Abstract
Keywords
Several books in recent years have addressed the historical and the present relevance of different representations of Jewish culture in European and American cities. These include an interesting general review but rather simplified analyses of Jewish patronage of modern architecture in Europe and in the United States (Bedoire, The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture, 1830-1930), a reconstruction of the Jewish perspective (the “Jewish connection”) in the analyses of European and American architectural history through detailed examination of the relationship between the Jewish German architect Mendelsohn and the Catholic Dutch architect Wijdeveld during the twentieth century (Herbert and Richter, Through a Clouded Glass), a critical review of the contribution of Jewish modernist, post-modernist and de-constructivist architects to the supposedly delayed formation of the “memory cult” but not necessarily to the formation of critical “historical consciousness” in the United States and in Germany after the Holocaust (Rosenfeld, Building after Auschwitz), and finally intriguing analyses of what it meant and what it means to be a “cosmopolitan city” in relation to the projected and self-defined “Otherness” of Jewish communities in different countries in Europe and the ex-Soviet Union (Humphrey and Skvirskaja, Post-Cosmopolitan Cities). These four books are worthwhile readings and further include interesting insights relevant to different scholarly discourses concerning “European,” “American,” and “Jewish” identity transformations. The authors examine the positive reciprocal relationships and the negative reactions and inter-dependencies between politicians, city mayors, patrons, rabbis, and architects, who were and are seeking to contribute to these identity formations, and how these identities were materialized and are represented in city landscapes and in contemporary cultures.
Fredric Bedoire’s book presents a pioneering examination of a wealth of examples of the contribution of Jewish patrons to the formation of modern European and American architecture. He perceives their “Jewishness” as the font and energizer of modern European culture, and he characterizes the contribution of Jewish clients and architects to American architecture as a European Jewish contribution. Unfortunately, the author does not systematically explain how he identifies the characteristics of “Jewishness” in relation to the “Jewish contribution.” Bedoire offers a historical review of prominent architecture financed by patrons and a few well-known buildings built by architects. He explains how Jewish patrons positioned themselves in the European and American societies, and further introduces their social networks, also pointing out in the case of patrons their cooperation with Jewish architects. Bedoire examines different case studies concentrating on Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest as well as cities such as Nagyvárad (Romania), Lodz (Poland), New York, and Chicago. The first and the last chapters are dedicated to cities in his own country, Sweden: Stockholm and Goteborg.
A too brief and not entirely coherent attempt to introduce a historical background is presented in the description of the ghettos in Prague and Frankfurt am Main as an historical explanation to the emancipatory ambitions represented in Jewish patronage. This serves as background to the chapter dedicated to the House of Rothschild. Bedoire attempts to portray the Rothschild family as patrons through a detailed survey of castles and city houses of James de Rothschild in Paris. The Rothschilds were indeed the richest of patrons but can hardly be regarded as a progressive force in modern architecture. Bedoire points out the reputation of the “Style Rothschild” (p. 125) to show that their palaces and city houses serve rather as Historicist exotic examples within the contribution of Jewish patrons to modern architecture. There are a few mistakes and simplifications like identifying Wertheim who built a palace next to Vienna’s Ringstrasse as a Jewish patron and the simplified reference to Walther Rathenau’s expressing his Jewish self-hatred in his villa. Yet the challenge for Bedoire was to tackle a field that scholars have consciously avoided, and as a pioneering work, he achieves an interesting reference book and starting point for further research.
The focus of the book by Herbert Gilbert and Liliane Richter is the personal and professional relationship between the Dutch architect Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld and the German-Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn. The book is a detailed examination of a long-lasting friendship between two architects of different nationalities, religions, and cultures. The authors introduce the professional networks of both architects and describe how their relationship and these networks developed or declined in relation to their joint visit to Palestine in 1923, their ambitious joint venture of the European Mediterranean Academy, and the divergence of their fates before and during World War II, as well as in relation to the tragic history of the Jewish people in Europe during the Holocaust, and their short interaction in exile in the United States (Mendelsohn fleeing from Germany, first to England and then continuing to the United States, and Wijdeveld forced to emigrate after being denounced by his colleagues as a collaborator with the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands). Gilbert and Richter chose a specifically Jewish perspective with emphasis on examining the relationship between the two architects in relation to their “Jewish connection”: Mendelsohn was a Jewish architect, supported by Jewish clientele in Germany, himself supportive of the Zionist project in Palestine, and later built synagogues in the United States, and Wijdeveld was married to the Jewish Ellen Kohn and closely associated with Jewish colleagues in the Netherlands and in Europe. Given the adaptation of the Talmudic passage “the prophets saw their visions through a clouded glass” (Yevamot, folio 49b) for the title of the book, methodological questions arise: do the lenses chosen distort or clarify the relationship or could they offer an objective examination of “cultural transfer” exemplified by the careers of both architects? Furthermore, in what way does their focus on the Jewish connection help us understand modern architecture?
Describing in detail the personal biography of the two architects helps us understand how relevant it is to include all aspects of their lives: family origins, marriage, education, politics, ideology, and religion. Furthermore, the discussion of the interaction of cultures and cultural adaptation is thought provoking. A challenging aspect in this book is the attempt to address the issue of cultural transfer between continents, countries, and religions, but in the end it remains uncompleted. Further extended analyses of Mendelsohn’s and Wijdeveld’s architectural works would have offered a more concrete overview relevant to the positioning of the two architects in the chronicles of modern architecture before and after World War II.
Gavriel Rosenfeld introduces his interesting discussion on “Building after Auschwitz, Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust” from an American lens, namely, the local trauma of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the announcement of Daniel Libeskind as the master planner in charge of redeveloping the World Trade Center site in February 2003. For Rosenfeld, the fact that Libeskind was already a finalist “underscored the increasing prominence of Jews in the Western architectural profession” (p. 1). Furthermore, this development represented a new phenomenon in modern Jewish cultural history, according to Rosenfeld: “in the decades since 1945, and especially since the late 1970s, Jewish architects began to attain unprecedented international visibility” (p. 1). Rosenfeld mentions a list of Jewish architects including Louis I. Kahn, Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, James Ingo Freed, Eric Owen Moss, Moshe Safdie, and Robert A. M. Stern, among others, and argues,
It was not just that these architects came from Jewish backgrounds, however; many of them, I noted [in an earlier review by the author], consciously drew on Jewish sources of inspiration in their work, so much so that their architecture was arguably more “Jewish” in orientation than that of earlier Jewish architects. (p. 1)
Addressing the conceptual problems of the subject of “Jewish architecture,” Rosenfeld points out the lack of unifying style “across the vast temporal and spatial parameters of Jewish history,” further arguing that “in the absence of a unifying style, it is unclear what the concept of Jewish architecture might mean” (p. 2). Yet the same challenging arguments could apply to Christian architecture. He then surveys the literature regarding the problem of “Jewish architecture” and raises questions underscoring the difficulty of defining Jewish architecture. Rosenfeld’s conclusion from his review of past scholarly discussion is useful for future research:
In light of these realities, it is best to set aside the essentialist idea that Jewishness can be defined in a transcendent sense in favor of the constructionist notion that culture and identity are forged under specific historical circumstances and evolve with the passage of time. (p. 3)
Rosenfeld’s solution to the methodological problems of his subject is to aim “for a new level of interdisciplinary in writing” his book. He integrates Jewish history and Holocaust history with architectural history, and he also applies methodological approaches from memory studies (p. 8).
Rosenfeld’s discussion is thought provoking and his attempts to reconstruct the authorial intent of leading post-modernist and deconstructionist architects such as Libeskind, Gehry, and Eisenman are fascinating. These include detailed description and reconstruction of psychological considerations that lead architects both to recover Jewish identity and to come to terms with the Holocaust memory. Yet the problem is that Rosenfeld is focused on the Holocaust’s impact on Jewish cultural identity in such a way that he undermines or gives little attention to representations of Jewish identity by the modernists—for example, Vienna-born Richard Neutra granting special importance to psychological aspects in his architecture. (The architect Rudolph Schindler mentioned in this chapter was Catholic and not Jewish.) Nevertheless, Rosenfeld’s reference to Isaac Deutscher’s notion of the “The Non-Jewish Jew” (1968) regarding rebellious Jews who rejected the limitations of Jewish religion and pursued the universal in their thinking and activities sheds interesting light on biographical narratives of leading modernist Jewish architects (p. 96f). Given the rise of anti-Semitism and nationalism in the first decade of the twentieth century, Jewish architects according to Rosenfeld, “strove to create new universal norms that would be welcoming to all, including outsiders like themselves,” and further “strove to create a modern, revolutionary, and universal form of architecture as a way of becoming insiders in a society remade in their own image.” . Yet it remains open for further investigation how post-modernist and deconstructionist Jewish architects reacted to the heritage of modernist Jewish architects (their formal language and ideologies)—for example, the formal and the symbolic relation between Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001) and Mendelsohn’s dyeing hall in his hat factory in Luckenwalde, Germany (1923).
Rosenfeld’s discussion is interesting and based on much research from beginning to end. Yet there are some misleading assumptions concerning assimilation and conscious identification with Jewish history, the expectation that Jews in the United States would react immediately to the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and what it means to build “Jewish” in relation to showing American patriotism. Still, Rosenfeld succeeds in demonstrating how Jewish architecture epitomized the pluralism of modern Jewish experience, reclaiming a historical perspective on lessons drawn from the Holocaust and demonstrating how architecture served and serves as a defining tool in fashioning modern Jewish identities.
The anthropologists Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja concentrate in their essay collection Post-Cosmopolitan Cities
on particular cities with a history of vibrant combination of many cultures; we describe the way in which cosmopolitanism was practiced and sustained in them, the hostility it nevertheless often had to contend with, and the fragility of cosmopolitanism in recent years. The main part of the book then focuses on an anthropological study of the new kinds of relations that are being formed today in more nationalistic contexts. (p. 1)
The question arises if the authors present convincing examples given the methodological framing of their research and the chosen essays. They apply cosmopolitanism as a measure of estimating past and current “quality of relations” (p. 1) in different places and it is not clear if it is helpful to differentiate between cosmopolitan identified as “generous interactions” and other “less generous relations” (p. 1) that could also be regarded as acts of violence against cosmopolitanism. However, their identification of both phenomena as urban assemblages that can be studied together is helpful for future research. Furthermore, their argument that cosmopolitanism must always imply a capacity for openness and appreciation of others and an ability to stand outside the givens of one’s own community (p. 2) is relevant also for checking the case studies presented.
There are three chapters dedicated to the Ukrainian city of Odessa. The first chapter, by Humphrey, examines both cosmopolitanism and pogroms together as “urban assemblages.” She argues that “Cosmopolitan networks and pogrom crowds created their own separate, patterns of relations, which can be seen as topographies, defined by the overall connectivity of their different elements as assemblage” (p. 18). This deconstructive approach based on several theoretical and historical sources does not always convince. Humphrey deals with Odessa during the last few decades of the Russian Empire. She examines several historical pogroms, describing places, development and conclusion, and emphasizes the temporariness of “pogrom mobs” and “Cosmopolitan networks” (e.g., Freemasons, socialist revolutionary movements, trading networks), identified as “temporary assemblage” and understood as “temporary patterns of relations” (p. 7). The apparent “continuity” of religious hate rhetoric as a legitimation of killing and stealing from Jews is referred to only in passing. In the second chapter, “Negotiating Cosmopolitanism: Migration, Religious Education and Shifting Jewish Orientations in Post-Soviet Odessa,” Marina Sapritsky examines patterns within the Jewish community today. She describes the largely simultaneous processes of Jewish emigration from Odessa and the entry of Jewish international organizations and emissaries whose efforts and economic means are aimed at helping the remaining Jewish inhabitants as well as the growing trend of return migration. Using the term negotiation in relation to the phenomena of cosmopolitanism helps to understand her findings. She argues that the story of Odessa’s distinctiveness owes a great deal to its Jewry, and, especially during the Soviet period, being Jewish in Odessa was nothing like being “the Other,” the alien face of modernity. Sapritsky analyzes how this “ordinariness” has been undermined by the new religious and political formations created by various connections to overseas diasporas. Furthermore, she claims that old local models of Jewish identification, informed by the cosmopolitan orientation and idealized internationalist practices of the Soviet regime, have been confronted with foreign models of Jewishness (pp. 71ff). This idealized concept of the Soviet past and critical reference to Orthodox organizations in the present appear stereotypical. Relying on her interviews, Sapritsky describes the views of returnees. While some returnees arrive back with a heightened sense of Jewishness or develop stronger attachments to Jewish life on their return, others prefer to remain on the periphery of Jewish activity in the city. She concludes by noting that it is possibly too early to tell how influential the new Jewish orientations will be for future generations (p. 87).
It is enlightening to compare Sapritsky’s observations with Vera Skvirskaja’s presentation of distinct patterns of “self-exclusion” of other minorities in Odessa in the third chapter, “At the City’s Social Margins: Selective Cosmopolitans in Odessa.” Skvirskaja focuses on two groups, “local old-timers” Ukrainian Roma and recent, mainly post-Soviet, “Afghan immigrants,” who illustrate “two different modalities of marginality: the marginality of a historically local (or ‘internal’) Other, the Gypsy; and the marginality of the recent foreign migrants who have become omnipresent in Odessa’s market places but less so in other public realms” (p. 94). Skvirskaja investigates what kinds of coexistence strategies exist among these minority groups, specifically the dialectics of openness and closures, developed sensibilities relating parallel (“dialogised with”) perspectives of their ethnic worlds and as possible defenses against their stigmatization as “aliens” and “blacks” (chernye) by the wider society (pp. 95f.). Her argument challenging the definition of cosmopolitanism “only” as an elitist phenomenon is thought provoking. Referring to cosmopolitanism as “a matter of attitudes, skills and the enjoyment of difference,” Skvirskaja notes that working-class migrants, petty merchants, and the destitute (i.e., people from lower down the socioeconomic ladder) do not share them uniformly. She examines the Servy Roma, the largest ethnic group of the Ukrainian Roma, identified through its high degree of acculturation, and perceiving itself as “native to Ukraine and integral to Odessa.” In contrast and yet similarly, the core of the Afghan diaspora in Odessa are Muslim men who have adopted a modern way of life against their traditional society (a transformation process that relates to the Sovietization in Afghanistan, p. 101). The two groups are conscious of their acculturation, modernization and attachment to the city and yet are also aware of the negative attitudes of the wider society toward them. Despite and as a reaction to the representation of hate rhetoric and discrimination against them in the public sphere, Afghan and Roma communities practice what Skvirskaja calls “endogamous” and “selective” kinds of cosmopolitanism, showing a stock of integral and highly valued cultural skills.
How relevant it is to secure constructive relationships between the majority and “the Other” minorities as a trial for a functioning “Cosmopolitan city” is presented in the chapter by Joanna Kostylo, “Sinking and Shrinking City: Cosmopolitanism, Historical Memory and Social Change in Venice.” Kostylo introduces the Venetians as representing a cosmopolitan population since they emerged as a city with a strong identity and its own dialect as a result of cultural mixing, and further examines the Venetian Ghetto as “Quasi-Cosmopolitan” (pp. 173ff). Kostylo’s rhetoric regarding the dialectical relation between the “Jewish Ghetto” and the phenomenon of cosmopolitanism is thought provoking. Questions arise how the enforced boundaries of the “Ghetto” may have helped the formation of a coherent Jewish identity and eventually contributed to a specific form of cosmopolitan interactions. An interesting historical anecdote refers to the request by Turkish merchants in 1573 to establish their own warehouse: “they wanted ‘a place of their own, as the Jews have their ghetto, to accommodate their merchandise’” (p. 174f). 1 In an ironic manner, noting the exodus to the mainland motivated by economic considerations of the native population in the last few decades, the author uses the “Ghetto” as a symbolic term to describe the increasing “ghettoization” of the remaining local population today. Do the native Venetians who claim to be the carriers of true cosmopolitanism in the city today see themselves “victimized,” “less fortunate,” or “segregated” in relation to the tourists and the new émigré society as the Jews of the past did in relation to the Venetians? The claim that the present political-religious organization in the Jewish Ghetto could threaten the cosmopolitan character of the city (p. 178) is an expression of partiality and undermines the expectation that “cosmopolitanism” is an all-inclusive construction of relationships between the majority and “the Other.”
All four books are relevant to reconsidering the transformation of Jewish culture and its contribution to the formation of modern European and American cities. Furthermore, they contribute new dimensions to the research of Jewish material culture and the representations of Jewish culture within the urban environment.