• Harry Sneh

The Stephen N. Gerson Collection of Biblical and Mythological Coins

Biography, Stephen N. Gerson MD, MBA

I am often asked: “How did ever get interested in collecting old coins?” It was one rainy afternoon, when I was about seven years old. I was bored and rummaging through my mother’s desk. I found an old tin box that jangled and inside were 50 Indian Head cents. I had never seen one before and was fascinated by their age and appearance. Mom said she had inherited these from my maternal grandfather, Samuel Kernis, who immigrated to America in 1900 from Tripolis, a small shtetl near Kiev (now Russia). He was a peddler, eventually owning a junkyard in small town Weissport, Pa. near the Poconos in Eastern Pa. He put these pennies aside in the course of his business. I never knew him since he died 2 years before I was born, but his interest gave birth to my passion for coin collecting and I am indebted to him. By age 13, I was so involved with coins that I started a business in my home town of Sharon, Pa. with my childhood friend Lou Rotunno. During college at Northwestern University and medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, I had little time for coin collecting. However after going into the practice of psychiatry in Lorain, Ohio, I had more time to devote to the hobby. Now I had become interested in ancient coins. I also developed an interest in the history of ancient Israel and Greek mythology, along with the theories of Carl Jung. Eventually, I developed an understanding of paleo-Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin scripts. It has been a source of fascination to me that one can acquire and handle ancient objects that were used by our forbears. I became acquainted with David Hendin and coin academics such as Leo Mildenberg, Shraga Qedar, Dan Barag, Yaakov Meshorer, Haim Gitler and knowledgeable dealers such as Ronen Bachar. All have been helpful and have enriched my understanding of ancient coins. Eventually, I moved back to Boston where I had trained in psychiatry at McLean Hospital of Harvard Medical School, and earned an MBA at the Sloan School of MIT. I became a member of Society Historia Nummorum, a fellowship devoted to scholarly interest in ancient coins. I have given talks at our meetings and published a number of articles in scholarly journals. I also became interested in mythology and how it was represented on coins. Myth iconography projects legends, primal human values; unconscious “emotional-behavioral patterns” that define what makes us human. The Greek and ancient Near Eastern pantheon became for me a path into a deeper understanding of the unconscious. This collection is an indicator of my passions: Superb Judean coins and especially the Bar Kokhba overstrikes, and coins with mythological themes. Each coin in my collection was the result of an exciting hunt. I trust that those who acquire some of these coins will experience the joy of your own hunt and fascination with objects ancient and mythological.