Introduction: Bildung beyond borders

Abstract

Readers of the Journal of the History of Collections may reasonably ask why a special issue should be devoted to expatriate German–Jewish collectors in fin-de-siècle Europe, on the face of it a rather niche theme. It is our contention not only that these collectors represent a coherent group worthy of study in their own right, but also that they exerted a significant transnational influence on the history and practice of collecting in each of the countries in which they settled. More even than the Rothschilds, whose astonishing ascent from the Frankfurt ghetto dominates most accounts of collecting in nineteenth-century Europe, the collectors profiled in this issue were representatives of an intellectual tradition that they had imbibed from childhood as an integral part of their identity as German Jews. This introduction seeks to locate them in their sociocultural context and to assess their impact as agents of intercultural transfer, whose example revitalized the practice of collecting in Europe and beyond.1