Introduction by Harald Hentrich:

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I welcome you to the Hentrich & Shrivastava Gallery.

    The Federal Minister for Education, Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth in the Merz Cabinet, Karin Prien, said in May of this year: "I strongly advocate for us to focus more on the extent to which Jewish culture, Jewish thought, and Jewish art have shaped our German identity and continue to do so today."

    This is what we want to achieve with our exhibition: to make the contribution of Jewish artists in the 20th century to German art history visible.

    We are exhibiting a total of 36 Jewish painters here, 14 of whom are women – a   comparatively high proportion. Two of the artists live in Berlin and are present today.

   It is worthwhile to study the biographies of these artists, who are listed on signs beneath the paintings and graphics. This provides much insight into the fate of Jewish painters in the 20th century: repression, exile, and murder.

   Eugen Spiro emigrated to the USA, Edmund Fürst to Palestine. Vera Singer was forced to emigrate to Switzerland, Josef Bato to England, Vally Wieselthier to the USA, Ludwig Meidner to England, Lea Grundig to Palestine, Hedi Schick to England; Lili Rethi, Suse Byk, Leni Sonnenfeld, Lotte Jacobi, and Charlotte Berend-Corinth to the USA, and Th. Th. Heine to Sweden. Yva (i.e. Else Neuländer-Simon) perished in the Sobibor extermination camp in 1942, and Julie Wolfthorn in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944.

   Very few of these emigrants returned to Germany, and those who did were barely noticed by the art world or public.

   But their life and work in Germany should not be forgotten.

   I now hand over to Hermann Simon, the former director of the "New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum" Foundation.

Address by Hermann Simon, Founding Director of the New Synagogue Berlin Foundation – Centrum  Judaicum.

   I was delighted to be invited to speak to you today at the opening of the exhibition "Jewish Art in Germany" for many reasons. I have been asked to make the impossible possible: to explain what is meant by "Jewish art" and "Jewish artists."

   The study of the history of Jewish art is one of the newer disciplines encompassed by Jewish Studies. The prohibition against idolatry, "You shall not make for yourself an idol, nor shall you make for yourself an image like that of anything in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the water under the earth," was violated throughout history because the desire to create was greater than the inclination to follow the commandment literally. But the prohibition led to the suppression of the memory of the real achievements of the visual arts, including the realm of arts and handicrafts.

   It was only towards the end of the 19th century, when Jewish self-confidence and interest in their own history awakened in new forms, that attention was drawn to the artistic creations of all genres that had emerged over the millennia. In addition, the widespread adoption of more liberal views meant that nothing stood in the way of engaging with Jewish art. This gave rise to the need to collect and examine this heritage. The initiative, as is often the case, came not from museums, but from private individuals.

   A French collector named Isaac Strauss was the first to assemble a collection of ancient Jewish cult objects. This collection of Jewish ceremonial art was publicly exhibited for the first time at the 1878 World's Fair in Paris. The Strauss Collection is now housed in the Cluny Museum in Paris.

   An essay published that same year by the Hungarian scholar David Kaufmann, who had just seen the Paris exhibition, is entitled "Something of Jewish Art." This is, as far as I know, the earliest mention of the term "Jewish art." In 1895, the "Society for the Collection and Conservation of Art and Historical Monuments of Judaism" was founded in Vienna. Two years later, it was followed in Frankfurt am Main by the "Society for the Research of Jewish Art Monuments," whose founding was significantly supported by the (non-Jewish) director of the Düsseldorf Museum of Decorative Arts, Heinrich Frauberger.

   More important to us than the "Exhibition of Jewish Buildings and Cultural Objects" organized by the aforementioned society in Düsseldorf in July 1908 is the fact that a few months earlier, an "Exhibition of Jewish Artists" took place in Berlin at the "Gallery for Old and New Art" (Wilhelmstraße 45). It is therefore of particular importance because it drew attention to Jewish artworks in our city.

   Inspired by the London "Exhibition of Jewish Art and Antiquities" (1906), the Berlin "Association for the Promotion of Jewish Art" decided to organize a similar event. The exhibition, which served a charitable purpose – namely, to financially support and thus promote poor, aspiring Jewish artists – featured both paintings (oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, etchings, drawings) and sculptures. Finally, the historical and applied arts section showcased modern Jewish applied arts alongside Jewish antiquities and cult objects.

   The exhibition committee's foreword states that "the tendency toward denominational exclusion was completely alien to the initiators of the idea, who also included men of non-Jewish faith (...)." It is interesting that they speak of Jewish artists, not Jewish art, rejecting racist considerations. The organizers defined Jewish artists as those who, according to their own understanding, were Jewish. Artists who "had left the traditional community or did not wish to be considered part of it" were not included. This defined the group of exhibitors and did not specify the subjects.

   The concept of Jewish art is eclectic and can be defined in various ways. Should it be understood only as Jewish sacred buildings, cult objects, or artistic representations of Jewish subjects, regardless of whether their creators were Jewish or non-Jewish? Or does one define Jewish art as the works of Jewish artists of any kind, without considering whether there is a thematic reference to Judaism? Or, for example, does the 1960s painting "Swedish Landscape with a Tree by the Path," created by Lotte Laserstein, a painter who was baptized as a Protestant and persecuted by the Nazis as a Jew, belong in the context of Jewish art?

   The definition of the subject matter of Jewish art has been debated time and again. And there is no generally accepted answer as to what constitutes Jewish art. The organizers of the exhibition opening today have also asked themselves this question and—like me—cannot provide a conclusive answer.

   When the Jewish Museum in the Oranienburger Straße opened on January 24, 1933, this question played an important role. The press was still full of reports about the opening. I would like to address one of them because it is relevant to our topic: it was written by none other than the art historian Curt Glaser, a central figure in Berlin's art scene in the 1910s and 1920s.

   Glaser was not only the director of the Art Library of the Berlin Museums, but also an art reporter for the daily newspaper Berliner Börsen-Courier from 1918 to 1933. Glaser was born a Jew, but was baptized and, as was possible in Prussia, renounced Judaism on July 28, 1910. In the evening edition of January 25, 1933, he published an article in the Berliner Börsen-Courier entitled "The New 'Jewish Museum'" 1 . Glaser placed "Jewish Museum" in quotation marks and explained that the "concept of a 'Jewish Museum' (...) is essentially determined by the fact that there is no such thing as Jewish art."

   "All efforts to gather the specific expressions of ancient Jewish craftsmanship and the creations of more recent Jewish artists and to examine them from a common perspective have not led to the discovery of a distinctive Jewish artistic character, let alone a distinct Jewish style (...) A Jewish museum, as it is now established (...), therefore necessarily had to be organized and structured more according to art historical, religious historical, and ethnological considerations than according to actual artistic ones. It displays the cult objects and groups them according to their objective rather than their stylistic connection."

(1 Curt Glaser, The New "Jewish Museum," Berliner Börsen-Courier, January 25, 1933 (Evening Edition), p. 2)

   Glaser argued that the Museum should have gone even further on this point, "by depicting the cultic practices themselves (...) for which the religious tools serves." (...) Glaser criticized the museum for having "expanded its ambitions" and built "an artistic collection beyond the scope of cultural history." While the museum "prefers to collect representations related to Judaism and its history, (...) maintaining the right balance between representational and artistic aspects will always remain a difficult problem (...)."

   Glaser stated that it was incomprehensible "why one of Rembrandt's wonderful depictions of the Old Testament, if it were available, should not hang in a Jewish museum. On the other hand, one must ask where it leads when any still life or landscape by a German painter of Jewish faith is presented here under the title of Jewish art. It leads to a completely undesirable and objectively unjustifiable division. For Liebermann is a European, he is a German, he is a Berlin artist, but the fact that he belongs to a Jewish family is completely irrelevant to the form and essence of his art... Jewish art exists outside of the cult sphere today, just as there is no such thing as Catholic or Protestant art."

   As early as May 1933, Glaser was removed from civil service by the Nazis as a Jew. He emigrated to Switzerland in June 1933, later, via Cuba, to the USA, where he died in 1943. To my knowledge, he never again commented on the question of what constitutes "Jewish art." Under the impact of his experiences, his opinion might not have been so harsh.

   For our context here and now, and presumably tomorrow as well, I cannot remedy the vagueness of the term "Jewish art" with my own definition, but rather want it to be understood in the broadest possible sense.

   This seems to me to be the goal of the curators of the exhibition opening today. I am personally very interested in the works of the "last generation of Jewish" artists, those born in the 1950s and 60s who, according to the exhibition organizers, demonstrate "a more relaxed attitude toward Jewishness." See for yourself whether this is true. But above all, decide to what extent what you see is "Jewish art." The exhibition is open!