Musée de Cluny

Musée de Cluny—Hebraic Collection—Scent Box—Holland. XVIIIth Century. Published by the National Museums, Paris.

Silver, 19th century, height: 30 cm. Geographical origin unknown.

The havdalah ceremony that marks the transition from the holy time of Shabbat (or a religious holiday) to the ordinary time of the working week traditionally includes three blessings spoken over wine, herbs or spices and a source of light, respectively. The simple truth seems to be that we simply do not know why the blessing over the herbs was introduced in the first place. One suggestion is that the sensual appeal of the scent offers a compensation of sorts for the hardship the return to the less holy time will bring with it. Up to the twelfth century, Ashkenazi Jews used sweet herbs for this purpose, notably myrtle (hadas in Hebrew). When they switched to spices, the spice box retained the name hadas. Alternatively, it is known as a besamim (spices) box or, when it takes this particular form, as a migdal (tower) besamim. Perhaps the form of the fortified tower was chosen as a reflection of the high value of spices at the time. A more prosaic explanation may be simply that the spice boxes were frequently produced by Christian craftsmen, and they emulated the form of the Christian monstrance (there is at least one explicit early modern reference to a “Jewish monstrance”). The two explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, of course, given that the monstrance too is designed to contain (and display) something exceedingly valuable, notably the consecrated host. On the left-hand side, one can see the hinge at the bottom of the balustrade on top of the actual box that allowed for it to be opened. The rosettes on all four sides of the box allowed the scent to emanate as did four openings in the spire. The curators at the Musée de Cluny may have been led astray by the fact that the craftsman apparently recycled older material when creating the foot of the migdal besamim in the nineteenth century. The hallmarks are illegible and may well have been freely invented.

The migdal besamim was originally part of Isaac Strauss’s collection of Judaica and Jewish ritual objects. Isaac Strauss (1806–1888) was a violinist, composer and arranger and principal of the court orchestra under Louis-Philippe I and Napoleon III. In 1878, 82 ritual objects from Strauss’s evolving collection were presented in their own right at the (first) World’s Fair in Paris (which was attended by 13 million visitors). The exhibit was highly symbolic because it featured not in the ethnographic but in the art history section of the Palais du Trocadéro (the central location). In 1887, numerous objects from Strauss’s collection featured prominently at the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition in London. Following Strauss’s death, Charlotte de Rothschild acquired the Judaica collection for the Musée de Cluny where a dedicated room showcasing 133 objects from Strauss’s collection opened to the public on 22 December 1890. In 1981, Victor Klagsbald (1924–2019) of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem published a detailed inventory of the Musée de Cluny’s Judaica collection which was shown in Jerusalem the following year. It has since been transferred to the Parisian Museum of Judaic History and Art that eventually opened its doors in 1998.