Behind a gate on rue du Temple is a courtyard you would not expect: giant Corinthian pilasters, a carved coat of arms on the pediment, silence. This is the hôtel de Saint-Aignan, a 17th-century mansion that houses the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, the mahJ, which tells Jewish history from antiquity to the present through objects, manuscripts, models and paintings.
The permanent route takes up three levels and thirteen sections, and the 13-euro ticket includes the audio guide. The museum is closed on Mondays, and also on some Jewish holidays, which fall on different dates each year: this year they were Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September, and they are listed on the website.
What was a courtyard full of workshops doing in a house like this?
Let’s begin!
How the route works
It starts on the ground floor, on the staircase of honour, with a section called Being Jewish in Paris in 1939. On the first floor the story runs from Jerusalem to the diaspora, through the Jews of France in the Middle Ages, the Jews of Italy, the times of life, the Jewish year with the Sabbath and the festivals, the Jews of Amsterdam and the Jewish worlds of Eastern Europe. On the second floor come rites and traditions, the Jews of the Levant and the Maghreb, emancipation, the Dreyfus affair, the political movements and 20th-century art.
Two useful warnings. Until 2028 the last two sections hold two special displays, Itinéraires d’œuvres spoliées and L’École de Paris dans les collections du mahJ: what you will find in those rooms is not the usual presentation. And the museum gives you, free with the ticket, an audio guide in French, English and Spanish, plus a visit guide in fifty languages: take it, because many of these objects need explaining.
1. The gravestone of 1281
The first work to stop you is a limestone slab of 113 × 55.5 centimetres, dated Paris, 1281, on loan from the musée de Cluny.
How does a gravestone of 1281 turn up under a bookshop?
Its story is a piece of accidental archaeology. In 1849, digging in the cellars of the Hachette bookshop on rue Pierre-Sarrazin brought up more than seventy fragments of gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions of the 12th and 13th centuries. They came from one of the two Jewish cemeteries on the left bank, closed in 1306 when the Jews were expelled from the kingdom. Look at the inscription and consider that for centuries Paris went on building on top of those stones.
2. The Torah ark from Modena, of 1472
The piece you will photograph too is a Torah ark, in Hebrew aron qodesh, in carved, inlaid and painted walnut, with velvet and silk fittings, 265 centimetres high. It comes from Modena and is dated 1472.
The ark is the cupboard that holds the Torah scrolls, and it always stands against the east wall of the synagogue, facing Jerusalem: with the reading desk, the tevah, it is the main piece of synagogue furniture. This one too is on loan from the musée de Cluny, and comes from the Strauss collection given by Charlotte de Rothschild.
3. The booth for the festival of Sukkot
A hut in painted softwood, 285 centimetres wide, Austrian or south German, from the middle of the 19th century. It is a sukkah, the booth of the festival of Tabernacles.
To make sense of it you need the rule the object answers to, and the museum sets it out: the festival falls five days after the Day of Atonement, recalls the forty years in the Sinai desert after the exodus from Egypt, and for the seven days it lasts the commandment (Leviticus 23:42) is to live in a sukkah, a hut roofed with branches, built outdoors. This one is painted and demountable, and was put up again every year: it is a family object, not a synagogue one.
4. The model of the Zabłudów synagogue
A model in waxed and painted oak and glass, 32 × 52 × 45.5 centimetres, made between 1951 and 1953 in the joinery workshop of the ORT school in Algiers and given to the museum by ORT in 1953.
Study the roof: it reproduces the wooden synagogue of Zabłudów, a Polish town near Białystok where Jews had settled since the late 15th century and where, by the end of the 19th, they made up nearly 70% of the population. The synagogue is gone. Stop here: this is the object that explains why a museum should also keep models, and not only original things.
5. Soutine’s Landscape at Céret
Chaïm Soutine was born into a poor family in a Lithuanian village, studied in Vilna and reached Paris in 1913, living between La Ruche and the cité Falguière in real poverty. In 1919 his dealer, Léopold Zborowski, sent him to the south of France.
Landscape at Céret, oil on canvas, 55 × 65 centimetres, painted around 1920, comes from that stay. It was given by Claire Maratier and is one of the ways the museum tells the story of the École de Paris, the foreign Jewish painters who made Montparnasse the capital of art: if that world interests you, two of its figures have articles of their own, Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine.
6. The homage to Captain Dreyfus
395 centimetres tall, in epoxy resin, the statue is by Tim, the pen name of Louis Mittelberg, born in Warsaw in 1919 and died in Paris in 2002. The mahJ’s is a 2003 cast, on loan from the Centre national des arts plastiques, and it greets you as you come in, in the museum courtyard.
Why does the Dreyfus statue not stand at the École militaire?
The story of where it ended up is worth as much as the statue. It began with a public commission from the Ministry of Culture in 1985, and Tim wanted it in the courtyard of the École militaire, on the exact spot where Dreyfus was stripped of his rank in 1895. The culture minister Jack Lang said yes, the defence minister Charles Hernu said no, because that courtyard is not open to the public, and François Mitterrand was against it too: soldiers, he said, should be given «an example, not a remorse». Place Dauphine was turned down as well, facing the courthouse where the Cour de cassation cleared Dreyfus in 1906. The monument finally went up in place Pierre-Lafue, at the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and boulevard Raspail, on the initiative of Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, for the centenary of the arrest. The museum devotes a whole section to the affair, and in 1997 the captain’s family gave it an archive of 2,700 documents.
7. The inhabitants of the hôtel de Saint-Aignan in 1939
Before it became a museum, this house was full of workshops and small trades: cap makers, hatters, tailors, furriers, most of them Jewish, who lived and worked here until 1939.
Look at this photograph from 1916: the courtyard you walked through on the way in had painted signs under the arches, a goods depot, a wooden kiosk in the middle. Restoring the building wiped all that away, and Christian Boltanski (Paris, 1944-2021) chose to put it back. Les Habitants de l’hôtel de Saint-Aignan en 1939 is an installation of 1998, given by the artist: eighty printed posters, 40 × 60 centimetres each, pasted up in a small yard of the building, with the names and trades of the people who lived here before the Occupation made the genocide possible.
It is the work that ends the visit, and it is placed where it belongs: in a service yard, not in a gallery.
Practical information
Data checked on 23 September 2026 on the official website mahj.org. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. A full ticket costs 13 euros, reduced 9 euros, and covers the permanent collection, the display in the foyer and the audio guide, in French, English and Spanish. Opening hours. From Tuesday to Friday the museum opens at 11:00 and closes at 18:00; on Saturday and Sunday it opens at 10:00. From 15 October 2026 to 14 March 2027 it closes at 19:00 at weekends and stays open on Wednesdays until 21:00. Last admission is 45 minutes before closing, and the rooms are cleared a quarter of an hour before. Closures. Mondays, 1 January and 1 May. The museum also closes on some Jewish holidays, which change from year to year and are published on the website: in 2026 they were Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September. On 24, 25 and 31 December it closes at 17:00. Paris Museum Pass. The museum accepts it: with the Pass you are given a free ticket at the desk, for the collection and the exhibitions. Getting there. The entrance is at 71 rue du Temple. The stops are Rambuteau on line 11, two minutes away, Hôtel de Ville on lines 1 and 11, five minutes, and Arts-et-Métiers on lines 3 and 11, six. How long to allow. The seven works, within the full route, need two hours.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The museum also tells the story of the quarter around it, the Jewish Marais, and the other five museums on this route are all walkable: the Musée Picasso, the Musée Carnavalet, the Musée Cognacq-Jay, the Maison de Victor Hugo on place des Vosges and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, two hundred metres away. Two of the works in this guide are on loan from the musée de Cluny, the museum of the Middle Ages on the left bank: I will write about it soon.
Photo credits: courtyard of the hôtel de Saint-Aignan by Ecelan (CC BY-SA 4.0); small yard by VVVCFFrance (CC BY-SA 4.0); the courtyard in 1916, photograph by Charles Lansiaux (CC0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
