The Lost Encyclopedia of Jewish Artists

After escaping from Warsaw to Kazakhstan ahead of the invading Nazi German armies, the Polish-Jewish art dealer Józef Sandel (1894-1962) returned to his shattered home city to reestablish its once-vibrant Jewish art scene. Sandel would focus much of his attention on Umgekumene yidishe kinstler in poylin (Murdered Jewish Artists in Poland), a two-volume encyclopedia published in 1957 that showcased the lives and work of hundreds of Eastern European Jewish artists murdered by the Nazis. A similar project was undertaken by the Parisian cultural activist Hersh Fenster (1892-1964), whose Undzere farpaynikte kinstler (Our Tortured Artists, 1951) memorialized 80 murdered Paris-based artists of Eastern European origin, many of them his personal friends. Even together, these encyclopedias offer but a modest indication of the colossal creativity generated by and around the many hundreds of Jewish artists that were active throughout Europe before the Holocaust.

Still, for the memory of these dead artists, the genre of the encyclopedia proved an efficient showcase. Encyclopedias are, in effect, two-dimensional museums and, in fact, a recent French translation of Fenster’s book formed the basis of an exhibit mounted at the Jewish Museum of Paris in 2022. In the encyclopedia’s aspiration for breadth, it divides attention among the victims as individuals, recovering traces of their humanity one artist at a time, while simultaneously training its focus on the cultural loss they represent as a group. Both Fenster’s and Sandel’s encyclopedias are ecosystems, organized along the principle of the exceptional creativity of their subjects and the tragic interruption of their work and lives. They are hardly inclusive of all artists killed during the war, but they are invaluable archives of what the Nazis destroyed.

In light of these two works—both eulogistic and both, remarkably, published in Yiddish—it is striking that a third such encyclopedia, produced decades earlier, also devoted to a selection of over a hundred European-born Jewish artists, languishes unknown and unpublished. Der Jude und die Kunst Probleme der Gegenwart (The Jew and the Problem of Art in Contemporary Times), was written in German and prepared for publication in 1938 by the Austrian art historian Otto Schneid. The manuscript of this encyclopedia boasted a preface by the great German-Jewish theologian Martin Buber. It was awaiting publication at a press in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss, when Nazi officials commandeered the publishing house, confiscated Schneid’s manuscript, and blacklisted him, aggressively pursuing his extradition to the Reich from his home in Poland. Schneid barely managed to escape Europe with his life—along with an early draft of the encyclopedia manuscript.

Schneid tried several times to publish his encyclopedia after the war, but he failed. Drafts of it (in German, Hebrew, and partially in English) are held in the University of Toronto’s Fisher Archive, where Schneid’s collection also includes letters that he received from artists throughout the 1930s and letters from surviving artists who wrote to him in the 1950s. Artists of great achievement eagerly participated in his encyclopedia before the war, sending him biographical material and photographs of their work. In letters brimming with energy and excitement, the artists encourage Schneid and thank him for creating the encyclopedia. After the war, however, a good number of those who had managed to stay alive thought differently about Schneid’s project.

Schneid’s postwar failure to publish his book suggests that the world of art he had documented had no currency in the postwar cultural world, whether in Europe, Israel, or the United States. No matter how many editors and publishers he contacted, he could find neither the language nor the audience for his project. Schneid had written a book about an extraordinary cultural phenomenon that was not only destroyed, but one that was also undergoing a kind of erasure by postwar cultural producers and even its own participants—and this, notwithstanding the existence of a complete manuscript on the topic. Why had a project once greeted with enthusiasm now come to seem so irrelevant? Instead of writing about their deaths, as Fenster and Sandel did, Schneid had authored an encyclopedia about the central place of Jewish artists in the avant-garde European art scene—a place that the Nazis more or less comprehensively obliterated.

Schneid never explained what inspired him to turn his attention to his Jewish artist contemporaries, but his work is arguably one of the earliest examples of Jewish art history. As a graduate student, he trained under the eccentric Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski (who also trained the legendary art historian E. H. Gombrich a few years later). A Nobel Prize nominee in 1922, Strzygowski hatched controversial theories about the non-Western (Islamic, Croatian, Armenian, etc.) origins of Western art. By the 1930s, he was reshaping those theories in harmony with Aryan culture. Under Strzygowski, Schneid’s doctorate was on Chinese art; he began accumulating Jewish artist friends, it seems, when he was completing his doctorate in Paris. Perhaps he saw in his Jewish contemporaries another version of his teacher’s theory of the non-Western shaping the advancement of the Western. In any case, these artists were creating stunning art, and they were his friends and his people.

Indeed, Schneid was a firsthand witness to the École de Paris, or School of Paris, and its robust Jewish component. A large number of pioneering foreign-born artists like Spanish-born Pablo Picasso redefined the fertile “French” art scene as “Parisian”—that is, identified not so much with the country as with the city and its academies, open salons, mushrooming galleries, and ateliers. The art historian Edouard Roditi explains that many of these artists, especially between 1910 and 1940, were of East European Jewish origin, leading some to refer to this scene as the Jewish School of Paris or School of Montparnasse, for the Left Bank neighborhood where these Jewish artists lived and congregated. These were the artists that Schneid sought to document in real time. One of Schneid’s early respondents, a minor Parisian-born artist named Laurence Levy, brought this to Schneid’s attention in her letter to him in 1929:

I thank you for your charming letter and the good work that you have undertaken. I must tell you that most Jewish artists today can be found in Paris, and by Paris, I mean Montparnasse ... I assure you that the artists of value have all arrived here including Chagall, Mane Katz, Feder, Band etc. etc. I believe, Monsieur, that it’s all in Paris, that life dances in Paris, a liberal spirit and tolerance attracts every being of our race.

Often with little money and little grasp of the French language, East European Jewish artists arrived, studied where they could, roomed where they could, and spoke French as much as they could. Offering cheap housing and a network of friends and survival strategies to penniless artists arriving to the city, Montparnasse’s legendary “La Ruche,” (“Beehive”) probably launched more iconic careers than any apartment building in history. The Jewish artist scene in Paris had been in the making since the turn of the century, according to the historian Richard D. Sonn, but by the 1920s, the numbers and visibility of Jewish artists had greatly increased. Jewish artists, attracted to the city’s liberal spirit did not take for granted the value of being tolerated. Born in an Eastern European Jewish small-town setting of his own, Schneid understood that what he was observing was far-reaching trajectories of artists who, like Chagall, began as shtetl Jews, with barely a writing utensil at their disposal and little sense of man-made visual beauty, before becoming fully formed artists conversant in the idioms of Cubism, Expressionism, and Fauvism.

Schneid also understood that even as Poland fed Jewish artists to Paris, it also cultivated them on its own soil. With 300,000 Jews making up about a third of its population, Warsaw became both the mecca of Polish Jewish cultural life and the most visible Jewish city in the world during the interwar period. According to the art historian Renata Piatkowska, 120 Jewish artists attended Warsaw’s storied Academy of Fine Arts from 1923-1939. Most of Poland’s cities partook in the cultural efflorescence of the Second Polish Republic, with Jews playing a significant role. In Krakow, Vilna, Bialystok, Lodz, and Kovno, both Jewish and non-Jewish institutions (academies, guilds, publishing houses, theater) as well as municipal governments played a role in nourishing Jewish talent. Remarkably, art academies became the sites of some of the most natural Jewish-non-Jewish interaction. Even as Polish universities submitted Jewish students to such forms of harassment as ghetto benches—forcing them to sit or stand in the back of classrooms—by the late 1930s, Polish art academies remained, relatively speaking, safe cultural spaces for Jewish students.

Against this landscape, the careers and lives of Jewish artists unspooled in countless configurations. Some emigrated to Paris and became a part of the elite avant-garde, like the sculptor Maurice Lipsi (born Yisroel Moszek Lipshits in Pabianice, Poland in 1898), one of the most important abstract sculptors of the pre-World War II era. He wrote to Schneid in 1930:

In 1910, I participated in the Cubist Movement with Picasso, Braque, etc. [and] I, together with Duchamp-Villon (who died too young), was the first Cubist sculptor. After enlisting in the French army in 1914, I worked as a soldier throughout the duration of the war. After I was discharged, I signed with Léonce Rosenberg who was already working with Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Lipschitz, etc.

By the time he wrote this letter, Lipsi had made Paris his home, as had other Polish-Jewish artists like the versatile modernists Henri Hayden (1883-1970) and Alice Hoherman (1902-1943), both Warsaw natives. Hoherman’s idiosyncratic style was influenced by collage and Polish folk art, and reflects her work as a costume and set designer in Paris—notably, as she writes in a letter to Schneid, for the celebrated French dramatist Jean Giraudoux. All these artists, entrenched in the Parisian art scene, opted into Schneid’s encyclopedia with enthusiasm. So did another important sculptor of this era: Vitebsk-born Oscar Miestchaninoff. Miestchaninoff enjoyed substantial renown by the time he responded to Schneid in 1929, and his jowly face had already been the subject of portraits by the likes of Modigliani and Diego Rivera. To Schneid, he sent a photograph of himself with his prized granite sculpture Man With Top Hat—his entry in the 1922 Salon d’Automne—whose subject displays a top hat, gloves, and posture of formality, but is otherwise playfully nude. He concludes a third-person biography of himself thus:

“[T]his great artist now resides in France and exhibits his work in Paris salons and in other important cities throughout Europe.”

In a letter to Schneid dated February 6, 1932, the prolific neo-Impressionist Leopold Gottlieb portrayed a more peripatetic model of the Polish-Jewish artist. He was the product of a family that was part marvel and part tragedy, marked by the death of his older brother, the prodigy, Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879):

My older brother, Maurycy Gottlieb, as you most certainly know, passed away at the age of 23, shortly after my birth. Hit by the massive loss of their child, both my parents lost their will to live. My father neglected his businesses and died shortly after I was born. I had a very sad childhood.

From a childhood shadowed by Maurycy’s legend, Leopold emerged with his own refined artistic idiom and his own transnational experience. He describes his time at the Art Academy in Krakow, the early renown he earned with his portraiture and his personality conflict with the eccentric Lithuanian-born artist Boris Schatz, founder of Jerusalem’s Bezalel Art Academy. “It was an unfortunate blow because as both an artist and as a human being (if there even is such a distinction), the [Palestinian] landscape suited me very deeply.” Other Polish-Jewish artists drawn to Palestine who corresponded with Schneid include Michel Kikoïne (1892-1963) and Samuel Obodowski-Orjahu (1892-1963), who settled permanently in Palestine. Gottlieb’s Polish patriotism and Zionism was only rivaled by the urgent need to continuously produce art. Ultimately, home for Gottlieb was Paris if he had one, and nothing recognizably Jewish figured in his work. He concludes his letter to Schneid thus:

“I used to paint mostly portraits in the past and some compositions. Now it’s the opposite. Compositions are my favorite. About [what draws me to] art I can’t put into words. With the best will, to be helpful to you, I would say that I paint how I breathe: I can’t imagine my life without painting.”

It was not uncommon for Polish-Jewish artists to spend brief periods in Paris as students and then return to Poland. This was the experience of Ben-Tsiyon Rabinovitsh. At the age of 25, Rabinovitsh received a scholarship from the Bialystok municipal government to study art in Paris. Likewise, the Lviv-born artist Henryk Streng (Marek Włodarski, 1903-1960) trained in Paris at the renowned artist Fernand Léger’s Académie Moderne. Léger’s “machine art” brand of Cubism, which features his Michelin Tire-like figures (his detractors called him a “Tubist”), would soon come to characterize Streng’s work. After some time in Paris—where he was also strongly influenced by his personal contact with the Surrealist leader André Breton—Streng returned to Lviv.

There were also many Jewish artists that never left Poland, like Avrom Guterman. When Guterman met Schneid in Warsaw, he was a young, rising abstract artist who depicted the city with intersecting planes of color. In his letter to Schneid, he describes his unlikely evolution from heir to an important Hasidic dynasty to Modernist painter as something that grew from inside him:

I was born on December 25, 1899, in a small Polish shtetl near Warsaw called Nowy Dwór. My family was very pious, and my father was the nephew of the well-known zadik Reb Yenkele Guterman of Radzymin (1792-1834), and he aspired to make of me a rebbe. I received a very strict religious education. Until the age of 17, I studied in the Radyzmin Yeshiva and was immersed in the study of Talmud and Zohar. From the time of my childhood, I was pulled toward sketching. I would dazzle those around me in my pious circles with my first works. In 1917, during the tumult of WWI, I tore myself away from home and traveled to Krakow where I entered the Polish Art Academy as an extern. I spent two difficult and hungry but spiritually satisfying years there. In 1919, I exhibited two paintings in Warsaw’s Annual Art Exposition. The critics praised my work and said I had promise. After the establishment of the Jewish Society to Spread Enlightenment and Art in Warsaw, I took part in its collective exposition. The well-known art maven, collector and lawyer Noah Prilutski took an interest in my work and wrote about me in Moment (May 14 1928; #111) where he claimed that “no painter in Warsaw has more control over color than Guterman.” He bought my work and became a regular patron. …

From the abundance of new directions in the world of painting that emerged after the end of the Great War, I have aspired to capture both the impulsiveness of modern life and, on the other hand, that which holds together or endures within it. I struggle to pursue my own path with independent form and line.

A. Guterman

The letters Schneid received are matched only by the extraordinary range of painted self-portraits artists included in their letters to Schneid. Schneid pulled only small details from these letters for the purpose of his encyclopedia, but so many of them, like this one, stand on their own as remarkable documents of self-perception and cultural history.

Formulations such as “Jewish art” or “the problem of Jewish art” or “Is there such a thing as Jewish art?” appear in Schneid’s work, but none of them was central to his approach. The question at the center of his title, Der Jude und die Kunst Probleme der Gegenwart, or The Jew and the Problem of Art in Contemporary Times, is never resolved. Instead, he took the Jewish background of its artists as its organizing principle, and a part of his manuscript consists of an alphabetical list of Jewish artists with samples of their works and biographies. Schneid also provides essays about those artists he found to be most pioneering. He bundles and discusses them by topics, grouping some, for instance, as “the radicals” (Réth, Louis Lozowick, and Jacques Lipchitz), or under rubrics like “painterly realism” (Kisling, Simon Mondzain, and George Kars). The category “Jewish” therefore suggests sociological relevance, and surely bespeaks a measure of national pride that the participants shared, but in the encyclopedia, Schneid highlights the most accomplished of his artists according to originality, influence, line, and color.

While he worked on his encyclopedia, Schneid drew from the energy of the pan-European Jewish École de Paris, and from the cafés, ateliers, artists, gallerists, and critics across Paris and points in Central and Eastern Europe. An inveterate connector, Schneid loved meeting and talking with people—he enjoyed curating shows and introducing artists to different and often remote audiences—and so in the 1930s he rose as a kind of transnational impresario. By letter, he corresponded with a broad range of the intelligentsia, mostly Jewish, mostly European, and mostly artists, but also people beyond these parameters. As a student at the University of Vienna, Schneid interviewed the Nobel Prize winning Bengali writer and social reformer Rabindranath Tagore, and he successfully solicited a foreword for his encyclopedia from the philosopher Martin Buber. The encyclopedia was the product of the transnational existence of Schneid and his artists, whose lives were shaped by movement and transcontinental travel but also reliable mail service and the popularization of photography, which allowed them to disseminate images of their work across country and continent with unprecedented ease.

Schneid also identified with the political project of being an avant-garde artist in 1930s Europe. Throughout the eight years he worked on the encyclopedia, from around 1929 to 1937, the Nazi war on art and free expression moved like a poisonous fog through Europe. On Hitler’s urging, Nazi propagandists targeted avant-garde art as the output of degenerate races. Relatively early works such as architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s notorious Kunst und Rasse (1928) as well as local Schandausstellungen (condemnation exhibitions)—grassroots efforts to vilify Modernist and Jewish artists—gave way to the Nazis’ notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937, which displayed a selection of 16,000 works that Josef Goebbels had purged from museum collections across Germany. Almost all the living Jewish artists that Goebbels blacklisted were participants in Schneid’s encyclopedia, including the pioneering abstract artist Otto Freundlich (1878-1943) whose primitive sculpture titled The New Man was featured on the cover of the catalog of Goebbels’ perverse exhibition. Schneid’s encyclopedia would become an act of public defiance in solidarity with artists whose activity and lives took on a dimension of rebellion—and, as many thought at the time, invincibility. It never crossed Schneid’s mind that he—a fellow-traveler, to be sure, but hardly a known entity beyond the Jewish world—would attract the attention of the Nazis. Then came the Anschluss.

Although he lived in Poland, Schneid was an Austrian citizen and lived in his home in Poland on a temporary residential permit that required renewal by the Polish government. As such, the Nazis made the case that Schneid belonged to them, an enemy of the Reich who was subject to laws of extradition. Preparing his move to Paris (paperwork in his collection for a French residential permit was signed by France’s minister of culture and provides Chagall’s home as his temporary housing), Schneid was at home in Biełsko when he heard about the Germans’ request for his extradition. In little time, he figured out that he was neither welcome nor protected in either Paris or Poland. He went into hiding.

After a period of six months, Schneid fell into the hands of the Polish authorities. Friends protested his imprisonment. The Polish government weighed its position: It needed to appease the Germans, but too many Poles, Jews and non-Jews, supported Schneid. After three days, the government released him. It then promptly issued an order that he was to leave the territory of Poland in the following few weeks. If he didn’t leave, the Poles explained, they would have no choice but to arrest him and send him to the Reich.

Schneid’s friends recognized his life was in imminent danger and they moved through the process of securing a rare and precious certificate of immigration—or teudat aliyah—that would allow him entry to Palestine. After a final three days spent at his family’s inn in Szczyrk, Schneid said goodbye to his mother, sister, and brother-in-law and took a train to Romania where he boarded a ship at the Port of Constanta in late January 1939. His ship drew a diagonal line across the southwest corner of the Black Sea, then through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus Strait, and then eastward through the Aegean Sea into the Mediterranean. Besides an early draft of the manuscript, Schneid crammed four large suitcases with roughly 2,500 documents relating to the encyclopedia. By the end of the war, the suitcases had become a kind of black box of the interwar Jewish art world.

Schneid’s first years in Palestine were far too difficult for him to pursue the publication of his manuscript. A local Hebrew newspaper announced his arrival to the Yishuv—a nod to his status as an intellectual—but he knew few people in Palestine. He couch-surfed, mostly at the modest homes of some contacts in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The standard of living in the Yishuv was primitive compared to what he was used to in Europe, and conditions were made even more difficult following a legal regime of austerity passed by the British mandate government soon after his arrival. Schneid gave lectures on art with a homemade slide projector modeled on the magic lanterns that were still widely used in Europe. In an interview she gave after his death, Schneid’s wife, Miriam Ofseyer, explained that he would hoist the bulky projector onto the roof of the public Egged buses he relied on to reach his far-flung audiences.

The kibbutzim, clubs, and societies at which he lectured had little in the way of a budget for cultural events, but their members were hungry to learn about art. One correspondent invited Schneid to lecture at Kibbutz Etzion if he could plan his visit on a Saturday night: Little electricity is used on the Sabbath, his contact explains in a letter, so they can plan on having enough energy to power his projector. In a letter confirming another lecture, this one from the Israeli labor organization in Jerusalem, its representative Mr. Shimoni asks, “What is the lowest possible amount you would be willing to charge the organization for the lecture?” With each passing week, Schneid came to understand the permanence of his circumstances; his exile to Palestine had simultaneously both saved his life and ruined it.

Only in 1957 did Schneid try again to publish his encyclopedia. By this time, Schneid had learned about the murder of his family (a letter in the archive from a neighbor explains the deportation of his mother, sister, and brother-in-law to a death camp in the war’s earliest days) and the murder of his girlfriend, Karola Guttman, also an art historian (a letter in the archive by Guttman herself rightly predicts she will not outlive the German conquest of Poland). Schneid also witnessed Israel’s independence and the wars that followed. In 1945, he married Miriam (née Goldschmidt), whose parents—emigrés from the Russian Empire—had raised her in Hebron until 1929 and then in Jerusalem.

Otto and Miriam settled in Haifa in 1947 where he accepted a position as a professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. They had two sons, Moshe and Yaakov. Schneid continued to publish on various topics of art history, while also concentrating on his own art, mostly sculpture. Pummeled emotionally by the loss of his family and friends, Schneid designed a monument to the victims of the Holocaust and shopped it to various institutions with little luck.

In the late 1950s, Schneid made an agreement with a publisher in Israel to put out a Hebrew translation of his encyclopedia. In a revised introduction, he writes, “[t]his book was composed during the interwar period” but has since become a text “documenting the history of a whole world that no longer exists.” He gave it the new title, Our Art in the Diaspora. Soon before Schneid completed his Hebrew translation, a rival Israeli press published a Hebrew translation of Jewish Art by the prominent Jewish-British historian Cecil Roth. Roth’s book deployed a sweeping interpretation of “Jewish art” that drew its origins from the sands of ancient Israel and situated its triumphant last chapter in modern Israel. Afraid that the market could not take two such similar books, Schneid’s publisher declined to publish the encyclopedia. Schneid then set his sights on an English publisher, and while sending out query letters to editors decided to update the artists’ biographical entries.

Schneid had likely learned of the fate of many of his artists through his network of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues over the previous years since the end of the war. He knew of those that left Europe early. With the German conquest of Poland in September 1939, and then the Lowlands and France in 1941, some Paris-based Jewish artists rushed to leave. Chagall and Victor Tischler reached the United States, for instance, and the German-Jewish artists Ludwig Schwerin and Ludwig Meidner escaped to the United Kingdom. (Meidner wrote to Schneid after the war about the “humiliating” but “productive” years he spent in a British internment camp for enemies of the state.) The accomplished Fauvist, Leopold Levy escaped to Turkey where he became an influential teacher at the School of Fine Arts in Istanbul.

Schneid was also aware that most East European Jewish artists in Paris were without French citizenship, and so among the most vulnerable to early deportations to the death camps. Jewish artists with French citizenship understood they were in danger and abandoned their ateliers and apartments in Montparnasse for safer quarters in the Free Zone in the South of France. But no matter how prominent or well-regarded they were before the war, they were hunted like animals. According to Nadine Nieszawer’s Jewish Artists of the School of Paris, for instance, Hoherman tried several times to escape France on false papers but was captured by French policemen while waiting for a smuggler to help her cross the border into Spain. She was jailed in Toulouse and eventually murdered in Auschwitz. Likewise, the Nazis discovered the 65-year-old Otto Freundlich, one of the most innovative Modernist artists of the 20th century, hiding in a barn on a farm in the Pyrenees; he was gassed in Majdanek in 1943.

Schneid’s archive reveals the lengths he went to to correspond with artists or their surviving relatives. To the Lithuanian-born turned Brazilian Modernist Lasar Segall (1891-1957), for instance, he wrote:

Dear Mr. Lasar Segall,

After months of research I still had no luck finding your address and so I asked the Israeli ambassador to Brazil to forward this letter to you.

I hope you remember me. I remember you very vividly, not just your art, but also you, your beautiful house in Paris (1931), and not least the hospitality of your wife.

You figure in one of my books. That book was in production in Vienna in 1938 but it fell into the hands of the occupiers with 160 reproductions and all original photos (I have two more photos you sent).

Currently, I am in the process of rendering it up to date …

Responding to Schneid’s queries about other artists, his correspondents replied with lists of the murdered. The Vilna-born artist Isaac Lichtenstein, a co-founder of the Ben-Uri gallery in London and creator of Yiddish artbooks including the wordless journal Makhmadim, found himself in New York when the war began. In 1956, he wrote to Schneid from the United States: “Manievich is dead, Miestchaninoff also, [both by natural causes in the United States] and [Max] Band is in California.”

The 1956 letters reveal that for some of Schneid’s surviving artists, the pride they took in their Jewish heritage had precipitously declined. The legendary abstract painter Alfred Réth (né Roth) is one such example. According to his prewar correspondence, Réth was eager to be highlighted in Schneid’s encyclopedia. But in 1956, Réth writes apologetically to Schneid that “much has changed” and he considers himself a French painter and can no longer be part of an encyclopedia of Jewish artists. “I hope that you understand the reasons that dictate this attitude,” he wrote elliptically.

The Nazis murdered so many Jewish artists, but the war and its consequences also battered and corroded the pride so many of the surviving artists had taken in their shared Jewish heritage before the war. Schneid’s colleague A. Cerata, a Parisian Yiddishist who helped him reconnect with artists after the war, asked him in a letter, “And what about the Jewish artists who are converts [to Christianity]? You have no intention of still including them, do you?” Schneid’s manuscripts suggest that he intended to include reluctant Jews, baptized or otherwise.

Toward the end of his life, Schneid eschewed his writing entirely and worked primarily as an artist. An avowed pacifist, he left Israel before his sons reached the age of military duty. They settled first in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and then Toronto, Canada, where Miriam found work as a Hebrew teacher while Schneid devoted himself to painting. He had seven one-man shows in the United States and one more in Canada. He died in 1974 and Miriam donated his personal papers to the University of Toronto in 1998. Library and Archives Canada has deemed Schneid’s collection a national treasure.

It is hard to isolate why Schneid’s encyclopedia was never published. After the war, Schneid chose Hebrew and considered English for his encyclopedia as these were the languages of the Jewish people, of its present and future. But his colleagues, Fenster and Sandel, successfully published their encyclopedias, quite remarkably, in Yiddish when Yiddish was arguably the language of the past. Fenster’s and Sandel’s encyclopedias are primarily eulogistic works, the story of the culture’s devastation prioritized over its vigor and achievements. In all three iterations of his work, Schneid insisted on an aesthetic lens, seeing the artists first and foremost as artists; this was the way the artists wanted to be represented. But in the aftermath of the Holocaust, there was no language, or no conceptual framework, or maybe no audience, for the story of the Jewish artists of the avant-garde.