Ernst Cohn-Wiener

Ernst Cohn-Wiener was born in Tilsit in 1882 and studied art history, archaeology, and philosophy in Berlin and Heidelberg, earning his doctorate at Heidelberg in 1907. He first worked on medieval European material, but his interests grew much wider over time, and he became known for writing and teaching about Islamic, Indian, and Jewish art.

In Berlin he taught at institutions including the Humboldt Academy and became an important popular educator as well as a scholar. During the 1920s he turned strongly toward Islamic art history and traveled to Central Asia, where his research and photographs of architecture in places such as western Turkestan fed into influential work on the region.

Because he was Jewish, he was dismissed after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. He left Germany, spent time in England and India, worked at the museum in Baroda, and eventually died in New York in 1941. His life and writing reflect both deep scholarship and the upheaval faced by many émigré intellectuals of his generation.