Essays

The importance of the Holocaust for Jewish and general memory has led to scholarly discussion of the USHMM in religious terms. Such a choice is not obvious. The USHMM, like many other Holocaust memorial museums, is not owned or run by a religious community and does not serve traditional purposes such as providing a space for daily prayers. Yet visitors treat the museum space and its objects with a sense of reverence reserved for ritual spaces and relics. In this article, the author turns to Armin Loeb’s tallit katan, an object donated to the USHMM more than two decades ago, to show the value of analyzing what they call inaccessible objects.

In 2014, when the author first visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s original offsite storage facility, they saw a semblance of a series of wedding dresses under wraps, too delicate to be on display. In that dark space, the author came to learn about how one of these wedding gowns was made out of a repurposed parachute. So enchanted and intrigued by this story, the author vowed to return to these dresses and their promise of renewed life at least for some of those former concentration camp inmates who survived and were able to wear them.

This article conducts a codicological analysis of Szegö’s Holocaust diary written in a holy book, examining the manuscript as an object and the significance of its material features. While the diary entries are a rich text that deserve more scholarly attention, examining the diary as a unique bound object that preserves traces of the diarist’s interactions with it and some of the experiences detailed in the entries is equally important. Doing so foregrounds Szegö’s individuality and agency amid changing circumstances, offers insight into his complex identity as a devoted Christian convert persecuted for being Jewish, and emphasizes the significance of the diary as a survivor object.

This article examines a rosary and missal. These objects were given to a Jewish Holocaust survivor for her confirmation while she was hiding in a small French town as a child. Although the survivor returned to her Jewish faith, she still revered the objects, as demonstrated by her decision to keep them long after donating the rest of her Holocaust-related materials to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for safekeeping. In this article, the authors explore these multiple layers of sacredness. They also consider how a federal, non-denominational institution such as the USHMM should curate and display such objects.

In comparison to the considerable scholarship on drawings, prints, and photographs of Holocaust-era ghettos and camps by prisoners, the jewelry that prisoners created for themselves or other prisoners remains less investigated. Using a bracelet owned by Terezín prisoner Greta Perlman, jewelry constructed by Terezín prisoner David Grunfeld for fellow inmates, and various link bracelets and pins found in the ruins of the Łódź ghetto after its liquidation, this essay examines how prisoners understood the conditions they were living in and represented them in material culture, and by doing so asserted some form of material agency amid confinement and forced labor. 

In September 1942, in the Warsaw ghetto in German-occupied Poland, Maria and Maximilian Wortman hastily wrote a letter to their daughter, Dziunia, from whom they had become separated; they also wrote to a relative, Ludwik, whom they hoped might deliver Dziunia’s letter. The couple had been selected for deportation to the death camp Treblinka, and they were gathered on the Umschlagplatz, the railway siding from where the deportation trains departed. Their final words to their daughter are written on the reverse of a scrap of paper, a list no larger than 11 x 15 cm. 

Beijing's Tibetan Buddhist temples have always been places through which diverse groups of people moved. During the Qing, these were spaces where elites from different backgrounds met, collaborated, and enacted the multicultural character of the empire within the capital. The temples themselves announced the pluralistic nature of the Qing dynasty, as well as its grandeur, through their public display of signs and stelae aimed at the multi-ethnic audiences of the empire.

Fleming’s trilogy illustrates the complex dynamics of race, religion, and visual arts in the interwar United States. Though the extant scholarship highlights the increasing Anglo-Saxonization of Jesus’s body in American visual culture in this era, Fleming’s story reveals a virtually opposite impulse in liberal Protestantism: to search for multiple colors of Christ.

Kati Curts and Alex Kaloyanides introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to examining four key categories: “Material,” “Economies,” “Religion,” and “America(s).” The ambition of this issue is that the collective inquiries of its authors, which span various interpretive histories and genealogical fragments, can offer ways to better understand their assorted conveyances, as well as the powerful grip of their critical conjunction.

For many Indigenous people of Turtle Island, also known as North America, treaty medals are material reminders of sacred promises made between their nations and the British Crown or the U.S. Government. Settlers and colonial officials, by contrast, have often treated these medals as mere trinkets.

Anna Bigelow and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri introduce this special issue of MAVCOR Journal devoted to Material Islam. It explores devotional objects, the Islamic sensorium, the book as a material object, the Muslim body, and the various roles of the mosque as a social, political, and spiritual space. Taken together, its varied essays demonstrate an incredibly wide-ranging, rich, and exciting arena of study.

This article examines the genealogy of Afro-Brazilian mosques, answering some of the most immediate and puzzling questions that they force all who see them to ask. The answers to these questions demonstrate the fluidity of categories such as European, African, Islamic, and Christian, and how West African Muslims effectively drew on an architectural vocabulary with connections to three continents to forge an emergent cosmopolitan identity.

This article traces a fourteenth-century Persian history from Anatolia, Bazm wa Razm (Feasting and Fighting), written by ʿAzīz al-Dīn Astarābādī, from its presentation copy to its various recensions down to the modern period, examining how each era visually refigures this textual manifestation of its original patron, Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad (r. 783-800 AH/1381-1398 CE), for a new purpose.

Ubiquitous across the medieval Islamic world, khalwa is the practice of self-isolation, typically in a small cell, in order to focus on pious devotions. This article offers one possible approach to theorizing the heterogenous elements of khalwa coherently by insisting that we take the material and the social as seriously as we do the human and the spiritual.

As part of their activities in Kongo and Angola Capuchin Franciscan friars created dozens of images and wrote hundreds of pages of text in works that they called "practical guides." These Capuchin didactic images form an exceptionally important corpus that enriches our knowledge of central Africa and dramatically multiplies the European-format visual record about the African continent before 1800.

Early modern central Africa comes to life in the images that Capuchin friars. This Capuchin central African corpus consists today in four extant manuscripts connected by form and content. This essay offers additional visual material from the corpus by featuring details of each individual vignette that comprise the 1650s poster now in the Museo Francescano, as well as the unpublished versos of the Parma Watercolors that feature text.

Embracing the belief that the humblest of individuals participated in Jesus’s birth with their presence and their gifts alongside the wisest, Christians of every era have wished to display their own participation and contribution to this foundational Christian event. This article describes the ways in which a traditional, rural-inspired society like that of Santiago, Chile at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries expressed itself through its nativity scenes.

Conch shells frequently appear as objects in religiously inspired artwork and shrines in Sikkim, west India. Their frequent appearance in material culture and invocation in Classical Tibetan-language literary culture is indicative of a rich repository of connections. This essay explores some of their many resonances, in particular their significance as indicators of ecological change in the Himalayas.

Bridging ecology, ethnohistory, linguistics, and art historical inquiry, this article argues that the various forms of vegetation encountered along the slope of Mount Tlaloc during the ascension of the tlahtoque were of ritual significance within Nahua worldview.

Cremation structures serve the utilitarian purpose of incinerating a corpse to aid transition from life to death, but in contemporary practice in Northern Thailand, opulent, golden-colored cremation structures called prasat sop also create a stunning sight that give local viewers a deeper understanding of all sentient beings’ connection to death.

Known as the Bumkor, the books that make up the Bum are not just objects, but are generative, active agents that are capable of producing and renewing auspiciousness in the local human and nonhuman community that reside in the landscape.

The Riwo Sangchö is a ritual exchange that facilitates smoky relations between humans and spirits resident in landscapes around the world.

The look and shape, feel and function of the tobacco pipe footnote the transformational features of the early modern Atlantic world: landscapes of exchange.