Museum visitors gather to catch a rare glimpse of the V&A's hidden holdings (Credit: Liat Rosenthal)[Missing Credit]
The dress itself carries the story of migration and adaptation. Its cut, known as an entari, originates from the Ottoman Empire and reflects the clothing traditions that Baghdadi Jewish women brought with them to India. However, it is made from shimmering Indian fabric. A closer look reveals an unexpected detail: a small bustle at the back. This choice signals a deliberate nod to Victorian fashion, marking the wearer’s place in British imperial society while remaining grounded in Jewish tradition. The dress fuses many worlds, wearing its complexity lightly.
North Africa offers a different kind of splendour, where clothing preserves traces of an intricate social history. Here, as elsewhere, Jews living under Muslim rule were often constrained by dress codes designed to distinguish minorities from the Muslim majority. The legal framework that governed their lives can still be read through the objects themselves. One example was the sarmah, a towering silver headdress donned by Jewish women in Ottoman Algiers for special occasions, which appeared to be almost impossibly precarious to balance. While non-Jewish women could pair colourful scarves with the sarmah, Jewish women were only permitted black ones, and what began as a forced distinction was, in time, proudly adopted by the community as a marker of identity. We were also shown a heavy velvet Jewish dress from the same milieu. Lifting it slightly revealed circular motifs on the lining, believed to ward off the evil eye: a reminder that Jewish and Muslim communities across the Maghreb often drew on the same repertoire of protective symbols.
Elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, Jewish craftsmen became renowned silversmiths, producing jewellery for both Jews and Muslims. The reasons were partly religious and partly pragmatic. In some regions, social conventions and religious restrictions encouraged Jews to specialise in trades involving precious metals, and over generations they built reputations that spread further afield. Jewish Berbers in southern Morocco were renowned for their silverwork for centuries, maintaining this tradition until their exodus in the late 1950s. A similar story unfolded in Yemen, where Jewish artisans created some of the most technically accomplished jewellery in the Islamic world. Laid out before us were necklaces and bracelets showcasing the extraordinarily delicate filigree work for which Yemeni silversmiths became famous.
Necklace made in Yemen, 1850-1900 (Credit: The Victoria and Albert Museum)[Missing Credit]
Silver jewellery functioned as a form of portable wealth for many Yemeni women, received at marriage and remaining a woman’s personal property, to be sold, exchanged or passed down through generations. The objects on the table were therefore more than examples of fine craftsmanship: they were family assets, carrying both economic and emotional value. Communities of all backgrounds marked marriages through the giving and wearing of jewellery, yet distinct traditions emerged: in Sana’a, Jews and Muslims favoured different styles and techniques, producing jewellery with recognisable communal characteristics.
For me, the most intriguing object was a 19th-century Persian mirror case, resting on a protective cushion. The event provided a rare opportunity to discuss it with another visitor, a young Iranian doctoral student specialising in decorative arts. The hinged wooden lid is painted in the Persian lacquerwork tradition, but opening it reveals something entirely unexpected: a Hebrew devotional text applied directly to the mirror glass. This is a Shiviti, named after the opening words of Psalm 16:8, “I have set the Eternal always before me,” traditionally placed where a worshipper’s eyes will fall during prayer. This example features a menorah formed from the tiny, compressed letters of Psalm 67. When looking into the mirror, the worshipper would see their own face framed by sacred text, a powerful reminder of being encompassed by the divine word and presence.
Nineteenth century Persian mirror case with a protective cushion and Hebrew devotional text applied directly to the glass (Credit: The Victoria and Albert Museum)[Missing Credit]
Collectively, these objects reflect the experience of living between integration and separation – a tension visible even in dress, where Jews in Muslim lands occasionally preserved older clothing traditions long after fashions had moved on. The objects also reveal the close connections between Jewish and Muslim neighbours, frequently relying on the same craftsmen, moving within the same commercial networks and sharing common decorative languages. These pieces tell a story not only of difference – and, yes, sometimes of exclusion – but also of coexistence.
The complexity of that story is often forgotten in today’s world. Readers of the Jewish Chronicle may be familiar with the figure of 850,000 Jews who fled Muslim lands in the second half of the 20th century, following the establishment of Israel. Yet this figure obscures how different their experiences were. The Jews of Yemen left in the aftermath of the Aden pogrom: in 1948 a brief window opened for their departure, and by 1949–50 virtually the whole community had been airlifted to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet. The Jews of Algeria, by contrast, had been French citizens since 1870. Their lives were governed by French, not Muslim, law, and they left with their fellow French citizens at Algerian independence in 1962. Persian Jews, meanwhile, experienced growing secularisation and social mobility between the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–08 and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, gaining new footholds in education, commerce and public life. The objects at the V&A speak to this more differentiated past. As one of the world’s great encyclopaedic museums of art and design, the V&A is exactly the kind of institution that could finally give this history the attention it has long deserved. These stories are integral, not marginal, to that wider narrative of cultural exchange.
Yemenite jewellery crafted by Jewish silversmiths (Credit: Michal Friedlander)[Missing Credit]
In the meantime, ahead of the follow-up event in 2027, the V&A East Storehouse in Hackney Wick offers a remarkable alternative. Browse the collection online, choose up to five objects, and book a free appointment to examine them in person. A chamsa from Izmir, a pair of elegant leather shoes worn by a Jewish woman in Morocco, a glorious embroidered Bukharan textile bearing a Judeo-Tajik inscription: these things exist, they are cared for, and they can be yours to hold, at least for an afternoon.
Michal Friedlander is Curator of Judaica and Applied Arts at the Jewish Museum Berlin
