“[A] noble treasure house of learning.”
That’s how Mary Antin, a Russian Jewish immigrant, described the Boston Public Library (BPL) in her memoir The Promised Land.
The BPL in Copley Square has been an intellectual home and haunt for countless Jews. It houses the works of countless Jewish authors and other creators. But it doesn’t exactly convey the vibe of the tribe.
There’s the matter of John Singer Sargent’s antisemitic murals, which are not a simple matter. They deserve and have received a full-length book treatment (Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library by Sally M. Promey). Sargent’s murals, in the Special Collections Hall, are titled the Triumph of Religion, but they might as well be Triumph of Christianity Over Judaism or We Won and You Jews Deserved to Lose.
And as long as we’re talking about Christian murals in the BPL, consider The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail by Edwin Austin Abbey, a series of 15 murals in the Abbey Room. The Holy Grail, of course, was the cup that Christians believed Jesus drank from at his last meal. It is not something that Jews believe in or seek. It’s not just the murals’ theme that proclaims “Christian.” It’s the nuns, angels, haloed figures, crosses on banners, crosses on shields, and people kneeling, people kneeling, people kneeling. Kneelers appear in nine and possibly 11 of the 15 murals, including people praying with their palms together.
By the way, in one mural, what may look like two menorot with seven branches (the kind we used in the ancient Temple) are probably just seven-branched candelabras. (That’s the fifth mural in the series, “King Amfortas and the castle of the Grail lie under a spell.”) A seven-branched candelabra is not necessarily a menorah, just as a jelly donut is not necessarily a sufganiya.
Considering the library’s interior, it will come as no surprise that the exterior doesn’t exactly celebrate Jews’ contributions to humanity.
The older building’s façade – the BPL consists of two attached buildings, one that opened in 1895 and one in 1972 – is carved with the names of luminaries. Their many fields of accomplishment include literature, art, religion, music, and history. The carved names are weighted toward literary figures, especially English ones. There are 546 carved names – of 542 people, with four names accidentally duplicated.
How many Jews’ names appear? Not a minyan’s worth, not even close. Three names of Jews, by my count, four if an “excommunicated” Jew is still counted as a Jew.
The name of our teacher, leader, and prophet Moses is under a window with 22 other names, including Confucius and Mohammed. The name of Flavius Josephus (c. 37-c.100), a Jewish historian, appears under the same window with a cohort of historians.
(Moses’s name also appears inside the Boston Public Library. Along the top of Bates Hall, the main reading room, runs a stone band, a frieze, with the name of Moses and 33 other luminaries (none else Jewish) carved into it and highlighted in gold.)
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), a philosopher who was born into a Jewish Portuguese family in Amsterdam, received a traditional Jewish education. But at age 23, the Jewish community banned him for “monstrous heresies,” among other things. In contrast to Amsterdam’s Jews, the BPL embraces him by carving his name in stone.
These are “safe” Jews for a library with a goyish heritage, tainted by antisemitism, to honor: Spinoza, an outcast; Moses, a prophet in the Torah, which the majority religion considers a prequel to their holy book; and Josephus, a long-dead historian who in his life eventually cooperated (if not collaborated) with the Romans, Latinized his Hebrew birth name (Yosef), took the emperor’s last name (Flavius), and translated for the Romans during the siege that led to them destroying our Second Temple in Jerusalem (from which they looted a seven-branched menorah).
The BPL was less ambivalent about a Jew when it honored the German-Jewish composer, especially of operas, Jacobo Meyerbeer (1791-1864). Also called Giacomo Meyerbeer, he was born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer. (Different sources provide slightly different birth names.) His father maintained a private synagogue in the family home; Meyerbeer composed a cantata to be performed there. In his diaries, he used Jewish calendar dates. When he died, he was buried in the family vault in a Jewish cemetery. During his life, the notoriously antisemitic composer Richard Wagner attacked him, which diminished his reputation.
Meyerbeer’s name is carved into the BPL’s façade under the same window as Beethoven, Bach, and other immortal composers. Regrettably, Wagner’s name is carved in the same locale. Imagine being honored at the same place as your chief tormentor. Jews are not unambiguously honored on the Boston Public Library.
The BPL’s façade also pays tribute to at least two Christians with Jewish heritage: Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), the German composer, who was born into a Jewish family and baptized as a child; and Heinrich Heine, also known as Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the German poet, who was born Jewish and converted.
Mendelssohn’s name is carved right above Meyerbeer’s. Wagner vilified both composers for their Jewishness in one essay. The nazis banned both composers’ works. Did someone mean to similarly link Meyerbeer, who was Jewish, with Mendelssohn, who had Jewish heritage? Probably not; the carved names of composers are generally alphabetical.
It is unknown who selected the notables whose names are carved in stone on the BPL, and what criteria they used. Those involved in the selection process may have included James Russell Lowell, a poet and Harvard professor; Francis J. Child, a Harvard professor whose specialties included English poetry; and William R. Richards and Phineas Pierce, who were library trustees.
The names were possibly carved in 1892, but they were definitely on the façade before the library opened in 1895. That means that the Boston Public Library’s façade has no names from the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. The Blagden Street side of the building has five blank panels; it is unknown whether they were left blank for later additions. In any case, no names have been added since the original inscriptions.
If the Blagden Street panels were ever carved, the Boston Public Library could rectify the slights to Jews.
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