In the nineteenth century, the number of Jews living in Hamburg doubled, making up about four percent of the city’s population by the end of the century. Many managed to rise socially and economically. The founding of the reform-oriented New Israelite Temple Association (Neuer Israelitischer Tempelverein) in 1817 and the construction of the New Dammtor Synagogue (Neue Dammtor Synagoge) in 1894/95 stood for a pluralization of religious life. But the limits of acculturation and integration also became increasingly clear. Proponents of the emerging political antisemitism made the Jews responsible for the political crises and economic existential fears. The increasing immigration and transit of Eastern European Jews to cities such as Hamburg intensified anti-Jewish tendencies. Within the Jewish community, these various developments led to a new reflection on the meaning and form of Jewish identity. The founding of Jewish associations was an expression of this as it was also part of the rapid process of bourgeoisification and transformation of the Jewish community in the nineteenth century. As “secular forum(s) of inner-Jewish discussion about different approaches to self-conception”, associations were an integral part of middle-class life and offered orientation, support and security in the face of growing marginalization.
On October 29, 1903, the Israelitisches Familienblatt (Israelite Family Paper) reported on the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone for the meeting hall on Hartungstrasse in Hamburg’s Grindel district, the construction of which had been initiated by the Henry Jones Lodge. The Henry Jones Lodge, founded in 1887 as the first exclusively Jewish lodge in Hamburg, served as a regional branch of the Jewish order B’nai B’rith. Its board of directors included Gustav Tuch and Moses Deutschländer, who were also involved in many other associations and acted as central figures within Hamburg’s Jewish community. Just under a year later, in August 1904, the chairman of the lodge, Gustav Tuch, expressed his wishes for the meeting hall as a place of work and meeting in his opening speech: “We are dedicating a new house – one of work and sociability. [...] Our hopes and expectations are that the creation of a place to accommodate a whole number of Jewish institutions will lend freer movement to the common activity.” In addition to the Israelite-Humanitarian Women’s Association, the Youth Association, the Association for Jewish History and Literature, the work certificate, the reading hall, the housekeeping school, a restaurant, ballrooms, and a bowling alley, in 1903 the Society for Jewish Folklore also decided to use the premises in the new meeting hall for its library and collection – as can be gathered from the brief report in Israelitisches Familienblatt.
Nine years after the founding of the Henry Jones Lodge in Hamburg in 1896, the Hamburg rabbi Max Grunwald joined Gustav Tuch and Moses Deutschländer initiated the first ethnographic questionnaire in a Jewish context. The accompanying letter of invitation makes clear the motivation of the initiators, who saw the “conscientious appreciation and possibly revival of folk life and folk feeling on the basis of careful collections of folklore” as an answer to the increasingly difficult question of Jewish identity, as “its [the people’s] peculiarity falls victim to the all-compensating modern education.” “The favorable reception that this enterprise had met with in the press as well as in private circles” prompted the Committee for Jewish Folklore, which had been founded within the Henry Jones Lodge (Independent Order of B’nai B’rith – I.O.B.B.), to extend an invitation for founding a Society for Jewish Folklore in September 1897. Taken on January 1, 1898, this step was announced by the publication of the first issue of the Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde (“Bulletin of the Society for Jewish Folklore”) edited by Max Grunwald. The purpose of the Society, as stated in the articles of association, was “to promote knowledge of the inner life of the Jews.” This goal was to be achieved, among other things, by “collecting as comprehensively as possible all folk traditions and artistic products relating to Judaism and its confessors.” The subsequent pages list the accessions to date and feature a directory of members, which already includes around 200 names and points to a membership extending far beyond the regional context, from Hamburg to Berlin, Breslau, Budapest, and Strasbourg.
The Society for Jewish Folklore was not only able to record a rapid increase in membership, which extended far beyond Hamburg’s borders, but the first calls for collections also met with a great response, so that the Verzeichnis der Sammlungen der Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde (“List of Collections of the Society for Jewish Folklore)” from 1900 includes numerous objects, graphic representations, and manuscripts. In addition to collecting (historical) evidence of Jewish life, the Society was also interested in exhibiting the collected objects and accordingly, the search for suitable premises began early on. While special exhibitions and lectures took place at various locations in Hamburg, parts of the extensive collection were also shown in other cities such as Berlin, Copenhagen, and at the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1911. The Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde, the Society’s bulletin published by Max Grunwald between 1898 and 1929, both stimulated and documented the growth of the collection. At the same time, the Mitteilungen framed the collecting activity with contributions on folklore issues, thus placing the practical work in the context of contemporary academic discourse. The Hamburg initiative also provided the impetus for the founding of a Gesellschaft zur Erforschung jüdischer Kunstdenkmäler (“Society for the Study of Jewish Art Monuments”) in Stuttgart and Frankfurt. In Vienna, it was possible to set up a museum of Jewish antiquities and art objects under the direction of Br. Stiasny. The attempt to found a “Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden” (“Central Archives of German Jewry”), which had been promoted within the B’nai B’rith Order in Germany since 1903, was also an expression of the endeavor to “raise Jewish awareness and promote ideal Jewish affairs.”
The collecting activities and publications of the Society for Jewish Folklore were geared toward documenting and preserving everyday Jewish culture. This can be placed in the context of several simultaneous developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the generally growing importance of academic scholarship, which also included the establishment of museums. The academic approach was also characterized by an internal Jewish engagement with Jewish history, culture, and identity against the backdrop of Jewish emancipation, the striving for social integration and formal equality, as well as the simultaneous confrontation with the rise of antisemitism.
“Jewish folklore” was part of the discipline of “folklore studies,” a discipline viewed very critically in German-speaking countries after 1945 due to its instrumentalization by Nazi research; today it no longer bears this name at most universities. In terms of content, “Jewish folklore” focused on more recent Jewish culture and history. Linked to this – although not always explicitly formulated – was the question of what Jewish identity constituted. Collecting with the aim of preserving and exhibiting also meant a musealization of Jewish history and culture. With its intention to establish a Jewish museum, the Hamburg Society was part of a wave of museum foundations in Europe, including the first Jewish museums.
The object collection of the Society for Jewish Folklore comprised objects from everyday Jewish life, including ceremonial objects such as circumcision knives or Torah wimpels donated by private individuals.
In addition to collecting evidence of Jewish life, the board members of the Society were also concerned with exhibiting the collected objects and materials. The structure of a museum for Jewish folklore was already outlined in the list of the collection published in 1900. Proceeding with the “external appearance,” the “historical tradition,” and the “religious characteristics,” it was to focus on “family life” and “social life.” The fourth issue of Mitteilungen (2/1899) stated, “We hereby invite you once again to view our collections (at Mr. W. Wolff, Beneckestr. 2).” (p. 92) In the following year, “sincere thanks” were expressed to the administration of the Hamburg Antiquities Collection for the opportunity to organize an exhibition in the rooms of the Johanneum on Speersort. The collection was also temporarily on display in the building of the Patriotic Society. In November 1905, board member Paul Rieger reported on an increase in the collection and library in the rooms on the third floor of the meeting hall. Four years later, a brief note in the Mitteilungen held out the prospect of rooms in the new building of the Museum of Ethnology (Museum für Völkerkunde). In the following decades, the collection was also presented in lectures and small exhibitions in Hamburg, as illustrated by the short report from the Israelitisches Familienblatt of August 29, 1932, which reported that the Jewish congregation at Beneckestrasse 6 was making a room available to show the collection to the public.
In February 1912, the acting chairman of the Society for Jewish Folklore, Dr. Paul Rieger, and the director of the Museum of Ethnology Hamburg, Prof. Georg Thilenius, agreed to display the Society’s collections in the new museum building on Rothenbaumchaussee as a loan in the new exhibition. The Society wanted its collections to be permanently presented and accessible. Georg Thilenius was obviously particularly interested in the ethnographic holdings, which promised to fit into his comparative exhibition concept in a Eurasian context. Over the course of the year, the museum and the Society negotiated a contract, which the Finance Deputation concluded with the Society in June 1913. The collections arrived at the museum in August 1913. In addition to the object collection, these also included books, photographs and archive holdings. Though kept in the museum during the following years, the latter were not cataloged by the museum in the same way as the object collection, which was considered to be of ethnological interest.
It is not exactly clear how extensively the collection was expanded by the Society in the following years. For the year 1927, two objects are recorded that Dr. Nathan Max Nathan, who was chairman at the time, transferred to the museum as an addition. In the years after 1913, Nathan was one of the Hamburg residents who also donated Judaica to the museum for the general museum collection.
Associational work became harder after 1933 and the organization of the general meetings and the board increasingly difficult. In June 1934, the general meeting elected the Wandsbek rabbi Simon Simcha Bamberger as the new chairman of the Society for Jewish Folklore. In this role, Bamberger took charge of the Society’s collections, which were still in the Ethnological Museum, in 1937. It is not documented where the Society subsequently managed and stored the collections. Between 1934 and 1936, according to congregational records, rooms for the Society were under discussion at various locations. In July 1937, it was housed in two rooms of the community center at Beneckestrasse 6, where Bamberger was also working at the time. Various requests from Bamberger for suitable display cases, which were published in the Gemeindeblatt der Deutsch-Israelitischen Gemeinde in 1936, testify to the efforts of the Society’s board to continue exhibiting the collections.
The Society managed to convene one last general meeting on February 1, 1938. In January, Simon Bamberger had informed the Hamburg District Court that he would not be able to meet the set deadlines due to a ban on meetings and he referred to the impossibility of finding five people at all for a board. In addition to Bamberger as chairman, the last board consisted of Nathan Max Nathan, Alfred Lewald, Max Siegfried Oppenheimer, and Arthur Goldstein.
In the mid-1930s, the situation for the Society for Jewish Folklore and its collections changed at the Museum of Ethnology as well. This was politically motivated and reinforced by a change of director in 1935. For founding director Georg Thilenius, the Society’s collection of objects was of interest in terms of content and fit into his exhibition concept. The director who succeeded him, Prof. Franz Termer, was not academically interested in this topic and acted pragmatically. The Society’s collection was directly affected by this change. An article about Jewish objects in the museum published in October 1935 in the SS combat journal Das Schwarze Korps (“The Black Corps”) prompted the dean of Hamburg University, Prof. Adolf Rein, to contact Thilenius. His concern was obviously to have the objects removed. In his reply, Thilenius adhered to the collection as part of the exhibition concept, but at the same time suggested that he would reconsider the matter when the entire exhibition was redesigned. Adolf Rein seems to have subsequently influenced the museum management succeeding on November 1, and Franz Termer actually informed him on November 19 that he had “arranged for the exhibition of Jewish objects to be removed from the museum’s public display collection.”
The brief handover protocol dated April 27, 1937, states that Rabbi Simcha Bamberger, as chairman of the Society, picked up the collection items still remaining in the museum. The documentation pertaining to the collection and objects remained in the museum.
In 1938, the official associational activities of the Society for Jewish Folklore are documented for the last time by the Hamburg District Court. A report by congregation council member Leo Lippmann on the dissolution of Hamburg Jewish associations from 1943 shows that the Society for Jewish Folklore was dissolved in 1938 in accordance with National Socialist legislation and merged into the Jüdischer Religionsverband Hamburg e.V. (Hamburg Jewish Religious Association). In 1953, the District Court became active again in the course of an investigation. A search for the members of the last board of the Society reveals their fates after 1938 in a few key words: The chairman, Rabbi Simon Simcha Bamberger had managed to emigrate to Palestine with his wife in January 1939. Max Siegfried Oppenheimer was also able to leave Hamburg and flee to New York in 1941. Dr. Nathan Max Nathan, chairman of the Society for many years and legal counsel of the German-Israelite Congregation, was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 with his wife Dora, née Rieger, and from there to Auschwitz in 1944, where both weremurdered. Alfred Lewald was imprisoned in Fuhlsbüttel in 1940, deported to the Dachau concentration camp in 1942 and murdered in Auschwitz in May 1942. The fate of the fifth member of the board, Arthur Goldstein, is not known to date.
Formally, the District Court closed the file as a result of these findings. On October 28, 1959, it issued an order to delete the Gesellschaft für jüdische Volkskunde Hamburg e.V. (Hamburg Society for Jewish Folklore) from the register of associations along with other associations. The fact that the board members had either been murdered or forced to flee from the National Socialists was not dealt with in this context. The deletion took place on May 30, 1960.
The collections of the Society for Jewish Folklore are among the countless cultural assets from Jewish congregations, libraries, museums, and other Jewish institutions that were considered lost or destroyed during the National Socialist era or under German occupation. The “Tentative List of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Axis-Occupied Countries” from 1946 already listed the collections. The first list was compiled under the direction of Hannah Arendt on behalf of the prominently staffed Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in New York and published as a supplement in the journal Jewish Social Studies (8,1).
When Hannah Arendt traveled to Germany in 1949 in her capacity as an emissary of the trust company Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR), founded in New York in 1947, she also visited Hamburg to gain an overview of Jewish cultural assets that were still there and could be restored. Her report, written during the visit, showed “that the situation in the British occupation zone and in Hamburg in particular differed significantly from that in the American zone with regard to its community structure and the collections of cultural artifacts discovered there. While numerous looted objects from all over Europe were found in the American zone, the city of Hamburg in particular had stood out during the Nazi regime by keeping confiscated objects in Hamburg out of self-interest rather than handing them over to Berlin, with the result that many collections could at least be partially located and restituted, if hesitatingly.” In her report, Arendt also mentions a visit to the curator Dr. Kunz Dittmer at the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology, during which she had unsuccessfully tried to find out something about the collection of the Society for Jewish Folklore.
In the fall of 1963, the city of Cologne presented the first major exhibition on Jewish history in the post-war period, the Monumenta Judaica. Over 2,000 internationally borrowed objects were presented in two separate museums , covering a wide range of time periods and topics. The exhibition was documented in a three-volume catalog of the same name. The exhibition planning was triggered by the swastika graffiti on the Cologne synagogue in December 1959 and antisemitic copycat acts throughout the Federal Republic. A large exhibition on Jewish history in the Rhineland was intended to counter these antisemitic attacks.
The Altona Museum, too, was involved in the Monumenta Judaica with loans. At the time, no one was apparently aware that these included objects from the collection of the Society for Jewish Folklore. The very general details of origin differed from the original information contained in the Society’s documentation.
The exhibition also met with an international response and was a catalyst for the founding of the first Jewish museum in the German-speaking world after 1945, the Jewish Museum of Switzerland in Basel in 1966.
In November 1991, the Museum of Hamburg History opened its first comprehensive exhibition on “400 Years of Jews in Hamburg” based on a concept by Hamburg historian Ulrich Bauche. The preceding research was carried out in close cooperation with the Association of Former Jewish Hamburg Citizens in Jerusalem, led by Judaica specialist Naftali Bar-Giora Bamberger. A multi-volume publication with a catalog and academic articles accompanied the exhibition. The broad accompanying program with panel discussions, synagogue tours, and cultural events was supported by the Jewish Congregation in Hamburg.
The preparatory work also included a stocktaking of Judaica located in public collections. With the help of Naftali Bar-Giora Bamberger, they were identified and classified. The best-known object rediscovered in this context was an eight-branched Hanukkah candelabra, which also became an exhibition motif. Donated in the seventeenth century, it had been in the Kleine Papagoyenstrasse Synagogue in Altona until the night of the November Pogrom in 1938. The base and candelabra holder were then transferred to the Altona Museum. Identified by the inscriptions in 1991, a reproduction of this candelabra can now be found in the Hohe Weide Synagogue.
Also in the depot of the Altona Museum, Naftali Bamberger and exhibition curator Ulrich Bauche came across the nine objects from the collection of the Society for Jewish Folklore that are today in the MARKK. Based on the object numbers and the documentation preserved in the former Museum of Ethnology, project team member Heide Lienert-Emmerlich was able to identify them as part of the collection. The history of the Society for Jewish Folklore, its collections, and the surviving objects became public again for the first time.
The history of the collections of the Society for Jewish Folklore in the former Museum of Ethnology is documented in the museum archive. The formal correspondence between the members of the Society’s board, museum management, and museum staff has been preserved, as well as the agreement of 1913, in which the spatial accommodation of the extensive collection holdings in the museum was recorded in writing. A series of requests, inspections, and partial returns, including book collections and a medal collection dating from the following years, indicate the development and use of the collection by the Society and its members. On the part of the museum, the collection of objects was recorded in pictures and in writing. Thus, the museum has kept photographic documentation and basic descriptions of the more than 200 objects and a large proportion of the medals and coins. After 1913, the holdings were initially administered with temporary numbers, then, in 1929, they were given inventory numbers in the standard museum system, but without losing their status as loans.
Today, these collection documentations are probably the only remaining evidence of the collection, large parts of which have been considered lost. They form the basis for continued research into its whereabouts in the years ahead.
In June 2021, in addition to provenance research in colonial contexts, MARKK also launched its first project to examine its holdings for Nazi-looted property, funded by the German Lost Art Foundation (Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste) in Magdeburg. The project examines the acquisition history of the objects with regard to unlawful changes of ownership or appropriation contexts during the National Socialist era. The first step was to examine the European Judaica. Some objects and the documentation on the collection of the Society for Jewish Folklore were known, but knowledge of the objects from the collection of the Society for Jewish Folklore transferred from the Altona Museum to the MARKK in 1991 was no longer available at the time.
The history of the collection, many aspects of which are already known, will be reconstructed as part of the provenance research: There is evidence of acquisitions made by the Society in the early years of its collecting activities and of the loan to the then Museum of Ethnology (today MARKK). The return of the collections to the Society’s chairman Simon Simcha Bamberger, documented for 1937, does not contain a detailed list of the individual objects. It is also not known when, how, and by whom the items in the MARKK today had previously come to the Altona Museum. Therefore, an important so-called provenance gap continues to exist for the objects, and the question of ownership and whereabouts cannot yet be clearly clarified. An important first step initiated by the provenance project is to create transparency and to make the holdings and their history known again, for example, through this exhibition or the documentation in the LostArt database of the German Lost Art Foundation.
Provenance research at MARKK was funded by: German Lost Art Foundation (Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste).
The illustrated wooden tablets or panels are easy to identify in the collection lists of the Society for Jewish Folklore and were recorded in 1903 as an accession from the Synagogue Congregation of Graetz near Posen (Poznan) in vol. 12 of the Mitteilungen. They were transferred by Mr. J. Rosenberg, also from Graetz. No further information is available on this name. The synagogue origin is obvious; the Hebrew inscriptions “tal u-matar” (“for dew and rain”) and “mashiv ha-ruach” (“You cause the wind to blow”) refer to seasonal inserts in the Shemoneh esreh (eighteen blessings prayer), the main prayer in the Jewish service. The shape of the two tablets, whose borders are decorated with so-called rocaille, suggests a date in the eighteenth century or, respectively, around 1900. Possibly, the donation to the Society for Jewish Folklore was related to the dissolution of an old synagogue building from the eighteenth century.
The majority of the objects in the museum were recorded in the museum’s own index card system and were given their own inventory number in 1929. The historical photographic images also date from this period.
The illustrated pointed glass goblet with an engraved inscription is listed as one of two glasses in 1903 in vol. 12 of the Mitteilungen under the collection entries of the Society for Jewish Folklore. The Hebrew inscription, which reads “Tsebi, regional rabbi of Hildesheim” in translation, allows identification. The second glass goblet is not extant and is listed in the MARKK as having been returned to the Society in 1937. The date of origin and exact provenance of both glass goblets are not known. However, dedication glasses of this type were popular in the first half of the nineteenth century. The dedication points to Hildesheim and the surrounding area, but the name Tsebi or Zwi / Zvi has not yet been identified among the regional rabbis active there in the nineteenth century.
The donor of both glasses to the Society in 1903 was Samuel Leibowitz (1850–1932) from Hamburg, who worked as an economist in the retirement home of the German-Israelitic congregation (Sedanstrasse 23) until 1916 and is listed in the notices as a member of the Society’s board and, from 1917, as its treasurer.
The Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK) has been actively examining the history of the museum and the collections preserved there for several years. A particular focus is on the circumstances of acquisition. However, this is not about an isolated reconstruction of the changes of ownership themselves. The history and holdings of the museum as a public institution in Hamburg are shaped by urban and trade networks and are therefore closely linked to the history of the city and its residents.
The critical examination of the acquisition and appropriation of collection holdings for possible contexts of injustice requires separate research, which MARKK conducts in provenance research projects on colonial contexts and Nazi-looted property. Certain framework conditions apply to this research: Provenance research on Nazi-looted property in Germany is based on the Washington Principles adopted internationally in 1998 and the Joint Declaration drawn up in 1999. With both declarations, Germany has committed itself to encouraging and enabling public institutions to examine their holdings for Nazi-looted property. Regardless of the expiry of legal deadlines, the declared aim is to find a “just and fair solution” with the rightful owners.
The German Lost Art Foundation in Magdeburg bundles activities in this area and it is the central point of contact pertaining to unlawfully confiscated cultural property. It also supports provenance projects, including at MARKK. The Lost Art Database managed by the Center serves to document and search for critical holdings in the context of National Socialism, in particular Nazi-looted property.
The MARKK also feeds its findings into this platform. This online exhibition is a further opportunity to make research and results public and thus do justice to the self-imposed standard of being a transparent museum.
The collection, which has only survived in fragments, is representative of the annihilation and destruction of Jewish life and cultural assets, and the outstanding reconstruction of this collection history shows the gaps in knowledge that still exist today. While the objects were collected in their time as folkloristic sources and the focus was on their religious function or their identity-forming use, today they have become placeholders for what no longer exists; their significance is also symbolic in that they refer to a “Jewish heritage,” largely detached from their original function and history. Therefore, object research today is required even more so to reconstruct the individual object biographies as comprehensively as possible in order to do justice to the numerous levels of meaning of the items. If the objects and their history are taken seriously, then they not only stand for a folkloristically motivated collecting activity and thus for the scholarly and cultural commitment of some outstanding personalities of the Jewish congregation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they also stand for civic association life, secularization, for networks that extended beyond the Jewish congregation as well as beyond the city limits; they stand for questions of exhibition and visibility in urban society, but also for the ousting from this very society and the persecution and extermination of the Jewish protagonists. Finally, the collection stands for questions about how the city’s protagonists and institutions have dealt with historical responsibility and the Jewish cultural heritage that was not destroyed: a context in which research and exhibition work at MARKK can be located.
Conception and texts: Jana Caroline Reimer
(MARKK) and Dr. Anna Menny (IGdJ). Technical implementation: Helena Geibel (IGdJ). Translation: Erwin Fink.
A cooperation between the IGdJ and MARKK - Museum am Rothenbaum. Kulturen und Künste der Welt in the context of
provenance research about Nazi-looted property.
Status as of March 13, 2025.
![Speech by Gustav Tuch, President of the Henry Jones Lodge, in: The Meeting Hall in Hamburg. Publication Commemorating Its Inauguration. Sunday, August 28, 1904 (StaHH library, A 870/0059), pp. 25-30 [excerpts], edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History.](/viewer/exhibition/objektgeschichte/kacheln/1-kachel-festrede.jpg)
![Speech by Gustav Tuch, President of the Henry Jones Lodge, in: The Meeting Hall in Hamburg. Publication Commemorating Its Inauguration. Sunday, August 28, 1904 (StaHH library, A 870/0059), pp. 25-30 [excerpts], edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History.](/viewer/exhibition/objektgeschichte/1-2-1_festrede_large-2.jpg)
