“The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm”: The Repatriation of the Benin Bronzes and Nazi-Looted Jewish Art

The purpose of this research is to consider the question of Benin Bronze repatriation through the context of Jewish repatriation which has spanned the decades following World War II. By studying ownership and property rights, cultural heritage, and repatriation efforts of each movement, this study seeks to draw distinctions between European repatriation and African repatriation to show that success is limited in both cases because of the historic legality of looting in both cases. Ultimately, it becomes clear that a comparative repatriation study becomes problematic when European standards are superimposed on to African standards, when African countries struggle with vastly different problems than Jewish people