Jews and Heritage in Twentieth-Century Britain: Collections, Aesthetics, Narratives

This panel will interrogate the complex impact of Jews upon the making of national heritage in early twentieth-century Britain (c.1880–1950). It will reflect on how different members of this minority group simultaneously enriched national collections whilst also fostering organisations devoted to celebrating cultural difference. Through the prism of heritage, the panel will explore how Jews pursued both assimilationist and particularist strategies in relation to British society, past and present. With its focus on minority experience, the panel aims to reveal some of the complexity inherent in evolving ideas of ‘Britishness’, visually articulated and culturally performed.

Some papers may choose to explore art collecting and display as a vehicle by which Jews sought to project identity and cultural capital into the mainstream. Jewish collectors were actively involved with the art world in Britain through cultural patronage, sponsorship of contemporary artists, museum donations and the lending of artworks to public exhibitions. Other papers might choose to tackle the theme from the perspective of artists, art critics, curators, art dealers or designers, drawing out the role of migration of people and things in fostering new and unexpected expressions of the national character, the national past and the nation’s artistic inheritance.

While the speakers’ focus will be on the Jewish experience, the panel will invite comparisons from participants who have explored parallel issues in relation to other ethnic or religious communities. The session will thereby aim to refine our understanding of how forms of national belonging were predicated upon the assertion or elision of minority identities. This panel comes at a time of intense debate within Britain about the limits and supposed failures of multiculturalism, of intense fractures around Zionism and anti-Zionism as well as the continuing challenge of antisemitism. Interrogating the relationship between Jewish actors and experiences, and the production and/or problematisation of twentieth-century modes of Britishness, has rarely been so timely.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

John Hilary, University of Nottingham, jhilary@gmail.com

Tom Stammers, Courtauld Institute of Art, tom.stammers@courtauld.ac.uk