Dressing Up: “Reading” Costume in the Photograph Albums of Nineteenth-Century Bourgeois Jews

Abstract This study draws on over one hundred portrait albums compiled by bourgeois Jews living in the British, Austrian, German, Russian and Ottoman Empires, as well as those living in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Poland in the second half of the nineteenth century. These photographic albums allow us to study Jewish dress. They show Jews who presented themselves at photographic studios wearing uniform, ceremonial dress, fancy dress as well as in the latest fashions. Sartorial choices in Jews’ photographic collections communicate new facets of Jewish experience as Jews acquired wealth and civil rights. This study contextualizes the portraits within the photographic culture and the political events of the era. It contends that the dress they chose to wear for their portraits articulated new forms of identification, affiliations and national belonging within and/or beyond the Jewish community. It proposes, moreover that the apparel of bourgeois Jews in their costumed images embodied their negotiation of Otherness.