Archives

Jean Besancenot’s photographs, taken from 1934 to 1937, are a priceless record of rural Jewish communities in Morocco no longer in existence. 

Jules Adler (1865-1952) was born into an Alsatian Jewish family at Luxeuil-les-Bains in Franche-Comté. The powerful and singular oeuvre of this painter of the second naturalist generation is little known to the public today, yet one of his pictures, The Strike at Le Creusot (1899), became an iconic image of the workers’ struggle and has been frequently reproduced in history books.

Rosine Cahen (1857-1933) was born in Delme, a small town in Lorraine that had been home to a Jewish community since the end of the 17th century. She arrived in Paris in 1871, when her family opted for French nationality, as did 25% of the Jews in the territories annexed at the time by Germany.

The Guerry Columns, a major work Georges Jeanclos (1933-1997), joined recently the mahJ’s collections thanks to an exceptional donation by the artist’s family of a full-scale terracotta study of the bronze monument erected in the hamlet of Guerry at Savigny-en-Septaine in the Cher. A poignant evocation of one of the crimes of the Shoah perpetrated on the French territory, this work constitutes a major enrichment of the mahJ’s contemporary collection.

Adolfo Kaminsky, a member of the Resistance and a brilliant forger, spent thirty years of his life producing counterfeit identity papers to save lives. He discovered photography during the Second World War reproducing official stamps for forged identity cards.

Sous la direction de Dominique Bourel, CNRS, université de Potsdam, auteur de Moses Mendelssohn. La naissance du judaïsme moderne (Gallimard, 2004)

To mark its twentieth anniversary, the mahJ is devoting an exhibition – the first of its kind in France – to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). With more than two hundred paintings, drawings, prints, books, objects and scientific instruments – including major works by Gustave Courbet, Gustav Klimt, René Magritte and Mark Rothko – Jean Clair, the exhibition’s curator, is proposing a fresh insight into the intellectual and scientific development of the inventor of psychoanalysis and the influence of Judaism.