Oxford study of wartime experiences of Jewish professor and expert in Celtic Art

14 May 2010

Oxford researchers are inviting people to take part in a social history project which will help them to piece together the lives of refugees living in Oxford during the Second World War. They 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.

Professor Jacobsthal found refuge in Oxford, and was a senior academic in the University of Oxford 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 experiences as refugees in Oxford.

Project co-director Dr Katharina Ulmschneider, from Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology, said: 'This project is significant: Celtic art is now very familiar - in tattoos and jewellery, for example - but  few people today realise that Professor 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 his 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 recognised.'

The project also provides a human picture of what Oxford was like for wartime refugees, which was not always plain sailing. In one letter to a friend in 1946, Professor Jacobsthal wrote: 'The other problems of our life are too complicated to even hint at…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.'Project co-director Dr Sally Crawford, from Oxford's Institute of Archaeology, said: '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.'

Researchers from the School of Archaeology now want to enlist the help of local people who may have known the Jacobsthals, or who had experiences of being wartime refugees in Oxford between 1939 to1945. 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 be catalogued, digitized, and made available on the web from 2011 at www.arch.ox.ac.uk/jacobsthal.html

Please contact the University of Oxford Press Office on 01865 280534 or press.office@admin.ox.ac.uk for interviews with the researchers or a photograph of Professor Paul Jacobsthal.