Patrick Comerford
France is home to the third largest Jewish community in the world – after Israel and the US – with a Jewish presence goes back more than 2,000 years. Jewish people have lived in the Marais neighbourhood in Paris since the Middle Ages, and most Jewish people in Paris lived in the Marais until about 1985.
I spent some time in the Marais while we were in Paris last month, visiting synagogues, shops, cafés and other sites associated with Jewish life and history in Paris, and the two museums that document the history of Jews in France: the Shoah Memorial, the Holocaust Museum of Paris, opened in 2005; the Jewish Museum of Art and History (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme), commonly known as mahJ, has one of the finest collections in the world of objects of worship and art works.
The museum is housed in the majestic setting of the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, a 17th-century mansion at 71 Rue de Temple. Originally the Hôtel d’Avaux, it was built in 1644-1650 to designs by the architect Pierre Le Muet for Cardinal Mazarin’s Superintendent of Finances, Claude de Mesmes, Comte d’Avaux. It was later bought by Paul de Beauvilliers, Duc de Saint-Aignan, who added the grand staircase.
The museum focuses on the Jewish culture of France. It opened in 1998 and is the largest French museum of Jewish art and history. The permanent exhibition traces the history of the Jewish people of France, Europe and the Maghreb, through art and heritage. It is dedicated to preserving 2,000 years of Jewish history in France, with over 12,000 paintings, artworks, sculptures, furniture, religious artefacts and other items dating back to the Middle Ages.
Claude-Gérard Marcus, Victor Klagsbald, and Alain Erlande-Brandenburg initiated the project to set up the museum in 1985 and were supported by the City of Paris and the Ministry of Culture. At the time, there was a modest Jewish museum, on the rue des Saules. The then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, provided the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan in the Marais for the future museum.
The choice of location was poignant: when the French Vichy collaborators were rounding up Jews for the Nazis in 1942, several of the hôtel’s residents were arrested and deported, and 13 Jewish inhabitants were murdered in the Nazi death camps.
The Marais was also chosen because it had once been the centre of Jewish life in Paris. The architects Catherine Bizouard and Francois Pin redesigned the building as a museum, making at a centre for education and research and a cultural venue.
The permanent collection had three main sources: the Musée d’art Juif in Paris; the Muséenational du Moyen-Age, also known as the Musée Cluny, with a collection built up by Isaac Strauss in the 19th century; and long-term loans from museums such as the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre and the Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. In addition, there were loans from the Consistory of Paris, the Jewish Museum in Prague and the Fondation du Judaïsme Français.
The mahJ looks at Jewish history in France from its beginnings until the birth of the State of Israel, without including the Holocaust. The project for the Mémorial de la Shoah, now 800 yards metres the museum, already existed and was commemorating the Holocaust, and the two actually complement each other.
I have visited Jewish museums in other European cities, from Dublin and Seville to Krakow, Prague and Bratislava, from Thessaloniki and Rhodes to Venice and Vienna. Unlike other Jewish museums, though, the mahJ in Paris is not a community or confessional museum. Instead, it shows the story of Jewish life in France through time and space, and also helps to ask questions about Judaism and Jewish identity.
The permanent collection highlights the diversity and unity in rituals, beliefs, art, and material culture of Jewish communities in Europe and North Africa, and large part of the collection includes works of art from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century.
The story of Jews in France is unique, with both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews living side-by-side and the two traditions mingling. French Jews had a rich cultural life in the Middle Ages, with great thinkers such as the 11th century rabbi Rashi.
Philip August was the first European monarch to exile a country’s Jews, in 1182, but invited them back 16 years later. Philippe IV of France issued an edict in 1306 expelling Jews from France and Charles VI finally banned them completely in 1394.
The museum displays a number of mediaeval gravestones engraved in Hebrew, discovered in 1849 with the remains of a 13th century Jewish cemetery. They are testimony to the Jewish presence in Paris during the Middle Ages, despite many persecutions.
Jewish Emancipation in France began at the French Revolution, and Jews became citizens in 1790-1791. The consistories were created in 1808 when Napoleon organised French Judaism.
The trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a major setback for Jews in France at the end of the 19th century. He was accused of high treason and was only cleared years later. The museum’s Dreyfus archive consists of more than 3,000 manuscripts, letters, photographs, family heirlooms and official documents. Outside, in the centre of the courtyard, stands an 8-ft tall reproduction of a statue by the Polish-born French artist Louis ‘Tim’ Mitelberg (1919-2002) showing Dreyfus holding his broken sword.
A section on intellectual and political movements in Europe at the turn of the century includes the emergence of Zionism, the rebirth of the Hebrew language, the blooming of Yiddish culture, and the creation of political movements in Russia and Poland, with a small section looking at the creation of the state of Israel.
The museum decided not to have a collection devoted to the Holocaust because the Shoah Memorial had already been launched in Paris. However, the museum traces the lives of some East European, Russian, Polish and Romanian Jews who came to live in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. The museum traces the lives of 12 of these Jewish immigrants to Paris, illustrating Jewish life in the Marais before the deportations during World War II. Several scale models of synagogues from East Europe, most of them destroyed by the Nazis, are reminders of a world that has disappeared.
One room is devoted to Jewish life during the Italian Renaissance in Modena, Venice and other cities. It includes synagogue furnishings, including a rare Holy Ark (Aron haKodesh) from a synagogue in Modena, silverware, liturgical embroideries and several paintings attributed to Marco Marcuola (1740-1793) depicting Jewish life in Venice.
A 1720 masterpiece in late-Baroque style by Alessandro ‘il Lissandrino’ Magnasco depicts a Jewish funeral.
The ark from Modena is the only surviving 15th century Ashkenazi ark, and was probably made by the artists Lorenzo and Cristoforo Canozzi.
A small collection of 17th and 18th century Dutch engravings represent the wanderings of Spanish Jews after the expulsions in the 15th century. A series by Bernard Picart shows how Portuguese Jews integrated into communities in Amsterdam, London and Bordeaux after their expulsion in 1496-1497.
An entire room is dedicated to the holiday of Hanukkah, with an exceptional collection of Hanukkiyot, and another to Pesach or Passover. A well-preserved late 19th century painted sukkah or booth from Austria or south Germany was used for the festival of Sukkot (‘Tabernacles’). It is made of pine and its panels are decorated with scenes of an Austrian village, the first few words of the Ten Commandments, and a view of Jerusalem.
The Sephardic collection illustrates the wealth of traditions and ceremonies among Jews in the Maghreb and the Ottoman Empire. There are wedding costumes donated to the museum by Jewish Moroccan families living in France after decolonisation, including a ceremonial bridal dress late 19th century, silk velvet, gold braid handed down from mother to daughter in the one family in Tetuan.
A section on the Jewish presence in 20th century art highlights the Jewish cultural renaissance in Germany and Russia but also looks at important and sometimes forgotten artists, whose works include folklore, ornamental motifs, Biblical subjects and calligraphy, and the contribution of Jewish artists in the early 20th century.
The art collections in mahJ include works by Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani, and others, including works by Amedeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, Chaïm Soutine, Michel Kikoine, Jacques Lipchitz, Chana Orloff, Yitzhak Frenel and Emmanuel Mane-Katz.
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) painted Les Portes du cimetière (‘The Gates of the Cemetery’) in 1917 shortly after finding his grandfather’s grave in Vitebsk. Ida Chagall donated this painting to the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1984, a year before he died. In this painting, he associates the themes of death and resurrection with Balfour Declaration and the initial hopes for Jewish liberation after the Russian revolution in 1917.
Chagall was also inspired by words from the prophet Ezekiel: ‘I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people! And I will bring you back into the land of Israel’ (Ezekiel 37: 12-14). Two other paintings by Chagall depict the life of Jews in the shtetls.
The museum also regularly hosts temporary exhibitions. The current temporary exhibition, ‘Salonika, Jerusalem of the Balkans, 1870-1920,’ looks at Jewish life in Thessaloniki in Greece. But more about that on another day, perhaps.
Shabbat Shalom
