Julian Barnett
Deceit, Deception, and Disguise
Summary
Collector Julian Barnett gives an intimate tour of selected art objects in his collection, sharing the stories behind them and the various ways they were acquired.
Julian Barnett
Julian Barnett is a teacher, collector, tour guide, and writer with a specialist interest in ultra-orthodoxy within the various faiths. For the last 35 years, he has been investigating and documenting the most extreme sects of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. His experiences and travels were serialized in the Jerusalem Report and also broadcast on BBC Radio Four Religion. Outside of his full-time history teaching post at Southbank International School, Portland Place, London, Julian lectures at numerous venues around the UK and beyond. In 2013 Julian was a joint winner of the National Teacher of the Year Award.
Yes, I can give a quick recap as to how I clean silver. I don’t use silver spray, I don’t use a silver cloth, I use wadding. It’s called Silvo, S-I-L-V-O. It is literally wadding, so you pull off little bits of pieces, polish it up, and then just buff it up. Simple as that. But the key thing with silver is to stay on top of it. Don’t let it get too black too quickly. If you stay on top of it, the task always remains manageable, particularly if you have quite a large collection of silver, you’ve got to stay on top of it.
The Hebrew description on the silver candlesticks is, and I’ll read it to you now. It is “Yeshiva HaKadosha Haye Olam.” The Holy Yeshiva of Haye Olam. And on the other side of the candlestick, it has the year, which comes through as 1928. The candlesticks were made in the 1890s in Warsaw, but then they were engraved when were given as a gift to the yeshiva in Jerusalem. That yeshiva is still there, it’s in a neighbourhood called Sha'arei Hesed, near the Machaneh Yehudah market, and that’s where I went to find out about them.
Yes, I think it could have been, that could have been, the Jewish fabric might well have been a matzah cover, but it’s a little large for a matzah cover. So my guess is it’s more for a small Torah cover than a matzah cover. That said, I have sometimes seen in some communities, huge sheets of matzah, so you could very well be right.