Culture and Costume documents the perceptions and imaginings of Jewish modes of dress in North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. These illustrations, made by travelers and artists, were included in travelogues, history and costume books, and albums that purported to elucidate for a mostly European audience the local manners, laws, religions, and ways of life of foreign peoples. Although initially integrated into these larger works, over the centuries many of the prints featured in this exhibition were removed from the original publications for which they were created.
The earliest printed images designed expressly to document what people wore first appeared in the sixteenth century, in German illustrated costume books known as Trachtenbücher, as well as in travel books such as Nicolas de Nicolay’s Les quatre premiers livres des Navigation et peregrinations orientales (1567). Subjects are categorized by religion, profession, and place of residence. In the context of presenting this cosmopolitan view of the world, native dress was used not only to represent but to define the various peoples depicted. The images of Jews are an example of these attempts to identify nations by their people and their dress.
The costumes shown in this exhibition reveal much about the people who wore them: traditions, cultural attributes, adaptations of foreign styles, degrees of assimilation, and social standing. At certain periods in history, Jews were subjected to elaborately detailed regulations regarding their dress. Applied primarily to types of head- and footwear and to the wearing of certain colors, these regulations could take the form of restrictions or mandates. At the Fourth Lateran Council, for example, convened under the auspices of Pope Innocent III in 1215, it was demanded that Jews dress in a manner that easily distinguished them from their fellow Christians. This law, intended to prevent the “mixing of Jew and Christian,” imposed the infamous Jewish badge on the Jews of Europe. Conversely, clothing could serve to accelerate the assimilation process, as was the intention of Czar Nicolas I, who in the mid-nineteenth century prohibited Jews from wearing their traditional costumes. The clothing seen in these prints thus reflects a distinctive Jewish identity, whether forged by choice or by decree.
The engravings, woodcuts and lithographs portray the dress of Jews in particular, and costumes in general, with varying degrees of authenticity. Travel and costume books routinely claimed that their illustrations had been drawn d’après nature (after nature). Yet the reality of travel restrictions, prejudices and vivid imaginations, combined with the expediency of commercial publishing, led to depictions that were often less than faithful. Even though travelers such as Nicolay and Robert Johnston, and artists including Jean-Baptiste Vanmour and Jan Piotr Norblin, actually experienced the places they drew, proximity to one’s subjects did not necessarily guarantee accuracy. As Johnston, a nineteenth-century writer, dryly commented on the observational powers of the traveler, “his facts are collected under many disadvantages.” Furthermore, from the sixteenth century onward, costume prints were immediately copied and reprinted by opportunistic publishers. Later publications of these earlier images, often reissued long after they first appeared, routinely presented them as current, with accompanying text that frequently contained unreliable and out-of-date information.
Early modern Europeans seemed to have had an inexhaustible curiosity about the “exotic” and these images are tangible expressions of this phenomenon. The objects in this exhibit embody the appetites and interests of the consumers of these prints as well as the cultures that are represented.
Scattered Among the Nations:
Jewish Communities of India, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Peru and Uzbekistan
( November 2005- May 2006 )
For thousands of years, Jews have carried their religion with them wherever they have gone. Living in the Diaspora for millennia, Jews have maintained their way of life and gathered in communities to share ancient traditions. At times, others have been touched by the faith and traditions of the Jews scattered among them—or by the words of the Torah—and bound their own lives to this enduring heritage.
Scarcely more than 13 million Jews live in the world today—most of them in established Jewish centers like Israel and in large cities of North America and Western Europe. What many do not know is that there are communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America whose populations share the outward appearance and lifestyles of the people who surround them, with one major difference: They are practicing Jews. Some of these communities exist in places so geographically and culturally distant from other Jews that members of the communities must work daily to maintain the religion of their ancestors.
The photographs from this exhibit capture populations that remain on the geographic and cultural fringes of the modern Jewish Diaspora. From the Benei Menashe tribes in the hills of northeastern India, to a farming village in Ghana, West Africa…from crowded corners of Bombay, to peaceful Andean villages of Peru…each of these Jewish communities challenges stereotypes, preserving Jewish practice apart from the mainstream Jewish community.
The Talmud says, “Hearing is not like seeing.” With this teaching in mind, Scattered Among the Nations showcases the faces and places that comprise a dynamic component of today’s multicultural Jewish world.
Bryan Schwartz is a Washington, D.C.,-based civil rights attorney and a widely published writer/photographer, who has photographed and documented the world’s most far-flung Jewish communities in 28 countries on five continents in recent years while working with collaborators Jay Sand and Sandy Carter. Mr. Schwartz is president of the nonprofit organization Scattered Among the Nations.
Jay Sand of Philadelphia is one of the world’s leading experts on black African Jewry. Since visiting Jewish communities in six African countries during 1999 and 2000, Mr. Sand has published photographs and delivered multimedia presentations on the multicultural Jews of Africa to black and Jewish communities at synagogues, community centers, youth groups, schools, universities and museums throughout North America.
Sandy Carter of Anacortes, Wash., has photographed nuns in France and Korea for the Little Sisters of the Poor, as well as Gypsies in Slovakia for the Roma Foto Projekt and several of the world’s most isolated Jewish communities in India.
Traveling the Holy Land Through the Stereoscope
( February 2005- November 2005 )
The photographic medium of the stereoscope highlights an important development in the history of art. In 1839, the invention of photography captured the world's imagination. It was quickly adopted for use in creating photographic stereographs, paired images of two slightly different views taken by a double-lens camera. When viewed through a stereoscope, the paired photographs appear as a single image and take on the enhanced quality of three dimensions. By 1860, stereoscopes were mass produced and widely distributed. Stereography would become the primary early medium for photojournalism, in which Palestine was a regular subject. During this period, Palestine consisted of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, extending south to the Gulf of Aqaba. Stereography also played a part in inspiring travel to the region. In 1914, Underwood & Underwood, the largest publisher of photographic stereographs in its day, released Traveling the Holy Land Through the Stereoscope . As Christians, the publishing brothers Elmer and Bert Underwood felt that viewing images of Palestine helped the viewer connect with the Holy Land described in the Bible, which is reflected in the titles of the stereographs. In 1920, Underwood & Underwood sold its stereographic stock and rights to the Keystone View Company, which continued to publish these inspiring stereographs. In this exhibition, the stereographs are from the Traveling the Holy Land Through the Stereoscope set of 100 cards. The framed images are enlarged reproductions of the originals printed by the Keystone View Company.
The exceptional images depicted in this collection capture the daily lives, important sites, and landscape of Palestine at the turn of the last century (1896 - 1904). They portray views of ethnographic scenes and show places with religious, biblical, historical, and archaeological significance. The stereographs offer an intimate look at a landscape that has changed dramatically and at locations that no longer can be seen by visitors. They also reveal the ethnic diversity that existed in this region where Jews, Muslims, and Christians all lived
Roman Vishna: Remember the Days of Old
( October 2004 - January 2005 )
Born in 1897, Roman Vishniac studied biology and medicine in his native Russia before going to Berlin in 1920 to study philosophy and art. In 1935, commissioned by the American Joint Distribution Committee, Vishniac traveled across Central and Eastern Europe, documenting with his camera the lives of the Jews of Poland, Austria, Holland, France, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. By 1938, Vishniac began concentrating his attention on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, in the hope of focusing worldwide attention towards a community on the brink of destruction. Keeping his camera hidden, with only its lens peering out through a buttonhole in his coat, he shot more than 16,000 photographs. Vishniac dedicated three years to creating pictorial evidence of a way of life he feared would otherwise be erased from memory.
Vishniac took great risks to document the plight of his fellow Jews. On the night of November 9, 1938, he donned a Nazi uniform in order to
photograph the events of Kristallnacht. He was in Poland taking photographs of the Jewish community when Hitler's troops invaded in
September 1939. Twice he was apprehended and sent to concentration camps and twice he escaped. In 1941 Vishniac fled Europe and
immigrated to the United States, where he became a pioneer in time-lapse cinematography and light-interruption photography as well as the color photomicroscopy of living organisms. A professor of biological education at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Vishniac was also a specialist in East Asian art and philosophy. He taught in several fields at many universities, including the City University of New York, Pratt Institute, and Case Western Reserve University. Despite all these accomplishments, it is as the chronicler of the "Vanished World" of European Jewry that Roman Vishniac will be forever remembered.
While we are understandably compelled to remember, in literature and in art, the fate of the victims of the annihilation of more than a third of world Jewry, we sometimes lose sight of the unique world they inhabited before their destruction. A glimpse of that now "vanished but not vanquished world" as the photographer himself called it, is presented here in the works and words of Roman Vishniac.
Kabbalah:
Mysticism in Jewish Life
(November
4, 2003 - January 30, 2004)
Despite its complexity, Kabbalah has been one of the most powerful influences shaping Judaism. The imagery that surrounds Jewish mysticism is intriguing and intensely visual. Mysticism has permeated deeply into Jewish material culture.
This exhibition illustrated and explored traditions of Jewish mysticism in different parts of the world from the medieval era to the early 20th century. It also examined the impact of the Kabbalah on Jewish life and custom. Visitors were able to view materials from the Near and Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States. Kabbalah: Mysticism in Jewish Life featured numerous examples of engraved amulets to protect women and unborn children from the demon Lilith, elaborate charts and esoteric diagrams found in scrolls and broadsides, and scholarly books and manuscripts with mystical illustrations.
Catalog available.
Works
on Paper: Israel Prize Winners from the Burston Graphics Center
(March - September 2003)
Founded
in 1975, the Burston Graphics Center broadened the scope of printmaking in
Israel - mostly through lithography but also in other forms - and, in turn,
established a way to spread the appreciation of Israeli art to a wider public.
The center was a creative draw for leading artists from Israel and abroad,
including 10 winners of the highly coveted Israel Prize - seven of whom are
featured in this exhibition.
Borders
and Boundaries: Maps of the Holy Land, 15th - 19th Centuries
(April - September 2003)
The maps in this exhibition employ all of the conventional geographic components in the cartographer's tool kit - mountains, valleys, streams and oceans - but, they also run the gamut of symbolic and fantastic imagery. Mythic creatures and biblical scenarios literally are set within imagined geography, each map intending to bolster an intrinsic value judgment, vision or message of the Holy Land. ·
To
Have and To Hold: Decorated Jewish Marriage Contracts,
17th - 19th Centuries
(April - July 2001)
Throughout centuries of Jewish tradition, they joyous occasion of the wedding has given rise to the creation of numerous artistic objects. Jewish communities under Islamic rule, as well as the Sephardic and Ashkenzaic Jews of Christian Europe, dedicated much effort and considerable means to celebrating this major event in the life cycle. Central among the objects d'art made expressly for the wedding is the illustrated marriage contract (ketubbah, pl. ketubbot).
Building A Vision: Louis Marshall and Temple Emanu-El,
New York City, 1929
(November 1999 - March 2000)
Through a selection of fascinating archival images and documents, this exhibition
examines the life of Louis Marshall, a champion of Jewish causes and civil
rights, and his effect on the physical and political landscape of New York
City, the United States and the world.
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