Sabbath light

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Silver Sabbath lamp by Johann Valentin Schüler, Frankfurt / Main 1680-1720. (The Jewish Museum, New York)

A Sabbath lamp or Sabbath lamp , also known as a Jewish star , is a large oil lamp hanging from the ceiling . It can be made of bronze , brass or silver and was used to light up the festive meal on Friday evening in a Jewish household. The star-shaped container for the oil is typical. (Underneath a completely preserved lamp there is a container for dripping oil.)

Brass specimens from the 18th or 19th centuries are quite common in Jewish museums.

Sabbath traffic light in Erfurt

Perhaps the oldest surviving Sabbath traffic light is in the Erfurt Cathedral Treasury . A copy of the lamp hangs in the cathedral near the large bronze tungsten chandelier and in the Old Synagogue Museum . It was created around 1200 or later in an Erfurt foundry and shows four relief friezes with scenes from the life of King David on its 41 cm high shaft .

In Erfurt Cathedral : on the left the tungsten chandelier, on the right the bronze traffic light hanging from the ceiling.

According to the majority of experts, the lamp comes from a Jewish context, on the one hand because of the David illustrations and on the other because of the star-shaped oil bowl (diameter 35 cm) with twelve snouts. How it got into the cathedral is not known; a connection with the plague pogroms is assumed . The Sabbath traffic light has been revised in a Christian way for its ecclesiastical use as Eternal Light .

Sabbath traffic light in London

The traffic light exhibited today in the Museum of London is assigned to a domestic Jewish context and the second half of the 12th century. It is smaller than the Erfurt traffic light, namely 31 cm high, and has an oil bowl in the shape of a six-pointed star and a diameter of 18 cm.

Sabbath traffic lights in Bristol

A three-nose copper alloy lamp found on Peter Street, Bristol (City of Bristol Museums and Art Gallery) is considered a Sabbath lamp because of formal similarities with later Jewish Sabbath lamps and with a number of lamps known from earlier descriptions. They all come from cities in which there was a Jewish community until the Jews were expelled from England.

Sabbath traffic light fragment in Cologne

In the exhibition “ ... you hinder this nymandt ” (2016-2017) in the Museum Alte Synagoge Erfurt the fragment of a bronze Sabbath traffic light from the 13th century from Cologne was exhibited. The lamp was probably destroyed during the plague pogroms.

Web links

literature

  • Hans Gerhard Meyer: A sabbatical light in the Erfurt Cathedral (studies on art history, vol. 16), Hildesheim / New York 1982. ISBN 3-487-07294-7

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Museum of London: Hanging lamp. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .
  2. ^ Sabbath lamp. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .
  3. ^ EJ Boore: A Medieval Lamp from Peter Street, Bristol. Retrieved December 20, 2017 .