European Judaism

When the topic of Jewish museums in Europe arose we became aware of a wealth of opportunities. Through her work as Founder and Executive Director of the Hidden Legacy Foundation, Evelyn Friedlander has connections with many curators and scholars; Edward van Voolen, one of our correspondents, and curator of the Jewish Museum of Amsterdam, supplied further lists. What we had not anticipated was the enthusiasm with which so many of those we approached responded, and, what alas is a rarer quality in the experience of journal editors, actually delivered on time! And what unexpected doors they opened for us as each author demonstrated the way his or her museum reflected the different cultural assumptions, contexts and challenges faced by the local Jewish community.

The first Jewish museums were established in the late nineteenth century. By then, museums were coming into vogue all over Europe, with encouragement from central and local government. Furthermore, while private collections of objects of art had existed for centuries, these collections were now entering the public domain. And, for the first time, this trend also applied to the collection of Jewish ritual objects. As Cohen (1998) notes, art patronage in the form of donations to public museums was a way of displaying patriotism while at the same time seeking legitimacy in society.

All religions are practised within a larger social context, but different religions may relate to that context in different ways, posing particular issues for the way that religion is communicated through museum display. Christianity, for example, when displayed within a Christian country, will tend to focus upon the specific arena of religiosity. The Jewish minority within the same country is more likely to employ an integrated approach that sets religion within the context of history and social life. This is partly because Judaism is not only a set of beliefs and practices – it is also a way of life. The representation of Judaism therefore presents particular challenges and opportunities within a museum context. This article will provide a case study, focusing on Jewish museums within Britain.

The opening last year of the Jewish Museum in Berlin attracted much attention in the German public arena. It was a media spectacle, splendidly served by radio, television and the written word. The Federal President and Chancellor attended, accompanied by German celebrities from the worlds of the arts, science, religion and politics. Rarely has a German museum been transfixed by such a spotlight, as was Berlin’s Jewish Museum then. Gala dinners, gala speeches, a gala concert – the new symbol of Berlin was celebrated with enormous extravagance.

The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki (Salonika) has had an interesting history of experimentation determined to a great degree by the horrific effects of the Shoah on the Jewish community of the city. A museum, somewhat by definition, is a place where memories are stored, where tangible evidence provides witness to events and persons and the communities in which they lived and functioned. In this regard a museum is somewhat introverted and self-centred though at the same time it can create the sense of continuity and identity that are required in order to evolve healthy lives. The very tangible presence of the Shoah was envisaged as a potential danger to a museum dedicated to a very long and august history of Jewish creativity.

The Jewish Museum of Greece was founded in Athens in 1977 to house a small number of artefacts, sad remnants from the Greek Jewish Communities, which unlike their owners survived the destruction of the Holocaust. In 1997 the Jewish Museum left its long-time home, on 36 Amalias Avenue, and moved into its own premises, a restored neo-classical building on 39 Nikis Street. On 10 March 1998, the official inauguration of the museum took place, marking a new era for this historical and ethnographical institution, dedicated to preserve, study and present historical, cultural and material evidence of 2,300 years of Jewish life in Greece.

Before 1933 Frankfurt was home to the second largest Jewish community in Germany after Berlin. After the Shoah, only a small Jewish remnant remained in Germany. Still, the city on the banks of the river Main remained the second largest Jewish community. This ‘tradition’ ended after 1991 with the immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union and nowadays more Jews live in Munich than Frankfurt.

Denmark is probably the last country in Europe to get a Jewish museum. This might seem surprising, considering the Danish efforts on behalf of Jewish citizens during the Second World War. But it also suggests that it has not been felt necessary to have a museum for an integrated minority.

In the Balkans, the factor that influences the work of institutions most significantly is transition. As far as countries from East, Southeast or Central Europe are concerned, as well as countries from the post-Soviet bloc, the term ‘transition’ generally refers to democratisation. However, for the country that was called Yugoslavia until just a few months ago, and which is now called Serbia and Montenegro, ‘transition’ includes the restoration of completely ruined institutions, the regeneration of the economy, the modernisation of a dated telecommunications system, as well as dealing with the after-effects of the bombing campaign, revitalising its depressed people and many other things.

In the vicinity of the synagogue and the Jewish community of Basel and close to the city-centre, the first Jewish Museum of Switzerland (JMS) opened its doors in June 1966. The new museum, which had been set up according to the topical requirements of the museums of the time, and comprised a collection of remarkable objects, textiles, books, and documents, was very well received by newspapers and the public. In the first years about 3,000 visitors came to see the new structure. By now the number of visitors reaches about 5,000 a year, which does not include special events like the ‘Museumsnacht’ in January, which in 2003 drew 2,600 visitors to the museum within a few hours. In summer 2003 the temporary show of a collection of ketubbot from Italy (Braginsky Collection Zürich) was on display.

‘Frankfurt, the St Paul’s Church filled with guests ranging from George Weidenfeld to some of the old guard of intellectuals from the past, was a strange place’, said George Steiner. ‘The city itself, with its skyscrapers proclaiming its economic status, obscured its own memories of an old republic of letters. The fake Goethe House on the square, and the Börneplatz as a reminder of the vanished Jewish community, were depressing. In the bookshops, there were photos and the books of Adorno, Habermas, and my own work. It was all quite depressing, although the laudatio by Joschke Fischer, an unusual autodidact, showed that Germany was aware of the fact that so much of its intellectual past had gone into exile – like the truth.’

How did George Steiner respond to this laudatio? With his permission, European Judaism here brings most of his response, fully aware that, as always, translators are traitors to the text; we lose so much of the delicacy of the text, but we must be grateful that one of the great teachers of Europe permits us this partial ingress into the changing patterns of European thought in a moment of reflection and response to a literary prize which must be recorded by us as surveyors of the European scene. (AHF)

The term haredi literally means ‘fearful’ with the reference being to fear of the Almighty. Appearing in the Bible in the phrase ‘Hear the word of the Lord, you who tremble [haredim] at his word’ (Isaiah 66:5), the haredim – along with the poor and the contrite in spirit – are those to whom the Lord will pay heed. Although the term is biblical, its contemporary use began only during the latter half of the twentieth century. Initially utilised by speakers of Hebrew to denote any Jew who was punctilious about his religious practice, the term gradually came to designate those Jews whose style of life, worldview, ethos and beliefs went beyond what many people seemed to understand by ‘Orthodox’. In English speaking countries the term ‘ultra-Orthodox’ served as a marker, but as it was foreign to the Jewish experience it did not precisely capture the essentials of the group it was meant to signify. Consequently, the term ‘haredi’ came into use (Heilman and Friedman 1991).

Since April 1990, more than 100,000 Jews from the Soviet Union and its successor states have migrated to Germany, radically and permanently altering the size, shape and culture of Germany’s Jewish population. This migration was unexpected, unplanned and, in fact, unwanted by the German government, by the Israeli government, and by most members of Germany’s Jewish communities. It took place against the background of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, and, once it began, it became unstoppable. Through the decades of the Cold War, ‘Jews in Germany’ – as they were called – appeared in newspaper and magazine articles as an endangered species, if not an anomaly. Books about Jews in the postwar Germanies carried titles like The Survivors (Mühlen, 1962), and Post-Mortem (Katcher, 1968).

It is a great pleasure, and an honour, to have been invited to give this lecture under the auspices of two organisations dear to my heart and so important to our community. I thank Rabbi Dr Mark Winer, Senior Rabbi of the West London Synagogue, and Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet, Principal of Leo Baeck College – Centre for Jewish Education; and I thank you all for attending.

It’s been over fifty years since Mischa the herring-eater came into my life, but I’ve never forgotten him. I was a young and impressionable kid when he rented our extra room. Pop was always bringing home boarders. He had to, it was the only way we could pay the rent.

Born 29 March 1947 Tel Aviv, Israel, died Netanya, Israel 15 June 2003, aged 56

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Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550–1950, (ed.) David Cesarani, London, Frank Cass Publishers, 2002, £17.50, ISBN 0-7146-8286-1.