A Ceremonial Judaica Textile Owned by Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus Depicting the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, [Pressburg?, early 19th century]

Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), the first Jewish officer to serve in the French Army, was wrongly accused of spying for the Germans in the fall of 1894. He was tried before a court-martial, convicted, publicly degraded, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana in December of that year. After evidence emerged that the true culprit in the crime was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy and that the army had done nothing to correct the record, the so-called Dreyfus Affair became a matter of national and even international debate due to the antisemitism-fueled miscarriage of justice that it had exposed. After much public pressure, Dreyfus was retried, re-convicted, but pardoned in 1899, and was ultimately rehabilitated by the French Supreme Court in 1906, allowing him to be reinstated to the army with the rank of major that same year.

The present lot once belonged to Alfred and his wife Lucie Dreyfus and was passed down in the family until it reached its current owner. It is a ceremonial Judaica textile depicting the three pilgrimage festivals: Passover, represented by Israelites bearing packs and walking sticks during the Exodus from Egypt; Shavuot, represented by Moses receiving the Tablets of the Law; and Sukkot, represented by Jews sitting at a table in the shade of a sukkah (booth). The inscription at the top quotes the verse “Three times a year all your males shall appear [before the Lord your God]” (Deut. 16:16), with the name of each of the holidays embroidered above the appropriate scene. The text below reveals the identity of the artist and of the artifact’s original donor: “This holy covering was made by the hand of my daughter, Treinele, for her tenth birthday, and I donated it—I, Joseph ben L. Bettelheim.” The term “holy covering” may indicate that this item was used to adorn the cantor’s lectern in a synagogue on each of the three pilgrimage festivals before it made its way into the possession of the Dreyfus family.

Assuming that the L initial used here stands for Leib, it is likely that the donor and his daughter lived in Pressburg (present-day Bratislava, Slovakia), since a resident of that city named Joseph ben Leib Bettelheim appears in the subscription list of a Hebrew book published in Prague in 1825. (He may also be the Joseph Bettelheim listed in books published in Vienna in 1821 and in Pressburg in 1838.) Incidentally, this date supports the idea that the enlarged words at the beginning of the lower text are meant to convey the textile’s date of creation, 5583 (1823).

Historian Paula Hyman has noted that this item, as well as other religious articles owned by the Dreyfuses like their ketubbah (marriage contract), and similarly a siddur (prayer book) belonging to Lucie, “suggest that bourgeois Jews, thoroughly acculturated to the mores of their class, retained a sentimental attachment to their Jewish origins and fashioned an identity from multiple elements.” In testament to its importance as a family heirloom, the present textile has featured in two Dreyfus-focused exhibitions: “The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice” at the Jewish Museum in New York (September 13, 1987-January 15, 1988) and “Dreyfus: The Story of a French-Jewish Family” at Beit Hatfutsot in Tel Aviv (March 11-September 10, 2014).

Physical Description

Wool embroidery on cotton (21 1/2 x 22 1/4 in.; 550 x 567 mm). Slight scattered staining; some letters threadbare. Matted.

Literature

Haggai Ben-Shammai (ed.), Dreyfus: koroteha shel mishpahah yehudit tsarefatit (Tel Aviv: Beit Hatfutsot; Jerusalem: NLI, 2014), 7, 72 (no. 37).

Hirsch Brod, Sefer shenei ofarim (Prague: Scholl & Landau, 1825), subscription list at rear.

Gabriel Löv Dessauer, Sefer iyyov meturgam u-mevo’ar me-hadash (Pressburg: Anton Schmid et Comp, 1838), subscription list at rear.

Paula Hyman, “The Dreyfus Affair: The Visual and the Historical,” The Journal of Modern History 61,1 (March 1989): 88-109, at p. 89.

Norman L. Kleeblatt (ed.), The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice (Berkeley; Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987), 271 (no. 27).

Moses Samuel Neiman, Sefer ha-yashar ve-ha-berit: reshit limmudim le-yaldei benei yisra’el (Vienna: Anton Strauss, 1821), subscription list at front.