Editor’s Note

Twelve years ago, as the head of the Department of Jewish Art at Bar-Ilan University, I was privileged to have the opportunity to establish Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art thanks to the generous patronage of Dr. Yonat Floersheim and her son Alexander, as a memorial for Michael J. Floersheim. This initiative filled a void in that it created a scholarly annual that would publish and disseminate the results of ongoing research in Jewish art and visual culture. Ars Judaica was warmly welcomed by leading Jewish art historians, who generously contributed articles to the first volumes. In a way, those articles continued the path laid out by the Journal of Jewish Art, published by the Center for Jewish Art of the Hebrew University, which discontinued publication after twenty-five volumes. Ars Judaica was designed as, and continues to be, a venue for dealing with a broad scope of time periods, subject matter, methodology, and media in order to enhance knowledge and understanding of Jewish visual culture among scholars and the public at large. A few years after the establishment of Ars Judaica we witnessed the launching of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, and the fruitful co-existence of two annuals clearly reflects the thriving of Jewish art, as both a creative activity and a scholarly discipline.

Today Ars Judaica is distributed by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization and is found on the shelves of libraries worldwide. It serves art historians, connoisseurs, museum curators, and students who are interested in Jewish art and visual culture. At this point, following my retirement, I am entirely confident in entrusting coordination of the editorial work to my colleague Ilia Rodov, who, together with Mirjam Rajner and Sara Offenberg, will continue to advance the journal. To you, my dear colleagues, I express my sincere thanks for your devoted cooperation and wish you much satisfaction and success.

The current volume offers an array of subjects. Jewish art in the Middle Ages is represented by two articles. The first, Zsófia Buda’s “Sacrifice in Balance: The Akedah – an Eschatological Perspective,” analyzes the depiction of the Sacrifice of Isaac, an illumination from the Hamburg Miscellany, a fifteenth-century Ashkenazi prayer book. The Akedah scene is combined here with a representation of the Day of Judgment, as known in Christian iconography, expressing the concept that martyrdom and sacrifice will be rewarded by divine redemption. Although it adapts the Christian motif, the image of the Akedah challenges the Christian concept of redemption. As the article demonstrates, this was one of the many ways in which medieval Jewish art entered into an enriching discourse with the surrounding Christian visual culture while at the same time creating its own unique iconographical solutions.

The second of these articles, “The Fleuron Crown from Neumarkt in Silesia (Środa Śląska): Christian Material Culture in a Jewish Context” by Ido Noy, focuses on a gold fleuron crown discovered among pawned objects in a treasure trove attributed to Jews found in a former Jewish quarter in the Silesian town of Neumarkt (now Środa Śląska in Poland). The article delves into Jews’ use and understanding of these objects, especially those of a more secular nature, that is, objects that bear little relationship to Jewish or Christian liturgy and lack explicit Jewish or Christian religious iconography or inscriptions. One of these pawned objects is a gold fleuron crown signifying nobility or royalty. When examining this crown in the context of similar imagery in Jewish art, it transpires that Jews were not only familiar with such crowns but were also well aware of their symbolic meaning as royal and noble insignias. Noy proposes that Jewish elites used such crowns to define their social status, presenting themselves as part of the secular nobility.

Moshe Idel’s “Visualization of Colors, 2: Implications of David ben Yehudah he-Ḥasid’s Diagram for the History of Kabbalah” continues his discussion of Kabbalistic diagrams that began in AJ 11. Idel’s studies expand the field of Jewish visual culture into “mental painting” – an esoteric practice of the creation of purely immaterial images in the mind of...