Invisible in Plain Sight: Islamic Art in Jewish Museum Collections | The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
Francesco Spagnolo, Curator
Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.
Founded in 1962 by Seymour Fromer and Rebecca Kamchi Fromer, the Judah L. Magnes Museum established an important record as a Jewish collecting institution focusing on the broad spectrum of Jewish cultures, outside the normative Eurocentric view that dominated Jewish culture at the time. Through important “rescue missions” carried out by Magnes emissaries in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, and India, The Magnes secured considerable holdings documenting the cultural and artistic legacy of Jewish communities worldwide. Additional acquisitions include items from Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Uzbekistan. These materials now amount to almost 3,000 items, including objects for the synagogue and the Jewish home, textiles and garments, books, manuscripts, photographs, and archival materials.
Over the decades, the former Magnes Museum documented some of these holdings through pioneering publications and exhibitions aimed at highlighting the specific cultures that they represented. Since the establishment of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley in 2010, these unique artifacts have been undergoing systematic inventory, cataloging, and digital documentation carried out by collections staff. At the same time, they have been activated through exhibitions, programs, and online projects aimed at highlighting their global and intercultural, rather than local and Jewish-centric, relevance to world culture.
In recent years, large museums across the United States have been trying to define--or redefine--the “right place” for Jewish culture within encyclopedic collections. The recent appointments of dedicated Judaica curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are paving the way for a new appreciation of Jewish artifacts beyond the reach of “Jewish museums” alone. These forays into “mainstreaming” Judaica are typically aimed at finding an intercultural space for Jewish culture within the canons of Western museum culture.
Thanks to its pioneering role in collecting and documenting Jewish cultural heritage from beyond the West (Europe, North America and, in part, Israel), The Magnes is singularly positioned to explore how Judaica may operate in the broad intercultural exchanges that also characterize the Islamic World. Recent exhibitions, such as Global India: Kerala, Israel, Berkeley(2013-2014)The Power of Attention: Magic Meditation in Hebrew Manuscript Art (2017)The Invisible Museum: History and Memory of Morocco(2017-2018), and The Karaite Canon: Manuscript and Ritual Objects from Cairo, all highlighted the relevance of the non-European holdings of The Magnes, enhancing both scholarship and public awareness. These exhibitions, which also investigated the provenance of Judaica from the lands of Islam, highlighted how little is known to this day about what holdings are still part of major museum collections in North-African and Middle Eastern countries.
This research project aims at achieving several goals:
1. Completion of the survey and digital documentation of items in The Magnes Collection that represent the legacy of Jewish communities in the Islamic World;
2. Documentation of the collecting history of these materials from within the Islamic world;
3. Creation of an online database that will present these items via the website of The Magnes in an unprecedented and innovative framework, highlighting the intercultural role of Jewish artifacts within Islamic culture through a collaboration between curators of Jewish and Islamic art;
4. Identification of Jewish museum holdings across the Islamic world and possible future collaborative initiatives;
5. Planning of a new public program and exhibition based on collaborative research by curators and scholars, at UC Berkeley, the Graduate Theological Union, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, focusing on the role of Jewish cultural expressions and other Islamicate cultures within Islam.
Role: The research apprentice will have the opportunity to work hands-on with primary sources from the global Jewish Diaspora, including rare objects, documents, photographs, books, manuscripts, and artwork from the 16th century to our days, and to create descriptive metadata to be made accessible by the public, online and on site. The apprenticeship offers a unique chance to learn about collection research, museums, online publication, operating in a collaborative environment and with cutting-edge digital humanities tools and perspectives. Apprentices are expected to work a minimum of six hours per week.
Qualifications: We seek students with good collaborative and communication skills, who are interested in cultural heritage and museum studies, and who are familiar with digital tools (digitization, image processing, HTML, QR coding, WordPress and Drupal).
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: The Magnes is located between Campus and BART at 2121 Allston Way.
Related website: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmLX931t
Related website: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmLX931t