The Jacobsthal Archive

Persecution and survival: the experience of the German Jewish refugee Paul Jacobsthal

Principal Investigator: Professor Chris Gosden

Project Directors: Dr Sally Crawford and Dr Katharina Ulmschneider

Education and Outreach Officer: Dr Megan Price

‘Persecution and survival’ is a social history project which will enable us to piece together the lives of refugees living in Oxford during the Second World War. We are focusing on one émigré in particular, Paul Jacobsthal, an eminent archaeologist who was forced to flee Nazi Germany because of his Jewish origins. The project is being funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Reva and David Logan Foundation.

Come and help us with our project! We are collecting oral histories, preparing an exhibition at the Museum of Oxford (15 January to 10 March 2012), and creating a database of Jacobsthal’s letters, all with the help of volunteers.

To get in touch e-mail Dr Sally Crawford or Dr Katharina Ulmschneider

Professor Jacobsthal found refuge in Oxford, and was a senior academic in the University until his death in 1957. He made his name as a world leading expert in Celtic Art, publishing a ground-breaking book Early Celtic Art in 1944. He also left a stack of personal letters, which reveal his and his wife’s experience as refugees in Oxford. 

This project is significant: Celtic art is now very familiar – in tattoos and jewellery, for example - but  few people today realise that Jacobsthal’s interest in Celtic art was politically dangerous in Nazi Germany. As Nazi power grew, the study of archaeology had become highly politicised, and the pan-European origins of Celtic Art did not fit with the regime’s nationalistic doctrines. What Jacobsthal’s letters reveal is that, even after he had fled Germany, many of his former colleagues continued to write to him with information and support for his research, in direct defiance of the Nazi regime. The quiet German resistance to Nazism shown in these letters has rarely been recognized.

The project will also provide us all with a human picture of what Oxford was like for wartime refugees, which was not always plain sailing: “the other problems of our life are too complicated to even hint at’, Jacobsthal noted to a friend in 1946, ‘England is very, very different to how guidebook writers present it…that life between the nations as we lead it is not easy, is evident, and the contact with friends, which is possible now, illuminates these difficulties even more”.  We are really keen to speak to refugees who remember the Jacobsthals or have a story from the period themselves so they can contribute to a remarkable social history project, which should benefit the whole community.

The project, in collaboration with the Oxford City of Sanctuary Group, the Association of Jewish Refugees, local schools and volunteers will result in an exhibition in Oxford, due to take place in 2012.

The exhibition will contain information from Professor Jacobsthal’s own archive of his wartime and refugee experiences. It will also collect oral histories from volunteers who come forward with their own memories of the period.

As well as the exhibition, the project will make Professor Jacobsthal’s letters available to the public digitally. They will catalogued, digitized, and made available on the web from 2011. 

Paul Jacobsthal

Professor Paul Jacobsthal (1880-1957) was Director of the Institute of Archaeology at Marburg University, Germany until 1935, when he was deprived of his post on racial grounds. His outstanding archaeological teaching collection and photographic equipment were confiscated, and he was forced by the Nazi Regime to leave the country. Thanks to his friendship with the archaeologist Sir John Beazley, he and his wife found a new home in Oxford, but in spite of this he became one of many refugees interned on the Isle of Man, writing an important account of his experience. Although Jacobsthal was invited to return to Germany after the war, he felt he could not go back to a University which had retained a Nazi on its staff. Instead, he continued to live in Oxford, where he became a Reader in Celtic Archaeology and remained active in building bridges between British and German archaeologists.

Jacobsthal’s lasting impact is in the area of European cultural identity. He was crucial in establishing the first ever professorship for prehistory in Germany, recognizing its importance as a separate discipline: it would not be going too far to say he was the father of modern German prehistoric studies. During this he also laid the foundations for his groundbreaking work on Celtic ornament and art. His 1944 publication by Oxford University Press on Early Celtic Art was an astonishing achievement of intellectual scholarship and collaboration through the war, and remains the benchmark volume. It laid the foundation for all subsequent European scholarship on Celtic art, and made an important new contribution to ideas of a pan-European heritage which became so vital in the rethinking of national identities in the post-war period.

On-line Database of Jacobsthal's Correspondence

The on-line database of Jacobsthal correspondence is under construction and will be coming to this page soon.

The archive

The Institute of Archaeology at Oxford University holds the largest and most important archive of Paul Jacobsthal’s life, comprising 127 notebooks and 57 boxes of letters, drawings, photographs, research notes and ephemera, ranging in date from 1908 to his death in 1957. The archive includes his pre-war letters, notebooks and such academic papers as he was able to take out of Germany.

The surviving letters, which not only include those received from his large circle of correspondents, but also carbon copies of his own, illustrate his experience of racial persecution, finding refuge, and making a permanent home in a foreign country. In particular, the correspondence includes letters to and from Germany immediately before, during, and after the war. They throw light on the wartime networks of friendship and academic collaborations which were maintained across Europe and America. His correspondence also gives an insight into Oxford as a place of refuge, and into the intellectual impact of German Jewish refugees in Britain.