their families, to preserve some sort of Jewishness (but not necessarily ultra-Orthodox Jewishness) while at the same time integrating and acculturating (though not assimilating) into their surroundings, to be aware of anti-Jewish hostility but not to be overwhelmed by it, not to flee to foreign lands, and not to feel alienated from the land in which they lived. The Jews of Kiev were also Russian Jews, at least in the sense of being imperial (rossisskoe) Russian Jews, if not “russkii” (ethnic Russian) Jews. By extension, this was also true of the Jews of many other Russian cities. It seems to me that Meir’s main point is that the history of Kiev Jewry is not so different from that of other Jewish communities in Europe. Just as some historians will not accept the familiar dichotomy of “Russia versus the West,” so he will not accept the existence of an essential difference between “eastern” and “western” Jewries. So far as Jewish-Gentile relations are concerned, he remarks that the situation in

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Kiev was not that different from that prevailing in Germany, Austria, and Hungary (p. 208). To be sure, distinctions are made in this book. Yiddish was spoken in early 20th-century Kiev, as it was not spoken by the non-immigrant Jews of imperial Germany, Budapest, and Vienna. Kiev Jewry was poorer and, despite the decline of Orthodoxy, more traditional than were the Jewish communities of Germany. Moreover, throughout the period under discussion, Russia remained an autocratic state; Meir shows how this was reflected in all aspects of Kiev Jewish history. All things considered, I find Meir’s approach to be stimulating. Everywhere in Europe, from England to Russia, Jews in the second half of the 19th century were busy turning themselves into loyal citizens, mastering the local languages (if they had not already long mastered them), participating in the local culture, and reforming their religion to make it more suitable to modern times. They were creating a Jewish press, and establishing important communal institutions. So it was in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Cracow; the Russian case was different, to be sure, but, according to Meir’s very impressive book, not all that different. Although the famous distinction between Ostjuden and Westjuden has its uses, perhaps the time has come to emphasize not so much what distinguished one “Jewish type” from the other as what united them. EZRA MENDELSOHN The Hebrew University

Kenneth B. Moss, Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009. x + 384 pp.

This meticulously researched, forcefully argued, and elegantly written book has already been widely praised as a landmark study of modern Jewish cultural history, and this reviewer enthusiastically joins the chorus. Kenneth Moss examines the crucial moment in the formation of modern Hebrew and Yiddish cultures in Russia and Ukraine during the first three years of the Soviet state. His analysis focuses on the interaction between art and politics in the new cultural centers of Moscow and Kiev. The idea to study Hebrew and Yiddish side by side, however natural it may look, is innovative if not revisionist for Jewish studies. Even more revisionist is Moss’ argument that the early years of the Soviet regime were a time of great cultural revival for both Hebrew and Yiddish. Hence the special attention that he gives to the avantgarde, anti-traditionalist trends in both cultures, especially to translations of children’s literature from various European languages, which he regards as central to the process of “deparochialization” of Jewish culture. Following the fall of the tsarist regime in February–March 1917, Jewish cultural activists promptly utilized the new socio-political situation to build a network of secular cultural institutions, most prominent of which were the Kultur-Lige (for Yiddish) and the Tarbut (for Hebrew). The purpose of these institutions, Moss explains, was to “project the new culture into Jewish public life” and to generate “sustained popular engagement” in the sphere of culture (p. 152). But the period of institutional

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creativity lasted only as long as “the regime made no efforts to shape a policy toward Jewish culture” (p. 223)—that is, until mid-1918; by the end of 1919, it had become clear that the fate of the two branches of Jewish culture would be different. Whereas Hebrew culture was deemed “reactionary” and “clerical” and its institutional activity was suppressed (the last surviving institution was the Habimah theater, which left the Soviet Union in 1926), the Yiddishists found ways to fit into the new Soviet concept of ethnic multiculturalism. Moss persuasively argues that the roots of the Jewish cultural renaissance of 1917– 1919 go as far back as the 1880s, whereas the catastrophic events of the First World War and the Russian Revolution created suitable conditions for its “unfettering and culmination” (p. 286). He operates with an impressive array of historical and literary sources in different languages, exploring the cultural, ideological, and political developments in their full complexity, yet his presentation remains consistently clear and coherent. Moss is remarkably attentive to literature, offering insightful and illuminating readings of Yiddish and Hebrew fiction, poetry, and essays through the lenses of politics and ideology. He aptly describes the central character of Soviet Yiddish literature as a person “subjected to brutal suffering because his ideals are out of step with the demands of History” (p. 290)—a characterization that is true not only for the time under the discussion but also for the entire interwar period, if not beyond. While the bulk of the study is fully convincing, one of its conclusions appears somewhat less so. Moss seems to presume that the short period of blossoming for Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union left no impact beyond the 1920s: “by the time official Soviet Yiddish culture was essentially dismantled in the 1930s [. . .] it was an unrecognizable deformation of what ‘Jewish culture’ had once meant” (p. 290). I would argue, first, that “official Soviet Yiddish culture” was producing remarkable works of literature, scholarship, and theater production well into the 1940s, and that one could make a case, using Moss’ study as a model, for another, smaller, Jewish cultural renaissance in the Soviet Union during the Second World War and its aftermath. Second, I would argue that there is a great deal of continuity between the early and later works of the main Soviet Yiddish authors (Der Nister, David Bergelson, Leyb Kvitko, David Hofshteyn, Perets Markish) who occupy a prominent place in Moss’ study. In his otherwise detailed account of the “Bolshevization” of the Kultur-Lige in Kiev in 1919–1921, Moss does not mention Isaak Nusinov, one of the key figures in that process. Yet Nusinov was instrumental not only in “dismantling” the Kultur-Lige as an independent institution, but also in securing a partial survival of its legacy. Indeed, Nusinov, who emerged as one of the leading Soviet Marxist literary scholars, operating alongside other influential Marxist critics such as Aron Gurshteyn and Meir Wiener, carried the program of deparochialization of Yiddish further by promoting an impressive output of translations to Yiddish from Russian and world literature and by writing introductions to many of these translations. For a good number of Soviet Yiddish writers, translation work was a safe haven and source of income. Nusinov could also put the requisite ideological spin on the works of such nonCommunist writers as Der Nister, which were published under the Kultur-Lige imprint as late as 1929. Another option available to Soviet Yiddish writers was writing for children, a genre which, as Moss so convincingly demonstrates, was also

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central to the Jewish renaissance project. Children’s poetry by Kvitko and other authors was by far the most popular aspect of Soviet Yiddish culture, widely available in translations into many languages of the Soviet Union—including, of course, Russian and Ukrainian. The Kultur-Lige also left a significant impact on the arts, in particular book design and illustration. The creation of an original Jewish style as a fusion of Jewish folk art and European avant-garde was a central element of the Kultur-Lige program. By the 1920s, when luminaries such as Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky had already “renounce[d] these aspirations and reorient[ed] toward the new horizons of the victorious Revolution and the international avant-garde” (p. 48), other artists, arguably less talented and ambitious, stayed in Kiev and attempted to carry through this artistic program in the Soviet institutional framework. Most prominent among them was Mark Epstein, who from 1923 to 1931 was the director of the Jewish School of Industrial Design in Kiev. A large retrospective of Epstein in the National Arts Museum of Ukraine in 2011 indicates that Soviet Jewish art has entered the canon of Ukrainian modernism, while still awaiting recognition by Jewish scholars. These critical remarks should only underscore the significance of Moss’ book, which goes beyond the temporal and perhaps conceptual limits set by its author. Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution will become required reading for everyone interested in Jewish modernity as well as a source of inspiration and ideas for the future generation of Jewish historians. MIKHAIL KRUTIKOV University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Dina Porat, The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Yuval. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. xxiv + 411 pp.

After the Holocaust, Abba Kovner wrote that “Vilna no longer exists. Vilna without Jerusalem in the mind’s eye is not the Jerusalem of Lithuania; however, will Jerusalem without the Jerusalem of Lithuania remain Jerusalem?” (p. 14). In this groundbreaking book (originally published in Hebrew)1 about one of the most remarkable figures of modern Jewish history, Dina Porat never loses sight of the fact that, for Kovner, each “Jerusalem” needed the other. For all his extraordinary talents and achievements, Kovner was, to put it mildly, no stranger to controversy. Even as he inspired admiration and devotion, he also sowed discord and resentment. How does a historian capture the nuance, the richness, of Kovner’s life? How does a historian effectively deal with the paradox of explaining the creative tension between the persona of eccentric creative genius that Kovner cultivated and his absolute devotion to collective ideals and national renewal? Here, too, Porat does an exemplary job. In Vilna, Kovner emerged as a charismatic leader of Hashomer Hatzair who, remaining true to Zionist ideals, also became a leader of Jewish resistance. In Israel, he became a leading advocate of the Diaspora Museum (Beit Hatefutzot), and he

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ceaselessly underscored the relevance of the diaspora past. Kovner was a larger than life figure—poet, resistance hero, fighter for Israel’s independence, kibbutznik, painter, cultural icon—whose fascinating life reflected one basic principle: a commitment to the unity of the Jewish people. Born in Sevastopol in 1918, Kovner moved to Vilna with his parents and siblings when he was eight; there, he studied in Vilna’s famed Tarbut gymnasium and became a member of Hashomer Hatzair. Interwar Vilna was unique among the cities of Jewish Poland. Although Jewish life throughout Poland was riven by ideological and political differences, such differences lost some of their sharper edges in Vilna. There was less acculturation, and even the middle and professional classes used Yiddish, at least in the public sphere. As a Jewish civil society that derived its strength not only from a plethora of vital associations and organizations but also from a common language, Vilna fostered a strong sense of Jewish identity. To paraphrase Vitka Kempner, a Kalisz native who would later become Kovner’s wife: in Vilna, a Jewish communist felt more Jewish than did a member of Hashomer Hatzair in western Poland. Porat skillfully shows how Vilna shaped Kovner’s determination not to let differences of opinion trump a sense of common Jewish identity and fate. Between October 1939 and June 1940, Vilna (as the short-lived capital of a not yet Sovietized Lithuania) became a temporary refuge for thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland, including the leaders of political parties and youth movements. The fragile oasis lasted until June 1940, when the Soviets extinguished Lithuanian independence. This turbulent time was a formative experience for Kovner, who carefully observed the conduct of his fellow shomrim and other youth movement leaders. On the one hand, a sense of obligation to their abandoned comrades in Warsaw impelled Mordechai Anielewicz, Tosia Altman, and Shmuel Breslav to return to German-occupied Warsaw. On the other hand, there were leaders who escaped to Palestine or other countries. Kovner would never forget these choices and would never quite forgive those who made the perfectly understandable and quite human decision to flee to safety. Kovner became a harsh and unforgiving judge, too harsh in the eyes of detractors who would accuse him of arrogance and excessive self-righteousness. By the same token, Kovner could not forget the alacrity with which many Zionist youth abandoned their ideals in order to join the Komsomol. While the Soviet occupation led many to a flirtation with Communism, for Kovner it served to reinforce his strong Zionist loyalties. As Porat shows, even though Kovner was a leader of Hashomer Hatzair, he was never an ideologue. Collective bonds and ideals meant more to him—then and later—than did ideological pieties about the Soviet Union and world revolution. (Later, in Israel, this determination to put Jewish unity over ideological purity would complicate Kovner’s relations with “party comrades” such as Meir Ya’ari.) Following the German invasion of Vilna, Kovner spent the first period of the occupation hiding in a convent. But he soon decided that his moral obligation was to enter the ghetto and share the fate of the collective. If Kovner is remembered for one thing during the Holocaust, it was his remarkable proclamation read to youth movement leaders in the Vilna ghetto on the night of December 31, 1941: “Throw away illusions. Your children, husbands and wives are all dead. Ponar is not a camp—everyone was

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shot there. Hitler has plotted to murder all the Jews of Europe. The Jews of Lithuania are doomed to be first in line. Let us not go like lambs to the slaughter!” (p. 71). With amazing intuition, Kovner was one of the first Jews to understand the true contours of the Final Solution, which the Nazis themselves were only beginning to plan. Some of Kovner’s comrades remained unconvinced that the killings in Lithuania presaged the total destruction of European Jewry. Even when the Vilna Jewish community sent out emissaries to other ghettos, their message took some time to sink in. Porat correctly notes that, since the proclamation was a “turning point” in the history of the Holocaust and of the Jewish people, many stepped forward after the war to share the credit with Kovner for its inception. Whether the idea was Kovner’s alone is immaterial. It was a remarkable insight, and it quickly led to the organization of the United Partisan Organization (Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye [FPO]) in the Vilna ghetto. Some of the most riveting pages in the biography deal with the inherent tension between the FPO and the rest of the ghetto. The logic of the New Year’s proclamation was that ultimately there was no hope and that the crucial choice was whether to die fighting as opposed to meekly giving in. One of Porat’s more significant observations is that Kovner did not intend the phrase “lambs to the slaughter” to cast Nazi victims in a pejorative light; in later years, he sharply rejected the invidious distinction so popular in Israel between the heroic “fighters” and the passive and docile masses who walked to their death. But the calculus of heroism and dignity proved more complicated than the heroic rhetoric of the proclamation. Was it less worthy to accompany a parent to a death pit? If the decision to fight meant that one abandoned a mother or a father or a child, was the fighter any better than those who stayed behind? The 20,000 Jews left in the ghetto wanted to live, and they clung to the shreds of hope that Jacob Gens, the commandant of the ghetto, offered them. Perhaps their labor could buy time for a miracle, for a sudden Allied victory, for unexpected deliverance. Kovner’s call for armed resistance also seemed to be a call for collective suicide. Zelig Kalmanovich, one of the most respected intellectuals in the ghetto, bluntly told Kovner that his approach was irresponsible and dangerous. This tension between the fighters and the wider ghetto community culminated in an incident in July 1943 in which Yitzhak Wittenberg, a leader of the resistance, was handed over by Gens to the Nazis. The ghetto masses supported Gens; there would be no repeat of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, where the ghetto population gave the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa [ZOB]) its solid support. Porat deftly points out Kovner’s lonely burden of being a messenger of death. When the remnants of the ghetto, wanting to live, grasped at every straw of hope, why would they listen to Kovner’s warnings that they were all doomed? Porat uses Kovner’s own poetry to retrace his emotional turmoil: “. . . they will be lost, he mumbled. You will be lost, he stumbled/on his words. Am I the destroyer, am I the seer?” (p. 74).2 By September 1943, it was clear to Kovner that the only option open to the FPO was to leave the ghetto and go to the forest—a step he had long resolutely resisted. But this presented another cruel dilemma: abandoning his mother. He left, but never entirely forgave himself. Porat cites these unpublished words found in his

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desk drawer in Israel after his death: “I am in the Ghetto/Savior/Killer/Cheered/And the mother: killer” (p. 75). From September 1943 until the liberation of Vilna in July 1944, Kovner led a Jewish partisan detachment within the general framework of the Soviet partisan movement. Here one might say that Kovner was relatively “lucky.” He avoided the fate of other Jewish fighters who were disarmed, humiliated, and sometimes murdered by Soviet partisan commanders. He managed to look after noncombatants, and he was able to preserve the Jewish character of his unit. The Jews were fierce fighters, and Kovner earned the grudging respect of Soviet commanders. But the entire experience only reinforced his deep contempt for the Soviet system, hardly an attitude that would endear him to his movement comrades once he arrived in Palestine. The chapters on Kovner’s life after the war are no less insightful and informative than those dealing with Vilna and the war. One of Porat’s most important points concerns the attempt by Kovner and about 50 other survivors to wreak revenge on Germany after the war. The group they formed, Nakam (vengeance), concocted various plans (including the poisoning of German reservoirs), though none of these schemes was actually realized. This is the best treatment yet written of a murky and puzzling topic, and Porat’s conclusion speaks for itself: Had Kovner left the nakam as an open symbolic-moral question to be answered at the general national level, he would have been received in Eretz Israel as an outstanding leader, and the lesson to be learned from the Holocaust would have been brought to Eretz Israel with greater force. However, by committing himself to the nakam, Kovner committed political suicide (p. 213).

Yet Kovner, who first arrived in Palestine in 1945, remained a seminal figure in the Jewish state. As always, he stirred controversy. As an information officer of the Givati Brigade, his stirring “battle pages,” writings aimed both at informing and inspiring the soldiers, simultaneously boosted morale at a critical time and infuriated the defenders of Nitzanim (a kibbutz that fell to the Egyptians during the War of Independence) by what seemed to be a callous attack on the defenders’ courage and patriotism. While Kovner settled down on Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, where he raised a family with Vitka Kempner, he never abandoned his quest to remind Israelis of what had been lost in the Holocaust. This was a quest marked by some bitter disappointments, but Kovner’s single-minded focus never let up. In large part, the establishment of the Diaspora Museum was the culmination of Kovner’s crusade to firmly anchor Israeli consciousness in a determination never to forget the Jewish people of the diaspora. (Like Kovner, the Diaspora Museum came in for its share of controversy, its critics arguing that the museum overemphasized religion and gave short shrift to the complexities of modern Jewish history.) Dina Porat has written a superb book, certainly one of the most important works of modern Jewish history to have appeared in recent years. The scope of her achievement is all the more convincing given the fact that she chose a very difficult subject for a biography. For all that he wrote, Kovner remained in many ways an elusive figure. He never wrote his autobiography, and he often missed chances to definitively craft his own version of key events, such as the Wittenberg surrender, that had sparked

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controversy and criticism. In order to meet the challenge, Porat supplemented her extensive research into written sources with an enormous number of interviews. Here she has pulled off a tour de force. Inevitably, a certain number of mistakes have crept into her book. The foreign minister of the USSR was Vyacheslav, not Stanislav Molotov (p. 101). One cannot say that “Russian captives who returned were invariably executed” (p. 178)—many were, but most were sent to camps. Porat makes it quite clear that, in his later years, Kovner was quite worried about the direction of Israel: its growing materialism, the rising power of the ultraOrthodox, the strength of the settler movement versus the decline of the kibbutzim, the weakening of national will and collective cohesion. Porat’s book serves as a reminder that sometimes individuals do not have to wield power in order to inspire and to serve as moral lodestones. To paraphrase a quotation from Yitzhak Greenberg cited in Porat’s book, there is a world of difference between a false messiah and a messiah who failed. SAMUEL KASSOW Trinity College

Notes 1. Dinat Porat, Me’ever lagashmi: parashat h.ayav shel Abba Kovner (Jerusalem: 2000). 2. The poem in its entirety appears in Abba Kovner, “Nokhri yotze me’iro,” in idem, Mikol haahavot (Merhavia: 1970), 149.

Daniel Tsadik, Between Foreigners and Shi‘is: Nineteenth-Century Iran and Its Jewish Minority (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. xxi + 295 pp. David Yeroushalmi, The Jews of Iran in the Nineteenth Century: Aspects of History, Community, and Culture (Brill Series in Jewish Studies, vol. 40). Leiden: 2009. lvi + 437 pp.

Of all of the major Jewish communities of the Islamic world, Iranian Jewry, which has had a continuous diaspora existence since the Babylonian exile, may be the least studied. Although a considerable body of scholarly literature has been produced over the past half century in a variety of languages (French, German, Hebrew, Farsi, and to a lesser extent English), it has often been highly specialized and atomistic. Furthermore, a considerable proportion of this scholarly output deals with the preIslamic era. Thus the appearance of two important historical works in English on the Jews in 19th-century Iran is all the more welcome. Moreover, the two books, which are quite different in structure and conception, have the additional virtue of being to a great extent complementary. Daniel Tsadik’s Between Foreigners and Shi‘is, which is based on his Yale University doctoral dissertation, is a tight, analytical monograph on the evolving nature of

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Muslim-Jewish relations in Qajar Iran, with particular focus upon the reign of Na¯ s.ir al-D¯ın Sha¯ h (1848–1896), who made the first efforts both to modernize government and (under pressure from the European powers) to ameliorate the condition of the non-Muslim minorities. Using an impressive range of archival, manuscript, and published primary and secondary sources, Tsadik describes the internal societal tensions and the mounting western external pressures that contributed, on the one hand, to anti-Jewish reactions on the part of the Shi‘ite clerical establishment and the populace, and, on the other, to modest improvements in the Jews’ civil status. He also depicts the important role of European protection and intervention, a phenomenon with significant parallels and differences in the neighboring Ottoman Empire and in the Sharifian Empire far to the west. He points out that one of the major outcomes of these foreign efforts on behalf of Iranian Jewry was the latter’s “gradual exposure to the international community,” “[i]ncreased contacts with foreign powers and foreign Jewish society,” and the ending of “years of isolation” (p. 184). A central theme of Tsadik’s detailed study is the religious, legal, and social understanding of dhimma, the theoretical pact of protection governing the tolerated non-Muslim minorities in the Muslim world—and in the Iranian case, in its particular Shi‘ite context—as well as its actual practice and ramifications. He also makes instructive references to parallels and differences with regard to the other non-Muslim Iranian minorities during that time. Like any good scholar of diaspora Jewish history, Tsadik possesses intimate familiarity with the history and culture of the surrounding non-Jewish societal matrix. David Yeroushalmi’s The Jews of Iran in the Nineteenth Century, which basically covers the same period, is a very different kind of book. Rather than a synthetic history presenting developments in a chronological sequence, it is a source book consisting of forty texts (both archival and published), together with detailed introductions and analytical notes, organized thematically. These texts include some of the sources that Tsadik extensively mined for his study—for instance, the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris), the Public Record Office (London), the manuscript collections of the Ben-Zvi Institute and the National Library of Israel (Jerusalem), published reports of travelers and missionaries, and Judeo-Persian, Hebrew, and Persian Shi‘ite legal and polemical texts. Thus, in Yeroushalmi’s work, one has the opportunity to read a judiciously chosen and representative selection from some of the texts that inform Tsadik’s work (some of which are quoted or paraphrased at length by Tsadik). For example, Yeroushalmi’s first text (pp. 5–10) consists of excerpts ¯ mil¯ı’s great juridical compendium Ja¯m‘i-i ‘Abba¯s¯ı, cited from Baha¯ al-D¯ın al-‘A among numerous others by Tsadik in his detailed first chapter on “Shi‘i Legal Attitudes toward the Jews” (pp. 15–32). Tsadik’s and Yeroushalmi’s respective books are complementary in other ways as well. While covering the same time period, they have different strengths with regard to focus. Yeroushalmi offers a much lengthier historiographical introduction (pp. xix–lvi), more detail on sources, and greater scope of historical background, starting with the triumph of Shi‘ism in Iran with the advent of the Safavids at the beginning of the 16th century. In contrast, Tsadik’s briefer introduction (pp. 1–14), which touches on some similar themes, provides a more detailed statistical discussion of demography (Yeroushalmi provides the various reports on population estimates in his section on demography and geographical diffusion [sources 10–12, pp. 63–84]). āş

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Two of Yeroushalmi’s eight sections—“Aspects of Life and History in the Larger Communities” (sources 27–35, pp. 193–293) and “Major Events and Processes” (sources 36–40, pp. 297–414) once again give voice to the sources used by Tsadik in constructing his historical tableau throughout chapters 2–5: “‘Justice and Kindness’ (1848–1866),” “Vacillating Steps toward Change (1866–1873),” “Fragile and Erratic Amelioration (1874–1884),” and “Reassertion of the Dhimmah (1884–1896)” (pp. 33–177). Another valuable feature of Yeroushalmi’s book are the sections devoted to a broad range of topics that are either not treated or treated only in passing in Tsadik’s more specifically focused monograph. These include economic life, communal organization, culture, education, and religious life (pp. 87–190). Texts such as a legal dispute between two commercial partners from Yazd brought before the Baghdadi sage Yosef H.ayyim al-H.akam around 1880 (pp. 108–118) or a decree (haskamah), issued by the rabbis of Sanandaj in 1874, threatening with excommunication anyone who informs upon a coreligionist before the Muslim authorities (pp. 134–137), provide colorful micro-portraits of daily life within the Jewish community, and thereby complement Tsadik’s vivid macro-portrait of the community in its ongoing relations with the dominant Muslim society. Both books contain substantial bibliographies which, not surprisingly, have a considerable degree of overlap. However, Tsadik’s bibliography (pp. 262–282) includes manuscripts and archival sources, whereas Yeroushalmi’s (pp. 415–426) is limited to published works. Although Yeroushalmi’s collection appeared two years after Tsadik’s monograph, the author does not cite it in his bibliography, probably because of the short overlap of time. However, he does cite Tsadik’s doctoral dissertation both in his bibliography and notes. Both books are extensively annotated, not only with source citations and references, but at times with lengthy and highly informative excurses. Yeroushalmi’s volume has the convenience of footnotes rather than endnotes, one of the great virtues of European academic publishers such as Brill. This is particularly welcome when reading texts, where frequent elucidation is required. Tsadik’s monograph has endnotes, as is now de rigueur with most American university presses. However, the serious reader should not be deterred from flipping back and forth. That minimal effort will be amply rewarded. Tsadik’s history and Yeroushalmi’s source book would fit very nicely together as textbooks in a course on Jews in Iran or in the broader Muslim world in the early modern period. They are major and timely contributions to Jewish, Iranian, and Middle Eastern studies. NORMAN A. STILLMAN University of Oklahoma

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

Sami Shalom Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews, trans. Oz Shelach. London: Routledge, 2010. xii + 298 pp.

Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews is Sami Shalom Chetrit’s account of Mizrahi resistance, over a 60-year period, to the Ashkenazic hegemony in Israel. From the time of their mass arrival in the 1950s, Mizrahi Jews who had migrated from Arab and Muslim countries struggled against discrimination on the part of the Ashkenazic Zionist establishment. Chetrit aims to show what Mizrahi consciousness is and how it developed throughout years of struggle. He identifies four stages of opposition developing along different lines, all of which are presented as being in some way radical. The most radical direction was that espoused first by the Wadi Salib rebels in the late 1950s and later by the Black Panther movement in the early 1970s. In contrast is the Shas party, established in 1983, which is defined by Chetrit as a radical religious party. Finally, there are intellectual radicals, among them those belonging to the Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow Movement (Hakeshet Hademokratit Hamizrahit) and other, smaller, organizations. Chetrit begins with a theoretical section that defines two archetypes of resistance: integrationists and nationalists (pp. 7–8). This division is based on models designed by Sidney Tarrow and Herbert Haines to explain the history of African Americans’ struggle against racism in the United States, according to which integrationists (such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) sought to subvert or change the system from within, whereas nationalists (such as Malcolm X) opted for more radical or violent grassroots activism.1 Chetrit applies this theoretical platform to the case of Mizrahim in Israel, claiming that their struggle may be understood as a battle against Israeli racism. After setting out the socio-historical background in Israel, Chetrit defines and identifies Mizrahi moderates and radicals. Moderates (integrationists) are those who worked within the hegemonic Ashkenazic Zionist establishment, in particular during the 1950s and 1960s. Among them were a number of Knesset members and government ministers, including Bechor Chetrit (minister of the police, 1948–1967) and Yisrael Yeshayahu (minister of postal services, 1967–1969, and speaker of the Knesset, 1972–1977). According to the theoretical model, radical resistance develops at a later stage. Chetrit, however, includes among the radicals the Wadi Salib protesters of 1959, even though their activities took place during “the first decade of shock” in which the mass of newly arrived Mizrahim were engaged mainly in acclimating to their new surroundings and were mostly absent from the political scene. 352

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Chetrit’s theoretical analysis initially leads us to understand that the radicals were the “good guys” as opposed to the “bad guy” integrationists. This dichotomy, however, gradually fades away as the analysis proceeds to a detailed description of Mizrahi movements, parties, and leaders. At this point, it becomes difficult to classify the various actors via Chetrit’s suggested models and terminologies, and one is left questioning the worth of his theoretical approach. Regarding the Black Panthers, for instance, Chetrit presents them first as radicals who led a social protest in Israel but then shows how they gradually crossed over to the integrationist camp. Yet while describing them at one point as “Ashkenazified bourgeoisie” (p. 21), he nonetheless seems eager to preserve the Black Panthers’ perceived historical role as the most radical movement since the establishment of the state of Israel. The theoretical approach is even more problematic in the case of Shas; after extensively comparing it to the Iranian revolution, Chetrit concedes that existing models on political movements do not succeed in explaining its success. In any event, he concludes, Shas is not even a movement, but rather a political party. In the last section of the book, Chetrit demonstrates the shift of emphasis on the part of Mizrahi activists from awareness to organization, providing brief descriptions of a number of small organizations (Bimat Kivun Hadash, Apiryon, Hila, Kedma, and Hakeshet Hademokratit Hamizrahit), that began functioning in the late 1980s and 1990s. Chetrit, who has been personally active in several of these groups, lauds their political effectiveness. In his conclusion, Chetrit correctly observes that Mizrahi activism, no matter how radical or accommodating, is based on a common desire to have Mizrahim incorporated into the national ethos of Israeliness (yisreeliyut). Furthermore, neither the radicals nor the integrationists can claim sole credit for bringing about any political or social change; as previously demonstrated by Haines and others, such change comes about through a combination of the two forces, even if there is no practical cooperation between them. Thus change, as Chetrit puts it, is eventually the outcome of a situation in which “one shakes the tree, another picks the fruits” (pp. 8–9). HENRIETTE DAHAN KALEV Ben-Gurion University

Note 1. Sidney G. Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (Cambridge: 1989); Herbert H. Haines, Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954–1970 (Knoxville: 1988).

David Ohana, Political Theologies in the Holy Land: Israeli Messianism and Its Critics. London: Routledge, 2010. xvii + 179 pp.

Political Theologies in the Holy Land is a book of great importance. It discusses the attitude of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, on the question whether Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel represents a messianic realization,

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and the contrasting attitude of major Israeli intellectuals. The book presents a complicated picture: it offers many possible definitions of messianism as well as a spectrum of possibilities for its actualization. However, it also raises a few unanswered questions. David Ohana begins his account with a chronology of four stages of political messianic development: the Zionist movement; the Mandate-era state-in-the-making; the newly founded state of Israel; and Israel following the Six-Day War of 1967. In his first chapter, which discusses the rise of secular messianism, we are introduced to two major forms of messianism: transcendental and Promethean. Whereas transcendental messianism is an expectation for the end of days that would be brought about by God, Promethean messianism requires humans to take control of their salvation. Pre-modern movements anticipated a miraculous salvation by God; modern political movements would try to create their own utopia. Ohana reviews messianic movements in Jewish history, and correctly focuses on the change that the modern period brought with regard to messianic expectations. Following this, he provides an overview of Zionist ideologists that emphasizes the utopian overtones of their thinking. The chapter ends with the messianic idea in the thought of David Ben-Gurion. I felt the chapter could have benefited from an introduction of the idea as it was articulated by the Jewish Reform movement, which revived the kabbalistic notion of tikun ’olam, whereby the role of the Jewish people is to promote an ongoing process to make the world a better place. Ben-Gurion’s vision, I believe, was inspired by that concept. The second chapter deals with the specifics of Ben-Gurion’s messianic ideas, which, as Ohana shows, were already part of his early writings. This chapter portrays Ben-Gurion as a sophisticated figure: on the one hand, a rigid philosopher who was inspired by romantic nationalism, and on the other, a sound and pragmatic statesman. In accordance with the messianic myth, Ben-Gurion’s theology contained short- and long-term goals. In the short run, he believed, the mission of Zionism was to regather Jewish exiles and establish a territorial homeland. From there would come a more utopian phase in which the messianic message of the Jewish people as a “light unto the nations” would go forth from the land of Israel. This myth also included an apocalyptic phase that was realized with the rise of Fascism, Nazism, and the Holocaust. In terms of the Jews, statism (mamlakhtiyut), the fusion of all ethnic groups into one mixture, was the essence of Ben-Gurion’s utopian vision. The third chapter presents the sober analysis of messianism offered by two great historians, Jacob Talmon and Gershom Scholem. Both Talmon, who studied modern totalitarian ideologies, and Scholem, who wrote a major work on the Sabbatian movement, saw a great danger in the fusion of utopian ideas and politics, not just in the Jewish context but also in the more universal frame of reference. Talmon warned against the attempt to realize messianic vision by force, fearing that Ben-Gurion’s messianic vision could not be actualized without violence (as Ohana notes, Talmon also rejected the political platform of Israel’s sixth prime minister, Menachem Begin, who advocated retention of “Greater Israel”—those lands captured during the SixDay War). Scholem, for his part, was concerned about the overly nationalist aspect of Ben-Gurion’s vision, and even more troubled by the religious Zionist messianic blend that was created by the followers of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.

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The fourth chapter focuses on Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a major Jewish intellectual whose influence grew in the decades following the Six-Day War. Ohana reviews Leibowitz’s critique on messianism, which for him did not represent “true” Judaism. In Leibowitz’s view, the core of Judaism lies in its emphasis on religious observance; he opposed the mediation between man and God. Moreover, according to Ohana, whereas Leibowitz was a true Zionist, he was also a humanist who had a high regard for universalism. Therefore he opposed the Israeli occupation of lands captured during the Six-Day War, denied any identification of Zionism with messianic redemption, and rejected the sanctification of the state and the land. In fact, Leibowitz’s early writings support the idea of establishing a Torah state that would become a Jewish utopia. Ohana does not mention these writings, and thus misses the chance to discuss the transformation in Leibowitz’s ideology. The fifth chapter discusses Nietzsche’s influence over Israel Eldad, an extreme right-wing Israeli ideologue. This is a fascinating historical and intellectual review of an important scholar who is much neglected by academics. However, Ohana’s discussion overlooks Eldad’s more specific messianic ideology, as articulated in numerous writings about the “kingdom of Israel” (malkhut yisrael) that appeared in Sulam, a revolutionary journal he published. Because Ohana does not deal with this material, the chapter on Eldad appears to be flawed and out of place. Finally, the sixth chapter, titled “The Critique of Political Theology,” gathers a group of thinkers with different perspectives. The discussion starts with Martin Buber’s support of Ben-Gurion’s ideas—Buber, Ohana notes, tended to be drawn into the utopian vision of Israel’s role of being “a light unto the nations.” From there, Ohana presents the views of selected modern Orthodox intellectuals, including Baruch Kurzweil and Akiva Ernst Simon, and contrasts these views with the “Mercaz Harav” philosophy promoted by the followers of Kook. Whereas Kook’s disciples sanctified the land and the state of Israel, these thinkers, like Leibowitz, drew a clear distinction between the sacred aspects of Judaism and the secular nature of the modern Jewish state. In sum, Political Theologies in the Holy Land offers a major contribution to the understanding of how the messianic myth influenced Ben-Gurion’s ideology, as well as how this ideology was critiqued from both the right and the left. There is still place for discussion of how this mythology influenced later developments in Israeli history. MOTTI INBARI University of North Carolina at Pembroke

Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. London: Routledge, 2007. xxiv + 279 pp.

During the Second Zionist Congress (1898), Max Nordau called for the inauguration of a “muscular Judaism” to counter stereotypic images of Jews as weak and unhealthy. This call became part of the Zionist ethos that promoted the notion of a “new Jew”: one who could take on the physical (and cultural) task of resettling the land. In Muscular

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Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration, Todd Samuel Presner provides a profound and wide-ranging analysis of Nordau’s concept and the way in which it evolved and became incorporated into the larger Jewish national movement. Presner’s basic assumption is that many of Nordau’s ideas can be traced back to ideologies and processes that were initiated in Central Europe, mainly in Germany, at the end of the 19th century. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a different theme. The first focuses on the rhetoric surrounding the term “regeneration,” with an emphasis on the obvious link between Max Nordau’s reference to Jewish degeneration and the need for “muscular Judaism” (as a modern expression of physical regeneration) and the opinions expressed by such thinkers of the time as Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Julius Langbehn—despite the differences between him and Nordau—and antisemitic thinkers such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Presner also focuses on aesthetic aspects of the term, with an emphasis on two central figures: the philosopher Martin Buber and the artist Ephraim Moses Lilien. Buber equated Jewish regeneration in art (as manifested in Jewish artists’ depictions of the body, in contrast to prevailing notions within Jewish tradition) with regeneration of the national spirit; Presner notes the evident association between Buber’s ideas and those of Friedrich Schiller, who believed that art was a means of promoting moral and national values. And Lilien’s paintings, according to Presner, are the most tangible expression of Buber’s ideas. In a lengthy, in-depth analysis, Presner shows how Lilien was not only greatly influenced by the decadent art of his time but was also a pioneer in Zionist art. The central chapter of the book is dedicated to the link between 19th-century concepts of the gymnastics movements with respect to national identity and Michel Foucault’s notion of “bio-power,” which links power of the state and society with control over the body and sexuality. German gymnastics movements founded by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn treated body cultivation as cultivation of the nation as a whole and as a means of enhancing national hygiene and improving the race. Such notions also encouraged the establishment of a Jewish gymnast movement, Jewish youth movements, and Jewish student movements—as Presner shows by means of numerous examples, Jewish gymnast journals often contained references to the prevailing German ideology of the time. Another issue treated at length in this chapter is the importance ascribed to “hygiene,” not only in the sense of physical activities (such as gymnastics), nutrition, and disease prevention, but also as the maintenance of “racial purity.” Among those subscribing to such views was a Jewish physician named Felix Teilhaber, who warned that, as a result of mixed marriages, the Jewish race could disappear. Presner also points to the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden (1911), which featured a number of rooms devoted to “Jewish” hygiene, as the most salient expression of the association between national hygiene and the maintenance of racial power or degeneration. In a chapter dealing with the historic connection of the Jews with the sea, and the influence of the European colonialist image on the Zionist settlement, Presner outlines Hegel’s ideas on the link between national and cultural hegemony and argues that Jewish colonialism in Mandatory Palestine was influenced by the European notion of “cultivating” the East. The last chapter, titled “Soldiers of the Regeneration,”

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returns more closely to the theme of muscular Judaism as it focuses on the concept with respect to Jewish fighters—specifically, German Jewish soldiers of the First World War, whose fighting skills were lauded by Jewish nationalists as exemplifying a revival of the ancient heroic past of the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba. Special emphasis is placed in this chapter on the newly emerging image of the pilot in Germany as a reflection of the modern fighter who integrated physical and mechanical prowess, and the impact of this image on the aspirations of Jews to become pilots. Muscular Judaism soundly establishes its central and highly innovative thesis regarding the link between Nordau’s slogan and German notions of national regeneration (and degeneration). However, there is a serious gap between the broader subject of the Jewish body in national regeneration and Presner’s more specific, but overly narrow, perspective. Presner provides ample documentation to support his claim that the source of various aspects of muscular Judaism, including much of the terminology associated with it, lies in German culture. Yet the actualization of the Zionist regeneration endeavor was far more the product of efforts made by Jews from Eastern Europe, and it took place mainly in the Jewish settlement in Mandatory Palestine. To be sure, Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau—both of them products of German culture—are extremely important figures in the initial inception and later shaping of the Zionist movement. However, a majority of the leaders who succeeded Herzl and Nordau were from Eastern Europe, among them Zeev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, Nachman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, and A.D. Gordon. While these leaders and others similarly sought to transform the image of the Jew, their main points of reference (and objects of criticism) were the diaspora (galut) and traditional Judaism rather than Central European ideas or specific German ideologies regarding race, hygiene, degeneration, and colonialism. In addition, most of the Jewish writers that Presner cites extensively (among them, Felix Teilhaber, Elias Auerbach, Max Grunwald, and Heinrich Loewe) were unknown to the majority of Jews from Eastern Europe who joined the Zionist movement; the impact of these writers’ ideas on the national regeneration endeavor were extremely limited outside of German culture. A much more significant factor in the transformation of the physical image of the Jew was the new Hebrew culture that originated in Eastern Europe and evolved mainly in Mandatory Palestine. Hebrew writers and poets such as Hayim Nahman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and Yosef Hayim Brenner, who all dealt with the new Jewish body in their writings, had little if any connection with German culture.1 Indeed, the new Jew in Mandatory Palestine—as crystallized in the image of the “sabra”—was far more likely to be identified either as a farmer working the land or as a soldier rather than as a Jew engaging in sports, “hygiene,” or some form of cultural endeavor aimed at providing the backward East with European values. Similarly, the more recent image of the Israeli soldier fighting for his land may reflect the military dimension of the new Jewish body better than the older image of the German Jewish soldier seeking to prove his bravery in response to antisemitic accusations. Thus, even if “muscular Judaism” was initially a concept based on German and Central European notions, these did not materially influence the later stages of the national Jewish regeneration project, and it is doubtful that its principal architects were even aware of its German origins.

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Book Reviews

In conclusion, a technical comment: although there are endnotes and an index in Muscular Judaism, there is no bibliography. This is problematic, because dozens of citations in the book include abbreviations of sources, and there is no list for decoding them. HAIM KAUFMAN Wingate College

Note 1. See Michael Gluzman, Haguf hatziyoni: leumiyut, migdar uminiyut basifrut ha’ivrit hah.adashah (Tel Aviv: 2007).

Studies In Contemporary Jewry XXVII Edited by Uzi Rebhun

Symposium—The Social Scientific Study of Jewry Sergio DellaPergola, Jewish Demography: Fundamentals of the Research Field David Dutwin, Eran Ben Porath, and Ron Miller, U.S. Jewish Population Studies: Opportunities and Challenges David J. Graham, Contradictory Constructions of “Jewish” in Britain’s Political and Legal Systems Harriet Hartman, Studies of Jewish Identity and Continuity in the United States: Competing, Complementary, and Comparative Perspectives Aziza Khazzoom, Jews in Israel: Effects of Categorization Practice on Research Findings and Research Frames Judit Bokser Liwerant, Latin American Jewish Social Studies: Trends and Challenges Leonard Saxe, Elizabeth Tighe, and Matthew Boxer, Measuring the Size and Characteristics of American Jewry: A New Paradigm to Understanding an Ancient People Arnon Sofer, Jewish Majority and Jewish Minority in Israel: The Demographic Debate Mark Tolts, Sources for the Demographic Study of the Jews in the Former Soviet Union Chaim I. Waxman, The Precarious Discipline: Science and Values in Jewish Social Research Esther I. Wilder, Defining and Measuring the Socioeconomic Status of Jews . . . plus essays, review essays, and book reviews

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Note on Editorial Policy

Studies in Contemporary Jewry is pleased to accept manuscripts for possible publication. Authors of essays on subjects generally within the contemporary Jewish sphere (from the turn of the 20th century to the present) should send two copies to: Studies in Contemporary Jewry The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 91905 The text should not exceed 40 pages in length and must be double-spaced throughout (including indented quotations and endnotes). All essays undergo a review process. Alternatively, email inquires may be sent to the following address: [email protected]

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