Chagall lovingly portrayed shtetl life, of course, and, by his own account, his childhood home was “the soil that nourished the roots of [his] art.” But he turned away from formal religion after his bar mitzvah, left Russia for good in 1922, and became a vital member of the École de Paris. While his work never fully escaped charges that it was provincial, the dream-like depictions of floating brides and animals for which he is best known mostly universalized his enduring spirituality.

All this makes the three relatively straightforward paintings of synagogue interiors being auctioned by Sotheby’s tomorrow somewhat remarkable. Rare documentary representations from trips Chagall made to Palestine and Vilna in the 1930s, the paintings are among only six known examples of the kind. The others are in the collections of the Israel Museum and Amsterdam’s Stedlijk and on long-term loan to the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris.

Perhaps because the works are atypical, the estimates for their sale prices, in the $300,000 to $600,000 range, are modest for Chagall. (Prime examples bring several million dollars, and his auction record is $14.8 million.) But the realism in the paintings is striking, given how strongly Chagall is associated with the fantastic, and was also a factor that helped Sotheby’s identify the sites. “This was one of his modes of painting,” Hebrew University scholar Ziva Amishai-Maisels told me. Chagall painted several churches around that time, though notably those are all exteriors.

Sotheby’s consignments come to the market from heirs of the collector who acquired them in 1945 at the inaugural exhibition of the short-lived Gallery of Jewish Art in New York. It was a low point in Chagall’s life, when he was still mourning the premature death of his beloved wife, Bella, and coming to terms with the recent destruction of European Jewry. Letters sent by Chagall and on his behalf to the buyer’s son two decades later suggest he cared deeply about these pictures and was interested in getting them back, a request that was evaded. Beyond their sheer radiance, which doesn’t come through in reproductions, the details surrounding the creation of these pictures shed light on why they were so personally significant.

In a presentation at Sotheby’s earlier this month, the artist’s granddaughter Bella Meyer said Chagall always wanted to visit the Jewish ancestral homeland. His opportunity ostensibly came when Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned him to make a book of prints illustrating the Bible. In fact, it has been established that Vollard had no intention of sending him to Palestine for the project but, fortuitously, Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, invited Chagall around that time to partake in the founding of that city’s art museum. Sailing aboard the Champollion from Marseilles to Alexandria in the spring of 1931, Chagall encountered Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, an old friend, and met the French Jewish philosopher Edmund Fleg. His own Zionism was emboldened by visits to sites like the Wailing Wall and Rachel’s Tomb, which he also depicted.

According to Meyer, Chagall “was very moved to be in the place where the prophets had been,” and, in a sense, the Holy Land replaced Vitebsk as his spiritual home. The experience seems to have reshaped his sense of Jewish destiny. As he put it upon his installation of stained-glass windows representing the 12 tribes in the synagogue at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Medical Center in 1962: “How is it that the air and earth of Vitebsk, my birthplace, and of thousands of years of exile, find themselves mingled in the air and earth of Jerusalem?” (He also noted that such thoughts first occurred to him on the 1931 trip, the first of eight visits.)

Curiously, of all the synagogues in Jerusalem, the one Chagall rendered was the inconspicuous Hagoral (meaning “lottery” and referring to a late-19th-century housing solution for poor Yemenite immigrants), on the second floor of a nondescript building in the Mishkenot Yisrael neighborhood. With the help of Reuven Gafni, the preeminent expert on Jerusalem’s synagogues, Sotheby’s Israeli art specialist Jennifer Roth tracked the site down and, upon discovering the accuracy and detail with which it had been captured, was awed to find herself “literally in the footsteps of Chagall.”

Despite it being Sephardic and very modest, Roth surmises that Hagoral would have appealed to Chagall, with its tripartite ark most likely carved by Galician artisans and the surrounding streets—narrow, windy, and impenetrable by cars—reminiscent of his Eastern European shtetl. Meyer echoed this, noting her grandfather’s passion for rich textiles, which she imagines was stirred by the synagogue’s Orientalist rugs and the colorful fabrics adorning its parochet, bimah, and benches: “I can’t help but thinking he saw it and said ‘Look how beautiful,’ and that it brought him back to such a deeply folkloric sense of his origins.”

Chagall also traveled to the town of Safed, where he painted two versions of the Sephardic Ha’Ari synagogue and one of the Ashkenazi Ha’Ari. (Both synagogues are dedicated to the 16th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, whose ideas would have been familiar to Chagall from his Hasidic childhood, but the former dates from the 13th century while the latter was built during the Ari’s lifetime.) Here, perhaps playing up the supernatural, Chagall emphasized soaring Gothic-like architecture and imparted an almost unnatural blue hue. In the Ashkenazi example, the only Safed painting at Sotheby’s, Chagall particularly elongated structural columns and lavishly illustrated the ark, with its red parochet and decorations of leaves and grapes in green, gold, and brown.

That vivid sense of color is also evident in the Vilna painting but the mood is more somber, reflecting that when Chagall traveled there in 1935, to help establish a Jewish art museum, he clearly sensed the impending danger. Whereas Chagall’s depictions of Palestine synagogues show them occupied by lingering worshipers, his Vilna sanctuary seems eerily empty. Tellingly, upon his return from Lithuania, Chagall and Bella ardently tried to shore up their French citizenship, though they would ultimately have to spend the war years in New York.

Sotheby’s initially had difficulty pinpointing this synagogue as well, but senior Judaica consultant Sharon Mintz found archival photos that helped identify it as the “kloys,” or private shul and study hall, of the Vilna Gaon. It was destroyed in World War II—a concrete Soviet school building now occupies the space—and Chagall’s rendering is actually the only image of this direct view, with the central ark flanked by three arched stained-glass windows. A testament to its historic value, it will be included in a forthcoming catalog of Lithuanian synagogues. More poignantly, the painting is an elegy for a lost world, also memorialized by Chagall in a Yiddish poem he later wrote about the Great Vilna Synagogue, included in Yale scholar Benjamin Harshav’s monumental 2003 biography, Marc Chagall and His Times:

The old shul, the old street
I painted them just yesteryear.
Now smoke rises there, and ash
And the parokhet is lost.

Where are your Torah scrolls?
The lamps, menorahs, chandeliers?
The air, generations filled with their breath?
It evaporated in the sky.

Trembling, I put the color,
The green color of the Ark of the Covenant.
I bowed in tears,
Alone in the shul—a last witness.

Chagall would go on to do a series of controversial Crucifixions, expressing the horrors of the Holocaust by linking Jesus’ suffering with the cruelties inflicted on his people, and he finally published his complete Bible prints in 1956. Toward the end of his prolific career, he also created seven monumental paintings that formed the core of the collection at the Musée Message Biblique in the South of France, designed mosaics and tapestries encapsulating the destiny of the Jewish people and its connection to the land of Israel for the Knesset, and (some say urged by his second wife, Valentina, a fellow Russian Jew who converted to Christianity) took several commissions for church windows. But there would be no more synagogues in the strict sense, no imagery as direct and intimate.

Whether because of his widow’s leanings or, as Meyer suspects, his love for his nearby home and the fact that he remained very Jewish but was no longer Orthodox, Chagall is buried in the Saint-Paul-de-Vence cemetery, near Nice, France. It is a far cry from his 1917 “Cemetery Gates,” with weathered stones marking centuries of Jewish life in stars of David and Hebrew letters. But this duality mirrors Chagall’s uniquely successful convergence of tradition and modernity, while the synagogue paintings affirm that he never really took off the mantle of the wandering Jew.

Founded in 1906 by Bulgarian émigré Boris Schatz with four teachers and 20 students, Bezalel today, between its Jerusalem headquarters and a satellite branch in Tel Aviv, boasts a faculty of over 400 and a student body of nearly 2,000. (The handful of newer design schools in the country were all founded by Bezalel graduates.) A key milestone in this history was the 1935 influx of refugees from the Bauhaus, who set Bezalel on a modernist course while maintaining its mission of integrating “European artistic and Jewish traditions with the local culture of the Land of Israel.”

This heritage is particularly alive this spring. In April, the school had a major presence at the world’s leading forum for applied design, Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile. And this week, Sotheby’s London is hosting a major show devoted to Bezalel artists.

In Milan, Bezalel was one of 45 groups selected to partake in the Ventura Lambrate, an avant-garde offshoot of the main Milan fair. Bezalel presented “Thinking Hands,” an exhibition of student work highlighting the school’s distinctly experimental laboratory approach. The title reflects an engagement with what Ezri Tarazi, head of Bezalel’s Master of Design program and one of the show’s curators, calls a “postindustrial revolution” characterized by “going back to the materials and finding smart ways to make things unique.”

A prime example is Ori Yekutiel’s LightStone, a bench made with volcanic powder converted to foam that looks hefty but is virtually weightless. Tarazi traced the work’s genesis to a workshop in which students attempted to recreate elements found at the Dead Sea. Similarly inventive is Ophir Zak’s Between the Lines, a mesmerizing orange chair realized after repeated trials with a laser cutter that transformed flat metal sheets into an elaborately twisted, net-like form.

Artifacts of everyday Israeli life find themselves radically transformed. In Ori Sonnenschein’s Solskin Peels, a set of citrus tableware is made with microwave technology; Yael Friedman presented a line of Veggie jewelry. Not surprisingly, politics come into play, most notably in Arthur Brutter’s Protectable, a classroom desk that doubles as shelter from earthquakes and is being outfitted for Israeli towns bordering Gaza. (Israelis can be said to be experts in the field of emergency preparedness; following the Southeast Asian tsunami, Bezalel tailored an entire course around what people need in the wake of a disaster.) The common thread is an improvisational attitude that is at the heart of Israeli culture. “The lack of resources and fixed traditions translates as a need to build something new, and we make things from what we have,” Tarazi said.

This sensibility was on full view in Milan, where Bezalel graduates were also featured in a show organized by Israel’s foreign ministry and in other, smaller venues and galleries. It wasn’t the first time Bezalel was at the fair, but this year, Tarazi said, there was “a lot of buzz; people kept saying what’s going on? Bezalel is everywhere.” Top-tier peer institutions approached Bezalel about potential collaborations.

The buzz will, no doubt, continue as independent curator Janice Blackburn showcases students and graduates of the academy in an exhibition at Sotheby’s London on view through May 11. The seed for the show, “Bezalel:  Legacy, Innovation, Inspiration,” was planted last May when Blackburn visited Israel to see her friend Ron Arad’s new Design Museum in Holon. While there, she explored Israel’s design scene and toured Bezalel, where she was struck by the quality and ingenuity of the work and intrigued by the institution’s rich history.

“Their products have a very independent spirit and freshness which I found very appealing,” Blackburn said, adding that Israeli designers are particularly conscious of recycling and sustainability. A case in point is David Amar’s Raymond Table, made of aluminum legs and reclaimed wood planks jointed to allow for various configurations. A similar sensibility informed the whole of the Sotheby’s show, which Blackburn hired Amar to install. Using two long displays made of secondhand industrial shelving, Amar juxtaposed examples from students and graduates (many of them now professors) to emphasize Bezalel’s informal, radically collegial atmosphere.

An eye-level platform will hold smaller, more delicate objects, among them Arad’s brand new stainless steel Pirouette cutlery, 50 sets of which have been donated by the manufacturer, and an experimental shoe project featuring funky and thought-provoking—if  not entirely wearable—footwear. Another long unit with lower plinths will present larger furniture like Tal Gur’s Sturdy Chair, which is made of plastic drinking straws, and a set of drawers made into bookshelves conceived by Raw Edges, the duo behind Stella McCartney’s retail stores. Both embody the whimsy that is also a hallmark of Bezalel designs.

Other works are overtly political, though even these can be quite witty. Edit Yemini’s readymade porcelain ware is adorned with small plastic toy soldiers and rifles. Less explicit but just as sharp are two tables by Tarazi: the first a prototype for his New Baghdad, which features a maze-like aluminum surface mirroring a map of the city, and the wood and Plexiglas Thermal Earth, which evokes a photo taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle and in which warmer areas appear darker. (The latter was included in a show of his work titled “Kalab”—Israeli army slang for karov labayit or “close to home”—at Paradigma Gallery in Tel Aviv this past winter, for which he created an entire home environment using military materials and metaphors.) As Blackburn sees it, the nation’s mandatory military service is a key factor in enriching the experience of its art students.

The only purely fine art entry at Sotheby’s, a photography project illustrating the port city of Ashdod, will hang on one gallery wall, while masks by Ami Drach and Dov Granchow made of repurposed headlights will grace another. Another centerpiece is an illustrated timeline of Bezalel’s history made up of informational pads from which visitors can tear off sheets.

In the months to come, there are plans for a show of jewelry and shoes at the Parisian boutique Cecile et Jeanne this summer; inclusion in London’s Design Week this fall; and a traveling U.S. exhibition kicking off in February 2012.

This sell-first approach marks a distinct strategic shift when it comes to the Valmadonna, whose creator, a London industrial-diamond dealer and bibliophile named Jack Lunzer, has spent the better part of the last decade trying quixotically to close a deal with the Library of Congress. Lunzer told me last year that he was hoping to rekindle interest from the institution, which would have offered the collection, and the record of European Jewish history that it embodies, pride of place in Washington, D.C. Above all, he was anxious to see his baby find a new home before his death, and to keep it intact. “Après moi, le déluge,” he told me.

It’s not clear how involved Lunzer was in the decision to accelerate the potential sale by putting a deadline on it; last year, he said he would bring it back to his North London estate, Fairport, if no buyers emerged by the end of this year. Now 86 and in poor health, Lunzer wasn’t immediately available to comment on the auction.

“Obviously, it would be wonderful if this does go to a public institution and is available to the public forever,” said Redden. He backed a high-profile exhibit of the collection in February 2009 at Sotheby’s Manhattan headquarters, which attracted long lines of book-lovers and observant Jews eager to see religious volumes that miraculously survived where Jewish communities did not. Can we imagine a future exhibit of the complete collection? We’ll see.

Previously: Treasure Trove [Tablet Magazine]

Torah Scroll, Kabbalistic Circle of Shem Tov Ben Abraham Ibn Gaon, Northern Spain [Sotheby’s]
Related: Treasure Trove [Tablet]

The story of one of the greatest coups in the history of book collecting began, as it happens, with a mistake. In 1956, an industrial diamond dealer and bibliophile named Jack Lunzer convinced a guard at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum to let him leaf through several early Hebrew books on loan from Westminster Abbey for a show celebrating the tercentenary of Jews’ readmission to Britain, in 1656, after their expulsion in 1290 by King Edward I. Lunzer quickly noticed the books had been mislabeled; one, it turned out, contained pages from the Babylonian Talmud printed by Daniel Bomberg, a Christian from Venice who was the first to issue a complete edition of the work, starting in 1520. Curiosity led Lunzer back to Westminster Abbey, where he discovered all nine volumes of Bomberg’s masterwork had lain hidden for centuries behind layers of dust—a perfectly preserved copy of the most valuable Talmud in the world.

Over the next 20 years, Lunzer trawled auctions and book sales, amassing loose pages, or tractates, to recreate his own Bomberg set while also buying up other early Hebrew manuscripts and printed books from across Europe to add to a small collection his wife had inherited from her parents in Italy. But the Westminster Bomberg never relinquished its hold on his imagination and, every now and then, he’d call the Abbey to ask the librarian if he would consider selling it. Each time, Lunzer was informed that the Talmud was not for sale. Not, that was, until April of 1980, when Lunzer happened to spot an item in the Daily Telegraph concerning efforts by the British government to block the private sale of a copy of the Abbey’s foundation charter to a prominent New York book dealer who had acquired copies of everything from the Gutenberg Bible to the Louisiana Purchase. Lunzer realized the charter, dated December 28, 1065, was the ultimate bargaining chip. Within weeks, he had arranged his deal: he bought back the charter for the Abbey, and in return, the Abbey sold him their Talmud. A ceremony to mark the occasion was held in the Abbey’s Jerusalem Chamber.

The Bomberg Talmud immediately became the cornerstone of Lunzer’s private collection, called the Valmadonna Trust Library after a town in Italy’s Piedmont region where his wife’s family had ties. Today, the collection encompasses more than 13,000 early Hebrew books, manuscripts, and broadsides—an exhaustive array of Mishnaot, siddurim, Haggadot, alef-bet tables, and ephemera that includes rare items printed on blue paper, vellum, and silk. As a collector, Lunzer’s goal was to illustrate Jewish history, primarily the Sephardic flight eastward from Spain through Italy to the Ottoman Empire, by assembling as much as possible of “the great jigsaw puzzle” of texts produced in workshops from Lisbon to Calcutta starting in the 15th century. It ranks among the greatest collections of Hebraica ever assembled by a single individual, and is one of the finest libraries of any kind assembled in contemporary Britain by a collector who is still living.

“You suddenly begin to glimpse what it means to gather the written Jewish heritage,” said Christopher de Hamel, a Cambridge professor and former head of Sotheby’s Western Manuscripts division. “It’s utterly, utterly dazzling.”

But now, after six decades of collecting, Lunzer is attempting to engineer what may be a feat greater even than his Bomberg coup: the $40 million sale of the Valmadonna in the midst of the worst economic and fiscal collapse in generations. In January, the collection was moved from Fairport, Lunzer’s mansion in London’s Golders Green, to Sotheby’s headquarters in New York, where it was exhibited for 10 days. Thousands of people waited hours in the February cold to see the full collection on display, arranged according to city of origin: Alexandria, Amsterdam, Baghdad, Bombay, and so on, a map of a lost Jewish world preserved in bound pages, despite the ravages of time and the best efforts of centuries of book-burners. But in the months since, there has been virtual silence from potential buyers. “There are people who call up non-stop asking about the collection,” said Sotheby’s vice-chairman David Redden, but as yet there have been no serious offers.

Later this month, Lunzer will turn 85, and he seems increasingly desperate to ensure the integrity of the collection—which he describes as his “baby”—rather than risk that it gets sold off in pieces after his death. “Time is running out,” he told Tablet in a recent interview. “I hope it’s not too late.” There are, he knows, only a handful of likely buyers, but Lunzer isn’t shy about telling people which one he most hopes steps forward: the Library of Congress. What few people know is that it came close to buying the Valmadonna once before, in 2002. At the time, the Library offered terms that would have allowed Lunzer’s collection to remain both intact and accessible to the public. The question now is whether a deal can still be struck.

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Lunzer, an inveterate charmer and raconteur, has spent his life brokering precious, rare commodities. He was born in 1924 in Antwerp, where his British father worked a diamond dealer for De Beers, but grew up in London and spent the years of the Second World War working in a Spitfire engine factory, making diamond tools. After the war, he went to work for his father, but young Lunzer, frustrated by the treatment he received when he went to the offices of the De Beers monopoly, decided to start his own firm, the Industrial Diamond Company, and took over his father’s business in 1949. Over the years, Lunzer secured monopolies for industrial diamonds throughout West Africa and into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). By the early 1980s, he had $100 million in annual sales and the exclusive rights to a diamond mining venture in Guinea, along with the honorary title of Guinea consul-general in London.

In 1948, at 23, Lunzer married Ruth Zippel, the Italian-born daughter of a Polish merchant. After the war, her brothers discovered their father’s small collection of Hebrew books had survived concealed in a Milan basement; they asked the newlyweds to take them to London. “The books weren’t terribly important and the condition wasn’t marvelous, but nevertheless I said, ‘Certainly,’” Lunzer explained. After a few years, Lunzer told his brothers-in-law he was going to send the books back to Milan; instead, his brothers-in-law agreed to turn over title to Ruth and her children. At the time, Lunzer said, he was beginning to invest in racehorses; he had no plans to get on with the books. But one day, he said, one of his daughters, Myra, asked at breakfast whether the horses were running that day. “I said that was it for me, and phoned the manager and said, ‘Sell my interest in these three horses,’” Lunzer recalled. “You cannot bring up Jewish children on racehorses.”

As a young boy, Lunzer—whose grandfather, Julius, was the founding president of the Adath Yisroel Synagogue, part of the resurgence of British Orthodoxy in the early 20th century—had studied liturgy with Solomon Sassoon, scion of one of Britain’s greatest Jewish collecting families, and was an avid amateur bibliographer. With the seed of his wife’s collection—technically owned by a trust incorporated in Liechtenstein—Lunzer began frequenting book sales. In the early years, book collecting, especially of Hebrew printed books, was a specialty job; there weren’t many of them, and those that appeared on the market tended to be in bad shape, compared to Latin books of similar vintage. “Hebrew books don’t survive in perfect copies,” said Brad Sabin Hill, curator of the Kiev Judaica Collection at George Washington University, who first met Lunzer in the early 1980s and has worked extensively with the Valmadonna collection. “These books were studied intensely under normal circumstances, and unlike Christian books preserved in monastic libraries or national libraries, they moved around all the time.” Lunzer benefited from big sales in the 1970s, including of the Sassoon collection, at a time when book prices were still quite low. “He was fortunate in the 1960s and 1970s that the books were cheap,” said Pauline Malkiel, the Valmadonna’s librarian since 1982. “This is a one-man collection, and nobody could put it together now.”

By the time Lunzer struck the deal for the Bomberg Talmud, in 1980, he had become part of the fraternity of men, many of them ultra-Orthodox, who turned up at book sales to shout at each other in Yiddish as they competed for the best items. At around the same time, people who found themselves priced out of the skyrocketing art market began to take a renewed interest in books; prices were steadily bid up from the low four figures into five- and six-figure calls, or even higher for manuscripts. Lunzer, who had made a practice of buying duplicates in order to assemble copies of books that were as close to perfect as possible, fed the craze by having all his books lavishly re-bound by Bernard Middleton, one of Britain’s pre-eminent antiquarian binders. (Several people who know the collection well remarked on the unusual smell of Valmadonna leather; one said it’s possible to identify a book that had been through Fairport, even years later, by sniffing the binding.)

Today, the value of the collection rests mainly in the Bomberg Talmud and a copy of an English Pentateuch manuscript from 1189. A sale last December at Sotheby’s, overseen by Redden, fetched $2.25 million—more than double the high estimate—for an incomplete Bomberg Talmud, inflating the value of Lunzer’s flawless Westminster copy. But the value of the whole may be less than the sum of its parts, if no buyer steps forward with an offer for the entire collection. As one person familiar with the Valmadonna put it, “The library was priceless, and so now it’s twice priceless.” Of course, Lunzer, having devoted his life to the project of building Valmadonna—which he refers to as “Val,” joking that he can do without the “Madonna”—is loath to imagine it being undone, and the collection being sold piecemeal as others before have been, from the Montefiore collection to the holdings of Britain’s Jew’s College Library and the London Beth Din. “The history of Hebrew libraries has been a very mixed one, with a lot of pillaging and mistakes,” he explained at Fairport. “I treasure every one of these books that Val has, and I’d be mad with grief if anything should happen.” But Lunzer is technically only the custodian of the library; the books belong to the trust, whose sole beneficiaries, he said, are his five grown daughters, and it will be the trustees who have the final say. (Martin Paisner, a London attorney who advises the trustees, referred questions to Sotheby’s.) “The trust is firm that it stay together, and we are doing our best to accomplish that,” said Redden. But, he added, the trust will ultimately need to liquidate its assets—the library—however it can. “It has beneficiaries who need to be dealt with,” Redden said. “It’s not going to keep these books forever.”

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Even without the recession, the Valmadonna sale would have been a challenge. Few, if any, private buyers are able or willing to take on the responsibility of housing and preserving such a vast collection, let alone of hiring a librarian to watch over it, as Lunzer has done for decades. (Members of the Safra family visited Fairport in the late 1990s to inspect the collection, but decided against making the purchase because, Lunzer explained, “it wasn’t their field.”) That leaves institutions, but many of the likely candidates already have substantial collections of Hebraica that rival the holdings of the Valmadonna. The British Library and the Bodleian, at Oxford University, both hold copies of the Bomberg Talmud, and Lunzer quipped, “Britain doesn’t need it.” The decision to send the books to New York reflects his belief that the eventual buyer will be found in the United States, where Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania are most often mentioned as plausible suitors. “The fact is that any university, for example, that acquired the Valmadonna would immediately have by far the best collection of Judaica of anyone,” Redden said. But Lunzer, in repeated conversations, said he doesn’t want just anyone to have his books. “It would be the crown of the Library of Congress to have these things, and for the Jewish community in America,” he insisted. “The world would gasp.”

The idea of bringing the Valmadonna to Washington originated with the current librarian, James Billington, who has made a practice of actively canvassing the world for potential acquisitions. Billington first approached Lunzer about the Valmadonna a decade ago, a few years before the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jews in America, in 2004—an auspicious time to begin fundraising for a monumental Hebraica collection. By 2002, the Library of Congress had raised $20 million, entirely from private donors, to buy the Valmadonna and refurbish a balcony overlooking the central rotunda reading room to give the core of the collection pride of place. “It would have been a great coup for American Jewry to have this thing cemented in that place,” said Hill, who was not involved in the negotiations. “The central document in the relationship between America and its Jews is George Washington’s communication with the Jewish community of Newport at the founding of this nation, and this is the only thing that would have had similar centrality. It was out of this world.”

Accounts of why the deal collapsed vary. According to Lunzer, some donors withdrew their commitments at the last minute for their own personal financial reasons. One person with knowledge of the negotiations said the problem lay with the trust’s decision to push the asking price higher once the initial $20 million had been raised—a move that could have looked like bad faith to an institution accustomed to receiving outright gifts, rather than having to buy its treasures. Fiona Scharf, one of Lunzer’s daughters, told Tablet that the Library, in the end, simply failed to raise sufficient funds for the purchase, but declined to elaborate. What is clear is that everyone involved was left disappointed. Billington, according to several people familiar with the affair, “got burned” and “was livid, absolutely livid.” (Billington declined to be interviewed for this article.) Lunzer, for his part, professes to similar disappointment over what he refers to variously as “the slip” and “the hiccup.”

Nonetheless, Lunzer insists the Library of Congress is still his dream home for the Valmadonna. He provided Tablet with a letter Billington sent more than a year ago, in January 2008, indicating that he was still open to negotiations. “We are still interested in the Valmadonna Collection,” Billington wrote. But, he added, “the linchpin to further discussions—once the export approval is granted—will be the negotiation of a price, terms that both parties can accept, and the willingness of new donors to provide the funds.” (In February, Billington told a Bloomberg reporter that Valmadonna “would find a great home here.”) One view of the decision to ship the entire Valmadonna collection across the Atlantic, without a firm buyer, is that it was an effort to entice the Library back to the table; another is that it was done with an eye to reigniting the interest of possible donors. The exhibit last winter—which marked the first time the collection had been displayed in its entirety—was designed by Sotheby’s as a marketing exercise, and succeeded wildly in attracting attention not just in the Jewish world but in the art world as well.

Lunzer admitted he had not spoken to Billington recently, but insisted that a deal could still be struck. “It’s not entirely a question of money—it’s a question of finding the right home for it,” Lunzer said. “For the sake of Judaism, and the role of Judaism in the United States, this library is a must for the Library of Congress.” Potential donors, he said, should think of it as a “way that the Jewish community as a whole can somehow express their gratitude” to America. “Nobody wants to see it broken up, but if they don’t put their act together, the Jewish community and the library…” he trailed off. What then? Unlike an auction, the private sale of Valmadonna is in principle open-ended, but Lunzer insisted, repeatedly, that if the library is not sold in the next year, he will bring it home to Fairport—where, for now, Sotheby’s has installed photographs of the books on the library shelves, a trompe l’oeil that gives the illusion Val is still there. “Après moi, le déluge,” Lunzer said, looking around the lounge at the images of the Bomberg Talmud, which once sat in pride of place behind a grille, near a table adorned with a photograph of Ruth, who died in 1978. “I suppose if worse comes to worst, everything will come back here. I can’t tell you what happens afterwards.”

Jews may be “the people of the book,” but their relationship to textiles predates the book itself. In Exodus, God provides detailed instructions for the creation of a rug-like partition to be woven of turquoise, purple, and scarlet wool and linen; embellished with cherubs; and hung in the portable sanctuary that accompanied the Israelites as they wandered through the desert. Wherever they settled and dispersed, Jews never lost their knack for textile production.

As early as the first century A.D., Baruch Albalia, a prince of Judea and expert silk weaver, was sent by Titus, the Roman general who conquered Jerusalem, to develop the textile industry in Spain. When the Jews were expelled from there in 1492, many of them found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, where for centuries the dyers, weavers, and traders among them built a reputation for creating the most extraordinary carpets in the world. Anecdotal evidence of Jewish textile expertise abounds: from ledgers revealing that in the Hungarian town of Nagykoros, most of the carpets purchased between 1630 and 1682 came from Jewish sellers, to records of the Pope granting a patent for silk manufacturing to the Italian Jew Meir Magino around the same time. Across cultures, it seems, Jews were famous craftsman before they established their reputation as merchants, and while fabricating designs for their gentile neighbors, they also created some fascinating pieces for themselves.

Yet rugs and carpets (a distinction purely of size) are hardly the first things that come to mind when considering Judaica. This may reflect their scarcity, compared with more common and easily portable objects like Kiddush cups and menorahs. Or it may reflect their relatively folksy character, sometimes bordering on kitsch—an aesthetic linked to the limitations of a medium defined by stitches rather than brushstrokes, and alternately hung like tapestries or walked upon. But it also stems from the misconception that Judaic examples were anomalies among Oriental and European carpets.

Anton Felton, a British collector-turned-scholar, challenged that misconception with his 1997 book Jewish Carpets. “Everyone thought I was mad, but I spent 50 years proving my point,” says Felton, who acquired his first piece while moonlighting as a bookkeeper for London carpet dealers in the 1960s. That piece—a silk rug from Kashan (circa 1850s) depicting King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba surrounded by symbols of the 12 tribes and episodes from Jewish history—so intrigued Felton that he convinced his employer to let him work it off rather than sell it to either of the parties vying for it: then-chief Rabbi Israel Brodie and philanthropist Sir Isaac Wilson.

He went on to scour the world in search of Jewish carpets, accumulating some 60 for his personal trove and researching more than 200 in public and private holdings. The one that started it all—and, Felton says, brought him “back to Judaism”—was the star among 18 lots of rugs and carpets from his collection featured in Sotheby’s December 17th Judaica sale; it fetched $23,750. (This annual Judaica auction usually features only one or two, if any, rugs and carpets, so despite the fact that only six of the 18 lots sold, it was a major event.)

Who would have thought a rug could be an object of Jewish faith? Felton makes a strong case for Jewish carpets as a distinctive category, rather than—as he recalls being suggested to him during his years of research—“abominations that cropped up by chance at the interface of two cultures.” Much was no doubt lost over time, but those examples that can be tracked down offer tremendous insight into Jewish history and iconography. “I don’t just look at a Jewish carpet, I try to look through it,” Felton explains. “I ask, what was the culture that produced it? What did it mean to the people who owned it and looked at it?” But all this very serious research raises the question: what really makes a carpet Jewish?

The Song of Songs, A Marbadiah Wool Rug, Jerusalem, 1920–1921, centered with a stylized palm tree against a blue filed inhabited by flora and fauna, the border enclosing peacocks flanking fountains alternating with grape clusters

Taking a broad view, the field encompasses secular pieces by Jewish artisans, along with works by non-Jews used in Jewish settings (like a purely decorative carpet used to adorn a synagogue). Getting more specific, they feature inherently Jewish motifs: stars of David, menorahs, torah crowns, biblical scenes, views of Jerusalem, and Hebrew writing. There also seems to be a spiritual aspect to these decorative works, most obviously in devotional textiles such as the sheviti (a textual reminder of the divine presence) and mizrach (to indicate the Eastern direction for prayer), mounted at home and in synagogues. Workshops established in the 20th century, meanwhile, found carpet design a surprisingly suitable medium for promoting social change.

The Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, founded by Boris Schatz in Jerusalem in 1906, and its offshoot, Marbadiah (in existence from 1920 to 1931), were influential in melding Oriental and European carpet traditions with imagery that tied Jewish identity to the budding homeland. The resulting works account for the vast majority of existing Jewish carpets—and also the bulk of the group in Sotheby’s sale. In some pieces, the Judaic elements are subtle, while others that feature biblical passages or images of Jerusalem put forward the possibility of a modern Jewish nation in an ancient land.

Around the same time, charitable institutions like the Alliance Israelite Universelle (founded by French Jews in 1860 to foster social mobility and combat anti-Semitism) and the socialist-minded Organization for Rehabilitation Through Training (founded two decades later in St. Petersburg with the goal of alleviating poverty) employed and trained Jewish carpet-makers throughout the world. Sotheby’s auction included a series of chenille rugs made by the Alliance featuring portraits of Zionist figures like Theodore Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Lord Balfour, and Sir Herbert Samuel—the first practicing Jew to become a British cabinet minister and later High Commissioner under the British Mandate of Palestine. These idealized depictions feature richly hued red and gold tones and elaborate Oriental borders, but primarily serve as wonderful historical documents—almost like commemorative postage stamps—which may explain why they failed to sell.

While these later examples aren’t the pinnacle of carpet-making, they hold their own against most contemporaneous examples. Similarly, more luxurious—but much rarer—earlier Jewish carpets from Persia and Turkey are indistinguishable from their Islamic counterparts in style, if not in substance. In the West as early as the 10th century, the rise of the church led to the creation of the guild system, shutting Jews out of creative professions. But in the major carpet production regions of the East, they were sought out for their trade secrets and skill. This explains the striking similarities between Jewish and Islamic carpets; experts presume that they were largely commissioned and made by the same workshops and individuals. Case in point: a circa-1920 Kashan silk rug featuring an elaborate depiction of the binding of Isaac was offered in Sotheby’s general carpet auction this past June. The non-Jewish consignor had acquired it purely for its aesthetic appeal and relevance to his broader Persian carpet collection, but it sparked aggressive bidding and surpassed its conservative $5,000–$7,000 estimate to fetch $20,000 from a Jewish buyer. Perhaps it also helps answer the more basic if less central question of why so many carpet dealers in New York, Los Angeles, London, and other international cities are Jews of Persian and Turkish descent. Craftsmanship apparently paved the way for trade.

“I looked at all the major places where carpets were woven in the Mediterranean and all the major Jewish settlements, and blow me down if 99 percent of the time they aren’t the same,” Anton Felton remarks. Even as the definition of home has proved impermanent, carpets have remained an integral form of Jewish artistic and religious expression—not to mention a quintessentially Jewish livelihood.

Jeannie Rosenfeld, a former editor at Art + Auction magazine, is a New York writer specializing in fine and decorative art. Her work has appeared in ARTnews, Interior Design, and the Forward.