A history of Judaic art and manuscripts

Throughout their long history, Jews had always understood the importance of visual communication in maintaining their cultural identity. According to 1 Kings 6: 1

Now it happened in the four hundred and fiftieth year after the sons of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the lord.

The first temple was built in the 10th century BC. in Jerusalem and the Old Testament it is described as a beautiful work of art in which Solomon has spared no expense or effort for his embellishment. It is described as covered with gold and adorned with cherubs (I Kings 6). He ordered large quantities of cedar wood from King Hiram of Tire (I Kings 5: 2025), had won large blocks of the best stone and ordered the foundation of the building to be laid with hewn stone. To complete the huge project, he imposed forced labor on all his subjects, setting up people for shifts that sometimes lasted one month at a time. He took such heavy debts upon building the Temple that he was forced to pay King Hiram by transferring twenty cities in Galilee (1 Kings 9:11).

An incised image of the Temple Menorah, found on the site of the Temple in the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel Antiquities Authority

In 597 BCE. King Nebuchadnezzar the Great of Babylon after plundering the gold and silver of the Temple of Jerusalem and the Royal Palace marched back to Babylon with several thousand Judean prisoners of war. Ten years later he would return to Jerusalem to avenge and destroy the first temple, because Zedekiah had become king of Judah and he had not been the loyal vassal.

The original structure of the Second Temple, before it was renovated by the Hasmoneans and later expanded by King Herod, was built by the decree of Cyrus the Great, King of Iran. Indeed, vessels from the First Temple, recovered by the Persians of the Babylonians who had overcome them, were returned to the Jews to facilitate and encourage the reconstruction of the Temple. The Talmud describes the beauty of the Second Temple of Herod and declares: "He who has not fully seen the temple has never seen a glorious building in his life" (Tractate Succot 51b). After the destruction of the Second Temple by the Roman emperor Titus in 70 CE - an event that was commemorated on the Arch of Titus in Rome and in the Jewish liturgy - images of the decoration of the Temple, in particular the famous golden menorah or seven-armed lamp, emblematic of the Jewish religion.

Judaic ships

In the first centuries after Christ, Jewish communities were spread in every corner of the Roman empire, from Sardis (Turkey) to Ostia (Italy), from Hamman Lif (Tunisia) to Intercisa (Hungary). The archaeological remains and literary attestations of more than 150 synagogues across the empire make clear that Jews were an integral part of the urban landscape of late antiquity, far beyond the borders of Roman Palestine.

With the discovery of the third-century archaeological site of a synagogue in the Roman garrison town of Dura-Europos, we learn in Asia Minor that there is also a narrative form of Judaic art, which depicts the figures from Bible stories as a way of keeping Torah alive. sharing and teaching his prosperous community. Like its neighboring Christian meeting house and the Mithraic shrine, dedicated to the Persian sun god, the Jewish stories or ceremonial art, deeply rooted in its rich culture, were beautifully decorated with beautiful murals and manuscripts with narrative scenes from their collective memories. On their synagogues painted tiles of zodiacal symbols adorned the ceiling, and plaques with inaugural inscriptions give an indication of the individuals and families who financed the construction of such synagogues.

Bake fragments with Menorah, Shofar and Torah Ark

The earliest Judaic illuminated manuscripts that are found belong to the 10th century and were made in the Middle East. There are also later manuscripts from the beginning of the 13th century, Iberia, France, Germany and Italy. Some colophons in certain manuscripts indicate that the illuminations and illustrations were done by famous Jewish artists. Some Christian miniaturists have also been commissioned to produce works of art for other manuscripts. Hence, the definition of "Jewish manuscript art" in the Middle Ages does not necessarily imply the creation by Jewish artists.

The first Hebrew illuminated manuscript that drew scientific attention was the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Sefardi manuscript from the 1330s. It was finally published in 1898, and from that time onwards scientists have used different methodological approaches to study and analyze medieval Jewish bookmaking. . In the 1950s, Kurt Weitzmann's revision theory replaced the bibliographic approach of the previous decades. Weitzmann theorized that every narrative image cycle was necessarily emulated by an early predecessor and that the art historian intends to reconstruct a prototypical version. According to this theory, the earliest surviving copy of a Hebrew illuminated manuscript is a Pentateuch fragment from Egypt, dating back to 929, and several Bibles from the Middle East and other texts were produced in subsequent centuries. The decoration of these books was rooted in the tradition of the illumination of the manuscript in the Middle East and did not include any figurative art.

Detail of the 'Maror' page of the Sarajevo Haggadah (with thanks to the Foundation for Jewish Culture)

The reality of the Jewish community under Muslim rule, during the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, explains much of the evidence of limitations in Jewish art that focused on the construction of synagogues and the illustration of manuscripts in those eras. Countries with strong Muslim influences, including Spain, exhibited much less physical representation of human forms in art than the Northern European communities, because Muslims shun such literal representations of human forms.

"Moses receives the ten commandments." Machsor mechol hashana. Germany, ca. 1290, leaves 59b, 50a. Vellum (2)

The Rothschild family gave this Persian Haggadah to Victor Bouton in the second half of the 19th century. The Braginsky collection (Ardon Bar-Hama)

A similar tradition of aniconic book decoration appeared later in the post-conquest of Iberia. Simultaneously, starting in the 1230s, a rich figurative and narrative art began to develop in Christian Europe, including Bibles, prayer books, Haggadot (the liturgical text for the Passover ceremony), compilations of the ritual law and miscellaries. Hardly any Hebrew illuminated manuscripts from the Byzantine world have been preserved, the only surviving works are some haggadot from the 16th century, which have not yet been thoroughly studied. It should be noted, however, that unlike the Christian Hellenistic and Latin communities, Jewish culture was quite familiar with their own biblical stories that made it unnecessary for the visual communication of those stories with the illiterate pagan masses. As the Encyclopedia Judaica states: "For the Jews, with their high degree of literacy because of their almost universal educational system and their familiarity with the Scripture story, this was superfluous."

This Haggada is illustrated everywhere with images of Passover rites and biblical episodes related to the Exodus, as well as with the lives of Moses, the Patriarchs and other figures. The numerous scenes, which are mostly based on midrashic sources, are accompanied by rhymed inscriptions, usually set in scrolls. The same artist, whose identity has not yet been discovered, decorated another similar Haggada, and both are filled with excellent illustrations.

By the 20th century, Jewish diaspora artists, while moving away from Judaism, were among the vanguard of modern artistic liberation. Artists such as Camille Pissarro, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, Moïse Kisling, Ossip Zadkine, Joseph Csáky, Jacques Chapiro and El Lissitzky were able to integrate their Jewish cultural heritage into the grammar of their modernist art. In their book Peintres juifs à Paris-- (Paris: Denoel, 2000) the authors; Nadine Nieszawer, Marie Boye and Paul Fogel estimate that more than 500 Jewish artists worked in the interwar period in Paris.