History of the ‘wandering Jew’ Captured in Seminary’s Exhibit

Very interesting portions of the history of Jewish wanderings from Palestine to Europe, the Americas, and as far as China are made real by the collection of historical objects of the Jewish Theological Seminary, now on view at Broadway and 122nd street.

A small clay object, like some sea-shell you might pick up on the beach, recalls the Period of the Judges in Jewish history three thousand years ago. It is an oil lamp, from which Samuel the prophet may easily have anointed Saul first king of the primitive tribes of the hills of Judea. It resembles to the inexperienced observer the clay pottery of the pueblos of New Mexico, representing the same period of development in Jewish civilization.

At another case you step abruptly into the early days of the Puritans in America. Increase Mather, "President of Harvard College at Cambridge in Massachusetts," speculates upon "The Future Conversion of the Jewish Nation," of which nation there may have been a round hundred members in the new world at the time. This preoccupation of pioneers with the Jews, who could rarely have been encountered in early American times, crops up again in a treatise on "The Ten Tribes" of Israel and the Aborigines of America," which rests by the side of "The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation," that is to say, conversion.

A PHILOSOPHER’S LETTER

Turning to another section of the exhibit, the Medieval Period, the living evidence of the life of the Jews in Europe and the Near East has been collected, and a letter from Maimonides, blackened and faded, attests the fact that those glowing, distant names of history were attached to people, people who signed letters and sent them and waited for the mail in the twelfth century as in the twentieth.

Illuminated manuscripts, the work of years of incredible painstaking, often the fruit of an entire life in a dark, restricted Ghetto, gleam with color across from similarly illuminated marriage-contracts, signed and sealed at lively festivities of long-departed Jewish families.

TRIUMPH OF RENAISSANCE

From that "most precious piece of printing in existence," the Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed by movable type, the Book of Esther has found its way into this collection. This triumph of the Renaissance is a job of printing that any modern publisher would be fortunate to equal.

Coins dating from Palestine of the Greek-Roman period, from the times of the Maccabees and of Bar Kochba, resemble pretty closely the dime or quarter of current circulation, though they bear inscriptions of the Herods and Caesars and are arranged in glass cases along a wall. With such pieces of money you bought yourself a ride on a donkey from Beersheba to Jerusalem, just to see the show and goings-on, on your week-end or summer vacation.

The history of their ancestors is made very easy to assimilate for people through an exhibition of this kind.

An inscription from a synagogue of the fifteenth century, which Jews had somehow managed to establish on the Yellow River in China, bears witness to an incredible trek of some ten thousand miles from the origin of the Jews in Palestine deserts, through the Caucasus, Turkestan, Tibet and Eastern China, blazing a trail for Marco Polo to follow. Hardly showing Jewish influence, it is only the scholar who can connect this Mongolian document with a Jewish congregation. Already in the fifteenth century, this Jewish community was writing its inscription in Chinese characters. When must it have arrived in the region of the Yellow River? And by what means? And how long must the trip have taken?

The American room of the exhibit, which has been assembled by the Jewish Historical Society, contains also, among other things, memorials to Congress by various individuals and communities of the nineteenth century, and also portraits of the worthies of that day.