A Moroccan ketubah featuring a Moorish arch outlining the document’s Hebrew and Aramaic text. An Iranian seder plate with a Passover celebration engraved against a backdrop of buildings that include a domed mosque. A photo of a Tunisian Jewish bride and her mother bedecked in traditional celebratory garb.
A trove of Jewish objects from Muslim empires going on display in Berkeley on Aug. 27 are more than just captivating historic treasures. They reflect a deep cultural affinity between Jews and the countries they’ve called home for centuries. Countries like Algeria, Egypt, India, Iran, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey.
The exhibit, titled “In Plain Sight: Jewish Arts and Lives in the Muslim World,” runs at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life from Aug. 27 through May of next year.
Through 60 items from the 19th and 20th centuries, the exhibit highlights attitudes, practices and visual landscapes that cross cultures, and it does so at a highly sensitive time for Jewish-Muslim coexistence.
“In the words of a donor, this is what the world needs right now,” said Francesco Spagnolo, curator at the Magnes and an associate adjunct professor at the university’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Spagnolo co-curated the new exhibit with Qamar Adamjee, a Pakistani-born art historian of the Islamic world and the Indian subcontinent who is now a researcher in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian department.
“The goal of the project was really finding a shared and joined perspective,” Spagnolo told J. “What really unites us is the idea of belonging to many cultures at once.”
“The echoes of the Jewish-Muslim encounters are, in fact, at the core of today’s Jewish experience,” the pair said in a joint statement. “They speak of human connections across divides, prompt reconsideration of assumptions that shape our public cultural and political debates, and map the precious possibilities (and inherent fragility) of coexistence, mutual appreciation and belonging to many cultures at once.”
The items selected for display come from the Magnes permanent collection, which museum co-founders Seymour and Rebecca Fromer shaped beyond the scope of Europe and the Ashkenazi world to reflect the broad cultural heritage of the Jewish diaspora. In some cases, exhibit artifacts were left behind when Jews in Muslim countries fled due to harassment, discrimination and persecution, or were forced to leave.
There are textiles, such as one decorated with floral and arboreal motifs given as a dowry gift in Uzbekistan. There are Torah curtains, a red velvet one from Egypt, and from India, a yellow silk covering woven with gold and silver filigree. Hamsas, a sign of protection against the “evil eye” across cultures, appear in a variety of shapes and styles.
Over the course of five years, Spagnolo and Adamjee met regularly to curate the collection, studying primary sources and related literature to understand items’ origins and the layers of meaning in repeating symbols such as cypress trees. The pair was surprised to discover that these often show up in visual representations from both cultures, Spagnolo said, and appear to be a shared marker of divinity and transcendence, a link between heaven and earth.
“I would say that once we learned to see these threads, it became almost hard to unsee them,” Spagnolo said. “When I learned that the eight-pointed star is a graphic marker for Muslim sacred text and then I saw eight-pointed stars featured on both Hanukkah lamps and bags to hold prayer shawls, it just made me think about Jewish texts in a different way.”
The fundamental role of light in Jewish and Muslim prayer spaces serves as the exhibit’s physical throughline, as well as its metaphorical underpinning. There are hanging synagogue memorial lamps inscribed in Hebrew and Hanukkah lamps featuring Islamic architectural motifs. Hebrew and Arabic inscriptions encircle a copper Moroccan lampshade.
“We spent many hours in the fashion of the Talmudic chavruta,” the co-curators said in the statement, referring to the Hebrew word for a small group of people learning together. They described themselves as “two students with complementary, divergent and contradicting views training ourselves in the other’s perspective, seeing the same object with the other’s eyes, and forming, day after day, a shared perspective, a common sensibility.”
UC Berkeley scholars from various disciplines, as well as students from the university, worked with Spagnolo and Adamjee to inventory and interpret the Magnes objects.
Exhibit funders include the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, the David Berg Foundation and Kenneth Kofman and Andrea King. While the project has been in the works since 2019, its opening around the year mark since the Israel-Hamas war started makes its message more relevant than ever.
“I guess it’s the zeitgeist,” Spagnolo said of the timing.
“What’s happening in the world right now is something that’s forcing seemingly everyone to want to take sides and abandon nuance,” he added. “What’s timely is the ongoing reminder that a nuanced discourse, a blended discourse, a world in which people can communicate and create together is what we should all strive for, even when it feels impossible to do so.”