Cleveland Museum of Art’s new display of Judaica begins a long overdue recognition of Jewish art and history

By Steven Litt, cleveland.com, updated July 29, 2024

Image: A Torah case with finials, circa 1870, made by the Parisian Jewish craftsman, Maurice Mayer, is on loan to the Cleveland Museum of Art from The Jewish Museum, New York. It is juxtaposed at the Cleveland museum with William-Adolphe Bouguereau's painting of an Italian peasant mother and children, left, and Albert Besnard's portrait, "Madeleine Lerolle and Her Daughter Yvonne,'' 1879, at right. Courtesy David Brichford for Cleveland Museum of Art

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Museum of Art prides itself on representing diverse cultures, religions and aesthetics from across the globe and more than 5,000 years of human history. For most of its 108-year history, however, the museum has given virtually no explicit attention to Jewish art, religion and history.

That’s changing this summer. In late May the museum installed seven examples of Judaica — ritual objects used in Jewish religious observance. They’re on view in galleries 116, 202, 212, 214, 219 and 236, where they mingle with Islamic art, European art from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and Korean art.

The objects are on loan through Jan. 5 from The Jewish Museum in New York. Founded in 1904, it is the first institution of its kind in the U.S. and one of the oldest Jewish museums in the world. Its collection comprises more than 30,000 objects from antiquity to the present.

All seven pieces on view in Cleveland were fashioned in silver, a precious material signifying hiddur mitzvah, Hebrew for the practice of seeking beauty in ritual objects as an enhancement to worship.

The gleaming objects are installed on eye-catching blue fabric in display cases designed to make them stand out quietly in each location while tying them together across an artistic, cultural and historical journey that is entirely new for the museum.

Selecting classics

Abigail Rapoport, the Jewish museum’s curator of Judaica, said she worked with Ada de Wit, the Cleveland museum’s curator of decorative arts, to select classic examples that could enter visual dialogues with the Cleveland collection at the highest levels of artistic quality.

In addition to evoking hiddur mitzvah, Rapoport wanted to represent core religious practices including the weekly observance of Shabbat — the Sabbath — and the reading of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. The objects include a Sabbath festival lamp, a Torah case, a Torah crown, Torah finials, and spice containers used in the Havdalah service observing the conclusion of Shabbat and the beginning of a new week.

Judaism prohibits idol worship as an affront to the monotheistic core of the faith. The Jewish Museum objects represent their meanings through inscriptions describing their artists, patrons and congregations. They also communicate through sometimes lavish decorative forms. Two ebullient 18th-century Torah finials from Mantua, Italy, express religious delight through spiral columns and curlicue scrollwork encrusted with scallop shells and cornucopias.

Beyond their aesthetics, the finials and other items embody the dispersal of diaspora communities following events including the ancient Babylonian conquest of the Kingdom of Judah in 586 B.C.E., the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the Holocaust.

Each object has a provenance — a story of origin and a history of ownership — that weaves together centuries of worship, regeneration and hopes for peace amid convulsions of antisemitism that culminated in the industrial-scale Nazi murder of six million Jews during World War II.

“It’s a snapshot,’’ Rapoport said of the works on view in Cleveland. “It’s trying to tell these heartbreaking stories while evoking the beauty and joy and preciousness of these objects.’’

Cultural exchange is very much part of the story. Given that Jews were prohibited from joining professional guilds across Europe, congregations and private patrons had to commission Christian silversmiths to make most, but not all, of the seven objects on view at the museum, creating connections between Jewish communities and the larger societies around them.

Today, Rapoport said, The Jewish Museum is working to advance the interpretation of Jewish worship by supporting the creation of new ritual objects by Jewish and non-Jewish artists alike. Examples include the spice container on view in the Korean gallery, No. 236, created by the Korean-American silversmith, Chunghi Choo.

Amid the entrancing shapes of traditional Korean ceramic and bronze vessels, the spice container, resembling a flower with broad, curving and tapering petals, builds a delightful Jewish connection to Asian aesthetics.

Electrifying and timely

The Judaica exhibition at the museum is, in a word, electrifying. It’s also timely, given the wave of antisemitism unleashed by Israel’s invasion of Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack in which Hamas terrorists killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis, raped women, and kidnapped 253 hostages.

The death toll from Israeli military action in Gaza has surpassed 35,000 according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, which does not distinguish between military and civilian deaths. Israel said in May that 14,000 Hamas fighters and 16,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war. Hamas continues to hold hostages. Peace talks are faltering. The possibility of famine in Gaza looms.

The museum’s installation, which opened shortly after pro-Palestinian demonstrators disbanded an encampment at nearby Case Western Reserve University, takes no position on the causes and conduct of the war.

But it’s easy to view the Judaica exhibition as a plea for understanding that goes beyond antisemitic stereotyping and othering. This has been long overdue. Despite the presence of Jews on its staff and board of trustees in recent decades, the museum has practiced a kind of benign disregard for Greater Cleveland’s vibrant community of more than 80,000 Jews.

One partial exception to the rule in recent decades came in 1999, when the museum hosted an exhibition of prints on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, then directed by James Snyder, the son-in-law of the late Cleveland sculptor David Davis (1920-2002). That show has had no follow-up, until now.

Amazingly, 25 years later, Snyder has played a critical role in the current exhibit. After his tenure at the Israel Museum ended in 2018, he decided to accept an invitation to head The Jewish Museum in New York starting late last year. Soon, he was talking to Cleveland Museum of Art Director William Griswold, a longtime friend of his, about the possibility of a show like the one now on view here.

Snyder, who visited Cleveland last week for a private reception with museum donors and supporters, said his mission in New York includes reinterpreting the Jewish Museum’s collection by promoting the integration of Jewish art and history through loans of artworks to museums like Cleveland’s.

“I really started to think how you take that incredible collection of finest quality Jewish world culture and ceremonial art and have it resonate with the collections of encyclopedic museums like the Cleveland museum,’’ he said. “The point is to be a counterpoint to the xenophobia and ignorance that are the pandemics of today.’’

Making amends

From a local perspective, the current installation is a first step toward making amends for the Cleveland museum’s Jewish blind spot. It also demonstrates the potential of encyclopedic art museums to serve as safe houses for resistance against violence and hate. That’s a familiar role for the museum.

When former president Trump threatened in 2020 to bomb Iranian cultural sites if war broke out with the U.S., the Cleveland museum’s Islamic Gallery was a place to turn to see elaborate Iranian metalwork and luminous lusterware ceramics dating from the 900s to the 1600s. The gallery showed the kinds of artworks what might have been targeted in Iran, had Trump followed through.

That same gallery, No. 116, is now hosting a pair of 19th-century Torah finials from Tbilisi, Georgia, which stand amid Islamic ceramics and textiles.

The display suggests the possibility of peaceful coexistence among Abrahamic faiths. This occurred famously in the Iberian Peninsula during the “Convivencia” extending from the 8th century Muslim conquest of Iberia to the Christian Reconquista and the Edict of Expulsion signed in 1492 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, forcing Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave.

Rip tides of history

Upstairs, in Gallery 212, the big room devoted to 17th- and 18th-century Baroque art from Italy, Spain, France and present-day Belgium, the museum takes the story of the expulsion and subsequent diasporas a step further with a display case enclosing an 18th-century Torah crown from Ferrara, Italy, and the Torah finials from Mantua.

The objects originated in tolerant Italian cities that welcomed Jews starting in the middle ages. There were crackdowns, however. When the Papal States took control of Ferrara in the late 16th century, the Vatican forced the city to ghettoize its Jews. The same thing occurred in Mantua in 1612.

Jews in both cities, who assimilated after the abolition of ghettos in the 19th century, were sent to Nazi death camps during World War II. The annihilation of Ferrara’s Jewish community, which included supporters of fascism loyal to Mussolini, was viewed as a particularly odious betrayal.

This was chronicled in the 1962 Giorgio Bassani novel, “Garden of the Finzi-Continis,’’ which director Vittorio de Sica adapted for his 1970 film of the same name. Author Alexander Stille explored the same topic in part of his 1991 book, “Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism.”

These histories now resonate in Gallery 212 with a nearby painting by 18th-century Italian artist Alessandro Magnasco depicting worship in a synagogue in Livorno, a liberal Italian port city that gave refuge to Jews expelled from Spain and did not later force them into a ghetto.

To the left of the Magnasco is the Diego Velazquez “Portrait of the Jester Calabazas.’’ Painted in 1631-32, the Velazquez is a product of the Spanish court that terrorized, arrested and executed Jews, Protestants and Moriscos (baptized Muslims) through the Spanish Inquisition established by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1478.

The juxtaposition of The Jewish Museum objects with the Magnasco and the Velazquez creates storylines about communities linked by the Mediterranean Sea, culture and commerce, but also inundated by waves of antisemitism. In Gallery 212 today, it’s possible to feel rip tides of history never before explored by the museum.

I suspect that for many Jews, these currents will feel deeply personal. A 19th-century spice container, on view in Gallery 202, devoted to Neoclassical art, is believed to have originated in Berdychiv, a onetime center of Jewish learning and commerce in present-day northwestern Ukraine. 

My wife Rosalie’s great-grandfather, Isaac Ettinger, was born in Berdychiv in 1863 and emigrated to Boston in 1899, where he became a peddler and, later, a dry goods merchant. We don’t know what happened to family members who stayed behind. But it is known that more than 30,000 of the city’s Jews perished in the Holocaust and only a handful survived. The spice container in Gallery 202 speaks of this lost and broken world.

Why now?

The obvious question raised by the Judaica exhibition is, why now? Why is the museum bringing these stories to its audience at this particular moment?

One explanation is DEI — the widely favored social movement to embrace diversity, equity and inclusion. The Cleveland museum and other institutions like it across the U.S. are feeling pressure as never before to embrace previously marginalized and disregarded groups. And they’re responding, despite a hard pushback from the political right.

The museum’s first DEI plan in 2018 called for greater attention to African, African-American and Latin-American art. In a 2022 update to its strategic plan, the museum made its first written commitment to include Judaica in its collections and exhibitions.

Here, I need to get personal again. When I interviewed the museum’s director, Griswold, about the Judaica exhibition, he told me that I had played a role in his thinking about the project.

He reminded me of a conversation we had in 2018 or 2019 about the Magnasco painting in Gallery 212. I told him at the time that for many years, the painting had been the only depiction of Jewish life regularly on view in the museum’s collection, which is true.

It’s likely I also told Griswold that while I don’t believe the museum had been overtly antisemitic in recent decades, it hadn’t done much to recognize the Jewish experience by revising wall labels or organizing a tour that could tease out references to Jewish history and Jewish artists in the permanent collection that are hidden in plain sight, if you know how and where to look.

“That really struck me,’’ Griswold in our recent discussion. “Subsequent to that conversation, others who are friends of the CMA commented that they too really didn’t see themselves in the museum. That really resonated with me, and it’s honestly true, so thank you.’’

Following the 2022 update to the strategic plan, Griswold said he began investigating how to begin the museum’s exploration of Judaica. When Snyder became director of The Jewish Museum last year, they decided to act together quickly.

“We concluded, why not do this now?’’ Griswold said.

The Cleveland museum obviously is a latecomer to exhibits of Judaica. The state-funded North Carolina Museum of Art, established in Raleigh in 1947, began collecting Judaica seriously in the 1970s under the leadership of Abram Kanof (1903-1999). Other museums followed the NCMA example, including the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Snyder said The Jewish Museum also recently loaned objects from its collection to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and that it plans collaborations with other American museums. Future projects with Cleveland may be possible.

The hand that held the book

There’s more, however, that the Cleveland museum could do now. First, it could provide more information on its website and in printed handouts about the detailed histories of the objects from New York and the current status of the Jewish communities in which they originated. Ferrara, for example, is now home to the Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah (Holocaust).

The Cleveland museum could certainly build its own collection of Judaica through purchases and donations, and continue to borrow works like those now on view.

It could also organize tours highlighting Old Testament themes, works by Jewish artists, works owned once by Jewish collectors, or purchased by the museum through Jewish art dealers in Europe, some of whom were exiled or murdered in the Holocaust.

The museum could do more to reveal the histories of Nazi loot confiscated from Jewish families and later restituted to them before the museum acquired the works through the art market. Hundreds of such objects are listed on the museum’s website.

The museum’s own actions under its DEI plan set a precedent for a new program of reinterpreting and understanding Jewish history through its permanent collection. New wall labels in its English 18th-century galleries, for example, show how certain artworks relate to the trade in enslaved Africans. Labels in Gallery 108, devoted to African art, explain how Benin brass sculptures in the collection were looted by British soldiers after a horrific colonialist massacre in 1897.

Just last year, the museum installed a Native American land acknowledgement in its North Lobby, recognizing the injustices including the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which created Ohio’s own Trail of Tears.

Other museums are beginning to address Jewish history and antisemitism in revelatory new ways. Over the past year, for example, The Prado Museum in Madrid and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, exhibited “The Lost Mirror: Jews and Conversos in Medieval Spain,’’ which traced the history of antisemitic imagery in Christian art before and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.

At the Cleveland museum, it has long seemed more than odd that the label accompanying the 1500 Book of Hours painted by Flemish artists for Queen Isabella the Catholic of Spain, on view in Gallery 209, omits any mention of the Edict of Expulsion, which today would be considered a crime against humanity.

Online, the museum states that Isabella “sponsored Christopher Columbus’s exploratory voyage to the Americas.’' For Jews, her reign has another significance. Could the museum now find it within its power to say that the hand that held the book signed the Edict? It is, after all, the truth.

 Subscribers to cleveland.com may visit the fully illustrated article.