Why Jewish Museums?

Introduction: Why Jewish Museums?

… I am as far as I know the most typical Western Jew among them. This means, expressed with exaggeration, that not one calm second is granted to me, everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past too—something after all which perhaps every human being has inherited, this too must be earned; it is perhaps the hardest work.1

The history of the first Jewish museums reflects the spirit of Kafka’s words—it is the record of the efforts made by the modern Jew to forge a new identity, by formulating historic and cultural memory during the tempestuous and tragic period that began towards the end of the nineteenth century with the rise of nationalism and racial anti-Semitism, and culminated in World War II. Already in the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza, the first modern Jew,2 defined memory, as an essential element of identity, and described loss of memory as an indicator of the type of change that suggests imminent death.3 In Greek my- thology, Mnemosyne the goddess of memory is mother of the Muses. Memory is therefore a vital element of identity, culture and art. In the nineteenth century, in the wake of the Emancipation in Western and Central Europe, many of the leading intellectuals, Jewish and Christian alike, agreed with Friedrich Schleiermacher who wrote in 1799 that “Judaism is long since a dead religion.”4 They often saw only two options: either traditional Jewish practice, or radical assimilation through intermarriage or conversion. In the course of the nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals tried to create a third alternative. They established and developed the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) movement that played a positive role in defining and preserving Jewish identity. The earliest Jewish museums to be established in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century served to consolidate these efforts, along the same lines. Unique among the Jewish museums, the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem was the first to declare that it aimed to engage in art as part of the Zionist narrative and national revival.

1 Frantz Kafka, Letters to Milena, Schocken Books New York, 1974, 219. 2 On Spinoza as the first secular Jew, see: Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason, Princeton University Press, 1989, 172–205. 3 Spinoza, Ethics, Part 4, footnote to Statement no. 39, The Collected Writtings of Spinoza, Edwin Curley translator, Princeton University Press, vol.1, 1985. 4 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultures Despisers. Translated by R. Crouter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 211.

The development of the Jewish museum is a fascinating subject of study, especially when the study looks into the circumstances underlying the estab- lishment of the institution, and specifically the manner in which the individu- als involved strove to preserve memory, and, through this, shape their public’s conceptions of the past, and thus bear influence on the present and future. Contrary to popular belief, a museum is not simply a passive repository of artifacts. Rather, it is an institution with a complex history, which, notwith- standing its focus on memory, is inseparable from the spirit of its own time. Directors and curators carefully pick and choose, selecting the items to be put on display as well as those to be rejected. As such it plays an important role in the formulation of culture and art. In other words, studying the Jewish museum is fascinating because it essentially represents an examination of the politics of memory. For instance, had Boris Schatz, founder of the Bezalel Museum, been con- vinced that the works of Isidor Kaufmann—who painted nostalgic portraits of ghetto Jews—were no less important than works by Samuel Hirschenberg, who portrayed the persecutions of Jews in the Diaspora, then it is quite likely that the collection of images that dominated Bezalel, and served as a source of inspiration for many generations of Israeli artists, would have been entirely different. Consequently, the development of Israeli art over the past century would have taken an entirely different course. The development of the Bezalel Museum represents an everlasting testa- ment to the potential power of a museum curator and director to create culture, and mold attitudes towards it. Out of one room, with a small collection that Boris Schatz began assembling a hundred years ago, grew an institution which, in spite of seemingly impossible circumstances, would one day become the Israel Museum, Jerusalem—the most important of Jewish museums. Another example, perhaps even more exceptional, is the Jewish Museum of Prague, which grew and developed because of and in spite of historical circumstances, and on account of the efforts of the people who managed it. Its first director, Salomon Hugo Lieben, began assembling this museum’s collection early in the twentieth century, following the destruction of the city’s Jewish ghetto. The collection was dramatically expanded during World War II. Under the directorship of the museologist Josef Poláck, collections taken from the Jewish museums of the towns of Mladá Boleslav and Mikulov were housed here. In addition, the contents of the synagogues, libraries, and archives of 153 Jewish communities from across Bohemia and Moravia were collected and brought to the museum, even as the owners were being sent to the death camps. Consequently, in the shadow of the destruction of the community in