In 2023, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts opened a permanent Judaica gallery, the country’s second at a general — read: non-Jewish — institution. A year later, Houston’s MFA followed suit. And, just last week, the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, continued this Judaica revival of sorts by acquiring a 12th century Afghan kiddush cup for a cool $4 million, a record for a ceremonial object of Judaica. (The previous high was $1.6 million, for a Rothschild Torah Ark.)
Sharon Liberman Mintz, International Senior Specialist in Judaica at Sotheby’s, New York, presided over the sale. “This object ticked all the boxes,” she told me over Zoom. “It’s close to 1000 years old, and except for a little bit on the lip, which has been repaired, it’s in astonishingly good condition.” The finely crafted silver cup is the oldest of the 25 medieval Judaica relics left in the world. Mintz sometimes asks people how many such artifacts they think have survived; their guesses are invariably too high, and she would know. “I counted them,” she said, chuckling a little.
The Toledo Museum of Art had been searching for an object that embodied the “connectivity” of the pre-modern era, said its director, Adam M. Levine, over email. The cup would make an excellent narrative device, therefore, calling attention to the largely forgotten medieval Jewish community of eastern Khorasan, modern-day Afghanistan; to the many fruitful exchanges between Jews and Muslims in the region; and to the crucial medieval trade route that sliced through central Asia, the Silk Road…