translated from Spanish: New York’s Met exhibits Jewish treasure that was hidden for centuries

New York.- More than 500 years remained hidden within the walls of a French residence a Jewish treasure made up of rings, brooches, headbands, hundreds of coins and other valuable objects, and which now, having recognized its enormous historical value, reaches the Metropolitan Museum of New York.” It was hidden in the same way that people can keep something under the mattress when you go out on the weekend, in case someone raids the house, but in this case the owners didn’t come back,” sample curator Barbara Drake Boehm explains to Efe.

The items date back to the 14th century, and are estimated to have remained hidden in a house in Colmar, northeastern France, from 1349 to 1867, when the then owner of the building stumbled upon the now-deed “Treasure of Colmar” by chance during a Renewal.
But after hundreds of years hidden, this group of valuable belongings of a Jewish family did not immediately receive the recognition it deserved, as it was in private hands for several decades. Afterwards, it was acquired by the Cluny Museum in Paris, but, considering its Jewish origin, “did not receive much attention for a season because it was bought shortly before the outbreak of World War II and things took a while to return to normal,” Boehm says.

Efe

Experts believe that the “Treasure of Colmar” was a collection of jewels of a Jewish family, which hid it in their residence at a time when the black plague was ravaging part of Europe and which led to a campaign against the Jews, accused of being the cause of the epidemic. In the collection, rings of rubies, sapphires, garnets and turquoises, brooches with pearls, a delicate enamelled belt, gold-plated buttons, and more than 300 different coins that can be seen at the Met Cloisters, the venue that the institution devotes to medieval art in upstate New York.

Efe

The Jewish origin of the articles is confirmed by the inscription of “Mazel Tov” – “good luck” in Hebrew – in one of the rings in the collection, a marriage alliance considered extremely exceptional.
In historical terms I would say that the Jewish wedding ring, of which only five other copies of the medieval period are preserved, is a spectacular specimen,” explains Boehm.

Apart from its economic value, which the curator did not want to reveal, the expert noted that the “Treasure of Colmar” represents a rare opportunity to understand how the merchants of the Middle Ages lived.
So we are able to convey what the class of merchants was like in the Middle Ages, rather than kings or nobility, and know what their existence was like,” she said.

The Cluny Museum in Paris has ceded this particular treasure until January 2020 to the Met, an institution that has supplemented it with period articles from its own collection to present an even more specific portrait of the life of a family of merchants in the Middle Ages.

“What makes it special is that this stash of jewellery and coins represents a Jewish artistic heritage of the medieval period, something that is exceptional and that is very important, because ‘The Cloisters’ is the public face of the medieval world in the USA.” The Cloisters,” located in the Washington Heights area of northern Manhattan, is one of the headquarters of the Metropolitan Museum of New York and concentrates works of art from the Middle Ages, including the prominent “Tapices of the Unicorn”, a seven-piece series considered one of the most enigmatic specimens of the time. Efe



Original source in Spanish

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