The First Jewish Museum in Vienna
The Jewish Museum in Vienna, opened in 1895 by the “Society for the Collection and Preservation of Artistic and Historical Memorials of Jewry,” was the first institution of its kind worldwide.
Fotoabzug
Exhibition space of the first Jewish Museum at 16 Malzgasse
From 1913 onward, the Jewish Museum was housed at Malzgasse 16 in Vienna’s 2nd district, inside the building of the Talmud Torah School.
Ausstellungsraum des ersten Jüdischen Museums in der Malzgasse 16Archivalie
Inventory of the first Jewish Museum
From the very beginning, the museum’s collections were entered into an inventory book. Shortly before the museum was closed by the National Socialists in 1938, it recorded 6,474 entries.
Inventarbuch des ersten Jüdischen Museums
Fotoabzug
The 'Gute Stube' in the first Jewish Museum
One of the museum’s attractions was the “Gute Stube”, created by the painters Isidor Kaufmann and David Kohn. It presented to Vienna’s partly secular and assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie an idealized vision of the peaceful domestic Sabbath—a vision imagined by the artist as belonging either to a distant past or to the Eastern European shtetl.
Die ‘Gute Stube’ im ersten Jüdischen Museum
Reproduktion
Portfolio of works by Isidor Kaufmann
Isidor Kaufmann furnished the Gute Stube with objects that he also depicted in some of his paintings, reinforcing a highly nostalgic portrayal of Eastern European piety.
Mappe mit Werken Isidor KaufmannsRitualobjekt
Wall sconce from the 'Gute Stube'
Some of these objects—such as this wall sconce—have survived to the present day and remain part of the museum’s collection.
Wandleuchter aus der ‘Guten Stube’Alltagsobjekt
Doll with "Sterntichel"
One of the central collecting focuses of the first Jewish Museum was ethnographic objects, many of them from Eastern Europe. Some of the lenders and sponsors of the Jewish Museum themselves came from the northeastern provinces of the Habsburg Empire, including Adele von Mises, born in Brody in Galicia. She owned a collection of traditional Jewish women’s headwear, which she donated to the Jewish Museum in Vienna in 1920.
Puppe mit Sterntichel
Alltagsobjekt
Purim grogger
International scholarly exchange was extremely important to the founders of the first Jewish Museum. The museum maintained close contact with the physician and ethnographer Samuel Weissenberg from Yelysavethrad in what was then the Russian Empire. Weissenberg provided the museum with his extensive ethnographic collection.
Purim-Ratsche
Schautafel
‘Building the Nation: Modern Hebrew Education and Intellectual Life in the New Palestine’
Beginning in the 1920s, Jakob Bronner, the curator of the Jewish Museum, established a Palestine Department to document developments in the region and the Zionist nation‑building efforts.
‘Aufbau des Landes. Das neuhebräische Schulwerk und geistiges Leben im neuen Palästina’
Tora-Mantel
Meil of the Arnstein family
Another highlight of the museum was the so‑called “Vienna Room,” which focused on local history and on prominent members of the Jewish community in Vienna.
Meil der Familie Arnstein
Gewürzbüchse
Wooden Besamim
After the National Socialist seizure of power in March 1938, the Jewish Museum was closed without delay. In 1939, the anthropologist Josef Wastel displayed part of the objects in the antisemitic exhibition “The physical and psychological appearance of the Jews,” which he had conceived. The collections of the Jewish Museum were then incorporated into the Museum of Ethnology—which at the time belonged to the Natural History Museum—where they were assigned new inventory numbers.
In the early 1950s, the Museum of Ethnology restituted the surviving objects to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (Jewish Community of Vienna). Many objects are lost forever; whether they were deliberately destroyed or stolen can no longer be determined.
