ICMA Annual Lecture: Judgments in Nuremberg

Why It Matters

The lecture highlights how postwar politics and collective memory can reconfigure the meanings and markets for cultural heritage, with direct implications for provenance research, museum collecting practices, and ethical stewardship of disputed or politicized objects. Understanding these dynamics is essential for historians, curators, and policymakers addressing restitution, authentication, and the legacy of contested artifacts.

Summary

William J. Debold’s ICMA lecture, “Judgments in Nuremberg,” examines the post‑medieval reception and trade of two medieval Christian and Jewish manuscripts in Nuremberg between 1950 and 1957. Drawing on archival evidence, Debold situates these transactions within the city’s fraught recent history—its role as a Nazi rally site and the location of the postwar trials—and argues that political and social contexts in mid‑20th century Germany reshaped the meaning and circulation of medieval objects. The talk advances a methodological point that reception studies must extend beyond the Middle Ages into modernity to understand how artworks’ meanings evolve. Debold links art‑historical analysis with provenance and cultural politics to reveal how shifting postwar agendas influenced the valuation and interpretation of medieval manuscripts.

Original Description

Judgments in Nuremberg: The 1950s Trade in Medieval Christian and Jewish Manuscripts in the “Most German of All German Cities”

In the early 1950s, a number of public and ecclesiastical institutions in Nuremberg, West Germany bought, sold, and exchanged medieval illuminated manuscripts. A museum acquired a Christian gospel book but sold two haggadot from its collection; a church gave away a mass book made for it four hundred years earlier; the city library sold a Hebrew liturgical manuscript it had held for centuries. These transactions were fraught for a variety of reasons. Not only were monetarily and culturally valuable objects changing hands, but, just a few years after the Shoah, Jewish cultural artifacts were leaving German public collections. And all of this was taking place in the “most German of all German cities,” a Nazi-era sobriquet for Nuremberg that had been given a new twist when the city that had hosted the annual Nazi party rallies became the site of the trial of the leading Nazi war criminals.

This lecture, drawing on extensive archival research, attempts to answer such questions as: What did it mean in the early 1950s for a German museum to acquire a spectacular Ottonian gospel book? For a church to give an American donor a liturgical manuscript that had been made for it? For German public institutions to sell Hebrew illuminated manuscripts to an émigré German Jew living in Israel? These transactions are placed in their political and social context. Germany, accused of the worst crimes in the history of mankind, was struggling to reestablish itself. One of the ways it tried to do this was by reshaping the relationship of its medieval past to its modern present.

Organised by Dr Jessica Barker, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art History at the Courtauld. This event is kindly supported by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), and the drinks reception sponsored by Sam Fogg.