Hanukkah Lamp

This lamp belongs to a special group of cast synagogue lamps made of copper alloy that use prickets to hold candles instead of candle sockets. They all have a similar form, their arms decorated with scrolls and buds and with a floral finial placed at top. Other examples of this type have been recorded in synagogues primarily in Germany, but also across the border into Bohemia, suggesting the locus of production and use.
It is normally very difficult to determine which cities or foundries manufactured copper-alloy objects, including such Judaica as Hanukkah lamps, Sabbath lamps, and candlesticks. This lamp is exceptional in that it bears a foundry mark that possibly identifies a maker and center of production. The mark is closest to that of Karl Dürschner, a lamp maker in Nuremberg active at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. His dates of activity are close to that of the inscription. Nuremberg became renowned for its bronze-casting beginning in the fifteenth century, with the arrival of bronze workers from the destroyed center of Dinant, in Flanders.
Dated inscriptions on other lamps of this type indicate they were manufactured from the 1680s to the early nineteenth century.