Nineteenth-century Jewish portrait albums

ABSTRACT

The portrait albums of nineteenth-century bourgeois Jews, which reified their social world, provided a space in which women exerted their agency and forged new identities, in national and cosmopolitan environments, beyond the family.

KEYWORDS:

• Portrait
• album
• Jews
• nineteenth-century
• photograph collection
• Jewish women

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Joanna Sassoon, Abigail Green and the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Women were the primary authors of 40 of the 69 nineteenth-century Jews’ albums examined for this study, whereas fourteen were compiled by men and the authorship of fifteen remain unclear. These albums, conserved in museums, libraries, archives and private homes worldwide, were compiled by nineteenth-century European Jews and Jews in the British, Austrian, Ottoman and Russian empires.

2 Warner, “Parlour Made,” 29–32; and Di Bello, Women's Albums and Photography.

3 Hannah Merton’s albums 3, 5, poetry notebooks, and journals, Richard Levy Family Archive, Israel.

4 Richard Levy Family Archive, Israel, album 5.

5 Hoël, in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “Le pardon de Ploërmel.”

6 Jewish Museum Berlin, Burchardt album, 2000/500/46/46.

7 For example, Salomons Museum, album 507. Plunkett, “Celebrity and Community,” 57.

8 Avcıoğlu, “Immigrant Narratives”; Roberts and Davoli, “The International.”

9 Levi D'Ancona Modena, “Jewish Women,” 14.

10 Shai, “Ha-albom ha-mishpakhti,” 110–81; and for Valero family philanthropy: Glass and Kark, Sephardi Entrepreneurs in Jerusalem.

11 Now Międzyrzec Podlaski, Poland.

12 Klein and Ginzberg. “Family picture album”; Green, Moses Montefiore, 413.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michele Klein

Dr. Michele Klein served as guest curator for three exhibitions of Jewish art and is the National Jewish Book Award winner for A Time to be Born: Customs and Folklore of Jewish Birth, published by the Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1998, 2000. After researching her family’s nineteenth century photograph albums, she now studies those of other Jewish families from the same period.