National Council on Public History

At last year’s NCPH conference, I met a kindred spirit – another historian interested in social justice who teaches a class called “Museum History and Theory” in a large Museum Studies MA program. In discussing our approaches to constructing syllabi on museum history, she asked, “Does your class boil down to ‘museums: a history of imperialism’ like mine?” I laughed knowingly, and concurred. That is how much of the first two thirds of my course plays out. We read Tony Bennett’s analysis of museums and an “exhibitionary complex” that helped constitute a (white) citizenry at once “civilized,” decorous, and rooted in hierarchies of race and nation. Museums, to a great extent, became codified in the scholarship – and hence in the classroom – as the ultimate imperial project. We talk a lot about anthropology and ethnographic collections that reified racial hierarchy. When we get to the 1970s, and especially by the 1990s, we start to discuss a more emancipatory trajectory fueled by such academic developments as critical anthropology and race and gender studies. But I also try to make clear that museum history, like most history, does not progress linearly from oppression to liberation. John Cotton Dana, after all, demanded as early as the 1910s that museums become useful by responding to community needs. And many museums to this day remain mired in a general program that reifies an Enlightenment project, replete with its hierarchies – of sight, of race, of gender, and of a subject over object.

Although I have taught it again and again, I have never been wholly satisfied with this narrative. While the overall conceptualization of nineteenth-century and early/most twentieth-century museums as places that upheld rather than challenged structures of power is likely accurate, surely such a simple narrative flattens the history. History, and other museum topics, have not always and only been used to fuel reactionary impulses.

My research project is inspired by an urge to unearth the other museum history, that which is only beginning to be researched and written. In the opening essay to AAM’s landmark Mastering Civic Engagement (2002),” Ellen Hirzy urges museum staff, allegedly at that point in the nascent stages of understanding the relationship between museums and civic engagement, to “learn from their colleagues at ethic and community-based museums, which have set the standard by establishing deep and meaningful civic involvement as their founding principle.” (Hirzy, 10) The history of ethnic museums in the US dates largely to the mid-twentieth century, when immigrant groups established local museums in an effort to preserve their heritage and cultural knowledge. As Rosa Cabrera notes in one of the only full-length studies of these museums, these institutions provided a space where adherents to a culture could recall their homeland and preserve their cultural identity, including passing it along to a new generation born in the United States. Surely these museums served the goal of preservation in some, if not in large, part. But they also disrupted canonical national historical narratives by asserting the contributions and values of non-Anglo -Saxon Protestants. And by the time the International Afro-American Museum movement was underway, the charge had surely oriented toward a more revolutionary insistence on telling a largely untold history and charting a more just future.

This is what I had been thinking about when I read Andrea Burns’ account of the African American museum movement. In 1960, as Margaret Burroughs began considering opening a museum devoted to African American history and culture in Chicago, she visited “small ethnic museums,” including the Jewish Museum in New York (1904) and the Polish Museum of America in Chicago (1935) (Burns, 18). The first date caught my eye, preceding as it did by decades the post-colonial (or nearly so) moment most often cited as the start of these “small ethnic museums.” I mentally inserted this date into my teaching narrative; a mere fifty years or so after Barnum’s American Museum, and roughly thirty years after the start of the “Golden Age” of the American Museum, an ethnically-specific museum was founded in New York City, by Jews, during a time of virulent anti-Semitism, immigration, and labor protest.

The Jewish Museum began as an antiquarian collection, ancient texts and rare books under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary. My project explores the early history of the Jewish Museum and will try to uncover whether the early organizers formulated a mission beyond preservation and cultural persistence. Was there an interest in speaking to questions of race at a time when the “Jewish race” was a popular expression in Europe and the US? Were museum founders looking to combat stereotypes and anti-Semitism? What was the role of the museum, if any, in addressing the new wave of Jewish immigrants in light of the already established nature of the second- or third-generation German Jews who founded the collection? Were there claims about national belonging, or assertions of an ancient global cultural tradition to combat Orientalist tropes? Did the Jewish Museum refute or ignore the nationalism that was part of other museum-building projects at the time? The early history of the Jewish Museum might also be an interesting avenue into the question of “tolerance” and the “underserved,” given the framework of much of the existing work on ethnic museums in the United States.

In 1947, in a far different, post-Holocaust moment, the collection of the Jewish Museum moved to a more publically accessible location on Fifth Avenue (where it remains today). At the opening ceremony, Nelson Rockefeller addressed the assembled crowd about “moral law,” a central theme of the museum’s inaugural exhibition. The businessman, philanthropist, art collector, and arts advocate (who would become New York governor in 1959), warned that “the unchecked interplay of material forces would lead to conflict.” He continued, within the unspoken context of the end of World War II or perhaps the beginning of the Cold War, “Spiritual motivations, on the other hand, lead to a yielding of selfish interests, and hence to effective cooperation.’” Addressing the educational mission of the Jewish Museum, he opined, “This is an American museum, serving a cause for which every thoughtful American should feel a genuine concern.” I would argue that this claim for a collection of religious and historic objects serving a spiritual and civic mission –harmony, peace, and ethnic and perhaps racial coexistence – is an interesting place for a museum to arrive. I am curious as to how it got there, and if that journey has anything to teach us about the possibility of (ethnic )museums that collect the past to forge new futures.

~ Laura Schiavo, The George Washington University

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