Gustav Cohn’s Jewish Cemetery: A Cultural History

Abstract

‘The old€€ Jewish cemetery has recently been enjoying increasing interest as a historical source of eminent significance.’ These are the opening words of the booklet Der jüdische Friedhof: Seine geschichtliche und kulturgeschichtliche Entwicklung, published in 1930 by the community rabbi of Leipzig, Gustav Cohn (1881–1943).1 This observation of the growing interest in Europe’s Jewish cemeteries was as true in Cohn’s day as it is in ours, with Jewish cemeteries figuring in works of scholarship, literature, and the fine arts since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century—albeit that the chasm of the Holocaust has inspired the present-day interest in Jewish cemeteries for fundamentally different reasons. The plethora of works old and new, long and short, general and specific pertaining to Jewish cemeteries is innumerable: a sense of this abundance can be gleaned from an almost 800-page bibliography on the subject.2 Published in 2005, this bibliography could today already be augmented with many titles that have been published since.