The late nineteenth century witnessed for the first time the public display of Judaic ceremonial art. The collecting and displaying of Jewish ceremonial art for aesthetic as well as educational purposes was all but unknown until the nineteenth century. Such objects up to that time were used in the life cycle and holiday ceremonies performed in the home and synagogue. They served to enhance the worship of God through hiddur mitzvah—the adornment of mitzvot (divinely ordained deeds)—so that God could be worshiped in the “beauty of holiness.” In Christian services the objects used in the sacraments are considered sacred and serve to help invoke the redeeming power of the actual Divine Presence. In Judaism the sacramental aspect is absent. Ceremonial objects are a means to beautify the liturgical acts in the worship of the invisible deity, not the means through which the Divine Presence becomes manifest.

            In 1875, some Jewish ceremonial objects were displayed in the Amsterdam Historische Tentoonstelling, and 1878 saw a private collection of eighty-two objects, owned by Isaac Strauss, the French orchestra conductor of the royal balls, put on display at the Exposition Universale held in Paris. But the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition in 1887 was the first major independent public Judaica show. The publication of a catalog of its 2,945 items was the first significant scholarly catalog in the as yet uncharted and neglected field of Jewish art.

            No doubt the London exhibit sparked the collecting of Jewish ceremonial objects at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and led to their display in 1893 at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Similarly, the London exhibition may have inspired German and Austro-Hungarian Jewish scholars in the 1890s to begin researching Judaica objects. A pioneer Jewish scholar of Jewish art, Rabbi David Kaufmann, expressed his enthusiasm in 1897: “The fable of enmity of the synagogue towards all the arts until the Middle Ages and even modern times should finally be dismissed in light of the facts of life and the testimony of literature.” As Kaufmann was aware, it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that public displays, catalogs, or studies of Jewish art were to be encountered. In fact, both Jewish and non-Jewish scholars generally denied the existence of Jewish art, dismissing it by citing the anti-iconic “Second Commandment.” Moreover, the racial theories of the time claimed that Jews had not been endowed with a talent for the visual. Jews were deemed to suffer a congenital incapacity for the visual arts. Even as eminent a Jewish philosopher as Martin Buber wrote that “the Jew of antiquity was more of an aural than a visual being, and felt more in terms of time than space.”
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            What then prompted the collecting, exhibiting and study of Jewish ceremonial art? No doubt, the establishment of ethnographic museums during the second half of the nineteenth century influenced Jews to review their own ethnic artistic heritage. The Judaica collector Salli Kirschstein (his collection is now housed in the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles) noted that “in the last years of the nineteenth century I frequently visited the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin.” All the cultures of the world were represented —“only the Jews were absent from this museum. As if a Jewish people never existed, as if they had no indigenous cult or culture.” In addition, Europe’s virulent late nineteenth-century racial and political anti-Semitic movements made Jews conscious of the bitter truth that legal emancipation was proving insufficient to attain full acceptance of Jews by their Christian neighbors. These anti-Semitic movements not only spurred Jewish nationalism but intensified Jewish self-awareness. All of these factors contributed to the collecting, display, and study of Jewish ceremonial art in the nineteenth century.

            The destruction of Jewish communities and their Judaica museums, as well as their private Judaica collections in Nazi-occupied Europe had a profound effect, especially on American Jewry. In addition, the rapid integration of Jews into American life and culture has made some Jews acutely aware of their responsibility to preserve the three-thousand-year-old Jewish heritage. As a result, since World War II both Judaica collectors and museums have had an astounding growth in America. This “mania” of collecting and displaying ancient Judaica objects represents, no doubt, a nostalgic yearning for concrete artifacts of a quickly disappearing piety and a desire to cling to shreds of a lost pious past. Public Judaica displays in our own day are no longer a novelty, as Judaica museums regularly have displays of Jewish ceremonial art. Even the many synagogal museums sometimes display Judaica objects possessed by their members. The Cleveland show, however, is unique in reflecting for the first time Judaica treasures of private and synagogal collections of an entire city.

            No cult objects from the Jerusalem Temple have survived. All we have are the stone reliefs of the menorah and the table of showbread sculpted on the Roman triumphal arch of the emperor Titus after 70 C.E. (Titus defeated Judea in 70 C.E., but the arch was completed only in 81 C.E.). Only a handful of Jewish ceremonial objects have come down to us even from the Middle Ages. Most of the extant Judaica items date from the sixteenth century on and reveal Baroque, Rococo, neo-Classical, and modern art styles.
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            The history of Jewish ceremonial art is largely a manifestation of the historical experiences Jews have undergone within the last one thousand years within the contexts of Christian and Islamic cultures. Thus Jewish ceremonial objects in form and style bear the indelible stamp of this long, multicultural and complex development. Jews, for instance, formed a minority in the Christian world and were banned from Christian guild organizations in Western Europe. Since they were not permitted to establish their own guilds, we find that before the nineteenth century, most of the silver Jewish ceremonial objects were made by Christian silversmiths. In the Islamic world, which tended to consider metal smithing an inferior occupation, Jews were active as smiths and probably fashioned their own ceremonial objects. Given the multifaceted involvement of Jews in dominant Islamic and Christian cultures, it is not surprising to find a rich diversity in the use, style, and form of objects in different Jewish communities. The Wimpel, for example, appears to be unique to German-speaking Jewry. Likewise, most Ashkenazi communities preferred to cover the Torah scroll with textile mantles and placed the Torah scroll flat on the reader’s desk, whereas in Islamic communities the Torah scroll was enclosed in a cylindrical or octagonal tik, a case made of metal and/or wood. The case was opened and the Torah scroll was not removed but was read while it was standing upright on the reader’s rostrum.

            The Jewish ceremonial objects in the Cleveland exhibit stem primarily from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. They include such fine pieces as part of a 1785 Torah mantle (Cat. 12)—donated by Wolf Zappert, the prominent gabbai (head) of the still standing sixteenth-century Pinkas synagogue in Prague, and his wife Patsche (only the section with the wife’s name is on display). The tik (Cat. 7) covered with silver sheeting from twentieth-century Iraq reveals the Islamic love of floral and geometric ornamentation. The 1757 Torah shield (Cat. 24) crafted by the Christian silversmith Anton Gutwein comes from Augsburg, Germany, and is a good example of the exquisite Torah ornaments made by Christian silversmiths. The Wimpel  (Cat. 164) from the nineteenth century is made of linen and was used during a boy’s circumcision. It was gaily embroidered by a relative or pious Jewish person and handsomely exemplifies a folk art, first introduced into southern Germany around 1500. The exhibit is especially rich in contemporary pieces such as the splendid Havdalah set (Cat. 59) made by Ludwig Wolpert -- a pioneer in contemporary Jewish ceremonial art, who studied at the Bauhaus in Germany. The elegant seder plate (Cat. 136) from the collection of Shoshana Herman, the imaginative and colorful Elijah cup (Cat. 146), and the striking memorial candle (Cat. 214) by Shenfield also deserve special attention among the many noteworthy objects in this unusual display.