Jacques Schulman

Jacques Schulman (1906–1991) was a Dutch numismatist who served as president of the International Association of Professional Numismatists (IAPN) from 1953 to 1961. His Handboek van de Nederlandse munten introduced a classification system for Dutch coinage, known as the Schulman number, that remains in international use.

Background

Schulman came from a family of numismatists. His grandfather Jacob Schulman (1849–1914) established a coin trading business in Amersfoort in 1880, holding his first public auction in 1889. The firm moved to the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam in 1902 and later relocated to the Jan Luijkenstraat, where it remains active.

Jacques studied at the Cabinet des Médailles, the École du Louvre, the Sorbonne, and the British Museum. Jacques continued operating the Amsterdam business throughout the occupation, and expanded it after the war. He co-founded the first Dutch numismatic circle in Amsterdam (1947) and the journal De Geuzenpenning. Before his departure Algemeen Handelsblad reported that he was going with a series of buying commissions and that Farouk had earlier been a client of his firm. At the sale he said he was chiefly interested in buying back Dutch coins that he had sold to Farouk while the collection was being assembled. His New York cousin Hans M. F. Schulman also attended and paid the second-highest price of the opening day, £200 for a twenty-dollar gold piece.

In 1976, the Royal Dutch Numismatic Society (Koninklijk Nederlands Genootschap voor Munt- en Penningkunde) elected him an honorary member. He received the Knight of Orange-Nassau for his contributions to numismatics as a scholarly field.

The Handboek assigned each Dutch coin type a reference number. These Schulman numbers became the standard citation method for post-1795 Dutch numismatics and continue to appear in auction catalogues and scholarly literature worldwide.

Family

Jacques Schulman's cousin Hans M.F. Schulman (1913–1990) emigrated to New York in 1938, where he became a founding member of both the Professional Numismatists Guild and the IAPN. Jacques's son Laurens Schulman (born 1948) continues in the field, operating Laurens Schulman BV in Harderwijk.