At no. 71 rue du Temple, the attractively restored Hôtel de Saint-Aignan is now home to the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme (Mon–Fri 11am–6pm, Sun 10am–6pm; €6.10; www.mahj.org; M° Rambuteau). Opened in 1998, it's a combination of the collections of the now closed Musée d'Art Juif in Montmartre, Isaac Strauss, conductor of the Paris Opera orchestra, and the Dreyfus archives, a gift to the museum from his grandchildren. The museum traces the culture, history and artistic endeavours mainly of the Jews in France, though there are also many artefacts from the rest of Europe and North Africa. The result is a very comprehensive collection, as educational as it is beautiful. Free audioguides in English are available and well worth picking up if you want to get the most out of the museum.It's spread out over three floors with the collection housed on the upper two in a series of smallish rooms, each packed with pieces from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Highlights include a Gothic-style hannukkah lamp, one of the very few French Jewish artefacts to survive from the period before the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1394; an Italian gilded circumcision chair from the seventeenth century; and a completely intact late-nineteenth-century Austrian sukkah, decorated with paintings of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives and built as a temporary dwelling for the celebration of the Harvest. Other artefacts include Moroccan wedding garments, highly decorated marriage contracts from eighteenth-century Modena and gorgeous, almost whimsical, spice containers. Appropriately enough, one room is devoted to the notorious Dreyfus affair, documented with letters, photographs and press clippings; you can read Émile Zola's famous letter "J'accuse" in which the novelist defends Dreyfus's innocence, and the letters that Dreyfus sent to his wife from prison on Devil's Island in which he talks of épouvantable ("terrible") suffering and loneliness. There's also a significant collection of paintings and sculpture by Jewish artists – Marc Chagall, Samuel Hirszenberg, Chaïm Soutine and Jacques Lipchitz – who came to live in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. Though it may seem an odd omission, there's nothing about the Holocaust. The only reference is an installation by contemporary artist Christian Boltanski: one of the exterior walls of a small courtyard is covered with black-bordered death announcements printed with the names of the Jewish artisans who once lived in the building, a number of whom were deported. Its very understatement has a powerful impact and is perhaps all that's needed to evoke recent Jewish history.
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