The Jewish Home Dwelling on the Domestic, the Familial, and the Lived-In ('19–'20)

Introduction

The domestic life of Jews, their homes, houses, and households, was the subject of the 2019-20 Katz Center research theme.  This exhibition highlights examples of this most formative and intimate of contexts for Jewish life drawing from texts in the Penn Libraries’ collections and from around the world. The contributors interpret Jewish domestic culture, architecture, clothing, landscape, and material evidence through the lenses of archaeological, anthropological, historical, legal, literary, and visual research.  Among the topics discussed are Jewish domestic labor, home and homeland, the cosmopolitan home, ghettoized homes, traumatized homes, refugee homes, Soviet Shtetl homes, symbolic homes, embodied homes, health and hygiene, affordable housing, as well as homelessness within the framework of broad social and political contexts. Also treated are Jewish costume and clothing, Jewish domestic customs, including lighting Sabbath candles and inscribing marriage contracts, as well as the homes and hands through which Jewish books have passed. The periods of time covered span the ancient Near Eastern archeological sites of home, the ancient rabbinic home as a worksite, Fatamid Egyptian Jewish home interiors, early modern Jewish households of masters and enslaved people; modern representations of Jewish notions of home and office in the visual arts, including photography and engraving, and studies that approach the home as part of the built environment and design of local neighborhoods.

Exhibit

Dr. Erna Meyer, Wie kocht man in Erez Israel?

Viola Alianov-Rautenberg

How to cook in Palestine? This question was addressed in a plethora of publications in the Yishuv of the 1930s. One of the most active participants in this debate was Dr. Erna Meyer. Herself an immigrant from Nazi Germany, she had been a well-known expert on the domestic economy and the rationalization of housework prior to her immigration. Her cookbook How to Cook in Palestine was published in 1936 in Tel Aviv on behalf of the WIZO. It appeared in German, Hebrew, and English. The three languages notwithstanding, its main target group was the newly immigrated women from Nazi Germany. The cookbook provides insights into the norms that women were supposed to follow in the allegedly private realm of housework and nutrition in pre-state Israel.

In the book, Meyer argues that the newcomers from Germany should overcome their Diaspora-identity through a new way of cooking, thereby becoming entrenched in their new homeland, Palestine. She prompts her readers to acquaint themselves with “healthy Palestine cooking.” This cuisine should be based on local food staples (e.g. eggplants and zucchini) instead of European cooking traditions. Meyer also makes it clear that the homemakers were no longer responsible solely for their own family but also for the Yishuv as a whole. In the struggle for supporting the developing national economy of the Yishuv, it was the responsibility of the homemaker to “vigorously strive to buy local products” (Tozeret Haaretz).

Ben Shemen as an emblem of a Jewish Heimat

Ofer Ashkenazi

The “youth village” Ben Shemen was designed to be a “home away from home” for Jewish teenagers who had recently immigrated to Mandate Palestine without their parents. The founders, Dr. Siegfried Lehmann, envisioned a new model of national education, which shapes individual and national identity through life and work in the rural landscape of the homeland.

At first glance, Zoltan Kluger’s photograph of Ben Shemen seems to be off the mark. Not only that the caption is wrong (the village was founded in 1927, not 1925), but the photograph also shows no sign of the features that distinguished the place from other educational institutions: e.g., the children who lived without a family in Palestine; their work in the fields; and the cultural programs that were integrated with the school curriculum. These aspects of the village were indeed underscored in various other photographs and films that documented it in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet Kluger’s image does capture the essence of Lehmann’s vision and understanding of the school. Located on the hill, surrounded by fields and a forest, the village is interwoven into the landscape while towering above it. Compared with the fields, the darker shade of the trees around the school simultaneously indicates the connection with the natural landscape and distinguishes the village from its surrounding. Simply put, in line with Lehmann’s intention, Kluger conceived Ben Shemen as an emblem of a Jewish Heimat: namely, the place that constitutes and displays the authentic bond between a people and its organic, national landscape.

Between the Home and the Street: Jewish Dress and the Crossing of Boundaries

Cornelia Aust

Items of Jewish dress are among the most interesting objects when looking at material culture, though early modern clothes are usually not preserved as objects themselves. Clothes were stored within the home when not used, though for many Jewish men and women there was not much to store. Most certainly had a separate set of clothes for Shabbat and the holidays. Clothes were worn inside and outside of the home, thus, being an object constantly crossing this boundary. Dress played a crucial role in the display of belonging, the positioning of the self within the community and vis-à-vis the other. Thus, dress closely connects Jewish homes with the life outside - within the Jewish quarter or street and on the general market place and city or village streets of early modern Europe.

One of the sources commonly available to think about early modern Jewish dress are drawings and engravings (usually by non-Jewish artists) like the two displayed here. Presenting Jewish male and female dress from Nuremberg (or rather nearby Fürth as Nuremberg was closed to Jewish settlement) and Frankfurt am Main, both seem to provide a reliable depiction of early modern Jewish dress in the German lands. However, both only give a partial view. Like most drawings and engravings, they are depictions of ideal sets of dress, usually worn on Shabbat. Thus, they depict items such as the ruff or collar and the Shabbat cloak (shulmantel), which were not items of daily use. The Frankfurt couple included in the Neu-eröffnete Welt-Galleria of 1703 was a contemporary engraving (by Christoph Weigel), though we do not know who the model for the work was. By the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Hottenroth ventured into a three-volume project of depicting and describing German national costumes. He drew most of the depictions following older originals and descriptions. Interestingly, he mentions, that the woman’s large ruff was still common among Jews and non-Jews at the time. The red heart on the man’s costume, he states, was a specific local stigmatizing mark that Jews had to wear. However, we hardly know how he decided which clothes to depict and how to color them.

Ruines de Capernaum [Ruins of Capernaum]

Melissa S. Cradic

This historical photograph from the Lenkin Family Collection captures remnants of the ancient town of Capernaum (Kefar Naḥum in Talmudic sources, Tanḥum in Medieval sources, and the modern Arabic site name of Talḥum) prior to its excavation and transformation into a Christian pilgrimage site. The image shows the Galilean landscape of 19th century Palestine, riddled with ruins on and below the surface and inviting curiosity about the people who once lived, worked, and died there. Probing the palimpsests of the past, archaeologists excavating at Capernaum have subsequently revealed Roman/Byzantine remains including a richly decorated synagogue built from imported white limestone blocks (visible in the foreground of the image), as well as a modest Jewish fishing village with humble houses constructed from local basalt fieldstones (Tzaferis 1993).

Capernaum and other excavated settlements provide tangible windows into many aspects of “household Judaism” (Berlin 2005) and domestic life in ancient Palestine. Ancient architecture, art, and material culture reveal how Jewish homes in antiquity were spaces for creating and constraining community through access and movement, labor and maintenance practices, ritual observance, foodways, family dynamics, and gender relationships (Meyers 2008)

Hadar ha-Karmel: a ‘garden city’ in Haifa

Sigal Davidi

The photo of Hadar ha-Karmel neighborhood in Haifa is part of an album of 88 photos taken by the photographer Zoltan Kluger, in the years 1937-1938 in Palestine under the British Mandate. This collection contains spectacular photos of kibbutzim, moshavim, towns and cities, presenting the development of the Jewish Yishuv after a decade of tremendous waves of European Jews immigration. Kluger was the official photographer for the Zionist institutions Jewish National Fund (JNF) and Keren Hayesod, and this album is part of a large number of photos he took in Mandatory Palestine. 

Hadar ha-Karmel, or in short Hadar, was established in 1922. It was planned according to the principles of a ‘garden city’ by the German Jewish architect and town planner, Richard Kauffmann, who was back then the head of the planning department at the Jewish Agency. Hadar ha-Karmel was one of the first Jewish neighborhoods in Haifa, which was, and still is, a mixed city of Jews and Arabs. In the 1920s it was considered the distinct modern neighborhood of Haifa. After the 1929 Arab riots in Palestine, many Jews preferred to live in Hadar rather than in mixed neighborhoods of Jews and Arabs throughout the city. This led to the massive construction of modernist apartment buildings and the accelerated development of the neighborhood. 

The photo shows the modern apartment buildings and a big public park in the heart of Hadar ha-Karmel. The park was established in 1923 for the welfare of the neighborhood’s residents. In 1925 the park was named “Gan Binyamin” after Baron Benjamin Edmond James de Rothschild, on the occasion of the Baron’s visit to Haifa. The buildings and the park shown in the photo still exist today.

A Glimpse into the Jewish Cosmopolitan Home in the Early Modern Venetian Ghetto

Federica Francesconi

In both of its first editions (1637 and 1638), Historia de riti hebraici  by the celebrated Venetian rabbi Leone Modena (1571-1648) is known for its exploration of Judaism as a rational and enlightened religious system and the Jews as civilized residents who deserved to at least be tolerated within Christian society. Yet, less known are its descriptions of Jewish daily life in contemporary Venice. Indeed, in Venice despite ghettoization many Jews felt at home. His portrait on the frontispiece of Historia de riti hebraici shows Modena bare-headed. Leone Modena was willing to adopt the Italian social habit to remove one’s hat before Christians of honor instead of following the Jewish custom of covering of the head. Yet this portrait tells us something also about the Jewish home in the ghetto: Venetian Jews commissioned their own portraits quite often and more than elsewhere in both the contemporary Sephardi and the Ashkenazi worlds. In affluent Venetian Jewish homes, the portego (the typical hall) was often decorated with still life paintings (nature morte), decorative wall hangings (arazzi), gilded leathers (cuori d’oro), and portraits.

The Jewish home in early modern Venice was as a space that opens onto an extensive social and cultural network of Jewish refugees of Sephardi origins, displaced after the medieval Jewish expulsions, along with Italian and Ashkenazi Jews as well as victims of slave-hunting corsair galleys that roamed throughout the Mediterranean. The latter could include Jews and Catholics, black sub-Saharan animists and Muslims, Christian Protestants and Orthodox, both men and women (mentions at 8-9, 37). Indeed, Historia de riti hebraici documents certain aspects of the reality of the ghetto in early-modern Venice and the cohabitation of Jewish families with Christian and Jewish servants and black slaves, who at the time were sold in the Barbary regencies (the centers of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli), the independent kingdom of Morocco, and the east (the “Levant”) from Cairo to Constantinople (110).

Once transported to Venice, the preeminent occupation for black African slaves would have been domestic service. Manumission was a recurrent stage or an event in their life course and in the ghetto it happened through circumcision for men and immersion into the mikveh (ritual bath) for both men and women (110). Black Africans never constituted more than a very small minority of the slave populations of the cities of Italy. Rationales for their subjugation on the basis of skin color did not take hold as they did in Spain and Portugal. Slaves and servants also functioned as a symbol of status. Many Venetian Jews probably shared the view of a Leone Modena’s responsum that contemporary slaves were more like employees than possessions: “Nowadays, when our servants are held by us as comrades and not as slaves, as they were wont to term them in the past, we will not put them to harsh work. (Ziknei Yehudah, Venice 1650, no. 34).” Ultimately, Leone Modena’s Historia de riti hebraici as well as his and other contemporary Venetian rabbis’ responsa capture the complexity and alterity of the Jewish household and the broader Jewish society that in Venice were less prone to exclusivity, purification, and purgation than other early-modern religious and ethnic communities.

The Jewish Home in Fatamid Egypt

Miriam Frenkel

The Jewish house in the lands of Islam during the high middle ages (10 th -13 th centuries) was void of any heavy wooden furniture of the kind known in Christian Europe. It was textiles of all kinds, measures and forms which furnished the house. Curtains, rugs, mats, cushions, and mattresses substituted for chairs, tables and beds. This was part of the bon ton in furnishing Jewish, as well as the Muslim and Christian homes. Spaciousness was the desirable look of a home and it was achieved by this roominess. The Fatimid textiles were known for their high quality and unique artistic design. Many of them are mentioned in wedding lists from the Cairo Geniza as part of the bride`s trousseau, which will furnish her future home.

In the picture is a typical piece of Fatimid textile kept at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is linen, embroidered with colored silk. It depicts two bands of birds set into arches. Note the vivid colors of the birds that vary between red, blue, and yellow. A varied spectrum of colors is similarly used to describe the variegated textiles mentioned in trousseaux lists from the Cairo Geniza.

On the Couch between Trauma and Home

Keren Friedman-Peleg

This photo was taken by the highly acclaimed Israeli photographer, Alex Levak, in Jerusalem in 1996, across from the Kings Hotel. The image appears in Levak’s book, Our Country, published four years later, and is reproduced here with his permission. When viewed from a wide perspective, paying attention to the context in which a woman is dragging a heavy couch, this image is rich with Jewish-Israeli collective symbols of home and belonging. The location is at one of Jerusalem’s most iconic intersections, where the modern neighborhood of Rehavia in West Jerusalem meets the historical past of Jerusalem’s Old walled city, and where the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem stands just a few meters away. The image invites the viewer to reflect on the profound meaning attached to this place. The Kings Hotel was among the first to be built in Jerusalem after the establishment of Israel in 1948; the Great Synagogue was dedicated to the memory of the six millions Jews who perished in the Holocaust and to the fallen soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces; Rehavia is a neighborhood associated with German-Jewish culture, and with upper-class Ashkenazi Jews.

Yet, when we return our attention to the woman right at the middle of the image, the concepts of home and belonging shift from their collective and solid, even glorified and poetic, meanings, into much more fluid, flexible and negotiable ones. Crossing King George Street with this very heavy couch, this woman seems to be in the middle of a heroic effort to arrive, to find—to arrive and to find—a place, a place to settle down; a place where she can put the heavy couch she has just found, a couch on which to sit, to rest, to feel a degree of safety and comfort. As a sort of counter-narrative to all the collective symbols surrounding her, this woman, with this heavy couch, provides an individual, improvised, practical and casual meaning to these wonderful concepts: home and belonging.

Jewish Sabbath Candles for Latin readers: Willem Surenhusius’s edition of the Mishnah

Gregg E. Gardner

What makes a home a Jewish home? It is often the objects inside the home and how they are used that help create and define a distinctly Jewish space. One of the most well-known household objects associated with characteristically Jewish rituals is a set of candlesticks for fulfilling the obligation to kindle two lights on Friday evening to mark the onset of the Sabbath. The origins of the custom are unclear; later rabbinic interpreters would attribute it to two biblical passages—one candle to mark the instruction in Exodus 20:8 to “remember” the Sabbath, the other to mark Deuteronomy 5:12’s precept to “observe” the Sabbath. There is little evidence, however, that this was understood as a religious obligation before the Hellenistic or early Roman age. By the first century CE, we have writings from Roman onlookers testifying that Jews light oil lamps—which were used before candles—to mark the onset of the Sabbath. As they did with many rituals that had been only vaguely or sporadically followed beforehand, the early rabbis would take up lighting, elevate it to religious obligation, and discuss it in detail. Most notably, we see this in the Mishnah, the earliest work of rabbinic law (dating to the third century CE), particularly tractate Shabbat, chapter 2. The level of interest in even the most minute detail of these laws is exemplified by the rabbis’ discussions of the permissible kinds of oils and materials for wicks.

The figure at left shows a Hebrew-Latin edition of the Mishnah, translated by Willem Surenhusius (c.1664 –1729) a Dutch Christian scholar of Hebrew, and printed between 1698 and 1703. It includes commentary by traditional rabbinic thinkers (Maimonides, Bertinoro), as well as early modern Christian scholars. Translating the Mishnah into Latin made its teachings—and rabbinic thought—accessible to a broader audience of thinkers, historians, and theologians. Indeed, the earliest rabbis’ thoughts and ideas on lighting Sabbath lamps, as well as an array of laws on other areas of socio-religious thought, would reach a far broader audience and have far more influence within Judaism than the third-century rabbis could have anticipated.

Spindle whorls: the Jewish home as worksite

Pratima Gopalakrishnan

This item is one of 55 at the Penn Museum that is marked as “spindle whorl” and dated to the period of Roman rule in Judea. All 55 items are from Penn’s archaeological expedition in Beth Shean during the 1920s. Spindle whorls are disc- shaped objects with a hole in them, and they are attached to the spindle rod to provide weight and momentum as fiber was spun into yarn. Spindle rods were made of wood, and therefore disintegrate, but since spindle whorls were made of materials like ivory, glass, and bone, they survive in the archaeological record.

These items reflect the ubiquity of spinning in the ancient household. The ancient home was not a refuge from work, but rather a site of work. This is especially true of textile work. A great variety of textile products, destined for a variety of uses, were produced and traded throughout the Roman Empire. Spinning represented a major bottleneck within the process of textile production since it was extremely labor- intensive work. Spinning was ever-present work, the work free and enslaved women in the household could not escape. The bayit was not the site of decommodified work hermetically sealed from the market, but rather the social unit that regulated free and enslaved women’s work for that market.

Homeless in Their Home/Land: Mizrahis, Gender and Law in Israel

Claris Harbon

As if happening these days in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1959, in Wadi Salib a former Palestinian neighborhood in Haifa, a community of Moroccan Jews led by David Ben Harosh rebelled against their systemic oppression and racism inflicted by Ashkenazi establishment. They were crushed by the police, the courts and the public. In this picture, here a young man holds the flag of Israel. What you cannot see here are two important things: first, the flag is stained with blood, and second it had a profound sentence written on it: “Hassan King of Morocco, Take Us Back”. Let us briefly reflect on this short and yet deep sentence. These people, all Moroccan Jews, were probably all traditional/Masortim, for whom Israel was their home and refuge from the Diaspora. They are now asking the Muslim King, from whom they were taken away, usually indoctrinated to believe that he was their enemy, to take them back. They want to go back to the Diaspora. לחזור לגלות. This begs many questions, but one common thread: a sense of alienation and diasporic identity has been created persisting nowadays, at that exact home, where diaspora was meant to end. Corresponding with the subject and themes of my research, this is translated into a sense of temporality, destruction. Of defeatism. Of people who do not feel any affiliation to their homes.

In my work I offer a new understanding of the role of ‘home,’ particularly public housing in Israel, as a site of both oppression, dispossessing Mizrahis of their homes and homeland, culminating in instilling feelings of homelessness, and of resistance and agency, even reconciliation, generating defiant memories and social justice, redefining Israeli property laws. A home as a project of both memory and forgetting.

On Jewish anthropology, ethnographic serendipity and materiality of the Soviet shtetl

Anna Kushkova

This small episode of my ethnographic field life happened in July of 2008, in a small Ukrainian town of Bershad. Situated in the historic region of Podolia, one of the major destination areas of Semion An-sky’s expeditions in the early 20th c., Bershad was a town where St. Petersburg Judaica Center, of which I was then part, conducted ethnographic research in the post-Holocaust Jewish survivor communities.

On that day as I was walking along one of the town streets, and one uninhabited run-down Jewish house, one of many of such kind, somehow drew my attention. I jumped over the low fence and crawled into the house through what once was the door.

My intuition did not deceive me: this house contained probably one of the last extant removable ceilings – a distinct feature of local Jewish architecture. In this area shtetl houses were built so close to each other that there was no space for an outside sukkah. So, Jews were using their verandas for that purpose, with ceilings removed for the holiday.

The ceiling I discovered was composed of 6 squares (one already missing), attached above an outside verandah.

Needless to say, this particular architectural contraption proved to be extremely useful under the late Soviet regime: one could celebrate Sukkoth (Sikes in Ukrainian Yiddish) not being observed by the watchful eye of the local Soviet authorities – or nosy neighbors.

Therefore – since the house itself was most probably built in the early 20 th c. – one can safely say that this removable ceiling presents a concise symbol of the Jewish life that went on even in the most adverse circumstances, of the grass-root resistance to the anti-religious ethos of the state and its anti-Semitic policies, as well as of the creativity mobilized by Soviet Jews for this.

Cheap Houses: Building affordable, hygienic housing in Warsaw and Vilna

Cecile E. Kuznitz

By the end of the nineteenth century urbanization and industrialization led to rapid population growth in the cities of the Russian Empire, as elsewhere in Europe. As the development of urban infrastructure lagged reformers grew increasingly alarmed by a lack of affordable, hygienic housing. One of the most ambitious and successful projects to address this concern was the initiative of the Jewish banker and philanthropist Hipolit Wawelberg (1843-1901). In 1897 Wawelberg decided to “provid[e] working people with cheap, hygienic, and civilized housing” in the outlying Wola neighborhood of Warsaw. He erected three large blocks with modern apartments as well as auxiliary buildings housing amenities including baths, a day care, a clinic, and a room for “decent entertainment.” Wawelberg hoped this complex would “foster mutual respect and tolerance” between Jewish and Christian Poles and mandated that residents be drawn equally from both groups.

These so-called “cheap houses” inspired a similar project in Vilna the following year and a second nearby development in Warsaw in 1925. Yet their success was tempered by high construction and maintenance costs, which led to less profitability and more crowded conditions than anticipated. Moreover, few Jews chose to inhabit the apartments, thwarting Wawelberg’s goal of promoting Jewish-Christian co-existence. These buildings created comfortable and sanitary homes for poor Warsaw residents and a new kind of community that encompassed public health, social welfare, and cultural functions. Yet Jews’ failure to feel at home there suggests the difficulty of creating true integration on the intimate level of domestic space.

Yoma: Footprints of a Jewish Book

Marjorie Lehman

Between 1519 and 1523 the first complete editions of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds were printed in Italy. An entrepreneur from Antwerp, Daniel Bomberg (b. 1483) had made a significant business decision, opening a printing house in Venice. Printed copies of the Talmuds sold well. The printing house also became a meeting place for Jews and non-Jews to share printing skills, business acumen and ideas. The strong desire on the part of Jews—some to study and some to own a material copy of the Talmud—generated the need for second, third and fourth printings. Many of the copies, which were often purchased volume-by-volume, outlived their owners, passing hands many times. They continually entered new homes, becoming increasingly valuable over time. The Library of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies has become the home to many of these Bomberg volumes, each copy with its own story, each possessing information attesting not only to the movement of Jewish books across the globe, but to individuals who owned, read, bought, sold and gifted them.

Many of the Bomberg Talmud copies owned today by the Katz Center once belonged to the great book collector and native of Philadelphia, Mayer Sulzberger (b. 1843). After his death in 1923 they found a new home in the library of Dropsie College. Due to financial strains, Dropsie became the Annenberg Research Institute in 1986 and then merged with Penn in 1993, becoming the Center for Judaic Studies. It was renamed the Center for Advanced Judaica Studies in 1998, and now is the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.

The copy of Masekhet Yoma displayed here took a different path from Sulzberger’s collection. It came from the personal library of Samuel Tobias Lachs who was a professor of Religion at Bryn Mawr College for most of his career. He received his AB from the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 and his PhD from Dropsie College in 1958. Upon his death in 2000, his wife, G. Phyllis Lachs, presumably because of her husband’s connection to Penn and Dropsie, donated some of her husband’s most valuable books to the Katz Center. Included was this copy of Yoma, several other volumes of the Bomberg Talmud as well as Lachs’ unfinished scholarly works.

In its new home, Lachs’ copy of Yoma connects us to his life, his love of Jewish books, and to his devotion to scholarship in the field of rabbinics. It is also a testament to the fact that Jewish Studies has found a home at major research universities, building scholarly communities around the availability of valuable resources. The care that has been taken to preserve this copy of Maskekhet Yoma, including the clues to its past homes, is evident in a note found inside its pages with the name of Abraham Moses Luncz. It is not clear whether Lachs and Luncz had a familial relationship, nor can we be sure that this copy of Yoma was in Luncz’s possession. However, this piece of paper brings us to the home of Luncz, another book lover who lived in Jerusalem from 1868 until his death in 1918. He ran a printing press during his lifetime. An article written about him in the Jewish Encyclopedia reports that in 1904 he was involved in printing an edition of the Jerusalem Talmud, a sure reflection of his interest in Jewish books and a sign that he might have owned this volume of Yoma.

This copy of Yoma is only one example of the many books at the Katz center, each with a history waiting to be told. As a present co-director of a recent collaborative digital humanities project that tracks the pathways of copies of Jewish books, Footprints: Jewish Books through Time and Place (https://footprints.ctl.columbia.edu), we are now able to record all of the traces of the past homes of Jewish books. The database aggregates all of this information revealing the intersections between the people who owned Jewish books and the places they called home. As a result, the database enriches the history of Jewish life and culture from the beginning of print until the present day.

Jewish house inscriptions in the Art of Moritz Oppenheim

Nathaniel Riemer

Of course - the works of Moritz Oppenheim are quoted so often that it is completely old- fashioned to use them one single time again: The stereotypically recurring elements of his pictorial language seem kitschy to us and are no longer capable of arousing any kind of nostalgic feelings. Oppenheim’s oeuvre is nevertheless important for my research. His pictures show objects that were sorted out of the Jewish culture or whose meaning changed radically. These include Jewish house inscriptions. In some of the Jewish artist’s works they occasionally appear in the margins. Readable only with a magnifying glass, they have changed their content, their spatial positioning and function. In which of his other paintings could you find those modified “house inscriptions”?

Jewish Wedding Ideals and the Symbolic Home in a Remote Community

Shalom Sabar

Kurdish Ketubah from Zakho (Iraqi Kurdistan), 1910

This cheerful and naively decorated small ketubah from the superb Zucker Family Collection of Jewish marriage contracts, now being digitized by the Penn Libraries, attracted my attention from the first time I saw it. The reason is not surprising. It bears a striking resemblance to a ketubah hanging in our living room – a ketubah presented to me years ago by my late father when he learned that I was writing a thesis on the history of the ketubah and its illustration. This was no ordinary ketubah he gave me. It belonged to his parents, my grandparents, who both passed away when I was a child, a few years after the entire Jewish community of Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan (northern Iraq) immigrated to the young State of Israel. The ketubah of my grandparents, inscribed and witnessed in Zakho in 1912, was obviously created by the same anonymous scribe and folk artist responsible for the present attractive document (Zucker Ketubah 6).

According to oral traditions, the Jews of Kurdistan claim they are descendants of the Ten Tribes who first arrived in this area after the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (722 BCE). In fact, in this and every other Zakho ketubah, the city is described as situated on the bank of the river Khabour (כאן במתא זאכו דעל נהר כאבור יתבא), a tributary of the Euphrates. Zakho Jews believed this is the same river called חבור (Ḥabor) mentioned in the Bible (2 Kings 17:6), and identify their hometown with one of the sites to which the Israelites were exiled with the fall of the Northern Kingdom in the time of King Hoshea. Moreover, the Jews of Zakho, as many other Jewish communities of Kurdistan, speak a dialect of the ancient Aramaic language (often called Neo-Aramaic). The word for the bridal canopy (ḥupah) in our dialect is גנוניה (genunei) the _s_ame Aramaic term used in the Talmud (e.g., Nedarim 50b). The biblical word ḥupah (e.g., Joel 2:16) certainly implies a room where the bridal couple were united for the first time. While in other Jewish communities the ḥupah became a symbolic canopy raised over the bridal couple, Kurdish Jews preserved the ancient custom and made it as a room – a beautifully decorated bridal chamber with colorful woven fabrics, where the newlywed spent the seven days of the wedding festivities together (with a child seated between them) and guests came to visit them. This room thus served not only as a symbol of the wedding and fertility, but the actual “first home” of the groom and bride.

The contents of the dowry (some of it bought by the mohar or bride’s price raised by the groom’s family) brought to the couple’s new home is detailed at length in the ketubah. The list appears in the middle of the page written in a different colored, light ink. Each item is mentioned by its name in the local dialects (written in Hebrew letters). The monetary value of each item is written below it in Arabic numerals. The practice was for all the dowry items to be presented publicly on the wedding day for appraisal by experts. The Ḥakham would then inscribe the stated values, one by one, in front of all those present, onto the space on the page left for this purpose by the community’s expert scribe, who had drawn up the ketubah in advance. Finally, the community’s and the bridal couple’s expectations of what ideally should “fill” their new home is expressed in the wish that God will grant them “honest and respectable offspring, who observe the Torah and the commandments.”

Inspiring Jewish Collectivism

Katherine Sorrels

This text by the Welsh thinker and industrialist Robert Owen (1771-1859) is a radical proposal for socialist reform. Owen ran a mill based on socialist principles, guaranteed his workers’ jobs, and provided for their children’s education. He envisioned self-governing communities in which workers owned the means of production, essentials were distributed, and women had equal rights. This text is an 1821 a proposal for a cooperative based on these principles in Scotland. The most famous of his initiatives was New Harmony, a community established in Indiana in 1825. It survived only four years, but is regarded as a foundational experiment in the tradition of utopian socialism.

Indeed, Owen’s ideas inspired Jewish refugees from Nazi Vienna, who fled to Scotland in 1938 and established an intentional community to care for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in which the staff lived together with students, received no payment for their work, and distributed resources according to need. Their experiment far outlived the one at New Harmony. The first community, called Camphill Special School, grew into an international movement of over 130 Camphill and Camphill-inspired communities around the world. The mission to provide a shared sense of home for abled and disabled community members has sustained the movement for eighty years.

Ma’aseh Tuviah: Jews, Bodies, Health, and Houses

Joshua Teplitsky

Plague in early modern Europe was a disease of the house (Snowden, 42). Its transmission by fleas meant that domestic living conditions were a crucial factor in the spread of illness. An array of sources from the period reflect this understanding, even if the microbiological underpinnings of disease transmission were not established until the late nineteenth century: state archives preserve documents ordering the cleaning of houses, the separation of individuals, and concern over objects within the home; religious texts debated the merits of flight versus home isolation; and medical textbooks offered wisdom about treatment and prevention through home remedies.

A touchstone of scholarly exploration of Jewish medical knowledge in the early modern period, the book Ma’aseh Tuviyah is an apt artefact for thinking about Jews, bodies, health, and houses. First published in 1707, the book’s metaphorical rendition of a human body as a house offers a visual representation of the theme of this seminar year (Lepicard, 229-255). The second volume of the work, first published in Jessnitz in 1720, bore a sub-section entitled “Mishmeret ha-Bayit” [The Watch of the House]—meant to invoke both the body as house and the importance of the home itself—which deals largely with forms of illness.

This text offers a powerful, yet common, example of the importance of house and home in the history of disease in Jewish life. The author deals with types of illnesses—including plague “that most fearful of all illnesses”—and considers the medical commonality between Jews and non-Jews both in their experiences and by drawing together Jewish and non-Jewish sources. The work thus represents a valuable window into thinking about body and house as the locus for prevention, treatment, and cure, as well as our understandings of Jews as they related to their neighbors in early modern Europe.

Freud’s Uncanny Home Office

Liliane Weissberg

In 1919, Sigmund Freud published an essay that focuses on the term heimlich, that designates what belongs to a home, and on its counterpart, unheimlich or “uncanny.” They turn into central notions of psychoanalysis. In 1938, then, the photographer Edmund Engelman enters Freud’s own home and office, to document these spaces shortly before Freud’s emigration to England. Engelman’s record shows a medical practice that is part private museum, part bourgeois living room. This room, with the couch at its center, is part of Freud’s home and it is not. It turns into the central locus of psychoanalysis and its practice. On the shelf to the right of the couch, among various pictures and antiquities, he placed two kiddush cups.

Selected Bibliography

• Alianov-Rautenberg, Viola. “Migration und Marginalität. Geschlecht als strukturelle Kategorie in der deutsch-jüdischen Einwanderung nach Palästina/Eretz Israel in den 1930er Jahren,” in Internationales Jahrbuch Exilforschung (36, 2018).

• Ashkenazi, Ofer. Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. (New York City: Palgrave-McMillan, 2012)

• Aust, Cornelia. The Jewish Economic Elite: Making Modern Europe. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018)

• Berlin, A. “Jewish Life Before the Revolt: The Archaeological Evidence,” in Journal for the Study of Judaism (36(4): 417-470). (2005)

• Cradic, Melissa S. “Residential Burial and Social Memory in the Middle Bronze Age Levant,” in Near Eastern Archaeology (81, 2018).

• Davidi, Sigal. A New Woman in a New Land: Women Architects and the Design of Social Institutions for Women. (Hebrew; Open University of Israel Press, forthcoming)

• Francesconi, Federica. Invisible Enlighteners: Modenese Jewry from Renaissance to Emancipation. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming)

• Frenkel, Miriam. “The Matter of Things: Material Culture in the Medieval Islamicate,” in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5F5i5RdszU (Lecture 1). (Bard Graduate Center. February 5, 2020)

• Friedman-Peleg, Keren. ha-`Am `al ha-sapah: ha-politikah shel ha-traumah be-Yisrael., Translated into English from Hebrew and published as PTSD and the Politics of Trauma in Israel: A Nation on the Couch (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2017) (Jerusalem;,Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2014)

• Gardner, Gregg E. The Origins of Organized Charity in Rabbinic Judaism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

• Gopalakrishnan, Pratima. “Domestic Labor and Marital Obligations in the Ancient Jewish Household,” (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Ph.D. thesis, 2020)

• Harbon, Claris. Squatting and Invasion to Public Houses in Israel: Mizrahi Women Correcting Past Injustices. (Hebrew Tel Aviv: ha-kibbutz ha-meuhad, forthcoming)

• Kushkova, Anna. Peasant Quarrel: A Study of Rural Everyday Life. (Russian St. Petersburg: European University at St. Petersburg Press, 2016)

• Kuznitz, Cecile. YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

• Lehman, Marjorie. Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination., Edited with Jane L. Kanarek and Simon J Bronner (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017)

• Lepicard, Etienne. “An Alternative to the Cosmic and Mechanic Metaphors for the Human Body? The House Illustration in Ma’aseh Tuviyah (1708)”,” in Medical history (52, no. 1 (2008): 93-105;).

• Levak, Alex; Mordohovich, Hava. _Our Country: Photography. (_Carmel: MOD Publishing House, 2000)

• Meyers, C. L. “Grinding to a Halt: Gender and the Changing Technology of Flour Production in Roman Galilee,” in Engendering Social Dynamics: The Archaeology of Maintenance Activities, ed. S. Monton-Subias and M. Sanchez-Romero (Pp. 65-74). (BAR International Series 1862. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008)

• Riemer, Nathaniel. JewBus, Jewish Hindus & Other Jewish Encounters with East Asian Religions., Edited with Rachel Albeck-Gidron and Markus Krah (Potsdam, Germany: University of Potsdam Press, 2018)

• Ruderman, David B. Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, 229-255)

• Sabar, Shalom. Ketubbah: The Art of the Jewish Marriage Contract. (New York: Rizzoli, 2001)

• Singer, Isidore and Moses Löb Bamberger. “Luncz, Abraham, Moses,” in Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1906, 8:208)

• Snowden, Frank M. Epidemics and Society : From the Black Death to the Present. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019, 42)

• Sorrels, Katherine. Cosmopolitan Outsiders: Imperial Inclusion, National Exclusion, and the Pan-European Idea. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

• Teplitsky, Joshua. Prince of the Press: How One Collector Built History’s Most Enduring and Remarkable Jewish Library. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019)

• Tzaferis, Vassilios. “Capernaum.,” in New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, ed. E. Stern, A. Lewinson-Gilboa, and J. Aviram (Volume 1, Pp. 291-296 Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society & Carta, 1993)

• Weissberg, Liliane. Münzen, Hände, Noten, Finger: Berliner Hofjuden und die Erfindung einer deutschen Musikkultur. (Graz: Clio Verlag, 2018)

Contributors

• Viola Alianov-Rautenberg - Institute for the History of German Jewry / Ruth Meltzer Fellowship

• Ofer Ashkenazi - Hebrew University of Jerusalem / Charles W. & Sally Rothfeld Fellowship

• Cornelia Aust - Bielefeld University

• Melissa S. Cradic - Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology, Pacific School of Religion / Jody Ellant and Howard Reiter Family Fellowship

• Sigal Davidi - Tel Aviv University / Ruth Meltzer Fellowship

• Federica Francesconi - University at Albany, SUNY / Primo Levi Fellowship

• Miriam Frenkel - Hebrew University of Jerusalem / Ruth Meltzer Fellowship

• Keren Friedman-Peleg - The College of Management-Academic Studies / Israel Institute Visiting Faculty

• Gregg E. Gardner - University of British Columbia / Jody Ellant and Howard Reiter Family Fellowship

• Pratima Gopalakrishnan - Yale University

• Claris Harbon - McGill University / Maurice Amado Foundation Fellowship

• Anna Kushkova - University of North Carolina / Dalck & Rose Feith Family Fellowship

• Cecile E. Kuznitz - Bard College / Ruth Meltzer Fellowship

• Marjorie Lehman - Jewish Theological Seminary / Thomas and Elissa Ellant Katz Fellowship

• Nathaniel Riemer - University of Potsdam / Louis Apfelbaum and Hortense Braunstein Apfelbaum Fellowship

• Shalom Sabar - Hebrew University of Jerusalem / Erika A. Strauss Teaching Fellowship

• Katherine Sorrels - University of Cincinnati / Ivan & Nina Ross Family Fellowship

• Joshua Teplitsky - Stony Brook University / Ariel and Joshua Weiner Family Fellowship

• Liliane Weissberg - Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts & Sciences, and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania / Ellie and Herbert D. Katz Distinguished Fellowship

Special thanks

Special thanks to all of our contributors. This year’s exhibition is especially indebted to Lido Giovacchini who has meticulously reviewed the content and created the pages for this year’s exhibition. Thanks also to Leslie Vallhonrat, the Penn Libraries’ peerless Web Unit manager for designing this web exhibit, to Bruce Nielsen and Josef Gulka at the Library at the Katz Center, Eri Mizukane at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Michael Overgard and the staff at the Schoenberg Center for Text and Image (SCETI) for their time and unflagging efforts coordinating the production of digital images for this exhibit.