The Committee of the Henry Jones Lodge for Jewish Folklore, Invitation and Questionnaire, Hamburg 1896

Source Description

This invitation for collecting folklore was the first of its kind in the Jewish context. The Jewishness of this questionnaire is apparent: a Magen David symbol of the Henry Jones-Loge of Hamburg at the top of the front page. Below it, we find a programmatic exposition on the importance of folklore for Jewish cultural identity. This one page invitation is signed by three members of the “Comité der Henry Jones-Loge für jüdische Volkskunde”: M Deutschländer, Dr. Max Grunwald and Gustav Tuch. It is unclear how many copies of the document were distributed. The extant copy was stored in the archives of the Swiss Folklore Society Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde (SGV) in Basel, a society established in 1896 by the famous folklorist Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer. Hoffmann-Krayer later incorporated a Jewish section within the SGV. The questionnaire demonstrates how the emergence of Jewish folklore studies belonged to the institutionalization of “Volkskunde” more broadly. Despite its symbolic importance, the content of the questionnaire exhibits very few specifically Jewish aspects.
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Recommended Citation

The Committee of the Henry Jones Lodge for Jewish Folklore, Invitation and Questionnaire, Hamburg 1896 (translated by Insa Kummer), edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, <https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-209.en.v1> [April 19, 2024].