Silver Hanukkah Lamp

Johann Valentin Schüler

Late 17th Century

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Silver oil lamp with row of eight cups on bottom, and elaborate carvings of two figures and floral designs on lamp with carved birds on top. — At the center of the backplate of this Hanukkah lamp from Frankfurt am Main is a scene depicting the biblical heroine Judith, who has cut off Holofernes’s head and is about to place it in a sack held open by her maid. Judith was a common image found on Hanukkah lamps in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as a popular subject in art and literature in Western European culture at large. This is an early example of a Hanukkah lamp with feet, which allow the lamp to sit securely on a windowsill or tabletop. It resembles some inkstands of the period.

Credits

Hanukkah Lamp. Purchase: Norman S. Goetz, Mr. and Mrs. Henry A. Loeb, Mr. and Mrs. Henry L. Marx, Ira A. Schur, Lawrence A. Wien, Leonard Block, Gustave L. Levy, and Robert I. Wishnick Gifts / The Jewish Museum, New York.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 5.

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Creator Bio

Johann Valentin Schüler

1650–1720

Johann Valentin Schüler was one of a family of silversmiths whose workshops in Frankfurt-am-Main produced ritual objects for Frankfurt’s Jewish community. The family included his brother, Johann Michael Schüler (b. 1658), and brother-in-law Johann Adam Boller. His father, Michael Schüler, was also a silversmith. Boller and the Schülers were the first to produce a new type of Hanukkah lamp, for home use, that became popular in the Jewish community in Frankfurt in the early eighteenth century.

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