Hanukkah Lamp

This lamp type, decorated in pierced work with a central menorah supported by two lions, was very popular in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Some forty examples are known in public and private collections and from auction sales, with more being revealed each year. The earliest lamps, and the vast majority, were created by Frankfurt silversmiths, indicating quite clearly that this type originated in that city.
Among Frankfurt silversmiths, the most prolific producer of these lamps was Rötger Herfurth. Although scholars have proposed that this Frankfurt type was created by him, it is possible that this Jewish Museum lamp by Schedel is as early as or earlier than what may be Herfurth's earliest known example. The Frankfurt mark on the Schedel lamp was in use from at least 1694 to 1756, which considerably predates those on the Herfurth pieces. The earliest that the Schedel lamp can be dated is to the 1730s, when the Rococo style, characterized by the shell-like appendages on the scrollwork, began. The type eventually spread to other German cities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and cast copies were made in the twentieth century.
Of the eight works known by Georg Wilhelm Schedel, five of them are Jewish ceremonial objects.