The museum began in 1962 in a single room above the Parkway Movie Theater near Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland. Seymour and Rebecca Camhi Fromer named it for Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, a Jewish activist born in Oakland in 1877 who went on to co-found the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Magnes had died in 1948, but his legacy -- bridging Jewish intellectual life between California and the wider world -- gave the small museum an outsized ambition. As the collection grew, the Fromers moved it to the Burke Mansion, a grand residence designed by architect Daniel J. Patterson at 2911 Russell Street in Berkeley. The mansion's rooms filled with ceremonial objects, folk art, and documents that traced Jewish communities from North Africa to India to the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Artist Beatrice Winn Berlin taught printmaking classes there in the 1970s, adding a creative dimension to what was fundamentally a rescue operation.

The Fromers' approach to collecting was part scholarship and part archaeology of the disappearing. They traveled to communities where Jewish populations had dwindled or vanished -- in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, India -- and retrieved objects that synagogues and families were discarding as congregations dissolved. Back in California, they found Yiddish culture fading among the assimilated children and grandchildren of immigrants. The chicken farmers of Petaluma, many of them Eastern European Jews who had built a cooperative agricultural community in Sonoma County, were aging out of their Yiddish-language libraries. The Fromers took the books. The dumpster-diving for Yiddish records was not metaphor but method. This was collecting driven by the conviction that if someone didn't grab these objects now, they would cease to exist -- and with them, the tangible evidence of how Jewish communities had lived, worshipped, celebrated, and endured across the diaspora.

By the 2000s, the Judah L. Magnes Museum faced a familiar challenge for independent cultural institutions: the collection had outgrown the organization's capacity to preserve and display it. Negotiations to merge with the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco fell through. In 2010, the museum donated its entire collection to UC Berkeley, which agreed to display, preserve, and expand the holdings. The university reopened the collection in 2012 as the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, housed on campus and integrated into the research ecosystem of one of the world's great public universities. The move gave scholars direct access to materials that had been assembled by passionate amateurs and transformed them into a resource for academic study -- without losing the human urgency that had driven the Fromers to fill their car trunks with artifacts in the first place.

Two acquisitions after the move to Berkeley dramatically expanded the collection's scope. In 2017, the Magnes received 450 artworks by Arthur Szyk, a Polish Jewish artist and political caricaturist whose intricate illustrations addressed the most consequential events of the twentieth century -- the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, the founding of Israel. A year later came the archives of photographer Roman Vishniac, a gift from his daughter Mara Vishniac Kohn. The Vishniac archive -- over 30,000 images, audiovisual materials, correspondence, and memorabilia -- tripled the number of items in the collection overnight and became the third most valuable gifted collection ever received by UC Berkeley. Vishniac is best known for his photographs of Eastern European Jewish communities in the 1930s, images that became among the last visual records of a world the Holocaust would destroy. Together, the Szyk and Vishniac holdings give the Magnes a gravity that extends well beyond regional Jewish history into the broader story of twentieth-century art, persecution, and survival.