11 The picture of David Kaufmann

Photograph taken by Károly Koller

Budapest, cca. 1899

Albumin

Donation by Róza Gomperz, 1910

David Kaufmann (1852–1899), who was born in Moravia, graduated from the Rabbinical Seminary in Breslau (today: Wroclaw), and was appointed as teacher in 1877 at the newly opened Jewish Rabbinical Seminary where he taught theology and history. In 1892, he became the editor of the most prestigious journal of modern Jewish scholarly life, the ’Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums’, by which he connected the Budapest Rabbinical Seminar with the international scholarly circles. With the financial support of his wife’s family, he created and studied a collection of Hebrew manuscripts and books, and was the first one to publish about the topics of Jewish art. He was the founding member of the first Jewish Museum in Vienna, which served as a model ten years later to set up the Budapest museum. After Kaufmann’s early death, his mother-in-law deposited the collection at the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and when the Jewish Museum was founded, she donated Kaufmann’s picture to the collection.