Untitled

Leora Auslander
The auction house records – which are admittedly biased towards the wealthy
– would indicate that approximately 10 percent of the households identified as
Jewish by the Nazi government had a significant number of Christian religious
objects as part of their decor. Given that the conversion rate (to Christianity from
Judaism) in Berlin was also approximately 10% of the Jewish population, it is
possible that these were all people identified as Jews racially but who did not
identify as such. It is also possible, however, that they did understand themselves
as Jews but collected paintings and sculptures with Christian themes as they did
art objects coming out of Buddhist or Confucian traditions, as did non-Jewish
members of their class. The case of Victor Hahn would lend support to this
hypothesis. Whether or not Hahn identified as a Jew is unclear, but his passion for
collecting Christian art is not. His home on the Kurfürstendamm included at least
two rooms devoted to Italian and German sculpture of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, largely, of course, religious figures. 43 Although more research is needed
for a full explanation, my sense thus far is that some “Jews” furnished their everyday
with Christian objects because they did not identify as Jews, others because
they found them beautiful, and yet others in order to “pass.”
Just as the strong presence of Christian objects is surprising at first glance, the
essentially complete absence of any Jewish ritual object despite the importance of
practice within the home in Judaism is equally striking. Research done in the
context of exhibitions on Jewish life under the Third Reich as well as anecdotal
information would imply simply that those menorahs, spice boxes, candlesticks,
prayer books, shawls, and wine goblets were sufficiently precious to their owners
that they were given into safe-keeping, buried, smuggled out, or possibly destroyed
rather than sold. It would clearly be wrong to read their absence in these sources
as an indication of either a massive lack of piety or lack of identification with
Judaism on the part of Berlin’s Jews. 44
Conclusion
Jews living in Berlin and Paris appear to have participated in the taste of the nation
and society of which they were a part. Wealthy Berlin Jews lived surrounded by
what was considered the best in European and Asian design. They had Boulle
furniture, Barbedienne bronzes, Chinese vases and lacquer furniture, Japanese
woodcuts, Meissen, Rosenthal, and Sèvres porcelain, and English library furniture.
They had objects from all periods from antiquity to the present. Among the
distinctively German things they owned, many were defined by their regional
origins – Meißen, Wien, Berlin, or Dresden china, for example. Parisian Jews, by
contrast, lived surrounded by overwhelmingly French things. The goods came
from all periods in French history (or were modern versions of historical styles),
but were only occasionally linked to a particular regional location.
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