Great Jewish Portraits In Metal. Selected and 50 similar items

Birkitts Books presents ... GREAT JEWISH PORTRAITS IN METAL. Selected Plaques and Medals from the Samuel Friedenberg Collection of the Jewish Museum. Author: Roth, Cecil Publisher: Schocken Books; Jewish Museum Release Date: 1963 Seller Category: Collectibles Qty Available: 1 Condition: Used: Good Sku: 230119001 Notes: Jacket has light wear to the edges, spine top and bottom are chipped, rear jacket has a 2.5" closed tear to the bottom, binding sound, internally clean. Great Jewish Portraits in Metal Introduction by CECIL ROTH THIS volume is at once an illustrated encyclopedia of Jewish men of achievement and a vivid history of Jewish medals. While Hebrew coins date back before Hasmonean times, and Jewish mint-masters were well known in Baghdad, Germany and Poland, medals only appear in Jewish life during the Renaissance. From the seventeenth century on they were produced in a steady stream. This book presents examples of a wide range of medals, some stamped in honor of great thinkers like Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn and Einstein, others to commemorate significant events in the life of an individual or a com-munity. Thus a medal of the Marrano Dona Gracia Nasi is reported to have been struck on the occasion of her first openly avowing Judaism, another was stamped on the occasion of the wed-ding of a Rothschild, while several fine medals signalize the successive emancipations of Jewish communities during the Napoleonic era. Tax tokens and Hebrew membership medals?even anti-Jewish medals?appear in this volume. But mainly the reader will find in it portrait plaques and medals in honor of Jewish scholars and scientists, artists and writers, religious and political leaders, financiers and men of the law. Through their images and through the concise biographies which appear next to each, he will come to know them as individual personalities. The two hundred fifty medals, plaques and coins?dating from antiquity to our own day?shown here are chosen from the vast Friedenberg Collection of the Jewish Museum in New York. Samuel H. Friedenberg saw in his collection a visual record of Jewish achievement as expressed in the lives of individual men of spirit and accomplishment. As a result (to quote from Cecil Roth's comprehensive introduction) "we have here, if not the full Hall of Fame, at least what might be termed the Inner Hall, comprising effigies in metal of some of those who made a major contribution to civilization and culture. It is a picture gallery of Jewish history. It is a monument to Jewish genius." Don't forget to check out other great deals in our Store!!