«To renew the old world – that is the collector’s deepest desire.»
The Scholar Michele Klein on Collecting Judaica
Judaica collections are the backbone of Jewish Museums. But who started collecting Judaica, when, and for what reason? Naomi Lubrich spoke with the scholar Michele Klein, whose ancestor Solomon Schloss was among the early Judaica collectors and who has studied the market for Judaica in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Naomi Lubrich: Dear Michele, your great-great-grandfather was among the first to collect Jewish ceremonial objects. What motivated him?
Michele Klein: Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher and collector of books, wrote in 1931 about the passion of collecting: «To renew the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire.» I think that the loss of the old world played an important role in the formation of the collection of my ancestor, Solomon David Schloss (1815–1911). His collecting activity, from 1887 until about 1907, enabled him to touch and revive his memories of the religious world of his childhood in Frankfurt, a world that was rapidly disappearing in the face of modernity and secularism.
NL: Who else was collecting Judaica, and what kind of objects were meaningful to them?
MK: Alexander David (1687–1765), a court Jew in Braunschweig, is thought to have been the first private collector to acquire fine appurtenances to beautify the performance of his religion, together with other Jews, in the prayer room in his home.
In the early 19th century, British financier Levi Salomons (1774–1843) built up a collection of some 400 Hebrew books and a dozen or more Torah and Esther scrolls. Bagdad-born Ruben David Sassoon (1835–1905) acquired the Salomons ritual objects, which he added to those that his family brought to London from the Far East. The media attention given to Sassoon’s collection at the two Jewish historical exhibitions in London, in 1887 and particularly in 1906, was flattering. I think that for Sassoon, who became the Prince of Wales’s gambling agent and whose Asian family made its wealth in the opium trade, the Judaica collection may have promoted the family’s status among the English Jewish elites.
The collection and display of fine art and objets d’art exalted the status of the Jewish elites in Europe. For example, in Vienna, Baron Anselm Salomon Rothschild (1803–1874) collected mostly metalwork of the Northern Renaissance, exclusive items that embodied imperial magnificence and power. Moritz Oppenheim served as Baron Anselm’s agent for the purchase of several exquisite German silver-gilt standing cups, made in the early 17th century, bearing Hebrew inscriptions that revealed these objects belonged to Jewish burial societies in Worms, Pressburg (Bratislava) and Alt-Ofen (Óbuda) in the early 18th century.
Isaac Strauss (1806–1888), a violinist, conductor and composer, focused more on the artistic aspect of the display, and less on the ritual functions of the objects. He predicted, correctly, that the collection would generate «a fecund field for observation and for studying the historical development of Hebraic art of the past.»
The subsequent exhibition of Strauss’s collection of Jewish artefacts at the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition in London, in 1887, alongside the Judaica owned by bourgeois British Jews, catalyzed passion for the collection of Judaica, the foundation of Jewish Museums, and the study of Jewish ritual art.
Other late 19th-century collectors of Judaica include London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which had acquired 25 items before 1887, mostly from dealers, including an illustrated Esther scroll, Torah finials, a Hanukkah lamp, 13 marriage rings, a Torah mantle and other textiles.
The Polish-Jewish merchant Lesser Gieldzinski (1830–1910) was an obsessive collector of paintings, ceramics, clocks, musical instruments, canes and much else, in addition to Judaica. Izmir art dealers Ephraim Benguiat (c. 1852–1918) and his son Mordecai also had the collecting bug and acquired mainly Italian and Ottoman Judaica. As with Schloss, the Benguiats’ collection of Jewish artefacts began with family heirlooms.
In contrast, Heinrich Frauberger (1845–1920), a Catholic historian and curator at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Düsseldorf, collected Jewish ritual art in order to research the objects.
NL: How was Judaica displayed, privately and publicly?
MK: For centuries, Jewish ceremonial objects were displayed in the room in which they were used; those that embellished rituals at home remained in the home, and those employed in the synagogue stayed there, perhaps in a cupboard or in a display cabinet in an adjoining room when not in use.
The Rothschilds and Isaac Strauss presented their art in their homes, where they entertained high society. Gieldzinski also showed his collection to visitors in his home in Gdansk, before he moved it to the wedding hall of the Great Synagogue in that city.
Jewish ritual art was first exhibited to non-Jews in the public domain in 1874, when Strauss showed his Jewish ‹curiosities› at the Palais Bourbon, Paris, at a fund-raising event for the protection of French citizens from Alsace and Lorraine. In 1876, visitors to the monumental Historical Exhibition of Amsterdam, which celebrated the city’s 600th anniversary, could admire 57 Jewish ceremonial objects belonging to the Dutch Jewish community. Strauss exhibited his Jewish ritual art at the Palais du Trocadéro, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, in 1878. Nine years later the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition opened to public acclaim in London’s Royal Albert Hall. Judaica was exhibited in exhibition cases or in a cordoned space, as was done subsequently in Jewish and non-Jewish museums.
Another turning point in the display of Judaica came when non-Jewish museums began to display Jewish artefacts. I do not know if London’s Victoria and Albert Museum revealed its 25 objects of Judaica to the public before the 1887 exhibition. After Strauss died, Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild bought and gifted his collection to the City of Paris, where in 1891, the Cluny Museum, an educational institution, presented it to the public. Benguiat’s Judaica, comprising over 50 items used in synagogue and in the home was shown to the public in the [Smithsonian] United States National Museum in Washington D.C., in 1901, and withdrawn when the museum refused to acquire it. In 1902, Charles Hercules Read, who curated the British Museum’s exhibition of Baron Ferdinand’s collection, remarked that such a collection would «cultivate and refine the masses.» This snobbish aspiration was a goal of the Exhibition of Jewish Art and Antiquities, which took place in 1906, in the heart of the overcrowded, poor neighborhood of Whitechapel in London, which housed the bulk of recent Eastern European immigrants.
Few, however, would have seen the collection of Schloss had he not loaned his most beautiful pieces for display at the Anglo-Jewish exhibitions of 1887 and 1906. A young relative who recalled visiting the reclusive patriarch in his home, noted that it was crammed with art; Maud Hall-Neale, who painted his portrait, also painted a Victorian drawing room scene with a considerable clutter of art objects around the fireplace, on the walls, side tables, and the mantelpiece. If this was not in the Schloss home, I believe it portrays accurately how he arranged his collection, for his own intimate pleasure.
NL: Michele, Many thanks for your insight into the early days of Judaica collecting.
verfasst am 22.05.2024
Solomon David Schloss. From the album of his granddaughter Peggy Spielman. Adam Spielman collection, London.
Some Jewish ritual objects displayed at the Anglo-Historical Exhibition, London, 1887, including (above the yellow mark) Schloss's figure-stem Havdalah, made by Röttger Herfurth, c. 1750, Frankfurt. Catalogue of The Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, Publications of the Exhibition Committee IV. London, Royal Albert Hall, de-luxe ed., 1888, no. 1677, photographic plate facing p. 101.
Part of Solomon Schloss’s collection of ritual Jewish silver, showing two objects now owned by the Jewish Museum of Switzerland: the Austro-Hungarian Torah shield to the right of the round Friday evening plate (center) and the three-tiered spice tower from Lemgo (North Rhine-Westphalia). Ralda Hammersley-Smith, 1931. Schloss collection.
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