We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky, wrote the late, great Leonard Cohen, and perhaps it is this lurking fear of eclipse that explains our desire to preserve the material proof of our presence. Museums are not only treasure troves of material proof that we humans are here and are large, they provide the bulwark of the past as protection against the alarming expanse of the future. Stories in many ways serve the same function, curating the random evidence of existence into meaningful narratives. But inevitably, both museums and stories are selective in how they arrange the evidence, depending on whose story they’re curating, whose presence they’re preserving. Oxford, where I’ve lived for nearly three decades, is home to one of the oldest and greatest museums in the world: the Ashmolean, founded by Elias Ashmole in 1683. When I used to visit as a child, I wasn’t much interested in the past. Egyptian mummies did the job just fine, the creepier the better. The allure of history has grown as I’ve got older, both history in general and those parts of it I can relate to personally. A few years ago, however, as a Jewish visitor to the Ashmolean, I began to realise that “my” history, although present among the vast riches of the museum’s collections, was at the same time curiously hard to see, a faint thread that wove through its galleries but was easily lost. The same is true for many other histories, of course, because curatorial choices have to be made. But in the case of Jewish history, the material evidence was there, on display in many different forms in nearly every gallery. It was just strangely difficult to find, and once found, strangely difficult to make sense of. Absorbed into different and sometimes competing narratives, the specifically Jewish meaning of these objects, even when you knew where to look, remained highly elusive.
This realisation led to the idea of curating a selection of the museum’s Jewish artefacts back into view, and with the help of Oxford Jewish Heritage and the Ashmolean itself, I embarked on a hunt through the museum in search of its Jewish treasures. The results far surpassed expectations. Here, preserved in clay, marble, bronze, gold, paper, ink, glass, wood and paint, were objects that spanned the whole 4,000 years of Jewish history, ranging across three continents and 14 countries, from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern day. The mere fact of their existence and survival is in many cases remarkable. Hidden in caves, buried in tombs, dropped in moats, sunk in alpine lakes, a significant number of these objects were never intended to be found.
This theme of concealment resonates, inevitably, with one of the darker motifs running through Jewish history: the recurring imperative for Jews to conceal not only their belongings, but themselves. Another strand in the story is the long history of voluntary and partial concealment through assimilation and integration. A pair of viola da gambas, made in Italy by master instrument-makers Gasparo da Salò and Girolamo Amati, bear no outward signs of their Jewish connections, but yielded rich stories related to the pressures on Italian Jews in the 16th and 17th centuries to convert and assimilate. Paintings by Camille Pissarro in the 19th century, and David Bomberg and Mark Gertler in the 20th, remind us, lest we need reminding, that assimilation is not without its difficulties.
The past is animated by our capacity to imagine it, and material evidence of the past helps anchor history in a tangible, imaginable reality. In choosing which of these objects to highlight, my aim was not to tell a comprehensive history of the Jews, but to identify those that would connect, like stars in a complex constellation, to convey the sweep of that history and the range of experiences it contains.
Inevitably, the objects reflect the history of the Ashmolean itself. The Bodleian Bowl, is one of the museum’s treasures, not because of the story it has to tell about the Jews of medieval England, but because it was one of the museum’s earliest acquisitions. The bowl’s cryptic Hebrew text excited curiosity in Protestant England in the 17th century, a time of renewed scholarly interest in Hebraism, and also explains why, for several hundred years, it was catalogued as a manuscript.
Since the objects in the Ashmolean determined the moments in Jewish history that the book I decided to write would cover, there are gaps in the story, places on the Jewish journey that I have had to leave out, but what is in the Ashmolean nevertheless covers a vast and varied terrain. Like the journey of the Jews themselves, the journey described by the 22 objects eventually decided on is both temporal and geographical. It begins with the King List (1800BC) from ancient Iraq, where Abraham, the founding father of Jewish monotheism, may once have lived, and from there wends its way across the centuries and continents, ending with a pottery camel, which has made its own long journey from Tang dynasty China via Nazi Germany to present-day Oxford. The Jewish Journey: 4,000 Years in 22 Objects thus takes the reader on two journeys: a physical journey through the galleries of the Ashmolean Museum, and a metaphorical journey, which traces the steps of the Jewish people through time and space.
Why 22 objects? As long as 3,000 years ago, the Hebrew alphabet had fixed on the 22 letters it still uses to this day, and while the script and language have evolved during that time, the letters are recognisably the same, symbolic of the blend of change and continuity that characterises Jewish history itself. According to kabbalistic tradition, the universe was created through 22 hidden paths on the Tree of Life, and the number 22 signifies the meaning of life. The objects in The Jewish Journey are not intended to reveal the meaning of life, but they do, I hope, reveal something of what life has meant to Jewish people at different times in their history, and of the diversity and complexity of that history.
Across the centuries, the frequent imperative for Jewish people to move from one place to another as refugees and immigrants gives their story a particular resonance at this moment in time, a reminder that human migration is nothing new and often proves highly beneficial to the countries in which people resettle. While these objects tell stories that sometimes pull in contradictory directions, taken as a whole, they speak to the human capacity for adaptability, resilience and renewal. Journeys necessarily begin with a departure, but where they end is less certain. In the words of another 20th-century Jewish poet, Uri Zvi Greenberg, we are all of us journeying “to somewhere beyond the final point, towards an endless beginning, far in the distance”.
• The Jewish Journey: 4,000 Years in 22 Objects by Rebecca Abrams is published by the Ashmolean Museum (£15). To order a copy for £12.75 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. Rebecca Abrams is hosting a Jewish Treasures of the Ashmolean tour at the museum on 9 Nov
Jasper seal, 750-700BC
Carved from light red jasper, and no bigger than a thumbnail, this oval seal was made in the 8th century BC in Lachish, one of the most important cities in the kingdom of Judah. It is inscribed with a winged sphinx and, in Paleo-Hebrew, the name of its owner: a woman named Hannah. Ancient Near East seals belonging to women are rare, but they suggest that Judaean women took part in official correspondence, held positions of authority, accumulated wealth, and exercised economic and political power. The woman who owned this particular seal lived in turbulent times, her country sandwiched between the great powers of Egypt and Assyria. In 701BC, after King Hezekiah refused to pay tribute, Sennacherib unleashed his army on the kingdom of Judah. Lachish was besieged and destroyed, and its citizens forcibly resettled in other parts of the Assyrian empire. Twentieth-century excavations of the site uncovered thousands of arrowheads of iron, bronze and bone, embedded in the mud-brick debris and bent out of shape, suggesting they’d been fired with powerful bows from close range. The mud bricks themselves had been nearly baked by the heat of the flames that consumed the city. Somehow Hannah’s jasper seal survived the siege, but the destruction of Lachish was a serious blow for the Judaeans, not just a territorial loss but a symbolic wound that would echo through the Jewish narrative for centuries to come.
Temple gold coin, 70AD
It took more Roman troops to capture Jerusalem in 70AD than it had to conquer Britain 27 years earlier, but in August of that year, after a gruesome five-month siege, the walls were breached and Titus’s army flooded in. The city was razed and with it the sacred Temple, epicentre of religious life for the Jews, as well as its administrative and economic hub. Lavishly expanded by Herod during his reign and famed for its gold-plated facade, the Temple was stripped bare, within and without. A few of its treasures made their way back to Rome, but the majority vanished without trace. This exceptionally rare gold coin was minted in Judaea immediately after the conquest of Jerusalem and brought with a deployment of Roman troops to England soon afterwards. Two thousand years later, it was struck for a second time in a field in Oxfordshire, this time by a farmer’s plough. Stamped on one side with the head of Vespasian and on the other with the figure of Justice, the coin represented a full month’s pay for a Roman soldier. But what was the source of metal for this Judaean coinage? The most plausible explanation is the precious gold melted and looted from the Temple in Jerusalem.
Bodleian bowl, 1260
“Forced away from where we dwell, we go like cattle to the slaughter,” lamented the medieval poet Meir of Norwich. On 1 November 1290, not long after he wrote these lines, the entire Jewish community of England was expelled from the country. They had come from northern France 200 years earlier at the invitation of William the Conqueror, spoke a dialect of French, had French as well as Hebrew names, and maintained close links with their former community. As the property of the crown, they enjoyed some privileges, but were taxed out of all proportion to the size of their population, and eventually asset-stripped into oblivion. This magnificent bronze cauldron, made just 30 years before the exp ulsion, is intimately bound up with the fluctuating fortunes of England’s medieval Jews. Following its discovery in a disused Norfolk moat in the 1690s, scholars spent the next two centuries arguing about how it had got there, where it had come from, and what it was for. The Hebrew letters encircling the belly of the bowl likewise resisted comprehension, although it was because of the inscription that the bowl was for many years kept in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and catalogued as a manuscript. Property deeds, which came to light in the late 19th century, finally unlocked the bowl’s mysteries, revealing a 500-year-old story of a Colchester rabbi named Joseph, a prison sentence, the head of the Paris yeshiva, and a father and son’s last journey from England to the Holy Land.
Wedding ring, 17th century
A portrait of Glückel of Hameln, whose lively memoir provides a detailed glimpse into the daily life of a 17th-century Jewish housewife and businesswoman, shows her wearing a wedding ring similar to this one strung on a cord around her neck. Decorated with enamel flowers and fine gold filigree, elaborate rings of this kind were used ceremonially in Jewish weddings from the late middle ages on. Known as “house rings”, they often featured small buildings or canopies, symbolising both the lost temple in Jerusalem and the newlyweds’ future home. A line from the Song of Songs or other Hebrew text was frequently inscribed somewhere on the ring, in this case concealed inside the hinged roof. Made in northern Italy in the 17th century, where many Jews settled after fleeing the Inquisitions in Spain and Portugal, the craftsmanship of this ring attests to the skill of Jewish artisans and their active involvement in many areas of the Italian Renaissance.
Gilbert Cannan and His Mill, by Mark Gertler, 1916
The youngest child of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, Mark Gertler was born in 1891 and raised in grinding poverty in the East End of London. In 1908, he became the first working-class Jewish boy of his generation to attend the Slade School of Art and was subsequently taken up by the Bloomsbury set. Gertler’s relationship to his Jewish identity was fraught with contradictions: fiercely loyal to his roots, he also saw it as an obstacle to his artistic ambitions and, outwardly at least, began to distance himself from the world of his childhood. But this painting tells a different story. The spindly figure at the centre of the work, completed in 1916, is the writer Gilbert Cannan, a close friend of Gertler.
Queasy with ambiguities, the painting expresses in part Gertler’s ambivalence about the English society in which he was now moving. And beneath its surface, revealed by a recent x-ray, is an unfinished work (above): a painting of a Jewish couple, based on an earlier watercolour, Rabbi and Rabbitzin. This work, in stark contrast to the atmosphere of instability in Gilbert Cannan and his Mill, conveys a resilience rooted in centuries of stoical suffering. Taken together, the visible painting and its ghost-companion go to the heart of Gertler’s tormented double identity as a British artist and as a Jew, a conflict he was tragically never able to resolve.
Forged banknote, 1943
Few of the insanities dreamed up by the Nazis backfired as spectacularly as Operation Bernhard. Named after SS officer Major Bernhard Krüger, who was in charge of it from 1942, the plan was to destabilise the British economy by flooding the country with forged banknotes. This £5 note, virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, is one of the forgeries. Krüger gathered his team of counterfeiters from Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, chosen not just for their relevant skills as printers and artists, but so that they could be killed as soon as their job was done. Assembled in Sachsenhausen, 36km from Berlin, the prisoners worked in top secret, strictly segregated from the rest of the camp. By late 1943 and all through 1944, the forged notes rolled off the presses at the rate of 650,000 a month. But by the time the forgeries were ready, the Luftwaffe no longer had planes to supply German troops in Stalingrad, never mind drop banknotes over England. Thanks to Operation Bernhard, the counterfeiting team survived the war, and with fitting irony, many of the forged notes were later used to help smuggle Jews into British-Mandate Palestine. This particular note was retrieved from an Austrian lake, where it had been hastily dumped in 1945 by the retreating SS.
