Jewish Collectors and Collecting
Jewish Collectors and Collecting: an Introduction
Silvia Davoli and Tom Stammers
Jewish collecting can be defined in a multiplicity of ways, depending on whether the focus is on the Jewishness of objects (notably ritual items of Judaica) or the Jewish identity of their owners (measured not just in terms of religion, but also of cultural heritage). This introduction to the virtual issue considers the Jewish contribution to the development of collecting traditions in modern Europe, noting the importance of cosmopolitan networks, enterprising dealers and the politics of philanthropy. It stresses the methodological challenges posed by working on Jewish collections, as well as the changing national contexts by which Jewish collectors could be valorised or victimised.
Depending on how it is defined, Jewish collecting can seem a minority phenomenon, restricted to the margins of art history. If we equate Jewishness with Judaica, then objects related to Jewish religious culture have been preserved ever since the Middle Ages. For Jews, conserving ritual objects was a sign of communal pride, just as the transmission of Hebrew manuscripts was central to the unfolding of Rabbinical interpretation, or the maintenance of rites and traditions. For medieval Christians, Jewish texts and objects held a peculiar fascination as they were entwined with the origins of their own faith. Judaism as a religion may have been superseded, but its material artefacts still invoked the stories of the Old Testament. Individual Jewish objects – such as shofars, rimmonims or illuminated Haggadahs – earned their place in the early modern cabinet of curiosities for this two-fold scriptural and ethnographic interest, simultaneously foreign and familiar, Oriental and European. Intriguingly, it seems Court Jews acted as suppliers of some key objects for Kunstkammern, just as David Alexander of Brunswick provided inspiration for their display by opening a ‘treasure house’ of ritual objects in his own home.[1]
In an era of Enlightenment – the Jewish Haskalah – the connection between Judaica and worship was weakened, but these objects nonetheless remained important expressions of cultural identity. Ferdinand de Rothschild’s 1898 bequest to the British Museum contains discrete but potent affirmations of his family’s Jewish attachments, from the Pressburg cup (with its Hebrew inscription) to the so-called Jewish ‘marriage rings’ (whose renewed popularity among collectors was exploited by forgers).[2] Judaica still fascinated the non-Jewish world, especially with the boom in biblical archaeology, and national museums vied for possession of artefacts related to ancient Jewish communities. When in 1897 Solomon Schechter announced the retrieval of hundreds of thousands of defunct scrolls and fragments which had been stored for centuries in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo – the celebrated ‘Cairo Genizah’ – it attracted worldwide attention. In the scramble by universities to acquire and analyse the manuscripts, the complex pre-history of their first discovery and dissemination on the Egyptian market for antiquities was obscured.[3] The very late nineteenth century marked a key moment of transition, when the objects of Jewish cult became visible within metropolitan institutions. In 1878, the Isaac Strauss collection was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris (before being donated by Charlotte de Rothschild to the Musée Cluny in 1890). In Britain, the Anglo-Jewish exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall in 1887 represented another landmark, in which the troubled history of the community was embedded within national narratives. Meanwhile, the Jewish Museum in Vienna opened its doors in 1895.
But focusing exclusively on Judaica can unhelpfully narrow the field of Jewish collecting, since it is difficult to claim that the Jewishness of any collector was significant only in the context of religious observance. In the modern era many Jewish collectors showed little regard for Judaica, and instead pursued objects which initiated a dialogue with other non-Jewish – and often non-European – cultures. The Silesian collector Alfred Pringsheim, father-in-law to Thomas Mann, had no qualms in collecting small Renaissance paintings on Christian subjects, to complement his extensive collections of maiolica, enamels and bronzes. The centrepiece of his collection was Renaissance and Baroque silverware produced in the German lands, although none of it was for either Christian or Jewish worship, in keeping with his irreligious outlook. But this does not mean that Pringsheim’s Jewish identity was simply irrelevant to his acquisitions. Rather, the provenance of his objects linked him with many other Jewish collectors, including Maurice Kann, Eugen Gutmann and the Austrian-born dealer Frédéric Spitzer.[4] Relations between Jewish collectors were by no means always amicable: in his memoirs, Ferdinand de Rothschild railed against the notorious Spitzer for hoodwinking him into buying fake Renaissance jewels, deploring his 'overbearing manner, parvenu tone and underhand methods'.[5] Yet whether comrades or rivals, the Jewish backgrounds of collectors often brought them together and dictated how they were perceived by the wider national society. Typically, Jewish heritage has been noted in passing by scholars but not fully analysed, despite its interpretive potential. As one study of George Swarzenski has surmised, it is hard to know whether his extensive links to other German Jewish enthusiasts of medieval art were forged through 'professional, religious or personal networks, if not a combination of all three'.[6]
Instead of thinking about Jewish collecting as inward or exclusive, the challenge of working on Jewish visual culture is to capture its diversity and eclecticism. Jewishness cannot be reduced to any single aesthetic and the search for a monolithic ‘Jewish taste’ is both dubious and fruitless (especially in an era of widespread conversion, integration and intermarriage). Yet Jewish collectors did lend their own stamp or inflection to the interpretation of numerous historical periods, recasting the value of objects through feats of appropriation and imaginative reconstruction. Take, for example, the neo-Kunstkammer in the late nineteenth century, exemplified in the Smoking Room of Waddesdon Manor, where Ferdinand de Rothschild and his sister Alice sought to create a unified ensemble through mixing modern, historicist pieces of furniture with original works of art in an atmospheric display.[7] Similarly, the Jewish contribution to the vogue for Louis XV and Louis XVI cannot be underestimated. Philip Sassoon’s sophisticated interiors in his town house at Park Lane illustrate both his deep engagement with the decorative arts of the French ancien régime and 'the cosmopolitan tastes of his kinsmen'. When Sassoon organized in his home exhibitions on Three French Reigns and Georgian portraits, he counted among the donors Lord Bearsted, the Dowager Lady Hillingdon, James A. de Rothschild, Mrs Meyer Sassoon and Sir Otto Beit.[8] Incidentally, both Ferdinand de Rothschild and Philip Sassoon suggest Jewish collectors’ self-conscious engagement with the history of collecting, an engagement reinforced by their ties to scholarship and expert art advisers. Social historians have demonstrated the profound interconnection of the Jewish financier families across the nineteenth century, cemented through overlapping ties of business, marriage and sociability.[9] The cosmopolitan background and horizons of the Jewish élite made them pioneers in importing continental traditions of art collecting and display into Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
By adopting an enlarged definition of Jewish collecting, we can shed fresh light on the activities and social circles of figures normally not studied through a Jewish lens. Consider Murray Marks, a son of Dutch Jewish migrants to Britain, who became the crucial dealer for the Aesthetic Movement and who was a leading connoisseur of white Oriental porcelain (and who also sold items of Judaica from the Sephardi community to the South Kensington Museum).[10] The turn towards the study of networks within the art market promises to shed more light on how Jewish dealers from across Europe were tied together through kinship and credit, passing stock and information across national borders. In Wilhelmine Germany, for instance, these networks were already highly controversial, with Berlin museums’ director Wilhelm von Bode denounced for cultivating a clique of Jewish donors to whom he extended scholarly respectability and commercial opportunities.[11] In Third Republic Paris, Louvre curator Émile Molinier’s proximity to the art market and close collaboration with Spitzer provoked an anti-Semitic backlash in the press.[12] At the fin-de-siècle, the collaboration of Jewish collectors with national institutions was as pervasive as it was contentious. The role of enterprising Jewish dealers like Paul Cassirer helps account for their remarkable concentration in certain pockets of the art market- for instance, in the breakthrough of Van Gogh among collectors in the Kaiserreich – and why the activities of this cultural élite were imagined by its enemies in conspiratorial terms.[13]
One reason for the growing visibility of Jewish collecting in the late nineteenth century was patterns of cultural philanthropy. Jews counted as major donors to museums – think of Ludwig Mond in London, Isaac de Camondo in Paris or James Simon in Berlin – and formed a significant presence on many boards of trustees and in learned societies. According to a recent monumental study, no less than half of all museums created by 1914 received some sort of gift from Alphonse de Rothschild as part of a systematic campaign of donations and cultural ‘decentralization’.[14] Pringsheim’s plans to donate to the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum were cut short by the rise of Hitler, and his collections of silver were ultimately subject to confiscation, restitution and dispersal.[15] Nazism negated the process by which art collections had provided a platform for Jewish engagement in the arts, turning donors and benefactors into victims of spoliation. In post-Anschluss Austria, where the policy was first systematically implemented, Jewish collectors such as Louis Rothschild, Oscar Bondy and Leon Lilienfeld were stripped of their artworks, many of which were re-appropriated by the Nazi leadership or were designated for the universal museum that Hitler planned at Linz.[16] The first efforts at restitution in Austria after the war were hampered not simply by the continuity of Nazi personnel but also by a 'devilishly perverse' and 'morally indefensible' tax which forced wealthy Jewish citizens to make further forced ‘gifts’ or ‘donations’ to Austrian museums in exchange for an export licence.[17] Whilst the policy of spoliation was taken to its most murderous extreme within Nazi Germany, Elizabeth Karlsgodt in her study of occupied France has identified a strain of ‘patrimania’ among non-Nazi curators of French museums who seized on the opportunity to discretely annex artworks from Jewish collections which had now suddenly become ownerless and available.[18] Provenance research into lost Jewish collections and complex legal cases continues to proliferate in the twenty-first century.
The essays gathered together in this virtual issue replicate the dominant ways in which Jewish collecting has been treated: first, through a concern with Jewish ritual objects and Judaica; second, through a study of opulent Jewish collectors, with the Rothschilds operating in a class apart; third, through reconstructing the fate of Jewish collections during the Second World War. In each case, the Jewishness of collecting is understood according to different criteria, whether religious or ethnic, and according to a changing context. As Dominique Jarassé has proposed, the question ‘what is Jewish art?’ cannot adequately be answered except by historicizing it, asking at what moments and under what conditions the Jewishness of objects or actors was deemed significant.[19] Some studies have ventured to extrapolate from aspects of the Jewish heritage to identify general proclivities found among Jewish collectors, drawing links between anti-iconism and the impulse towards abstraction, or equating the widespread interest in aesthetics with a mode of Jewish self-effacement, even radical assimilation.[20] A more modest goal would be to identify the crucial role of Jewish agents within the formation of the art market and to interrogate the points of contact and exchange with non-Jewish actors, trends and ideas. In turn, this might illuminate varieties of Jewish collecting concealed by the current configuration of the field.
Articles
‘Remarkable objects of the three . . . main religions’: Judaica in early modern European collections
Noam Sienna
A Genizah secret: The Count d'Hulst and letters revealing the race to recover the lost leaves of the original Ecclesiasticus
Rebecca J. W. Jefferson
‘What cannot often be obtainable’: The Revd Greville John Chester and the Bodleian genizah collection
Rebecca J. W. Jefferson
Émile Molinier, the ‘incompatible’ roles of a Louvre curator
Agnès Bos
The art collection of Alfred Pringsheim (1850–1941)
Lorenz Seelig
The art dealer and collector as visionary: discovering Vincent van Gogh in Wilhelmine Germany 1900–1914
Veronica Grodzinski
‘The time is opportune’: the Swarzenskis and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston
Shirin Fozi
Rothschilds, rubies and rogues: the ‘Renaissance’ jewels of Waddesdon Manor
Phillippa Plock
Baron Ferdinand Rothschild's sense of family origins and the Waddesdon Bequest in the British Museum
Dora Thornton
‘A gatherer and disposer of other men’s stuffe’: Murray Marks, connoisseur and curiosity dealer
Clive Wainwright
Sir Philip Sassoon at 25 Park Lane: The collection of an early twentieth-century connoisseur and aesthete
Marc Fecker
High art and National Socialism, part I: the Linz Museum as ideological arena
Monika Ginzkey Puloy
High art and National Socialism, part II: Hitler’s Linz collection – acquisition, predation and restitution
Monika Ginzkey Puloy
Frans Hals, Hitler, and the Lilienfeld collection: a case-study of expropriation in Austria
Victoria S. Reed
Book Reviews
Thomas Gaehtgens and Barbara Paul (eds), Wilhelm von Bode, Mein Leben
Jeremy Warren
Prévost-Marcilhacy (ed.), Les Rothschild, une dynastie de mécènes en France
Tom Stammers
Theodor Bruckler (ed.), Kunstraub, Kunstbergung und Restitution in Osterreich 1938 bis Heute
Monika Ginzkey Puloy
Acknowledgements
The authors are investigating the phenomenon of Jewish collecting (c.1850-1930) as part of the major AHRC project ‘The Jewish Country House: Objects, Networks and People’ (2019-2023). They are grateful to the AHRC for its support.
Addresses for Correspondence
Dr Silvia Davoli, Strawberry Hill, 268 Waldegrave Road, Twickenham tw1 4st.
Dr Tom Stammers, Department of History, 43 North Bailey, Durham, dh1 3ex.
Introductory References
- Noam Sienna, ‘”Remarkable objects of the three . . . main religions”: Judaica in early modern European collections’, Journal of the History of Collections 31 (2019), pp. 25-6.
- Dora Thornton, ‘Baron Ferdinand Rothschild’s sense of family origins and the Waddesdon Bequest in the British Museum’, Journal of the History of Collections 31 (2019), pp. 186-7, 191-2.
- Rebecca J. W. Jefferson, ‘”What often cannot be obtainable”: The Revd Greville John Chester and the Bodleian genizah collection’, Journal of the History of Collections 31 (2019), pp. 1-19; eadem, ‘A Genizah secret: the Count d’Hulst and letters revealing the race to recover the original lost leaves of Ecclesiasticus’, Journal of the History of Collections 21 (2009), pp. 125-42.
- Lorenz Seelig, ‘The art collection of Alfred Pringsheim (1850-1941)’, Journal of the History of Collections 29 (2017), pp. 174-5.
- Cited in Philippa Plock, ‘Rothschilds, rubies and rogues: the “Renaissance” jewels of Waddesdon Manor’, Journal of the History of Collections 29 (2017), p. 143.
- Shirin Fozi, ‘“The time is opportune”: the Swarzenskis and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston’, Journal of the History of Collections 27 (2015), pp. 437-8, n. 10.
- Ulrich Leben, ‘A High Victorian legacy at Waddesdon Manor: Baron Ferdinand’s smoking room and its contents since the creation of Waddesdon’, Journal of the History of Collections 27 (2015), pp. 335-45.
- Marc Fecker, ‘Sir Philip Sassoon at 25 Park Lane: the collection of an early twentieth-century connoisseur and aesthete’, Journal of the History of Collections 31 (2019), pp. 155, 165.
- Cyril Grange, Une élite parisienne: les familles de la grande bourgeoisie juive (1870-1939) (Paris, 2016), esp. pp. 385-91 for collecting.
- Clive Wainwright, '“A gatherer and disposer of other men’s stuffe”: Murray Marks, connoisseur and curiosity dealer’, Journal of the History of Collections 14 (2002), pp. 161-76.
- Jeremy Warren, ‘Review: Wilhelm von Bode, Mein Leben, ed. Thomas Gaehtgens and Barbara Paul (Berlin, 1997)’, Journal of the History of Collections 13 (2002), p. 252.
- Agnès Bos, ‘Émile Molinier, the "incompatible" roles of a Louvre curator’, Journal of the History of Collections 27 (2015), pp. 309-21.
- Veronica Grodzinski, ‘The art dealer and collector as visionary: discovering Vincent van Gogh in Wilhelmine Germany, 1900-1914’, Journal of the History of Collections 21 (2009), pp.221-8.
- Tom Stammers, ‘Review: Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy (ed.), Les Rothschilds: une dynastie de mécènes en France (Paris, 2016)', Journal of the History of Collections 30 (2018), p. 183.
- Seelig, op. cit. (note 4), p. 177.
- Monika Ginzkey Puloy, ‘High art and National Socialism Part i: the Linz Museum as ideological arena’, Journal of the History of Collections 8 (1996), pp. 201-15; Monika Ginzkey Puloy, ‘High art and National Socialism Part ii: Hitler’s Linz collection – acquisition, predation and restitution’, Journal of the History of Collections 10 (1998), pp. 207-24; Victoria Reed, ‘Frans Hals, Hitler and the Lilienfeld collection: a case-study of expropriation in Austria’, Journal of the History of Collections 30 (2018), pp. 471-86.
- Monika Ginzkey Puloy, ‘Review: Theodore Brückler (ed.), Kunstraub, Kunstbergung und Restitution in Österreich 1938 bis Heute (Vienna, 1999)’, Journal of the History of Collections 13 (2001), p. 92.
- Elizabeth Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures: French art and heritage under Vichy (Stanford, ca, 2011).
- Dominique Jarassé, Existe-t-il un art juif? (Paris, 2006).
- See Kaman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and modern affirmations and denials of the visual (Princeton, 2002); Todd Endelmann, ‘Aestheticism and the flight from Jewishness’, Jewish Culture and History 12 (2010), pp. 426-38.
